Sarah Cawkwell's Blog, page 10

Rambling On…

It’s Sunday. Insert stream of consciousness here. This blog plot exists because I thought ‘I’ll just start writing and see where my thoughts take me’. It’s quite telling, actually, and lets you know what’s truly on my mind at the moment.

Well, it’s Monday tomorrow.

Every Monday, the same question gets asked in the office. What did you do at the weekend? Almost invariably, my answer is the same.

Nothing.

I mean, it’s not strictly true. Yesterday, for example, I got up, washed up, tidied the kitchen a bit, read for a while, did some computer stuff, generally mooched and had a great afternoon with my guild leader running around Hoth getting my first tauntaun mount. Which was enormous fun and is more sociable than you might think given that we were on Skype the whole time.

Today is another day of nothing. But again, that’s not true. This morning, I wrote another 2,000 words of Project: Carpark. I’ve washed up, I’ve swept up all the bits of rogue cat litter that Yuna decided needed ditching out of the tray and I’ve just sat down here with a cup of tea to write my blog. When I’ve done that, I might play Spellforce for a little while.

Why have I done nothing? Because Himself works weekends. He works in retail. It’s inevitable. I don’t have a circle of friends up here, so I can’t ‘pop out’ and see someone without making plans in advance and it involving driving a reasonable distance. There’s only so many times you can look around the same shops (and I’m also the world’s worst shopper), so I don’t go into town every weekend.

Basically, I’m boring. I am a little hermit crab of sullenness, tucked quietly away in my corner. But you know what? It suits me most of the time. Yeah, occasionally I go through the whole ‘OH GOD I’M SO LONELY’ phase, but it passes.

Have a couple of weeks off work coming up and Himself is off too. It’ll be weird spending Actual Time with him. I’m not entirely sure what we’ll talk about and we’ve been together for eleven years. Wait… eleven? Or twelve? I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANY MORE. I lose track of things when they reach double figures.

Either way, our wedding anniversary (sixth – I know THAT much) is on September 8th. Hard to believe that six years have gone by. I was looking at a couple of our wedding pictures the other day and being amused that the Son was barely up to Himself’s chest at the time. Now he’s catching up fast. Looking up to talk to your child after thirteen years of looking in a downwards direction was the weirdest experience of my life.

He was so tiny and cute! He is now taller than me. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

He starts his GCSEs when he goes back to school. That by itself fills me with great anxiety. Over the next two years of his life, his academic future is going to be determined based on the results of a few examinations. Will he do OK? Will he go on to study A levels and go to University? I don’t know. I really don’t. He has expressed a desire to become an engineer – with a professed interest in robotics and bionics. Will he keep that interest? I don’t know either. Over the years, he’s wanted to ‘grow up to be’ a variety of things from a potter, to an actor, to a man who creates bionic limbs.

For the record, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. When I was five and was asked that question in my first days of school, I remember answering that I wanted to be ‘an adult’. It made people laugh. I was serious. I still haven’t achieved that goal, though.

From the moment the Son was born, worries arrived. When he was born, eight weeks premature, the worry was a physical and very tangible thing. ‘Is he still breathing? Is he alright?’ Note: poking a sleeping baby to test that it’s definitely just sleeping seems like a bizarre thing, but when they start screaming at you in disgust, it’s the best sound ever.

I went back to work full time and left him in nursery. I cried buckets that day. I never wanted to leave him, but I had no financial choice. Work it was. I spent the whole day in misery, rushed to collect him and discovered that he’d had a grand day. It reached a phase where if I was told ‘he missed you today’, I felt smug.

He started school. A whole new swathe of worries. Will he get bullied? Will he behave in class? Well, yes. As it happened, both of these things occurred. The behaviour thing is awesome; the Son constantly gets comments about his good manners and his grown-up attitude. The bullying thing is also oddly awesome. Let me explain.

I was bullied at school and I think it gave me an irrational fear of the same thing happening to him. He went in loaded with the opportunities to be picked on. He’s a glasses-wearing redhead who happens to prefer the Indoors to the Outdoors. I worried about how he was being treated at school right up until the day he was doing his cycling proficiency.

Himself regaled the story. They were walking back down from the school. The Son was pushing his bike and still wearing his bike helmet. Note: at the time, he was about eight or nine. The helmet was a Power Rangers one, I think. You know. Like little kids have.

They passed the corner shop and there was a little gang of three kids sat there, one of whom was a known quantity – one of the nastier kids in the school. He led a little snarky call of ‘nice bike helmet,’ which resulted in sneering derision. I asked the Husband how the Son took it.

‘It was great,’ says Himself. ‘The Son smiled nicely, turned around, fixed this kid with a completely neutral expression and said at least I’m not so fat I can’t ride a bike‘ and carried on walking. The bully’s friends turned their derisive laughter onto him instead and by all accounts, this kid never, ever bothered the Son again.

I stopped worrying about that then. But that’s OK, because not long after came secondary school and adolescence and a whole bunch of new worries, which still persist. Right now though, the big one is finding myself fearing for his future. Will he be able to get a job? Will he have financial stability? Will he be happy?

That last one is the big one. I live for my son, absolutely and categorically. He is fifteen in February and rapidly reaching that point where I will have to let go of the baby reins as it were. Between me, the Husband, the Ex and his wife, we have done all we can to produce a fully fledged individual, capable of taking that step off the roof of our protection and let his wings help him soar as high as he dares go. I have faith in his common sense and intelligence. But it doesn’t mean I’m not scared. What I do know is that the minute he steps off that building, all of us will be on the express elevator to the bottom to deploy the net. Just in case, you understand.

All that I should REALLY be worrying about of course is that his plans to become a bionics/robotics engineer don’t result in some sort of Mad Scientist state of affairs.

It could happen. Right?

On Hardcore, Handsome and Hapless Heroes

Very much of my writing time is taken up with the wonderful grim and dark worlds of Warhammer 40k. This is all fine and groovy, because as I observed a while back, I love Space Marines. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in writing stories about such heroic individuals, particularly when they can frequently be on the knife edge between being heroic and basically being completely mental.

A Silver Skulls Space Marine being suitably heroic. And looking good whilst doing it.

There’s other kinds of heroes that I enjoy writing about. My Star Wars: The Old Republic Jedi Knight, for example, has a series of little stories attached to him and he’s always a pleasure to write for. He has this fun kind of innocence and idealism that means he’s just ripe for throwing Bad Things at. He’s a big lad (see evidence in following picture). He can take it all in his stride. But the joy of roleplaying a Jedi Knight is the fact that you really do periodically get the opportunity to throw your character into doing something spontaneous and heroic. Like standing guard over a fallen master, for example, facing down one of the meanest Darths in the Empire. Knowing that with one flick of the wrist you will be turned into bantha kibble.

D’you think this is my best side?

And then… then there’s Gilrain.

Gilrain was born out of a need to write something decidedly more light-hearted. When the gorgeous Adele from Fox Spirit invited me to submit a story for her anthology, ‘Tales of the Nun and Dragon’, I already had a vague idea in mind. I wanted to do a traditional hero-meets-dragon-fights-dragon kind of story, but I wanted to make it light-hearted. And so, seemingly out of nowhere, Gilrain appeared. He kind of sauntered into the scariest, darkest recesses of my imagination where he sort of nudged me, gave a little laugh and said you know you want to write about me. Go on. Go on. Go on. (a’la Mrs. Doyle). I gave him a semi-competent companion/father figure, the long-suffering Therin… and off they went.

His first appearance, in the story ‘The Ballad of Gilrain’ was enormous fun to write. There is a sequel, which I can reveal more about later and that was somehow even sillier. There is a third story involving this most hapless of heroes prodding about at the back of my head and I am looking forward to letting him loose again. Although, like so many other characters I’ve created, he does have a worrying tendency to take on a life of his own whenever I start writing about him.

So in the meantime, here’s a little extract from ‘The Ballad of Gilrain’.

*****************************

‘How… magnificent!’

Therin’s reaction to seeing the dragon was unexpected. At the sound of the second roar, the horse had struggled to free itself from where Gilrain had tethered it, emitting a sound of terror that no animal should ever make. The young warrior, sentimental to the last, drewhis sword and cut the tether, giving the horse its opportunity to flee. It didn’t waste a second, turning and crashing through the undergrowth it had trampled on the way in.

‘Look at it, Gilrain! The colours! Greens and browns… the colours of the forest. It must be some sort of adaptability thing. I always thought dragons were red, or black, or white! Those colours… those markings… it must help the creature blend into its environment.’

‘To blend in? It’s the size of a village! What’s it going to do, Therin? Hide behind a tree? Jump out and go “boo” at us? I don’t care if it’s pink with sky-blue spots, it’s going to die!’

He leaped into the centre of the glade, directly below the rapidly descending dragon. He raised his head to stare defiantly into its gaping maw, lined on either side with razor-sharp teeth that were heading straight for him.

‘I’m not afraid of you!’ Gilrain’s defiance wafted up on the air and filled the dragon with delight. A fighter. She liked those almost as much as horses. They squirmed and kicked and…

As she almost collided with the warrior, she dragged herself into a horizontal position, swooping over him, barely a hand-span above his head. Her talons raked through his dark hair, but Gilrain stood his ground, brandishing his sword furiously.

Therin had dropped to the ground the moment the dragon had levelled out.

‘What are you doing, Gilrain?’

‘Fighting the dragon, Therin. That’s what I came out here do, wasn’t it?’ There was a determined look in the young warrior’s face. ‘So that’s what I’m going to do!’

‘Yes, but that was before we knew it was even real.’ Therin felt acutely ashamed of the fear coursing through his veins. There was a roar from the dragon as she turned again to make another pass. The first one had merely been to display her size and strength to her foe. This run would be different. This time, she meant business.

This time, her claws did more than rake through Gilrain’s hair. Her talons closed on his armoured shoulders, although the claws initially struggled to gain purchase on them, and she dragged him backwards, slamming him bodily into one of the trees. Rainwater fell in a shower around the dazed warrior as the dragon once more flew upwards.

‘Gilrain, we should retreat. This thing is too big for us…’

The young warrior staggered back to his feet, swaying slightly. The impact had left him dazed and his eyes were having trouble focusing. ‘Even big things have a weak point, don’t they?’

‘I don’t think your little pig-sticker there will be of any use in this battle.’ Therin was startled by the fact that Gilrain showed no fear of the dragon at all. She wheeled overheard, her jaw opening to display her long fangs once again. Another roar left her throat and another plume of flame streaked towards Gilrain.

The warrior ducked, rolling out of the projectile’s course and narrowly avoiding being turned into a pile of ash. He sprang nimbly to his feet and danced lightly from side to side, his sword clasped in both hands.

He has absolutely no fear, Therin realised. He’s actually going to fight that thing. The boy had no survival instinct whatsoever, which was somewhere between admirable and terrifying. He’s going to fight it, he thought again.

He’s going to fight it. And he’s going to lose.

And if he dies, he’ll blame me.

And I think I might actually miss him, the lanky bastard.

 

 

 

When in Rome…

Yesterday, a fun little hashtag was doing the rounds on Twitter. #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinions saw such things as ‘I didn’t think Avengers was all that great’ or ‘Game of Thrones is over-rated’ or ‘I don’t like Christian Bale as Batman’ fly past on the Twitter feed. It was kind of amusing whilst at the same time encouraging to see that other people agreed with what you were thinking.

One of the things I put up was ‘I don’t see the point in holidays that revolve around lying by the pool/on the beach’. So that’s the subject of today’s blog. Holidays.

When I was young, which was an event that took place in another century – literal truth – we used to have a week in August when my dad was off work. We would always spend a week at a Pontin’s holiday camp. We split between three camps, really: Tower Beach (near Prestatyn in North Wales), Brean Sands in Somerset and Camber Sands down in Sussex. These weeks away would be filled with such wonders as the amusement arcade, or the ‘spot the new car registration’ game… or marvelling at how it was that milk came in plastic bags and you put it in a jug… or inter-house games between the two ‘houses’ – Embassy and Castella (named for big cigar manufacturers, how politically incorrect that must seem now).

My mum and dad would leave my brother and I pretty much to our own devices for a week and we engaged in all sorts of activities. They were fun, those holidays. As I got older, I suddenly realised the inordinate amount of snobbery that came my way when I said where we had been. But I genuinely pity that. I had some of the best holidays of my life. It was what my parents could afford and manage and I enjoyed every single one of them. The time they all went off site for the day and left me to my own devices and I came second in the talent contest sticks out in my mind. Not the coming second thing particularly, even though that was awesome, but the fact that I genuinely had the confidence to put myself forward – something I’d never done before.

Every year I inevitably ended up with a crush on one of the Bluecoats, too. There was also a guy called Peter who I met at Tower Beach one year. We shared the same birthday and we spent the entire week together, squabbling like an old married couple. I wonder whatever became of him?

I did not go abroad (not counting day trips to Calais) properly until I was eighteen years old. My first ever flight was a long-haul to Florida on a DC10. I had never flown before that day (16th July 1989 – I remember it that clearly) and it was the most amazing experience of my life. Mind you, I also noted for future reference, that I would never go to Florida in July ever again. I am about as British as it comes and that means that the heat and sun combo leaves me wanting to curl up and whimper in a corner. I burn through Factor 50 suncream. I don’t mind sun and warmth, as long as there’s an indoors somewhere for me to go.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in terms of holidays. I’ve been to some of the most beautiful and incredible places. Orlando. Las Vegas. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Rome. St. Lucia. Santorini. Vienna. Prague. Strasbourg. I feel privileged every single time I go anywhere. But for me, it’s still the holidays where we get out and do stuff that are the most memorable. Mind you, having said that, since I started my Girly Weekends with the wonderful Nik Vincent-Abnett, I’ve discovered that there’s a lot to be said for just chilling out and chatting with a good friend.

Our last trip away was Rome, nearly seven years ago. We went there for a long weekend as our belated honeymoon and it remains, to my mind, the most incredible few days I can remember. Rome is a strange city; it’s easy to get around, there’s graffiti everywhere and every other car is a Smart car. I went there for one reason alone. The Colosseum.

For years I had – and still have – a recurring dream about the Colosseum. Naturally it left an ingrained urge to go see it. I remember that evening absolutely vividly. We’d arrived mid afternoon, found the hotel, had a drink… and decided we’d just take a walk. We let our feet do the guiding and were just wandering. We found the Circus Maximus purely by chance and it was about then that I started to realise just what a remarkable place we had come to.

We kept on walking, rounded the corner and bang. There it was. Just… there. Sitting at the end of the street on which we stood, the weirdest centrepiece to a roundabout you’ll ever see. And I cried. I cried Actual Tears. Because it was just so darned incredible to see it.

My other overriding memory of Rome was the sheer determination of the street vendors. There was a day when we were sitting having lunch in the Campo de’ Fiori, watching them hock their wares. Sunglasses. Hats. ‘I Luff Rome’ type souvenirs. You know. Tat. And then it rained. Boy, did it rain. The rain was bouncing off the pavements. It was utterly wonderful to sit there with a glass of Rioja watching this rain and watching the street vendors scurry away… only to return five minutes later selling umbrellas.

WHERE DID THEY GO? WHERE DO THEY STORE THIS STUFF?

Rome, it may come as no surprise to learn, is pretty high up on my list of places I want to go back to.

So how about yourselves, gentle reader(s)? What are the most memorable places you’ve visited?

Health Issues

I don’t normally look at current affairs in detail on my blog. I prefer to go with the whole random stream of consciousness thing. This is in part because the daily news is guaranteed to drag everyone down. Just a glance at the BBC News home page this morning and you see all these very negative words and phrases.

‘Struggling’. ‘Bailing out’. ‘Crisis’. ‘Failing’. ‘Discrimination’. ‘Backlog’. ‘Disappointed’. ‘Attacked’.

Today’s main headline is about bailing out struggling A&E departments. This in and of itself is not a bad thing; I work for the NHS and heavens only knows they need all the financial help they can get. But there also needs to be an extra layer of education amongst the people of this country and a change in expectations.

A&E departments get the rough end of the NHS stick. They get enough genuine cases, sure. But they also get people who turn up with sunburn, or people who roll in on Saturday nights, drunk out of their skulls, expecting a free taxi home. And they get it, too. Because the staff working on A&E aren’t paid anywhere near enough money to put up with the levels of abuse they get. Packing the drunk fool into a taxi and sending him/her on their way is the quickest answer. But the costs of this mount up alarmingly quickly.

I get frustrated with people’s negativity towards the NHS, I really do. Everyone has had their experiences, I imagine. I have. I have had three personally close experiences of the NHS; when I had the Son, when the Son broke his arm and when Himself broke his leg. In all three cases the staff were professional, courteous, kind and caring. In one of those two cases, they also saved the lives of two people. Sounds terribly dramatic when you put it like that, but the fact of the matter is that had the NHS not been there for me, both me and the Son would not be here.

But like anything else, all you hear are the horror stories. Good heavens, there’s some horror stories.

There is an enormous amount of pressure on the NHS. In response to asking ‘the people’ what they wanted to see out of their healthcare, more services are being shunted out to custom-designed GP surgeries. Simple procedures that at one time required a trip to hospital are now carried out in a more local location. This is in accordance with the expressed wishes of the various populations. They were in agreement that it would be more convenient to go to a health centre closer to home for a day procedure than having to get to hospitals. What happens when this is implemented? The hospitals are able to re-direct their funds, injecting cash into the services for serious diseases and trauma treatments.

This also means that hospitals shrink in size. They lose a number of beds because now certain services are outsourced, they don’t need to maintain as many.

‘It’s a bloody outrage!’ The majority of people from whom this refrain comes are the very people who ticked the ‘yes, this is what we would like to see’ box. Double standards much?

When the illustrious Welshman conceived the NHS back in the forties, our country was ready for it. The population has changed so much since then though. The sheer strain and pressure on our services is huge. A huge proportion of time is dedicated to illnesses acquired through things such as smoking, drinking, drugs, poor lifestyles… things that were nowhere near as rife back in Mr. Bevan’s day.

It’s difficult to know what the solution is. That’s because there is no solution, or if there is, it’s so multi-layered and complex it’s way beyond the understanding of a lowly pleb like myself. Investing in their staff a little more would be a good way for the NHS to go. A clearer understanding of the demands and pressures from the faceless monkeys at the Department of Health who gaily smash out impossible targets to put the hospitals under even more pressure might be nice. Unlikely, I acknowledge, but nice.

The staff themselves also need to change. The NHS has all these wonderful facilities. Modern technology, breakthroughs in medicine and understanding… better respect for patient’s wants and needs…’ and yet it seems to run on 1950’s values. You frequently hear phrases such as ‘well, that’s the way we’ve always done it’ being bandied about all the time. Introducing modern concepts to what can only kindly be called ‘stick-in-the-muds’ can be roughly the equivalent of searching for hen’s teeth.

Our Trust is going through the motions attempting to consolidate two hospitals into one, through downsizing and shipping services out to GPs and custom-designed healthcare centres, so that they can focus on saving lives. Staff should at least be partly invested in this process. They joined the NHS for a reason above and beyond paying the bills (in most cases) and yet despite all the positives – such as the Trust being in a position to climb the ladder of technical advances, to offer patients tip-top and world-class services – people are obsessed with one thing and one thing only. Tell them about dignity for patients in the form of single rooms. Tell them about offering cardiac CT services. Tell them about all of the positives and the same question comes up.

‘Where will I park my car?’

Goodness. This turned into a rant.

tl;dr – The NHS is in trouble – again. Take a minute and consider where the real problems lie. Is it all with the NHS itself? No. Is it because of governments, current or past? No, not really, although Labour’s idea of ‘targets’ still linger. Is it because of the way people abuse the system? Just maybe the blame for problems with the NHS can be laid at the feet of all these people – as well as the people who mis-use the service itself.

Enough ranting. Normality will resume tomorrow.

Ebb and Flow

About two years ago, I wrote three 100,000+ word manuscripts back to back. ‘The Gildar Rift’, ‘Valkia the Bloody’ and what is still quietly known as ‘Project: Loophole’. In that time, I also wrote a 30,000 word novella (‘Accursed Eternity’) and several short stories. I had a flow and rhythm to my writing. It was easy.

Then… it sort of stopped. Dead. For a few weeks, I had nothing to write. Nothing at all. I was flailing about like a little lost thing. For the best part of a year, this writing lark had taken over my life. I would come home from work and spend a full two hours tippy-tapping away at the keyboard, a repetitive click-a-click that was oddly soothing and relaxing. I was having a great time.

Things started getting busy again for me in the last six months but I’m not finding the discipline so easy this time round. I’ve changed my job since then and I think that’s a part of it. A good half of last year was spent wading around in the mire of depression (which I’m glad to say is now pretty much past) and since Himself broke his leg, it feels like it’s taken forever for a routine to re-establish itself. I am out of the rhythm. Marching to my own beat. Failing, completely, to fall in line.

It’ll come. I know it will. I need to exert just a little more will and effort and everything will be OK. The new blogging promise is helping; I find that writing these daily blogs gets me in a good writing mood.

People frequently ask me ‘what are your tips for writing’ and along with the standard ‘read everything, write lots’ advice that I was given myself back when I started, I’d add ‘structure your day’ to that mix. I work full-time, which means my writing gets done in those precious hours between getting in from work and going to bed. Some nights I have no desire whatsoever to sit in front of a computer at all and have to physically force myself to do it.

But for free, I’ll tell you this. It’s no great secret and I suspect that even full-time writers would agree with me on this.

It isn’t easy to make yourself write when your heart simply isn’t in it.

I try to block out a full two hour period between coming in from work in which to write. Sometimes I can be super-productive in that time. Other times, I write and think ‘that’s GOT to be about 1,500 words’ only to discover it’s only around 600.

I do try to set myself a minimum daily word count – 1,500 is a good minimum for me and fits in with most of my deadlines. Sometimes that’s higher. Other times, like now, when I’m working on about four different things at once, it simply varies. I’m blessed that I can type very fast, so the brain-to-fingers ratio is suitably quick. People don’t believe me when I say I can produce xxx words in an hour, but I can.

I don’t always do this minimum word count in the pre-ordained two hour writing window. Sometimes, I throw a couple of hundred words down whilst I’m doing something else, simply because it comes to me that way.

The fact of the matter is this, however.

I need to poke myself with a sharp stick in order to get back on track. I am pathologically addicted to delivering manuscripts on time – usually ahead of time – and the thought of requesting extensions to deadlines leaves me cold. Writing this down honestly here in the blog is actually helping. It makes me realise that the core of the problem is… well, me. Just me and my ever-lingering sense of apathy.

Time to shake it off and emerge, like a phoenix from the ashes. Or, as is more likely in my case, like a sparrow clambering out of a puddle of Superglue.

Onwards! Upwards! Er… sideways!

Home Sweet Home

And we’re back in three… two… one…

Whew! That was the weekend that was. It’s all fine, of course: my dad is both very well and now has the Son tucked neatly under one arm. I saw them off to the railway station yesterday, but didn’t wave goodbye. The Son is fourteen, after all. He neither wants nor needs a mother with a wobbling lower lip. And I –did- have a wobbling lower lip. I’m used to the Son being away from home, but there’s something about packing him off on a train that induces the clinging mother in me.

It’s daft. I mean, I’ll be seeing him a week Saturday anyway. Anyway, stiff upper lift, what-what.

So I had a day or two off the computer and it was hard going. My internet connection is effectively my social life. Neither me nor Himself are big socialites, so we don’t go out to the pub or things of that ilk. All our friends are mostly in different parts of the country, so we don’t have a circle of mates we meet up with regularly. Himself works pretty much every weekend.

Sometimes, this gets painfully lonely but there’s not a great deal to be done about it. I can’t suddenly change my personality and become Little Miss Gregarious. This year’s been better; I promised myself that I’d not rob myself of chances to spend weekends with friends just because Himself was at work. As such, I’ve been away a few times by myself.

Here’s some random numbers: I’ve been in the North East for twenty years come November. In that time, I’ve had two boyfriends (one local, one in London – the one time I almost escaped the North East), two husbands, one son, lived in seven houses and had five jobs.

This is scary: I’ve had ten cars in that time. That’s averaging a different car every two years which is somewhat startling. Two of those cars were written off (not my fault in either case) and one had to be swapped out due to Hassle From An Ex (a method of disguising myself so he didn’t spot me in town).

I’ve been to approximately forty LARP events in that time, seen my first cat through to her sad demise and acquired two more. The household has seen one Syrian and two Russian dwarf hamsters come and go. I’ve had two books published in English (both now also translated into French and one into German) and several short stories.

Numbers, numbers, numbers.

In twenty years, I’ve got up to an inordinate amount of stuff. I’ve lived in the North East longer now than I lived down south. But it’s still not ‘home’. I’m not entirely sure it will ever be ‘home’.

Several people have said ‘well, why don’t you move?’ Have you seen the disparity in house prices between the north and the south? I couldn’t afford a one bedroom flat in the village I grew up in even if I sold my house for the price I paid for it. The chances of being able to move back down to Sussex are somewhere between slim and non-existent. This makes me sad, because I’m definitely a Sussex girl at heart. I miss the South Downs. I miss Brighton. I watch Choccywoccydoodah not just for the awesome cakes and displays, but for the regular shots of Brighton sea front. Used to go there a lot on Sunday afternoons. We’d wander up and down the Palace Pier. I spent a small fortune on the ‘Outrun’ machine. ‘Magical Sound Shower’ is the soundtrack to my youth.

Of course, the weirdest thing of all is that when I was growing up in my little West Sussex ‘village’ (I use the inverted commas because the ‘village’ is now roughly the size of a small town and still growing), I couldn’t wait to get out of it. Now I wish I had never left.

Yes, yes, I know. If I’d never left, I’d never have had the wealth of experiences that I have under my belt. Maybe I’d never have discovered what it’s like to try to pull off the M42 during rush hour with my dashboard on fire[1]. Maybe I’d never have found out what it means to go on holiday to some of the most amazing places I’ve ever been. Maybe I’d never have met some of the most extraordinary people it’s been my pleasure to have got to know.

Regrets, huh? I’ve had a few and all that.

So the Son is spending two weeks in my home village-town. It didn’t take much for me to say ‘I’ll drive down to pick him up again!’ I’m looking forward to the visit. I’ll walk past the new village centre car park complaining about how it ‘was all a big patch of grass where I learned to ride my bike’. I’ll glance over the road from the allotments to my grandparent’s house and lament all the work that’s been done to it. I’ll walk through the allotments and remember the joy of my granddad scraping dirt off a carrot and rinsing it in the water butt before we ate it straight out the ground.

So many memories. And they are so much better than regrets.

[1] This is actually true. This happened.[2]

[2] In fact, most of my bizarre experiences have involved cars. [3]

[3] Ranging from dashboards being on fire and getting stuck on hay bales to being rear-ended by a man whose bumper promptly fell off.

Parent-Child-Parent

So, this is me today.

Under the Weather

It’s nothing much; certainly not anything that won’t go away after a couple of days and at my (more than considerable) age, you’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now. But it still comes crashing along with all the force of a speeding train and knocks me out of kilter for about thirty hours. The timing sucks, because my dad’s coming up this weekend to pick up the Son for his two week summer holiday stint. It means I’m in a grumpy mood before he even starts in on the criticisms. Breathe. Calm. Breathe. Calm. Find a soothing image.

Cripes, now I need the bathroom. THAT’S NOT SOOTHING

THAT’S STILL NOT HELPING! Why are all these ‘soothing’ images roaring, gushing, flowing wat… uh, brb… kittens. Kittens. I need kittens!

Chill.

My relationship with my dad is a strange one, but probably not so very different from countless other people the whole world over. Throughout my teenage years, I was – quite frankly – vile. I was independent from an early age and resented being told what to do. I’m still like that now, if I’m honest. I was a nightmare when I learned to drive. I have vague recollections of snapping ‘yes, I get it’ a lot at poor Mr. Twigg, my driving instructor. Now, if I’m sitting – say – attempting to assemble the one Necron that my Necron army current consists of, any helpful advice invokes much the same reaction. ‘Yes. I get it.’ I lke to be self-sufficient. It’s a good thing and bad thing in equal measure.

Anyway, as a teenager, me and my dad didn’t exactly get on so well. He criticised everything I did, but not in a nasty way. In an offhand, casual kind of way that had absolutely no malice behind it. Now that I’m a parent myself, I understand him a damn sight better. The problem my dad and I had (and still have to a degree) is a lack of ability to communicate with each other. We are the shining example of ‘what happens when A Generation simply can’t engage with the Next Generation’. He and I have so few things in common, but we do find common ground. He likes film music, I like film music. He enjoys sci-fi, I adore it. But the differences are too many to measure. He doesn’t read fiction that I’m aware of, for example. He doesn’t like music with lyrics. He can’t understand why I adore the internet and its crazy environs. Every so often at the back of my mind, I can visualise him standing just over my shoulder, shaking his head. The Generation Gap between us isn’t completely insurmountable, but it’s pretty damn huge.

My friend Nik and I were talking recently about how our generation is the last to truly have anything completely in common with our parents. We grew up in the eighties, a time when you still had to get up and cross the room to choose one of the four TV channels (until the remote controls-on-wires came along); a time where school holidays meant playing outside from dawn until dusk with only the occasional shout of the word ‘car!’ to prevent us from painful death. We knew it was stupid to play down at the lakes, but we did it anyway. I went in once. I remember making up some blatant and completely unrealistic lie about how I’d slipped on the bank of the brook on the way home and fallen in. The brook was about a centimeter deep. I was soaked.

I’ll always thank my mother for accepting the excuse and not telling me off. I get the impression that ‘hey, she didn’t drown, where’s the harm’? I never played at the lake again. Y’know. I learned my lesson.

But our kids have grown up in the age of remote controls. My son has never known a world without internet, or laptops, or mobile phones. He doesn’t go outside an awful lot, but always engages when we do. I was standing over his shoulder the other day watching him on his laptop. His ability to multi-task outstrips even mine – and I’m pretty short on internet attention span. At any given time I have about seven or eight or more different things on the go. He has more. He can flip between RPing on World of Warcraft to watching YouTube videos without batting an eyelid. But he still has the ability to switch off the technology and switch on the conversation when gently prised away.

It’s not -quite- this bad, I promise.

I like to think that I’m a billion times more approachable for my son than my dad was for me when I was his age. I think I’ve found the balance between friend and parent, but it’s hard. I’ve learned a lot about my own parents through being a parent myself. I’m a sort of… parent sandwich. I have my dad, which makes me a child, but I have my son, which makes me a parent. I catch myself constantly saying phrases my own parents used on me, despite all the countless times I promised I wouldn’t.

When mum died, my dad and I had to redefine our relationship. It’s definitely improved, but there are still times when he disapproves very loudly down the phone of something I’ve done, or something I’ve said I’m going to do. Whenever that happens, the rebellious teenager who flounced her way through doors and stomped up stairs comes to the fore. I’m able to ‘fight back’ now, which is something I could never have done when we had our screaming arguments back then and I’ve discovered that if only I’d stood up for myself back then, we’d probably have gotten along a whole lot better for longer.

Regardless, I am the person I am today thanks to a good upbringing from both my parents and much as he drives me completely mental, I do love my dad. Even if the minute he arrives the TV will be switched on and we will all be subjected to endless re-runs of M*A*S*H. He goes home on Monday, taking the son with him for a couple of weeks. Two days. I can do it.

Wish me luck.

Parting shot:

Damn straight.

 

Friday Creativity

Greetings, gentle reader, upon this Friday blog time. Today, in lieu of a og post, I thought I’d share a little vignette I wrote recently for my SW:TOR Sith Lord.

Enjoy. Or don’t. Whatever.

******

Corellia

It was chill enough for the trooper’s breath to mist before him; a visible cloud of vapour that gave away just how heavily he was breathing. But then, he had been running for quite some time. Dawn had barely stopped its slow creep over the horizon and the sky was still grey with only a suggestive tinge of gold to suggest that the sun was rising.

Not that it mattered much. Sunrise over Corellia did little to warm the coldness that seemed to accompany the devastation to Trooper Margon’s place of birth. Since the endless conflict and shellings had rendered the place a network of craters, unstable buildings and brick dust, sun did absolutely nothing to lift either its appearance or the spirits of those who still clung onto it with patriotic stubbornness. Corellia was, after all, their home world.

Grey, was the best word Margon had ever found to think of how he saw his home. It was also how he saw his life. No colour anywhere. His young wife and infant daughter had died during one of the endless air raids that had devastated an entire hab quarter, killing thousands in the space of a few short hours. Margon had never forgiven himself for having been offworld when it had happened.

Since then, he had been stationed with the reserve militia on the planet, dealing with threats from those who sought to continue raiding Corellia of its richness for themselves. Margon had fought countless Imperial troops, even a few rebel Republic ones and he had always come out unscathed.

But the scene that had taken place at the barracks that morning, in the cold moment where the world had held its breath before another dreamless night had ended, had been unlike anything he had known or trained for.

* * *

Barely an hour earlier, Margon was been sleeping. Or at least whatever it was that passed for sleep these days. Plagued by nightmares, the young trooper rarely got a full night’s rest any more. Thus it had been that he was awake during Last Watch.

Last Watch.

That his planet had come to this; the day divided up into military-style chunks of time when they were forced to stare into the endless grime of their own streets waiting for attacks that sometimes never came. Margon had long gotten into the habit of volunteering for Last Watch because it was easier than sleeping had become.

It was a cold night; a patina of frost rimed the streets and the barrel of his rifle. Margon stood, a cigarro in his mouth, taking occasional swigs from a hip flask. Corellian rum. Not the best brand to be sure; a trooper’s pay wasn’t exactly going to net him the five star liquor, but it was warming enough. The rules on alcohol were relaxed enough that he could sip at the warming, fiery liquid and stop his bones from freezing.

There was no liquor in the known planets that could have stopped his blood from curdling as the howl first reached his ears. It was a terrible sound; a nightmare scream dragged from the very bowels of hell. Margon dropped his hipflask and raised his rifle into the night.

‘Who goes there?’ The words were barked out, only a slight shake to his voice giving away the sudden fear that crept through him.

There came no reply. Three other troopers joined Margon in aiming the barrels of their weapons into the shadows. Something shifted slightly and the shadows began to coalesce into a solid shape, hunched over. Margon peered. It looked like some kind of animal; a hound with a prominent spine running in ridges down the curving back. Certainly the growling that came from it was animalistic.

‘Feral hound,’ grumbled one of his two companions. ‘Just shoot…’

The shape unfurled and something was thrown with inhuman strength across the gap between it and the troopers. The projectile landed with a sickening wet slap against Margon’s shoulder and then rolled to a stop on the ground a few feet away from the troopers.

His eyes automatically followed the object and seconds later he re-experienced the burning of the Corellian rum as it was violently projected from his mouth by the full force of the instinctive vomit reflex at the sight of his commanding officer’s severed head staring sightlessly up at him. The rest of the body followed seconds later.

‘Shoot it! SHOOT IT!’

Wiping the vomit from his face, Margon turned to fire at the creature in the shadows. Shots rang out in the ruined street, several ricocheting from the walls and zinging into the emptiness. But the creature that must surely have done this, the thing that had committed such an atrocity had gone, vanished with alarming speed into the cover that the ruined buildings afforded it.

‘I can’t! It’s not there!’ Margon took a few running steps forward, his heart beating painfully against his chest. His weapon sketched a wide arc in front of him as a little more daylight began to seep into the blackness, but he could see nothing.

It was then, and only then, that he realised there was no other sound apart from that of his own breathing. Moments later, that single noise was joined by a dark chuckle; a throaty laugh that seemed otherworldly. Margon became certain in that instant that whatever had killed his commander – and now apparently his companions – was most certainly not a hound.

I could just run, thought the trooper wretchedly. I could just run and never look back. Maybe… it won’t follow me. Maybe it doesn’t want me.

Instinct screamed at him. Run! Run, you fool! and yet he did not. Something else, some other curious primal urge made him turn his head to stare at the previously unseen attacker. Immediately, Margon regretted it.

A nightmare made flesh stood behind him, slightly silhouetted against the sliver of rising sun that made its way through the gaps in the buildings. Six and a half feet at least, the shoulders were so broad as to be exaggerated. The armour, crimson and black with silver detailing, was unlike anything Margon had ever seen. An artificial metallic spine ran down the ridge of the armour’s backplate giving the humanoid creature a terrifying aspect. A full face-helm obscured the thing’s features.

In one hand, it held the headless corpse of one of the two troopers who had joined him on the Last Watch. In the other, it held a weapon the like of which Margon had seen only rarely. A slim hilt with a slowly burning tongue of flame, red as the blood that now ran in rivers from the barracks, from the pile of corpses that this creature had engendered.

A lightsaber, thought Margon, a second of childish wonder causing his eyes to open wide. How…

The monstrous humanoid reached up a hand and tore off its helm. A shaven head, an all-too-human face and eyes.

The eyes burned into Margon’s face as though committing every detail about him to memory. And they were terrible eyes. They had the colour and intensity of amber flame, an orange hue that was somehow more animal than human. The left side of the man’s face was a mass of scar tissue that pulled one side of his mouth into a permanent sneer. The other half was marked by a tattoo that was worked intricately across the flesh of the cheek and eye. It was a man, then, but not the kind Margon had ever encountered.

He’d read about them, though. He knew what it was.

‘Sith.’ He whispered the word into the chill morning.

The scarred face twisted into a mockery of a smile and Arcarius Getharion, tasked with the destruction of this group of rebels, bowed deeply, threw down his penultimate victim before bounding towards the last with another feral howl of berserker fury.

That had been when Margon had started running.

He stopped now, leaning against the wall, his breath coming in short, painful gasps, tears running down his face from both his exertions and the sheer terror that filled his being at the thought of what was coming to get him. And it would get him, he had no doubt at all.

What he didn’t know was why.

Margon leaned against the wall, unable to run any further and wept in fear of his impending demise. He wept and he waited.

He waited. And he heard, or so he thought, a whisper in the dark. The words meant nothing to him and he pressed himself up against the wall as though willing it to swallow him up.

The sun came up, finally, although it was hardly worth the effort and Margon lived still. Hardly daring to believe that he might have been spared, he cautiously prised himself away from the wall. There were sounds. Voices. He could hear voices. Other troopers, he realised and eagerly, his limbs renewed with energy, he made his way towards them.

Carnage.

Everywhere, death. Everywhere evidence of the big Sith warrior’s passage. Each death – and there were upwards of twenty of them – had been uniquely different. Some had been decapitated cleanly, obviously with the blade of a lightsaber. Others had ragged stumps where heads had once been, implying that they had simply been physically torn off. One had been cut into two uneven-sized chunks of flesh. It was a vile scene of slaughter. But Margon was past throwing up.

‘Trooper Margon!’ The commander, a young-looked Lieutenant hurried over to him. ‘You’re still alive!’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened here?’

Margon looked around at the growing pile of corpses and felt nothing. For those who had once been his brothers and sisters-in-arms, he felt no grief, no sense of aching loss. All he felt was the weight of the burden that had been placed on him; a burden that had arrived as a whisper in the night. Finally he understood their meaning.

Always leave one standing…

Watch Your Manners

Today’s blog will mostly consist of me ranting. If this isn’t your thing, then turn away now. Go find a flowery, happy blog where people sing songs about unicorns, rainbows and fluffy bunnies. Because this morning, I am annoyed.

What has been the cause of these feelings of blood pressure increasing, twitch-inducing rage? Is it something in the news? Is it something I saw on TV? Is it the fact that I had to do all my ironing last night? Was it something on an internet forum? No. It was none of these.

What has brought on my rage is a selection of employees in this place who are seriously lacking in manners.

Over the six years I’ve been working here, I’ve unconsciously categorised people in terms of their Door Etiquette:-

Group One. The Polite Doormats. The people who end up holding doors open for everyone and wait patiently for their turn. Based on an Actual Experiment, approximately only one in six people bother to say ‘thank you’. I am a Polite Doormat. I have always held doors open for people to go through. Can’t help myself.

Group Two. The Reluctant Boy Scouts. The people who glare at you as they realise they need to hold the door so you can also come through. They perform this simple act of kindness with begrudging reluctance because they know it’s socially acceptable, but you can practically feel the hate radiating from them. Sometimes, Reluctant Boy Scouts deliberately accelerate their speed up a corridor so they can put distance between themselves and the person behind, thus making it far more acceptable not to wait for them.

Group Three. The Needless Hurriers. The people who just go through doors and let them close without bothering to look to see if anybody’s coming. There is a disturbingly high proportion of staff in this group. It’s ignorant, it’s rude and it’s completely unnecessary. It also, as you can probably tell by now, annoys the living beejeebus out of me. But even group three are as nothing to the one I’ve encountered several times. They should be rarer. They shouldn’t even exist, quite frankly, but let me introduce you to Group Four.

Group Four. The Unbelievables. I was subjected to one of them yesterday and bizarrely, another – different – one today. This is the most obnoxious group of all. This group consists of people to whom it’s actually OK to act in the following way:-

• Walk down corridor a few steps ahead of someone else.

• Reach door. Look over shoulder to see if anybody’s behind.

• Go through door. Let door swing shut anyway.

Wait, what? You even LOOKED to see whether someone was behind you! This morning, I called the person in question on it after I passed through the door they’d just let go in my face. I was carrying a bottle of milk, my coffee and a bag, so someone holding the door would have been very useful. It wasn’t exactly an insurmountable problem, but was there any need for it? So the following exchange took place. Politely, I hasten to add. Much as I rant and rage on my blog, I am cursed with being Terribly Polite.

Me: “Excuse me… why did you look to see if anybody was behind you and then just let the door shut in my face?”

Him: (Clearly confused by someone calling him out on his manners – or lack thereof) “Sorry.”

He didn’t even try to excuse it. If he’d said ‘I didn’t really look/didn’t notice you’, all that would have happened would have been a downgrading from being an Unbelievable to being a Needless Hurrier. Instead, he was just massively embarrassed about being called out on his lack of manners. I observed the said-same guy further on through the hospital. When he came to the next door, he actually took his time and, as it happens, DID hold the door open for the elderly gentleman who was coming through. So, small though it may be and as unlikely as it is that he’ll change his attitude, it did give me a faint sense of satisfaction. He scored a point for being chastised. Well done that man.

I was brought up to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. I was brought up to hold doors open for people to pass through and to be pleasant and polite. I’m grateful to both my parents for this and because they are the only template I have for child rearing, my son has also been brought up this way. I find it faintly alarming – although always very satisfying – when people feel compelled to comment on how nice his manners are. This should not be exceptional behaviour!

Someone said that I had nice manners because I was obviously – and oh, how I laughed – posh. Sure. If growing up on a council estate and attending a school the local bus drivers referred to as ‘The Zoo Run’ is your criteria, then I’m as posh as they come. I was simply brought up by decent people from a generation that knew the value of manners.

The value of manners, as encapsulated by my mother’s own words.

“Please and thank you cost nothing, but mean everything.”

Bah. It just annoys me. When I’m out and about, I can’t help but observe the behaviour of other kids, particularly young kids when they’re out with their parents. I watch as they are dragged along by the upper arms, whining and complaining, being sworn at by parents who themselves have never been introduced to the concept of good manners.

Right. I could go on about this forever. But I won’t. I’ll just be over here in the corner, smouldering. But I’ll be apologising for it, mark my words.

Playing Favourites

I was going to do this blog entry based on this article, but my feelings about the subject are so very strong that I decided it was too nice and sunny a day to get overly serious. I’ll save my thoughts on it for another day.

So instead, here’s a bit of random frivolity to celebrate the fact that I’ve blogged every day for a week. For the first time ever.

The lovely folks from the Black Library Bolthole did one of those author interview things with me yesterday. It’s up here.

Author interviews are strange things. I had enough trouble coming up with an author biography, so when people ask me questions about anything other than what I’m writing about, I sort of flail around a little helplessly. But the worst of these is ‘favourites’.

For example… being asked what my favourite drink is. I’m utterly hopeless at listing favourite anything. So I’m going to have a try in this post. I’ll read it back later and go ‘OH NO! I MISSED ZZZZZ OFF THE LIST!’ I guarantee it.

The hardest one for me is my top songs of all time. The list keeps changing around, although the top five more or less stays the same. For posterity, here they are, in current reverse order:-

5. Hotel California – The Eagles

4. Should I Stay or Should I Go – The Clash

3. Wicked Game – Chris Isaak

2. Boys of Summer – Don Henley

1. Man in the Long Black Coat – Bob Dylan

Sometimes they change order. Boys of Summer was my favourite for a long time and then Dylan finally beat it into submission and has held the top spot for about fifteen years. After the top five, things get a bit hazy. For me, ‘favourite’ is a fluid term. It could be what I like at that particular moment.

‘What’s your favourite Horus Heresy book?’ That’s another one that sets me to panicking when I’m asked. For the record, I love both ‘Flight of the Eisenstein’, ‘Prospero Burns’ and ‘A Thousand Sons’ in equal measure, with the original ‘trilogy’ coming in a pretty close second. What always gets me is if I don’t mention a specific title, the number of people who chip in with ‘what, you don’t think xxxx by yyyy is the best book in the series?’ Er, no. If I did, I’d have said so, right?

Favourite film? That’s a horrible one. You can generally spot the people who are trying to impress when they answer this question. They come up with some artsy-schmartsy thing that only they and their Uncle Bob saw after seventeen pints, when it was on late night BBC2 TV. A bit like my list of top five songs, this is a pretty changeable affair, but if I was pushed into answering, I guess it’d look something like this:

5. The Usual Suspects

4. Highlander

3. Star Wars

2. American Beauty

1. The Empire Strikes Back

‘Empire’ has been number one pretty much forever. ‘Highlander’ climbs up and down the list depending on my mood. Sometimes, ‘Silent Running’ pulls a fast one and shoulder-barges its way onto the list.

Favourite non-Warhammer books? Ah, now this one –does- change a lot, although the number one has been number one since I was about ten years old. Prior to that, the current number five on the list held the top spot.

5. Charlotte’s Web – E.E. White

4. Dragons of Autumn Twilight – Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

3. American Gods – Neil Gaiman

2. Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins

1. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

Someone asked me once what my favourite holiday destinations were. I struggled to list five. The best place I’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit is probably Rome, closely followed by Prague, Vienna and San Francisco. Does that count? I JUST DON’T KNOW.

When people put you on the spot and expect you to list your favourite anything, it can be really hard to do. Give it a try. Turn to your work colleagues and get them to list their top five songs. I bet very few people can just go ‘bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!’ Unless all their favourite songs are called ‘Bang’, of course.

Any questions on my favourite other things?

Don’t necessarily expect seriousness…