Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 13

In praise of farting…

My father would have died rather than fart in front of anyone (my mother would have gone one step further and murdered all the witnesses – no I’m just kidding). The first time I met anyone who just let it rip, I was impressed – but a bit taken aback. Here’s this hulking African-American guy pretty much levitating himself off my bed with the force of his rectal explosions…and he doesn’t even say ‘pardon me, ma’am!’. It was a revelation.

My African-American was soon followed by two other boyfriends wildly disparate in intellectual capacity and follicular gifts – but both able to blast off methane missiles like North Korea having a Show and Tell Day.

So now I’m single and all by myself and you know what, I’ve finally learned the joy of farting. If you’d challenged me to let off a trombone five years ago, I just couldn’t have made myself do it – even my arse would’ve crossed its metaphorical arms and zipped itself firmly shut. Don’t get me wrong, I could release a room-clearer as well as anyone – I just couldn’t do the loud and proud.

But I’ve got older and less genteel since then. So now I add the ability to fart whenever I feel like it to all the other advantages of being alone – of which, I’ve gotta tell you, there are quite a lot.

More of that some other time. How about you? Are you alone? Do you like it? What do you reckon is the best thing about being All By Yourself?

Rose invents new genres one book at a time. If you want to check out her novels, stories and semi-fictional memoirs, they’re ALL on sale for this week ONLY (99 cents) – they’re all HERE. Sale ends 15 May.

What would you do with your 15 minutes?

Andy Warhol was supposed to have said that that in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes (apparently, he didn’t. Probably he said it was just five).

As a writer I can’t help but notice that the scramble to be seen is becoming ever more frantic. In 2018, there were more than 1 million indie authors on Amazon, most of them hoping, at the very least, to sell a few books – and in their secret dreams, to become a household name like Lee Childs or E.L.James And that’s just the scribblers – there’s also the photographers, the fashionistas, the cat lovers, the travellers and those people who unwrap packages on YouTube. Nude.

So if I fail in the scramble to get my head up above the writhing masses, what then? If a book falls in the forest and no one is there to see it, has it really fallen? Who am I talking to, and does it matter if they don’t reply? Does anyone else feel there’s something a bit silly about jumping up and down like a kid in a classroom yelling “Pick me, Miss, pick me!”

Times have changed for attention seekers. The attention we crave has become scarcer than a self-deprecating comment by Donald Trump; if you want it, you have to get busier, louder, sexier. The market is glutted. Maybe instead of trying to catch the world’s ear, we should talk to the people who live next door. If it’s worth saying to a thousand people, it’s worth saying to one.

Which leads me to wonder – if you were absolutely guaranteed your 15 minutes of fame, what would you do with it? Is there something you’d like to say to the world that can be said in under 15 minutes and that is so important that you’d gladly give those 15 minutes of a lifetime over to saying it?

Come on then – what would it be? (And going from the, um, philosophical to the frivolous, here’s my song about bras – they shit me.

There are worse things than getting fat…

Why do we worry so much about what we put in our bellies…and so little about what we put in our minds?

After all, anything you put in your mouth will eventually just come out the other end and disappear down the dunny. As for what we put in our minds, well, that’ll emerge one way or another too…

This is something I’ve begun thinking about since the New Zealand massacre. After the massacre, it soon became clear that the idiot responsible had been hoovering up all sorts of crap from forums such as 8Chan and right wing nationalist gurus lurking around the Internet, and swallowing it whole. For days after the massacre, people were shocked at how quickly the shooter’s home video travelled around the world and into the noisome basements of the curious.

Talking about this with a young friend, I commented that it shouldn’t really be possible to watch people die at the touch of a fingertip on a mobile screen. He replied, “Never mind that sick fucker – if you know where to look, you can find much worse than that – people being burned alive in tires in remote African nations, people being tortured to death over several days by Mexican drug lords, people stomping on guinea pigs for, like, a sex fetish…”

“Ok,” I said, “so those things are out there – but in my opinion, we shouldn’t look at them.”

“Why not? I mean it’s terrible, but we all watch the news, don’t we? Maybe we need to know what really goes on in the world…”

I don’t agree. “Would you eat a plateful of dogshit? No, I thought not. Then why put it in your head? There are things it’s not good for us to see – or do. The more shit we take in, the more we’ll put out, or, as they used to say, you can’t walk through filth and hope to come out clean.”

It isn’t, of course, just a matter of what we watch. Perhaps the most basic consequence of any rotten act is its effect on the person who does it: we become what we do, for good or ill. (And yeah, that does worry me a bit!)

Anyway, I’m no advocate for a prim and censored society but it seems to me that we all wade through more and more soul sewerage…it’s gotta have an impact. My personal solution? I can’t stop other people eating their triple-cheese Whoppers of voyeuristic grime, but for myself, I try to watch what I eat.

 

A poem for the future

In the future

Few of us remain.

Summer never ends, for some

Far beneath the sea hides a better world.

There is no Other for the others are us and they are welcome

Fear is forgotten for the Shield protects mankind

New worlds await the blind

And all is mind.

In the future

Everything is going to be alright.

 

So this is a poem about a book I’m re-launching today – the thoughtful and optimistic collection of stories, Utopia Pending. FREE until 23 March. Because wouldn’t it be nice if….

two thirds of every news bulletin was about the great and lovely things that humans do for each other and for our non-human comrades
the deeds of terrorists, murderers and bullies were consigned to page ten, small print oblivion
the future was a gift, a promise, rather than a curse we inflict on our children
we hoped, and tried, and imagined better…

Pick up a copy here – and if you like speculative fiction, Fallacious Rose (that’s me) will be co-hosting a Facebook party for an hour on Thursday 28 March at 11 am Australian Eastern Standard Time (that’s midnight UTC on Wednesday 28). Should be fun – I and other spec fic authors will be sharing readings, stories NEVER BEFORE SEEN, free books, and…just chatting. Love to see you there – here’s the link!

And here’s me reading one of the stories from Utopia Pending – Alanah Andrews’ The Call. PS the beautiful photo above is by Aleksandra Boguslawska on Unsplash

So tell me, about that future…are you an optimist, a pessimist or something in between? Why?

 

Ten reasons to look forward to old age…

1. Age is power. You only have to look at all the old bastards lining board room tables and elbowing their way around the halls of Government to realise that. A young dog may run faster than an old dog but an old dog knows better than to waste her energy chasing sticks.

2. Your hair is now silver or even better, snow white. When you were young you probably would have paid $100s and risked death by peroxide to get it that colour. Sure, there will be people (for instance, the idiots who interview you for jobs) who think the grey in your hair has leached from your brain matter: they obviously don’t know that silver is the new blonde.

3. Nobody eyes you up any more. This is supposed to be a bad thing but I can’t see why. When I was young, random guys seemed to think they had a licence to judge the quality of my boobs, my arse and my face. Now they don’t bother and frankly, I’m ok with that.

4. You know stuff. You do, because you have been alive that much longer. Just think back to how stupid you were when you were young…or last week. You are no longer that stupid, and you’re getting less stupid all the time.

5. You are beautiful. You might not believe it but here’s the proof. When you look back at photos of yourself ten years ago, you’re generally surprised at how good-looking you were back then. So in ten years from now… Not that you care, anyway.

6. You have outrun your self-esteem issues, and got used to yourself. Maybe you even like her (or him). When I was young I thought I was ugly, socially awkward and unlikely to amount to anything. Now I’m old I know I was right, and I don’t give a frig.

7. You no longer have to prove anything. If you were ever going to do it, you’ve done it. The frenzied search for a mate is becoming a distant memory: either you’ve got one, or you don’t really want one that much, thanks. As Sophocles said, ‘Spare me, puh..lease!’.

8. There is nothing standing between you and your dreams. Except death, of course. When you were young you had things to do – families to start, career ladders to climb, bucket lists to tick off. As you become old, all of this falls away – and all you have to do is enjoy the time that’s left to you. Admittedly, it can be difficult when your body isn’t down with the program…but there’s still lots of time to watch every episode ever made of (insert your favourite series here).

9. You can demand respect (although you might not always get it). You have the right to be conducted across roads, listened to when you repeat stories for the hundredth time, and tolerated when you can’t find your change at the supermarket checkout. Nobody puts up with this shit when you’re twenty – make the most of it.

10. Children are an unmitigated joy. Sure, they’ve always been lovely in their own way, but how much nicer they are when they buy YOU dinner in fancy restaurants, don’t require their bowel-movements mopped up, and don’t say shit like ‘Mum, I’m boooored!’.

And in honour of getting old, here’s an untouched-up picture of me looking EXACTLY HOW OLD I AM.

What d’ya reckon? Am I trying to stick fancy handles on a sow’s ear, or do you LIKE being old? (Or you can download a truly horrid story here)

 

Five reasons to look forward to old age…

1. Age is power. You only have to look at all the old bastards lining board room tables and elbowing their way around the halls of Government to realise that. A young dog may run faster than an old dog but an old dog knows better than to waste her energy chasing sticks.

2. Your hair is now silver or even better, snow white. When you were young you probably would have paid $100s and risked death by peroxide to get it that colour. Sure, there will be people (for instance, the idiots who interview you for jobs) who think the grey in your hair has leached from your brain matter: they obviously don’t know that silver is the new blonde.

3. Nobody eyes you up any more. This is supposed to be a bad thing but I can’t see why. When I was young, random guys seemed to think they had a licence to judge the quality of my boobs, my arse and my face. Now they don’t bother and frankly, I’m ok with that.

4. You know stuff. You do, because you have been alive that much longer. Just think back to how stupid you were when you were young…or last week. You are no longer that stupid, and you’re getting less stupid all the time.

5. You are beautiful. You might not believe it but here’s the proof. When you look back at photos of yourself ten years ago, you’re generally surprised at how good-looking you were back then. So in ten years from now… Not that you care, anyway.

6. You have outrun your self-esteem issues, and got used to yourself. Maybe you even like her (or him). When I was young I thought I was ugly, socially awkward and unlikely to amount to anything. Now I’m old I know I was right, and I don’t give a frig.

7. You no longer have to prove anything. If you were ever going to do it, you’ve done it. The frenzied search for a mate is becoming a distant memory: either you’ve got one, or you don’t really want one that much, thanks. As Sophocles said, ‘Spare me, puh..lease!’.

8. There is nothing standing between you and your dreams. Except death, of course. When you were young you had things to do – families to start, career ladders to climb, bucket lists to tick off. As you become old, all of this falls away – and all you have to do is enjoy the time that’s left to you. Admittedly, it can be difficult when your body isn’t down with the program…but there’s still lots of time to watch every episode ever made of (insert your favourite series here).

9. You can demand respect (although you might not always get it). You have the right to be conducted across roads, listened to when you repeat stories for the hundredth time, and tolerated when you can’t find your change at the supermarket checkout. Nobody puts up with this shit when you’re twenty – make the most of it.

10. Children are an unmitigated joy. Sure, they’ve always been lovely in their own way, but how much nicer they are when they buy YOU dinner in fancy restaurants, don’t require their bowel-movements mopped up, and don’t say shit like ‘Mum, I’m boooored!’.

And in honour of getting old, here’s an untouched-up picture of me looking EXACTLY HOW OLD I AM.

What d’ya reckon? Am I trying to stick fancy handles on a sow’s ear, or do you LIKE being old? (Or you can download a truly horrid story here)

 

You know those days when you knock over the sugar bowl and accidentally decapitate your sister in law…

Actually, that isn’t what this post is about at all – it’s just a draft title I wrote ages ago and now I can’t remember why. But it made me laugh. What CAN I have been thinking!

No, this post is about recipes. Specifically, recipes for food, and for life. You see, my kids can’t cook (yes, I know, I’m a bad mother) so when they turned eighteen, I wrote them a book of recipes specifically designed for people who wouldn’t know a white sauce if they slipped in it, and think cooking is a mysterious and dangerous art that demands a library of spell books, a kitchen-full of arcane ingredients, and absolute and unwavering attention to detail lest a demon leap into the Sacred Circle and turn your Duc a l’Orange to dust and ashes.

It’s not. If you know the basics, you have the courage to experiment – and the wisdom to just chuck it in the bin and order a takeaway if it doesn’t work – then you can cook something with just about anything. So that’s what the book was about – the basics.

But then I thought, well isn’t cooking like life, really? I mean, isn’t it? There you are, hungry, tired, with just a can of sweetcorn and half a zucchini in the fridge – what do you do? You make something of it – or you ring up the pizza place. You cope or you fold, you save or you splurge, you make do or you don’t.

Speaking of life, we’ve been alive for a while, you and I. We know how to cook, and we know lots of other stuff, right? So why not share it? Why stick to just food? As the Bible said, eighteen year olds cannot live on bread alone. And it was thus the ‘recipes for life’ idea was first conceived…

So talking about sharing, here’s a little bit from the book (very much a draft at this point), for your reading and (maybe) eating pleasure.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE WEIRD PEOPLE

“I can’t find enough magpies for this recipe” (an old lady I knew once who sometimes mixed up her cooking with her nursery rhymes)

When I was a kid I had this annoying book called the Water Babies, where this poor kid gets bullied by a collection of bossy matrons with names like ‘Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby’ and ‘Mrs Ifyoudon’teatyourdinneryouwon’tgetanydessert’. As I remember it, any time the kid slips up he gets clouted or killed or whatever. Which is pretty much how life is.

But the point that Mrs I’mgoingtoreadyoulecturestillyoufalloveranddie missed is that people are weird.

Sure, being nice to people is a sound policy. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? You do someone a favour – and they throw it back in your face like a dirty dishrag. You sigh virtuously, you smirk, you say ‘I guess you needed to do that, didn’t you…” It’s all good.

But you’ll meet people, inevitably, who have a totally different idea of what’s nice than you do. You give them a present, they go round complaining to all their friends about what a dud it was. You do as YOU would be done by and it turns out, it’s not how THEY would be done by, at all, at all!

For instance, a dear friend of mine is a computer moron and often asks for assistance with technical issues, like sending an email.

“Help me,” he asks plaintively, “A Nigerian princess has just offered me money – how do I reply?”

So I patiently explain, and at the end of the process he turns to me with a glare and says “I wanted you to do it for me – not show me all these little buttons and stuff. Fat lot of help you’ve been!”

Or I notice him limping and say ‘Have you got a sore leg, mate? Can I get you anything?” and he’ll say, “No! Don’t you understand a real man enjoys pain? Are you calling me some kind of wuss?”

Which goes to prove that what I’d like done to me is not always what you’d like done to you. So show a little sensitivity, and don’t try to rescue people from suffering if they seem to be actually enjoying it.

But let’s move on to making pies. So much easier than wrangling weirdos.

Anything Pie

You need 

Frozen pastry sheets. Either puff or shortcrust will do fine.
Veg to make pie filling. My suggestion – potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, leeks, mushrooms, pulses (ie lentils, chickpeas, stuff lthat comes in cans). Even (gives vegetarian shudder) pre-cooked meat, chopped up in bite-sized pieces.
Stock cube or stock powder
Tomato paste (optional)
Herbs and spices (optional)

How to make it 

Start by frying something tasty like chopped onions or garlic. While it’s frying, get out your sheets of frozen pastry so they can thaw at room temperature.
Want to add spices? Now’s the time. Anywhere from a pinch to a teaspoonful is fine, and they only take a minute. Allspice, chilli powder, garum masala…what the hell, try it and see.
Want to add herbs? They don’t like being fried, so add them with the water (see Step 4). ‘Mixes’ are easiest – Italian Herbs, Greek Herbs, etc. Or take a chance…
Now throw in your chopped veg of choice (just about any veg will do) and/or meat, and add enough water to cover everything.
Optional – chuck in a can of lentils (water drained off first) or other pulses/beans. Note, pulses will absorb quite a lot of water so keep checking to make sure the whole thing doesn’t run dry. 
Add stock (cube, powder, whatever) in your favourite flavour. If you’ve got it, add a spoonful of tomato paste – that always makes things taste nicer.
Simmer on the stove until (a) your veg is just cooked and (b) you have hardly any water left. You don’t want a watery pie. If there’s too much water left, turn up the heat high and boil some off. Last resort, drain it off into another dish.
Put your thawed sheet of pastry in an oven-proof dish (anything that’s deep enough to hold your filling and won’t melt or explode when it’s hot)
Put the filling in on top of the pastry.
Put another pastry sheet on top.
Prick holes in it with a fork for the steam to get out.
Put the whole thing in the oven at 180/360 degrees. Should take between 30 and 50 minutes.

Want to find out more? Visit Rose’s author website at http://www.fallaciousrose.com.

 

Want to become a mesh addict?

A reading from The Immortality Game, by Ted Cross, with some thoughts…

Mesh addiction. It’s no joke. One minute you’re exploring hidden treasures with the Wizard Xiu, having mindblowing sex with Khloe Kardashian or on a date with your long-dead husband: the next you’re a desiccated corpse with a big grin on its face.

So this is a speculative fiction scenario in a thriller format – lots of futuristic concepts like air cars, meshing, digital cloning, nanobots etc spiced up with a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat plot that keeps you flicking e-reader pages quick as you can. Marcus wakes up from an eight year spell doing his PhD (via a USB in his neck) to find the digital remains of his dead father telling him to go off to Moscow and locate a missing chip (not the potato kind). Meanwhile in Moscow, morgue attendant Zoya has serious mafia problems…

The book’s fun, and thought-provoking. I mean, would you plug into a virtual world if you could and live your life in cyberspace? Most people say no but mean yes – after all, don’t we already do our best to digitise life whenever we can? You’d have a great life, guaranteed, tailored to your every wish – personally, I think I like the ‘surprise’ quality of the Real World, with its capacity to throw you curveballs and set you challenges, but then, you can program your Virtual World to do that too.

And then there’s the ability to download yourself onto a stick and then upload into a conveniently empty body. Be a born-again whatever you like! Are you still you when you’re inside someone else’s shell? If there are two copies of you prancing around, who’s the real You? And who needs a body anyway – haven’t religions been saying for centuries that we’re better off without them? Not to mention the planet, which would probably heave a sigh of relief if the physical population of humans decamped utterly into some kind of brain software storage facility.

So here’s my reading, ably assisted by Gucci the yapping yellow furball whose home I currently occupy (and yes, there is at least one slip-up).

Have you ever had a Brilliant Friend?

Have you ever tried out for Mensa?

I did their online quiz once. You get three minutes to answer twenty questions or something – if you pass, you’re in the top one percent.

I failed. But I once had a friend who passed, and so was entitled to go to meetings of super bright people and talk about physics or chess moves or whatever. After the first one, she stopped going because she said they were boring, charmless and (in the case of the men) probably had small penises.

I was naturally pleased to hear that. We were superior to those nerdy geniii. We were sexy, fascinating, vivacious. Well… she was.

The critically acclaimed novel My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante follows an almost obsessive friendship between Elena – busty, academically bright, hard working – and Lila, intense, brilliant and beautiful without trying. Whatever Lila is, Elena yearns to be; her achievements have meaning only if Lila is in the race.

Set in 1950s working class Naples, there’s plenty of violence, screaming and patriarchy. The novel has the intimate feel of someone taking directly from life, but literarying it up. It’s absorbing but a touch try hard, as if – in order for this to be literature – people and situations must be transformed into high art so we don’t quite recognise them. For instance, when Lila decides to erase every trace of herself at 70, for some abstruse reason.  As you do…

We don’t like to admit to envy, it’s too close to the bone. But like Elena, I’m envious. Of my pretty, clever friend (worse, she didn’t even care that she was pretty and clever!) And of Elena, the novelist. I mean, how many indie novelists can even approach the foothills of the literary pedestal she’s on, and for good reason.

Anyway, I’ve never been anyone’s Brilliant Friend – perhaps the Eccentric Friend, or the Sweet but Plain Friend? That’s fine, I’m old enough to be good with that.

Anyway, here’s me reading an excerpt from My Brilliant Friend on YouTube, complete with review and some burbling.

Rose is sad…

I often think of myself, smugly, as a cork. You can push a cork under water but once you let it go, up it bounces, cheerful as ever. That’s me.

But even a cork sinks if you tie enough stones to it (or shove it in a bottle full of sand). Right now, my five year friendship with a man I once loved has sunk irretrievably, I feel exiled (by my own choice, let it be said) from my country home, I’m devoid of creative spark, and I feel, literally, poor.

Ironically, I’m currently writing a book of recipes, for food and for life: perhaps my flagship recipe should be ‘Idiot Stew, and how to make it (tip: it tastes best in hindsight). I’m also writing the sequel to my gothic spoof, Lady Charlotte’s Dilemma – and that kind of depresses me, because I wish I was writing War and Peace. And I wish I was home.

What is it they say? This, too, shall pass. I know it will.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll amuse myself writing a collection of sour love stories…of which The Plate will be one.