The Week of Up and Down

Highlights

I’ve got a freelance job, hopefully starting next week, which will mean glory be and halleluiah for the bank account. I am fully prepared to put my head down and work like an enthusiastic Trojan. Money! I am so excited I could almost buy fancy things right now* except I shall wait and see if the job actually materialises or disappears back into a thin mist.

Freelance job is also in another city, which means I get put up in a hotel and have an expense account. I am actually very good with expense accounts, and seeing it has been so long since I was frivolous I will probably question every time I have a glass of water. I doubt I will see much of the city, but to be out of my little room into the wide world will be a nice change. And no evening distractions means I can sit and write/edit the novel to my heart’s content in a hotel room feeling like a proper writer.**

Freelance job also takes me until April, and then me and J are off on a road trip to Italy to attend a wedding. We planned it last year and I have been fretting over the money side, but now it might just work out ok. Woohoo! As you can no doubt tell, I am rather pleased about that.***

I have arranged a meeting with the editor of a magazine for my local borough, and we are going for a coffee next week (hopefully before I am in another city!). She sounds nice in her emails, and I am hopeful to pitch an idea to her that I think will work really well. Cross fingers for me!****

I took both my cats to the vet for a check up (the ginger boy behaved very stoically; the tabby girl felt the need to complain every ten seconds) and the vet gave them a clean bill of health.*****

Lowlights

I went out for a meal last Tuesday and was struck ill with food poisoning. Oh it was as rough as houses. Put it this way, since Tuesday night I have only been able to eat 2 small bowls of cereal, 1 slice of toast, half a banana, 1 small bowl of plain pasta, and 1 small bowl of plain chips (today). I am feeling better; tons better, but still have no appetite. Great for a quick diet though, if the looking haggard and having no energy thing also suits.******

Footnotes

* Fancy things for me at the moment are as follows: Tights. New cat litter tray. A jumper (this is probably the top of the ‘oh my God, I have no clothes left that do not have a hole in the elbow, why moths why?’ list). Smart clothes to complete Lois Lane transformation from Velma, the speccy short one in Scooby Doo that always wears the same polo neck.

**I have no idea why a proper writer should work in a hotel room. I fear it is another fancy delusion of mine. I suffer from a great many fancy delusions where authors are concerned. My favourite one at the moment is that all authors live in a rambling 17th century house with an iron bell pull and a front garden shadowed by trees. Although at the moment 'all authors live in a house' works for me, forget the trimmings.

***Bloody ecstatic, I think you’ll find. I can’t wait to spend some time with my J.

****This was a follow on from this post earlier. Patience is a virtue!

*****She also said that my ginger cat was very handsome and my tabby girl had beautiful soft fur. Yes I am a proud parent of two furry beggars, and was all happy and soppy for ages after that.

*****At the moment I am at the stage where I want to eat something but afraid it will make me feel horrible again. Like I have just spent the last hour wondering whether I should have a hot chocolate (tea, coffee etc are still a big no-no) or whether it will be a bad idea. Sigh. Still, on the mend!

Library Hunting

The hour of five this morning saw me up and helping J print off a load of work documents before he sets off South. ‘I am such a nice person’, I thought happily, as I waved him off. ‘I am going to stay awake and do lots of good things!’

Well, good things I have done – although my awakened state is more like a stupor than anything ‘zippy’. But I have managed to organise research (for a local magazine feature, rather than the novel – that puppy is still waiting), and this afternoon set off to the local library to prowl further into the subject.

I mentioned here that the local library is an odd place to hang out – the reference room was the place time forgot, but the building was nice and old and who cared if it needed modernising? It had history. Unfortunately this is now more like it had history, as it appears the local council cared (in a slap dash ‘bugger we’ll have to do something about this book problem’ sort of way) and have decided to relocate the whole thing. I harrumphed at the shut door to the old library, and peered crossly at the notice telling new patrons where the temporary library was being housed. ‘Oh over there’, I thought. ‘Righty-ho’.

Nothing against care homes, but it appears Tuesday is the day for my local borough to let all residents out for a stroll. And, as if in sympathy, my shoelace kept untying itself so I was either shuffling along at the same speed, or stopping to lean against walls (in a non-yob way) and re-tie them. No matter whether I did double or triple knots, I’d go a few yards and there they were, trailing along beside me.

Nor did it help that I’d somehow lost the new library. I walked (or shuffled) around in a large circle, wandering into the park to see if perhaps it was in there (it wasn’t), coming out again and peering around tiredly. I went back to the closed library door and this time noticed the map. 'Ah, now that would have been good to know', I muttered to myself as I set off again, catching the glances of sympathetic bystanders as they watch ‘yet another one’ shuffle her way down the street, cursing shoelaces.

I did eventually find the new library, and my word, it is a shiny new place reminiscent of Borders. The staff were amazingly helpful and it was so much nicer to search for books. I thanked the nice kind person who helped me find my books on old London, and said as much to her, feeling ever so slightly disloyal to the old building. She said a lot of people had mentioned that, and I got the feeling this new library may be here to stay - and I contributed to it! See - this is what happens when you start at five - nice old buildings get doomed.

Anyway, I am back home (obviously) and have already eaten dinner. Surely bedtime isn't that far away? Oh... 5.40pm. Rats.

So it starts again…

I’ve done it! A whole six weeks (yup - count them!) in an office with people and printers and sweets and spreadsheets and meetings and marbles (actually no marbles – that was just to keep you on your toes). It was great fun to be this efficient office lass with her pashmina for a while but oh the relief of going back to being me – back to being creative, back with my writing and books, back in my flat, back to my story.

The budget has now been shored up with sticks, and I have a month or two clear to get my red pen busy with editing. I have also successfully pitched an idea to a London magazine that I cannot wait to get cracking on (quirky London history is my forte!), and in the near dim and distant future will be editing a factual book that should test my subbing skills. Bring it on, is what I say! Oh yes.

I got talking to a children’s book author the other day (as you do) and gave him one of my children’s book ideas to see what he thought. It was really interesting advice (basically keep working on it, try and develop a ‘voice’, think whether a publisher can see more than one story in you) but it was what he said about the illustrations that really struck home. I had experimented with a new style for two of them, and one he liked, and the other he didn’t, and he pointed out the bits in the picture that didn’t work for him. I instantly saw where I had gone wrong – I had run out of steam, and had finished it hurriedly, instead of really working on it. This worries me slightly, as I knew that with that particular drawing, yet I still showed it to him, and presented it as ‘finished’ when in reality, it needed more time. I’m not altogether sure with these children’s books of mine – they were something I did at University and I think they need ‘a lot’ of work to get them up to scratch – the picture book market is very, very tough. Something to pop on the back burner, maybe…

In the meantime the flat is a tip. Me and J have been scudding in and out of the flat like clouds across the sky over the last few weeks and the result is little pockets of mess everywhere I look. So it appears my first job will be a spring clean, followed by a scrub – and that is just me! My hair is starting to look like an unravelled brillo pad, it has been so long since I last had it cut. So I have decided tomorrow is to be a day of treats – new hair, new clothes, new shoes (well, why the devil not!) and then I can really settle down. I have a bundle of old newspapers dating back to the 1700’s to work my way through – friend C’s mum and dad have a house that is part home / part amazing museum. They let me borrow a suitcase full of old treasure… erm, newspapers, to see if there are any from 1940's etc to help the book, but apparently they go back even further than that, something that keeps the historian in me very happy indeed. I have also been collecting old books on different decades from various charity shops – oh yes, my home library is alive and thriving. J is thrilled, I tell you. Thrilled.

On the ball

Sometimes, you find things on the Internet without even trying. Today I wasn’t even looking for local London magazines; I was after a magazine called The English Garden to see if they might be interested in my photographic services.

Did I tell you I can be rather nifty with a camera? But then again, cameras are so good these days aren’t they – nearly everyone can be nifty I think. You just have to get your composition spot on, or see the quirkier things in life.

I have digressed haven’t I? Right, Internet. So there I was, hunting The English Garden, which is published by Archant, which recently acquired a LOT of local London mags. I knew this, but obviously I had been as blind as a bat when I last flew into Archant’s website, as they have www links for nearly all of their publications, which includes editorial contact details. Oh fool that I am! But will I email or phone them? Hmm… See, it is tricky. As from experience in editorial, the phone is a constant annoying interuption from work. Yet emails can disappear very quickly down a big black hole, especially if they are a generic email eg to editor@...

And is Friday a good day to pitch? Liquid lunches, looking forward to the weekend, you get that whole 'I will deal with it Monday' feeling and by the time Monday rolls around there are hundreds of emails that have come in over the weekend for the busy editor and your Friday email will have fallen down the plug hole.

Or I am making yet another plausible excuse? Hmm, maybe I should be in politics.

Reference room of joy

I took my umbrella for a summer’s walk to the library yesterday afternoon, hoping that I would find the reference room open. This is an old library in a nice building, and there is something about the people that live in the reference room that intrigues me. It is like time has stood still in there, so to discover that the same man works there as when I was last in the reference room (1999) didn’t surprise me a jot.

The usual suspects were draped across tables in the silence – old men (one of which wanting the phone directory for Ipswich), a couple of students with weighty tomes in front of them and mixed range of folk on the out of place computers to the side of the room. An elderly gent asks the lady at the counter why his hotmail isn’t working. She looks flustered, as if answering I.T questions was not the reason she applied all those years ago to work in a library.

A strange metamorphosis comes over me when I am in a reference library.

I suddenly feel all worthy.

I drag down the Writers Yearbook 2007 from on high and scan it knowingly, flipping to the magazine listing section. A few new ones catch my eye, mainly as they offer to pay for articles, should you be so lucky. I scribble down the editor details and look for an email, even though I know full well I should just pick up the phone and call them.

Why are people (okay, why am I) so scared of speaking on the phone? It is not like they know me, so what is my problem with this? Relying just on email is not the done thing, and I just know it. Sigh… You would never think I once interviewed Will Smith, would you? I jot down phone numbers of everywhere in grim determination. I guess I think that I will somehow commit an appalling etiquette faux pas. What a thing to be scared of!

I then hit on the jack pot. I ask the lady behind the counter for a directory that lists London magazines and she looks relieved to be asked a question about books. She takes me unerringly straight to Benn’s Media – which lists them all. Oh praise be libraries, I think. So now I have...

Angel – North -- Belgravia – The Resident –The Westender – Southwest –Upside – Northwest

…to think about. The only concern is Angel and North’s editor is one and the same, same as Northwest and Upside. Which have the same www as Southwest, and six of these publications have the same phone number, so do I pitch my idea to one at a time or all six? And perhaps their content is syndicated, rather than original? It looks like only Belgravia and The Westender are independent, or at least have a different phone number. Okay… my mission today is to call them all and see if I can pitch an idea. Gulp.

Oh, and we passed the landlord inspection with flying colours, I have to say.

Bloody computers

Bloody, bloody emails! How to configure your existing email into Outlook and change your outgoing host to your new SMTP – anyone? I call my new broadband provider – Virgin – and am put on hold. Finally, when I am put through to ‘Derek’, I am cut off. I call again, temper rising. This time I get through to a bored sounding ‘David’, who mutters that I need to put smtp.ntlworld.com – which I do, and then nothing works. Outlook behaves as if I have just poured poison into its innards. I do what all good technical help people do, and wiggle the wires, and then press restart. Outlook glares at me. I call Virgin, again.

‘Oh, you tried to connect to ntl when you are blueyonder,’ chuckled ‘Neil’ at the end of the phone. Now, how on earth am I supposed to know the damn difference? But Neil was a delightful chap, telling me I could host my website and email by another way entirely. I didn’t understand him but he probably knew that and it didn’t worry either of us.

All now appears to be working fine, except last night’s tussle with Messenger. Apparently an old one I wanted to delete was running in the background, so I tried to delete it, only to succeed in deleting Internet Explorer. I really should go back to the days of pen and paper.

Oh, and yesterday I spent far too long searching for local London magazines. Y’see – I write for one already, and the idea I have is such a good one that it could easily be extended to other local mags, that is, if I can find the buggers. Now I have always prided myself on my ability to leap, skim and dive into the Internet to extract what I need. Yet yesterday I was like a splashy kid scared to let go of its water wings. So far I have:

North London
Angel -- North -- N16 -- Northwest

West London
Grove -- The Hill -- Westside -- Matchbox -- The Resident

South London
Rise -- Southwest -- Living South

East London
?

Yet I do not have contact details for any except Grove, Matchbox and Angel, except the latter's email came back with a message undeliverable. The Resident’s phone number was out of order. And who knows what folk in the East read – perhaps they don’t.

Sigh – all I need is a few magazines to write for each month that ‘pay’ (golden word, that) and then at least I have a few pounds coming in, as opposed to me opening the window and emptying my purse into thin air every day.