Phew!

Those of you who have read this blog before know that I have been working on a new book. On Friday, after real hard slog, I typed the immortal words "the end".

Although this has felt like the hardest book yet, I've actually written it faster any of the others (and have to remind myself that thanks to a mega-bout of RSI there were six weeks I couldn't touch a keyboard at all). I guess the most important thing is that I love it and can't wait for it to get out into the world properly :)

It's such an odd feeling, reaching that point when writing a book. It's not quite ‘the end’ of it for me as once I have comments back from the test readers, my agent, I'm sure, will have comments too. So the great news is I get to spend more time with these characters, and I think, when you get to meet them, you'll be glad to as well. But in the meantime the time pressure to be sitting at my desk 24/7 isn't quite as strong as usual, I may catch up with all the series on the sky box before the system deletes them for me, I'm off out twice next week on a school night (!), I could get used to this!

Having spent the last hour clearing my desk which, it turns out, is oak-coloured –who knew!?! - I now need to pack my bag for my day job tomorrow. That wouldn't be a lever arch file of editing sneaking in there, would it? Of course it is, back to the sequel of The Only tomorrow, I just can't help myself!

All ready for the next book . . . 

The Walk of Fame

So while I'm in LA of course I'm doing all the touristy things (you can check them out on my daughter's vlog if you're interested which is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=S1EOp_EeN00&app=desktop) and today we went to see the walk of fame on Hollywood Boulevard. It's amazing how long in each direction it stretches but I managed to find my favourite movie star (Bruce Willis) and my favourite composer (Hans Zimmer) and it got me thinking about the peculiar nature of fame. Here, more so than anywhere else I've visited, fame and the things it brings are at the forefront of everything, from the guys on Hollywood Boulevard offering tours of celebrity homes, to the designer shops, to the forbidding signs all round Beverly Hills that armed guards patrol 24/7. Of course we'd all like the lifestyle that comes from being a celebrity - not to have to do the 9 to 5 grind in a job that might not be your dream job, to be rich enough to never have to worry about money, to have the time and means to pursue those dreams - but with fame comes a heavy cost of not being able to just walk down the street, to being subject to the media machine watching your every move and broadcasting to the world things you'd maybe rather keep hidden, to the downright scary tales you hear about celebrity stalkers.  So why then do so many court it? 

Maybe because we all want to be liked and accepted and, going right back to school, who wouldn't rather have been a popular than not? Maybe too there's an element of wanting to leave some kind of a legacy behind to show that we were here and that we made an impact on the world in some way. But actually you don't have to be famous to do that - you can make an impact on someone through something as small as smiling at them. Doing some research for a short story last year I stumbled across an article about a guy who survived a suicide attempt when he jumped off a bridge. When he recovered he completely changed the direction of his life and became a motivational speaker. The most chilling thing he said was that he told himself as he walked half way across the bridge, if one person looked at him and smiled, he wouldn't jump.

Of course living in constant sunshine here in LA helps everyone stay cheerful, but they are really friendly and chatty and smiley and we haven't stopped smiling since we got here. It's something I'm definitely taking home with me. 

Dream on

Did you have a dream when you were a kid? Do you still have a dream you haven't yet achieved? My youngest daughter did, she still does. From the time she started at a school for performing arts aged seven, she knew she wanted to be an actress. The funny thing is no one else would believe her, with the exception of her family. When asked "what you want to be when you leave school?", she'd say 'actress' and the friends' parents, family members, people she met regularly, teachers, whoever it was, would always say "okay, so what's your backup plan?"

Makenna never had a back-up plan, even when she got A stars at A level she didn't bow to pressure to go to university to study drama. She knew that, for her, learning on the job was the best option.  And having a back-up plan was tantamount to admitting that she wouldn't get where she wanted to be. 

She's been learning her craft since she left school and this year she's really gone out there, worked hard and reaped amazing rewards. Next week she's attending (with me and her dad in tow as her ' crumbly entourage'!) her first red carpet premiere in Los Angeles for a film in which she plays one of the leads. Seeing my baby girl on a cinema screen is going to be quite something, I'm so proud of her I'm having to go and buy waterproof mascara ;)  But what I'm most proud of is that she didn't get swayed by the naysayers, by society's expectations of her, by her school pushing her to take a different route, she held fast to her dream through knock backs and rejections and now she's on her way.

She's just started a blog to share her journey - you can find it here

http://makennaguyler.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/errrrr-hi.html

Do you have a dream you haven't yet achieved? If so, all I can say to that is dream on.

Vive la difference!

How's your summer going? 

Last year I was lucky enough to do something life changing for my holiday (you can check out my post "back from out of the office" about trekking to Everest Base Camp) and a lot of people have asked me how do you follow that, where on Earth do you go next? Partly it was easy because once we got back to sea level,  after suffering the delights of altitude - the inability to eat, the daily checking of pulse and oxygen levels and the fretting if our levels got too low, the difficulty breathing - we all agreed no altitude for a couple of years. But how exactly do you follow something so amazing?

The answer was to do something totally different.  For our main holiday this year, we returned to France, place of one of our worst holidays (we didn't go far enough south and suffered horrendous weather for it) and one of our best, and a place we haven't been to for eight years. We stayed in Limousin, a very picturesque area with amazing rainfall and very strong sun. And, due to hubby's ankle injury, we actually weren't able to do very much at all. Two weeks of chilling (well, of course, I was editing!), enjoying the company of friends, remembering the simple pleasure of wandering into town to pick up fresh baguettes and pain au chocolat for breakfast.  We had so much time I was even able to read a book that I really enjoyed twice, once for pleasure and once as research.

Today marks the first day back into our normal routine and people have been commenting on how relaxed I am. I just need to re-read my last post here to make sure that lasts!

Slow down!

I've hung up my day job pass for three weeks holiday and I cannot tell you the 'ah' moment that was. Three whole weeks in which I can edit the work in progress, read ridiculous numbers of books, pull together all the little writing jobs I have on-going and generally get organised. Oh, and, of course, spend time with my family and enjoy a trip away, maybe tackle some decorating . . . 

I'm two days in to all this glorious r and r but I don't seem to have stopped rushing around. I really struggle with time because I always seem to have so little of it but I've been reading a great book about how what you think is what you attract and I'm always so busy running about like a headless chicken trying to cram all the stuff I have to do into every last second,  that I'm always busy running about . . . you get the picture. So now I'm practising feeling that I have all the time in the world and taking lessons from my daughter who has got this perfectly. If she's stressed because she's up against a time deadline, she sits down and calms herself and time slows down for her. She is achieving so much in the same timeframe it's astounding. I am trying very hard to be like her - I couldn't quite manage to sit down and be still when I got in from work last Thursday and had twenty minutes to eat and get changed before dashing down to London to see a play, but I may have managed to silence my squawking about how late I was for a minute or so.  Next time I'm aiming to be chill personified. Or maybe the time after that - I'm a work in progress here . . .  

Fair's fair, isn't it?

You may have seen this in the media this week, you may have missed it. I'm talking about a very sobering article that appeared in The Guardian showing how, for the majority of authors, their income has plummeted to 'abject' levels. 

The article's here - 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey?CMP=fb_gu

It's a very sad indictment on the state of our society where people will happily hand over £3-4 for a coffee that takes a barista a couple of minutes to make and which is gone within ten minutes and yet they baulk at paying the same, or more, for a book which has taken an author at least a year of their life to craft and will provide them, the reader, with entertainment for a few days or weeks or even years if it gains a place on their bookshelves. I wonder if you know that the author of a book on which a movie is based is not invited to the premiere as a matter of course? And in the squabbles on payment that have erupted between amazon and publishers over the last year or so, who do you think ends up being squeezed? 'Celebrity' biographies swallow much of publishers' budgets leaving virtually nothing left with which they can nurture new talent - Val McDermid admitted recently that in today's market she would be a failed novelist. How sad for us as readers to have never enjoyed her books nor the TV series generated by them and how ironic for the publishers if she had never gone on to sell the 10 million books she has sold. I attended an author event a while ago and was shocked by the number of household names the writer quoted that would also be failed novelists if they were starting out today.

When will publishing wake up and realise that if a career in writing becomes the premise of the rich, all creative sectors will suffer. The image of a writer starving in their garret while writing their 'great work' has never been closer to the truth. 

Camp Nano - get out of your way!

Today you'll have noticed it's the first of July and this means two things - it's halfway through the year (yes, really!) and Camp NaNoWriMo begins today. For those not in the know  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) happens every November and the challenge is to write a novel of 50,000 or more words in 30 days. You can plan beforehand but, in the true style of the challenge, you don't write a word until the first of November. When you've typed the magic words "the end", you can encrypt your work and upload it to a special members area where the word count is verified and you're sent the prized "you did it!" certificate. I have two of these certificates on my wall and they make me smile every time I remember the manic panic that made up my Nano experiences.

Purists will throw their hands up in horror that you cannot possibly write a novel that fast. In a way they're right because editing a Nano novel is a long job, with lots of "did I really write that?" moments of horror but also some "did I really write that?" moments of wow. Where Nano excels is that it teaches you to get out of your own way and gives you permission to write something, anything, to get you onto the next chapter – there's no place for thinking about the perfect word in the perfect sentence on that deadline. And that's okay because come the 1st of December, you have something you can work with, where, without Nano, you may only have had a blank screen. Nano shows you what you can achieve and takes away any limitations that you put on yourself. And it's often those limitations that are the most . . . well, limiting. I wonder how much more of our dreams we’d achieve and how much faster would we get there if we didn't put our own ceiling on them.

Camp Nano is NaNoWriMo but in July. I'm not doing it this time as I've just finished a first draft but, on checking out the website, when I saw the word count can be anything between 10,000 and 1,000,000, I heard myself shrieking in my head "one million! one million in a month!?" and, right there, is one of those limitations. Why not one million? That would really encourage you to go for it, wouldn't it? If my experience was anything to go by at the end of that you wouldn't be able to string any coherent words together, nor would you have any letters left on your laptop keys, but think of the brilliant achievement if you only hit a tenth of that.

So to those who are taking part, I salute you and hope you hit your magic number. As for me, I'm entering edit city, fountain pen and big smile at the ready because this is where I make my Frankenstein beautiful.