Networking.

I don't really get this networking thing.  I feel rather unsettled by the fact that 'network' has been transformed into a verb, for a start.  A 'network' evokes a sense of connection and support.  Networking smacks of being pressed into collecting people's contact details in a maniacal and feverish rampage through some convention room somewhere.  The very word conjures up images of glassy eyes and fake smiles, of people in suits trying to wedge business cards into each other's hands.  A network seems secure and solid; networking seems false and threatening.

People seem to have taken to collecting each other, like points in some game.  Do you level up when you reach each thousand?  At what point does this leveling up mean I grow dragon wings?  Because unless it leads to that, I can't see me being able to buy into it.

This is not to say I want to huddle, hunched up and growling, in a darkened corner of my house, refusing to speak to anyone from the outside world.  I mean, I do that.  It just isn't as a direct result of people saying I should network.  I don't actually think that hordes of people are camped on my lawn. (It's tiddly, in any case, so good luck with that.  We could only host a minor-league horde.)  Every now and then, I even go out and speak to people.

The Festival of Writing has provided excellent conversation both years I have been, so far, and I may have accidentally networked with a couple of people.  It seems fine, though, as long as they are interesting, witty beings who are good with me making everything about dragons (Or reindeer, if it's reindeer season -you have to be seasonal, don't you?  All the best cooking shows say that you do.  I choose to believe this is what they mean.)

This year, I ended up chatting for several hours to a bunch of lovely people, some of whom have names I never even heard, about our upcoming collaboration for a SciFi monster movie to end all monster movies.  (I cannot possibly reveal any details, but when we magically all end up in LA and get this thing rolling, it will be the most awesome thing to ever awesome.)

The year before was pretty good, too.  It lead me to meeting the lovely Penny, who was kind enough to link my blog to hers this week.

What fascinated me about the on-line activity of networking is how it really does connect people. You don't get a stiff-edged card with numbers and a business title.  You get snippets of people's humour and interests, links to articles and memes and all sorts of good things.  Some people may also end up with job offers - I don't know.  I mainly reblog pictures with funny comments on them and read articles which get me rethinking my views on things.  For that reason alone, deciding to follow some people on Twitter and tumblr has been well worth it.

Reading Penny's blog today had a knock-on effect, though.  The link by Liz to Penny's blog was read by my person (He who lives in the same house and with whom I shared a wedding a bit back.), who then went off to look up a website about borrowing a dog which had been mentioned in Penny's blog.  A link to this was then sent to my person's sister, who now says she has signed up to borrow people's doggies.  So, basically, someone I met over a year ago and who has never, to my knowledge, met or been anywhere near my sister-in-law, has got her to sign up to borrow dogs.  (I mean, they may have met.  They are both in the medical field.  All you medical peeps hang out in secret tree-houses together, right?  Thought so.) This is internet networking, and it is glorious.

Wow.  It is quite some time since I posted a blog.  Where do the days go?  (My theory is that they are sucked into the open maw of a giant, time-eating worm, which hunkers just beneath the surface layer of reality, feeding on our very lives... He is called Cyril.)

In any case, I have filled the time with having a barely controlled stress-breakdown and with covering my house with reindeer.  Not real ones.  I was not allowed to bring real ones back with me from Keswick.  Damn and blast it.  I have had to settle for ornaments.

Unpacking the Christmas ornaments was an exercise in calling out 'Reindeer!  I'd forgotten about this one', but I still bought a load more in Keswick.  They are on the tree, on the light-up dead-twig tree (it's a thing - look it up.  I love me some dead trees.  So sculptural and artistic.  Tree nudes.)  There are reindeer on the window sills, hanging from the windows, along the sideboard.  I am especially pleased with my offering to the reindeer gods.

Reindeer are not limited to ornaments.  I would not be so daft as to miss out the chance to add to one of my favourite sorts of item: mugs.  A few more wouldn't go amiss, actually.  I only have four or five with reindeer on them.

All right, so there's a monkey, as well.  He is, however, one of those little monkeys which advertise tea, so that's fine.  He is the tea monkey and brings the slightly scary, greyhound-reindeer their drinks when they get thirsty.

Last, but not really least (there is no such thing as a 'least' with reindeer ornaments and so on.  Everything about reindeer season is excellent), I have finally purchased a jumper with reindeer on it.  I have had to scour the shop and buy a man's jumper, but it has the added bonus of not being made of the clingy kind of fabric which turns my hair into an approximation of a dandylion clock, so that's good, too.

Reindeer!

It is reindeer season again, that wonderful time of the year when I can buy mugs and ornaments and pajamas with reindeer on them.  And plates.  And socks.  And cuddly reindeer which I claim are fabric ornaments, because that sound less like I am still five.  Oh, and reindeer candle holders.  We must not forget those.  Non-reindeer candle holders just aren't as good.  Not enough by way of antlers.

As we often can't find reindeer items in the shops during the rest of the year, I make sure to stock up when the supplies are good.

This weekend, we went up to Keswick for a weekend away for my birthday.  We often get a bit of Christmas shopping done.  Now, you can nearly always rely on the Lakes to give you sheep-themed gifts (mugs, socks, jumpers, notebooks and so forth, not to mention paintings and ornaments), but in December, Keswick is as full of reindeer as it is of sheep.  Well, nearly.  There is the Herdy shop in Keswick, dedicated to selling one particular brand of sheep-theme mugs, tea-towels and mats.

There are plenty of reindeer to be found, though.

This year, it got even better.  There were real reindeer.

They were down from the Cairngorms and usually run wild(ish) in the hills.  Except for this guy:

This is Grumpy.  Or maybe it was Grundig.  He looked grumpy.  He was raised by hand and the other reindeer did not think he was a reindeer.  I wanted to adopt him, but I was informed that we were not putting him on the backseat of the Suzuki Swift and carting him back to South Yorkshire.  Apparently, it was felt that Grundig would not fit in harmoniously with my three collies.  I don't see why.  I could see him curled up on the settee with the others...

Anyway, I spent about half an hour watching these reindeer and almost the first thing which popped into my mind was a question.

Who the hell decided these creatures look aerodynamic?

Out of every animal I have seen, I have to say that reindeer are pretty low down on the 'look like they're about the lift off' list.  Sheep look more likely to fly.  Horses.  Not reindeer.  Yet, someone decided these are the animals who must pull a flying sleigh, in December.

I knew that male reindeer shed their antlers, but I did not know it was any entire male (the castrated ones keep their horns for longer) or that the entire males shed their horns before Christmas.  I enjoyed learning more about reindeer.

They had some baby reindeer there, as well.  Only six months old.

Every now and then, a really mardy reindeer ran at one of them and the other reindeer had to get out of its way.  This appears to count as good parenting to a reindeer.

I also learnt that reindeer's coats feel something like a carpet and that they look a bit like a horse/goat close up, and smell of horse.  It has only made me love them more.

Then I went and bought some more not-really reindeer to place around my house for the Christmas season.

Yesterday, as I was sitting with my collies in the darkened living room, hiding from the bangs, there was a knock at the door.

Given that I am practically incapable of ignoring a knock at the door or the ring of the phone, and have never understood how some people can ignore those things, I went to answer it.  It was even louder out there.  Peering round the sliver of an opening I had created (I couldn't risk my black and white collie, who insists he is our butler and must greet every visitor to our house), I was met by a man going around encouraging donations to Shelter.

The first thing he said to me was 'Is your mum in?'  I thought that had stopped.  Don't get me wrong - I have taken advantage of this tendency people have to think I am still a lot younger to get out of talking to salespeople on my doorstep before.  I just say my parents aren't in (which is not a lie - they aren't in my house) and then the people get off my property.  Really, I would like one of those houses with a huge wall and guards at the gate.  As I can't have that, I usually just refuse to engage.

Here's the thing though - I am rubbish at cutting people off.  I mean, at work, when faced with a teenager who is sure they are the first kid in all of creation to come up with a convincing argument for why we shouldn't have to learn about Shakespeare in schools, I can cut right in and redirect them.  And good luck with that attitude - the new GCSE they have just announced contains phrases such as 'intellectually challenging' and 'substantial' throughout - and unseen texts in the Lit paper as well as the Language one.  Oh, and no combined English at GCSE, so schools will have to teach kids Lit and Lang.  Such on that, people who have taken away my English Lit teaching this last two years.  Now you have to give it back.  But I digress.

As I say, with kids in my classes, I can take control of the conversation, but I am really bad at cutting off people who come around selling things.  I ended up standing outside in a giant hoodie, with the hood up (which may have been what made him think I was a teenager) and my PJ bottoms.  This is twice in just over a week that the neighbours have seen I give up on daytime clothes pretty early on in the evening, as I answered the door throughout Halloween in a very similar outfit.  Still, I have three collies and say weird things whenever they speak to me - I think I already have my reputation.  Might as well own it.

The lad in question was an ex-homeless teen himself, and had a good pitch all worked out, with personal experience thrown in and everything.  It might have been a bit more convincing if he had not stopped every time a firework went off (and there were many - I think my neighbours might have been having a fireworks-off) to exclaim and declare it the best night of his life.  I have a similar opinion of fireworks to the one held by my dogs, so I was not so keen.  They are, basically, explosives, and that time dad bought one which I am sure was really from a black-market weapons dealer and it just made noise enough to shake the windows pretty much put me off them for life.  Still, I had already decided to give him some money.  Shelter is a good cause and I have been reading a fair bit about homelessness recently.  I just could have done with him getting to the point a bit sooner.

My total lack of any verbal response did not put him off.  For that alone, he perhaps deserved to gain a donation for his charity.

Of course, I got bored of that and started randomly talking, so now I know when his birthday is and that his favourite film is Romeo and Juliet, but he did not like Or Mice and Men when he read it at school.  Oh, and he has a border collie.  And has been smoking for ten years.  I am not sure why I can retain this information but can never remember the names of famous historical figures or the key dates in famous historical events.

Eventually, he must have felt we had bonded enough to ask about my age.  He looked a bit shocked that he had guessed my age as nearly ten years younger than him, when I am in fact nearly ten years older.  I can only assume that he thought I looked like a teenager who really doesn't get a lot of sleep.

As far as I am concerned, this all counted as socialising, so that is me up to quota on that for this month.  Anyone who wants me to interact with them face-to-face is free to put in a form with a request, but I cannot guarantee it will be approved.

Day Three

We are three days into this year's NaNoWriMo.  Yay!

For those of you who do not know, it is where you agree to write a novel in a month.  There's a website to sign up to, and you record your daily wordcount here to see if you are on track.  The target is set at 50,000 words for the whole month, which works out at 1,667 words a day, I believe.  It isn't actually hard to write that number of words a day; it's having them make any sense which is more of an issue.

So far, I am on track with the word count.

Here's the thing, though - some people plan their plots out, or have notes on characters and so forth.  I just had a line float into my head partway through day one and then went from there.  It is how I did it last year, but that didn't really turn into a proper novel.

People have different ways of planning.  I spend lesson upon lesson teaching different methods to kids, and encouraging them to plan, because it really does help.  No, it isn't marked.  No, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time.  Would I have spent all of this lesson time on it if it had no point?  Have you not heard me say we have a whole course to get through and we need to keep on track?

I may just record my answers to these questions, keep them on my laptop or iPod, and press play when the next class starts asking.  I could also do a playlist for 'Why do we have to read Shakespeare', 'But this isn't History class' and 'No-one else has asked me to have a pen today.  Why do we have to do writing?', amongst others.

Despite my insistence on the importance of planning, I do not, myself, plan.  At least, not in the sense that I know what I am going to write about before I start.  With an essay, yes.  To an extent.  The same goes for anything else with a specific brief.  I will plan enough to generate ideas and get me started, I will have as clear an idea as I can about the requirements, but I will still adjust and think of new things as I write.

With novel, or even short-story, writing, I often have a vague impression, one moment in time, one line, and then I have to write and see what coalesces.  Writing brings the ideas in the back of my head into more focus, and after I have written a draft, I can then go back and construct a more formal plan for a rewrite.  It tends to feel a bit like automatic writing, sometimes, though.  I have been told by more than one person in my lifetime that it seems like I have a plan when someone else reads that first draft, but I don't.

I can honestly say that I had no idea where this NaNo tale was going, or any of the stops along the way, or who would be making those stops.  Now, I have a couple of characters with names, one without, someone who is mentioned a couple of times and an object.  I am beginning to see something in the fog, but I don't yet know what it is.

Several themes, motifs and symbols seem to have cropped up already, possibly foreshadowing events.  I look forwards to finding out what they are.  Some part of my brain must have an idea.  Grey seems important, as does the idea of space, and there is something in there about the past and the future.

I suppose, if I am to find out, I had best just keep writing and hope that my mind is not actually being the conduit for the elder gods.  I don't fancy manifesting Cthulu in my subconscious.  Could put a bit of a dampener on my day.

I had a half-thought to blog about trick-or-treating (I think I accidentally summoned loads of kids by having my pumpkin tree lit and in the dining room window, on a stand.  A quick trip to the shops for more sweets was required.)  

However, my mind has switch over to the NaNo channel, so expect quite a bit about that over this next month.  This is my last day blogging every day for October, and I am glad to say I have managed it, even if some blogs have been a bit...odd.  Whether I will manage to blog and write 1600 or so words a day remains to be seen.  

Either way, I will be typing madly away, waiting to see what turns up.  I usually (read: always) write fantasy of some sort, but I am feeling like heading into the real-world setting, more artsy zone.  Then again, I may not.  Or maybe there will be an artsy dragon.  

I am now picturing a dragon standing in front of an easel, creating a masterpiece in oils.  The subject would, of course, be a huge pile of gold, interspersed with the odd artfully placed skill-of-the-enemy.  In this rapidly developing head-canon, this enemy is reborn and then, each lifetime, ends up coming to destroy the dragon again.  He never manages it.  It has got to the point where they actually enjoy a catch up and a cup of tea over cakes before getting down to the fighting.  In fact, the last few times, the enemy has only turned up once he is already pretty much out of life, mainly as it assures reincarnation, so he can have another go at life.  

And there is how I plan to plan my NaNo - waffling without much thought until words form into a sort of loose structure.  

Last year, I started with one line: 'The first thing I knew about it was when Vish slit his throat.'  From there, I ended up creating, without meaning to, a pretty rich backstory for one of the characters from my WIP.  I mean, his name was wrong, and he had different coloured hair, and was a different species...but it was him.  Tagic love-story and everything.  

I have never reworked that NaNo.  I have lifted sections out to use as backstory, but the work itself is still sitting here on my laptop, just waiting.  I think it could become something, at some point.  There are certainly a few lines I am really pleased with (which of course means that if I ever do rework it, they will be lines which end up having to go.  So it goes.)

The eve of NaNo, or NaNo's Eve, is one of slowly building anticipation.  I am sure some people have planned a novel out, that others haven't got a clue and that all of us are a bit anxious, on some level, about the word count for each day, but we are all at the start of an adventure.  

Maybe, by this time tomorrow night, I will even know whose adventure it is.

I just carved a pumpkin for the first time in my life.  It felt oddly unpatriotic.  Still, I made a grumpy pumpkin, so that is quite fitting for the Yorkshire mentality.

Then, to show allegiance to the other side of my ancestry, I carved a tree.  That's right - I am coming out and admitting that I am part tree.

We are an ancient people, and have been pushed back from covering most of the land by puny humans (whose guise we have adopted in order to survive), until many of us actually live in houses and...

No, wait.  Not what I was blogging about.  Pumpkin carving, that was it.

Pumpkins are pulpy.  Bet you didn't know that, what with it being esoteric knowledge known only to a privileged few and all that.  I was bored before I got all of the stringy, pulpy, seed-filled stuff out, but at least then I got to try out the carving.

The face is a bit wonky and is, as I have said above, somewhat mardy looking, but on the whole he is a fairly nice pumpkin face.  I am not sure if he will scare anyone.  On balance, the odds are not in his favour (so I hope there isn't a sudden Pumpkin Hunger Games, 'cos he might lose to the bigger pumpkin faces across the street), but he should be safe enough on his windowsill.  My assassin dog will glare at any kids who darken our door, so that'll sort the scary part of Halloween.

I don't really get Halloween.  I rarely went trick-or-treating, and then only down our street, and I have not really got on board with the dressing up thing.  We went to a Rocky Horror shows each year at Uni, and got dressed up for that, but I was princess in a blue and silver dress one year, so the scary thing clearly hadn't settled into my head properly.  I more went with 'what is completely out of character for me'.

Having just about worked up to having some sweets for little kids when they turn up at the door, I feel pumpkin carving is quite a big step.  I mean, one year, I had a black cat and a witch hat.  Not sure who the cat belonged to, but it got cuddled by me for most of the evening.  That was the year no-one came to my house, though, so nobody got to see it.  I think we had a few kids last year, so maybe some people will come by and see my pumpkin tree.

My dogs are bossy creatures.  I suppose all dogs and cats are, but I only live with my three, and the legacy of my first two dogs, and so I am ignoring the fact that most other dog and cat owners will have had experiences in common.

One of my dogs is extra needy, turning up and putting one paw on your arm, all the while not quite looking at you, as if to impress upon you that his pain and angst is so strong that he can barely go on and he just needs a hug.  Right now!  And he goes to sleep on my legs and gets hissy when I have to move.  Just try sleeping on him, though.  Oh, no.  Not having that, is he?  I don't see why he can't put up with being a pillow every now and then.  He gets free room and board.  I wouldn't mind so much, but he sits around demanding wine and port and JD and being catty about the other dogs.

My youngest dog is also needy, in that as soon as he detects a hug going on with the other two, he spreads himself in between you and the dog getting the hug.  He is a stealth hugger.  You start off hugging one dog and end up with a black-and-white collie turning his big brown eyes on you from an inch away, all whilst not realising you have switched dogs.

I am sure most of this is fairly standard fair, though.

What is less standard is my primary dog.  (Yes, she insists on this designation.)  She is the only girl.  We got her after my last girl died, but before my boy went, so she is the bridging dog.  We got her from a rescue center (same place we got the boys we have), but we are not entirely sure that the rescue place knew they had her to rehome.  You see, she is an escape artist of the kind which no use to anyone.

She once got out of her harness whilst sitting next to my chair in a beer garden, and was commando crawling away across the courtyard when one of the people I was with asked if that was my dog.  If let off the lead, she vanishes after birds.  You just see a little black dot with strong back legs powering away over the horizon.

At first, we thought this would be ok.  She's a dog.  They know their way back, right?

Wrong.

After a trip to the park meant not seeing her for 36 hours, because she walked around a bush and could not find her way back to us, we have learnt that she is the only collie type in the history of anything with no sense of direction.  She wouldn't mean to lose us.  She is actually very good with recall - as long as she can see us.  We have found her sitting mournfully behind a fence post, though, right next to the total lack of actual fence through which she had run two minutes before, clearly at a loss as to how to return to us.

The rescue place told us that she came from a farm, but we think it might not be the farm she started off on.  The farmer probably just got up one morning and found an extra dog running in circles on his land.  She likes circles.  I suspect her ancestors and wild relatives are to blame for crop circles.  Most likely in fields belonging to farms they do not live on.

This all means that we treat her warily, making sure we know where she is at all times, but she does not make it easy.  You see, my little collie-cross has a secret life.  Sometimes, we just can't find her.  We have come to the only sensible conclusion about this:

She must be an assassin.

I can say no more now for fear that she will read this blog and add me to her hit list.

Still, it means that when she decides to be all cuddly and share my pillow at 2am, I let her.  Last night, I gave up on sleeping and went to try the reboot known to all insomniacs - try a different place in the house to sleep in.

Only a few minutes after I settled into the spare bed, a small shadowed head appeared, ears perked and tail wagging.  I could practically hear her thinking 'Ah, here you are, human.  Yes, this looks like a good bed.  I see there are two pillows, so one of them must be mine,' before snuggling up and putting her paw in my hand.  It was sweet.  It really was.  But I daren't move.  You never know what might get you put on the list.

Right now, she is chewing on a bone.  I am choosing to believe it is one belonging to an animal.  And I am not going to go and check out the basement which seems to have added itself to our house, just in case...

I spend time rambling around on a few websites.  Writing sites, social media sites, sites which are primarily designed to enable me to stare at photosets of scenes from my favourite TV shows and read what other people have analysed in detail about the specific placement of a flowerpot in the background of one scene and how that adds to someone's tragic and unspoken backstory...at least as far as my use of them suggests.  Let's just go with that being the actual purpose - some people may also post photographs of coffee or flowers or some stuff like that, but as that has nothing like the artistic or philosophical meaning of a set of six photographs of Will Graham from Hannibal, or a deep musing upon the true nature of Hermione Granger's worth, I am going to ignore that section of the site.  They are not my people, though I do sometimes admire their pretty pictures of sunsets with inspirational quotations over the top of them.  I like it even better when someone has managed to make the whole thing be about my favourite TV show, which happens surprisingly often.

I say 'surprisingly'.  Spend any amount of time on certain sites, and this is really more inevitable than surprising.

Last night, as I browsed through fifty pictures of one actor's face (there was a convention for the show this last weekend, which means a lot of photographs of the same people talking to crowds), I saw many comments about the oncoming storm.  Sadly, this was not a Doctor Who reference, or a nod to The Wheel of Time series (though there really should be more of those about).  No.  This was in reference to the actual storm meant to batter the nation.

Maybe it did.  I only had two hours of sleep last night (thanks, exploding demon dog.  How I love cleaning up after you...), and as soon as I got home tonight, I fell asleep.  I have dragged myself awake to write this, but chances are quite good that I will fall aslleeleoeodopppppppppppppppppp...oh, just caught myself, there.  Where was I?  Ah, yes.  My nap has meant I haven't listened to/read the news.

This means I could be wrong.  Perhaps the storm has destroyed all of the country and I am living in the one house still standing.  If, you know, all the houses on my way to and from work have remained in tact at the front, like a many-miles long movie set made up of the remnants of real houses.

On balance, and given the fact that there were still a number of Doncaster Denizens wandering into the road in front of my car on the way home (I like to think this is a local tradition, with prizes and acknowledged local champions), I suspect that the storm did not hit South Yorkshire in quite the way my internet people from the USA thought it would.

There were updates asking everyone to stay safe and stay indoors, to make sure we had enough food and so on.  I checked, just to be thorough.  I had plenty of teabags and enough milk for a few days.  To be extra certain, I also made sure I had enough clean mugs, just in case the power cut out and I could not use the dishwasher.  Three cupboards looked pretty well stocked, so I declared that a good job of preparation and called it a night.

Now, I love the new ways of reaching out which have been offered by the internet (I am ignoring the darker sides, here, as I am talking about being able, finally, to find writers and Geeks to talk to and share ideas with after living in many areas with a seeming lack of such people), and I do not mean to make light of weather and its potential for harm.  The storms in the USA just about a year ago were destructive for many and not something New York was used to, which I mention purely for the reason that it was a storm and a place with a built-up, electricity reliant lifestyle.  OK.  OK.  I admit that Doncaster and New York do not quite come across as identical (I imagine there are fewer animal print, latex dresses in New York, although I suppose it depends what has been touted in the fashion pages that month), but it is similar enough in the sense of daily life and its use of laptops, TVs, electric lighting, the expectation that your living room furniture won't turn into a boat overnight...

In this particular case, I am more thinking about the ways in which social media can be used to spread the word, sometimes in a way which makes more of something than needs to be made.  (Ironically for this blog-post, I just started Much Ado About Nothing with my Year 9 class today)  To read those posts last night, you would have thought I had a very good chance of waking up in the land of Oz.

Just in case anyone is not sure by this point, I did not wake up the owner of a pair of not-quite-new ruby slippers, and if there is a yellow brick road anywhere it must be in such needs of a good street-clean that it is hidden amongst the other roads.  In this one case, I am going to call it; my cyber reality last night was far more dramatic and far more potentially damaging than my actual reality.

Having said that, it also had fewer Red Dwarf quotations pasted over pictures from Supernatural, so on balance I will probably still live in the internet at least some of the time.  I'll just make sure to check out of the window before believing an apocalypse has started.

My nephew came round to my house for the first time yesterday, and here is what he taught me: everything in the world is called 'gar'.

The dogs were called 'gar' (both of them - the demon dog was hiding in our bedroom, probably plotting the end of humankind in payment for making her suffer through a small person being in the house) the keys in the door were called 'gar', the floor was called 'gar', the glass roof in the orangery was called 'gar'.  I'm pretty sure that if he had noticed I existed for more than three seconds together, I would also have been called 'gar'.

This is a far cry from my mum's insistence that the kid is starting to speak, though I am willing to accept it is as much because I am not familiar enough with him to be tuned into his words.  (Which are all 'gar' - just making sure we don't lost that point amongst the complex linguistic discussion going on here), as it is that he is actually not speaking yet.  (As a side note, I have just reaslied that I am making up different rules for using and punctuating within brackets - I am not being consistent.  Bad me.)

The poor little thing looked most put out when we all, (my brother, my sister-in-law, my husband and I) stared back and him and answered with variations on 'Yes, that's right' and 'Yes, that's a [insert whatever object we each had decided he was probably pointing at].'  About the only thing it could not have been was what he was saying, as I am under the impression that I do not own a 'gar'.

I imagine it must have been most vexing, trying desperately to get his point across and us all failing to get it.  To his credit, he kept trying, kept pointing and 'gar'ing and then, for some reason, running around in a circle.  I can only imagine he was resorting to interpretive dance as a means of communication.  Not that it helped - I only really know 'jazz hands' in that dialect, and he didn't use 'jazz hands'.

If nothing else, it was an object lesson in not giving up, and not giving in.  When he did not get through to us, he flung himself at his dad, repeatedly bashing into the side of the settee (which my brother dearest had claimed all to himself) until he got hauled up and could laugh at us from the cushions.  I'm pretty sure that is not what he had started off trying to convey, a desire to be on the settee, not with the pointing in a totally different direction, but at least he seemed happy to have achieved something.

Maybe we should all try out this sort of toddler attitude again.  Just keep bleating on until something happens and then be happy with the result.  Giggle, run around, fall over a bit and then choose a random between laughing and screaming.  It seems like much more of a live-in-the-moment mentality than we have as adults, though I think dogs still have the edge in that one, and also combines the element of going after a goal which can get us further in life.  Most admirable.

As long as the goal is 'gar'.

Star Fluxx

Wow.  I am blogging early tonight.  It isn't quite 11pm.

We played a game this evening.  Star Fluxx.  The deck of cards which makes up this game arrived in the post the other day, after my person had watched the inimitable Wil Wheaton play this game on his Tabletop show.  (I hope I have spelt his name right - I went to check on Twitter, but he has turned into Wil SCREAMton, and I currently do not have the strength to check further, for reasons which will become clear.)

We have tried playing Settlers of Cataan, as well, and I rather enjoyed this, although I lost horribly every time.  Playing with friends was highly entertaining, especially as my mate Liz announced the acquisition of every single wheat card with 'Wheat-on' and a giggle.  I just made little roads which went nowhere and collected sheep.

Strategising in games turns out not to be my strong suit, but I do like to hoard.  I was very upset when the rules of the game meant I had to give up my sheep, mind, even though it also turns out you can't build a city out of sheep.  Highly unfair, in my view.  I thought that was how we had Bradford, for one thing.

No matter.  I was assured - by Mr Wheaton himself, via the medium of the internet, so I was practically a personal assurance - that strategy is actually impossible in Star Fluxx.  Ah.  Excellent.  The game for me.

Except for the part where it's not!

The thing with Fluxx is...well, it's in flux.  Constantly.  The rules change, the goals change...one card even has you swap your entire seat and hand of cards with another player.  I kept being half way to winning, and then the goal would change.  Eventually, a card was played which meant I would have won.  You know, if another player hadn't just taken the two cards which would have meant I won.  And he knew it.  He played the change of goal card, too.

Basically, this game set up a situation where I thought I had something, then it was taken from me, then the goal changed, and then the other person used my stuff to win.  So, in a lot of way, it is the perfect analogy for my working life.

Also like my working life, I went back and had another go.  I never learn.

The second time, I lost again.  This time, only one of my cards was stolen and it felt sort of like a victory, because at least the losing wasn't as bad.

I think I may use this game when teaching.  Just think of the points which could be made about the ways we have to be prepared to roll with the punches, how life is a tapestry of changing goals and rules, how we have to be willing and able to redefine winning in a moment's notice.  It would also be useful as a way of discussing how we cope with losing.  Given that I do that whenever I play a game.

Perhaps I will go and try The Game of Thrones.  You seem to need to be willing to kill to win at that.  Or else have a dragon.  Or both.

Nearly 11.30 at night seems like the perfect time to watch old show on cable, so we are watching Fun House.  It is worth it for the mullet alone.  Once you factor in the day-glo pink shirt with...actually, I can't quite work out what the pattern is.  My brain is refusing to process it.  Whatever it is, it is making me anti-nostalgic for the 80's.

I spent a good long time firmly believing that children's shows from the 80's were better.  We all remember Nightmare, right?  (I know at least one of you does - still on the look-out for that episode, by the way.)  Well, we have watched a few of the most up-to-date ones, when they brought it back for a bit.  They were dire.  At first, I was certain it was a drop in standards.  The show I remembered had been witty, clever, well-acted...right?  Well. No.  Not when I have rewatched a few of the originals.

Oh, there was wit and fun.  I actually rather enjoyed it, still.  It just wasn't quite the special effects joy-ride I remembered.

This only confirmed something I had been suspecting for a while.  TV hasn't, in fact, got worse.

Who used to watch Thundercats?  He-man?  Dogtanian?  Transformers? I will leave out such shows for even younger kids as Alastiar and Crystal Tips, as a rewatch of that suggests it was designed by people high on something.  The others, though... Oh, how my memory had reworked those as masterworks, with complex and complete plot lines and fully realised characters.  Ten minutes into the box set of Thundercats, and we were treated to a character who lived on the top of a snowy mountain.  He had a giant cat.  It was called...snow-meow.  There was no resolution to that story, either.  They just went home.  (Which, admittedly, is more than the kids on Dungeons and Dragons ever managed to do.  You would think, at some point, one of the others would have pointed out to the little barbarian kid that the unicorn was going to be an issue every week.)

I also had fond, somewhat smug, memories of the way He-man slotted in messages at the end of the show, and how they tied into the plot, but then we watched one where, in response to nothing at all, they all stood around reminding us to brush our teeth, then laughing.  If anything, the wide-shouldered stance and head-back laugh of Prince Adam almost put me off brushing my teeth now, and I know what happens if you don't brush your teeth.  The tooth fairy comes and hits you in the jaw with a stick of rock (Right?  I am right?), so it is not something I will be risking.

It's not even just kids' shows, is it?  Who has watched episodes of Bullseye on the reruns?  Go on.  You know you do.  Even some of the kids in my Year 8 class have watched it and they weren't born until after Richard of Richard and Judy fame had to admit the emergency millennium cupboard was a waste of time.  The hostess trolley seems to have amused them as much as it does me.

I am not saying the TV is automatically better.  There have been gems in each TV age, I daresay.  I find myself captivated by Buffy anytime it is on, and the dialogue more than stacks up.  I realise that is not from the 80's.  Hmm.  80's which stacks up?

Huh.  Having trouble, there.

I love many 80's shows.  And 60's shows.  BBC2 and Channel 4 must have bought a job lot and played them on repeat in the 90's.  The A-team, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Battlestar Gallactica, Cagney and Lacey, The Champions...  all good.  Mostly American, too, come to think of it.  Then again, so are most of the kids' shows I mentioned.  Perhaps that is a separate issue.

Shows from the 90's are still great.  Well, Red Dwarf is.

Perhaps that is the thing.  Witty, clever genre shows hold their water.  They have to, to stand a chance in the first place, what with not having the special effects budgets of bigger shows.  They just aren't necessarily better than what we have today, either.

And if nothing else, there are fewer mullets.

When I was fourteen, or thereabouts, I used to watch Northern Exposure late at night.  I remember lying on my belly on the living room floor, right in front of the gas fire with its large glass pebbles and the brown splodge burnt onto the glass (from where I once decided that the lit fireplace was a great place for a My Little Pony to stand), staring up at the screen as the moose walked past.  I think it was a moose, anyway.  It wasn't a My Little Pony; I could tell by the way it wasn't partially burnt on the fireplace.

Now, although the show was set in Alaska, it sparked a fierce desire in me to move to Canada.  Not sure why.  The show didn't exactly make Alaska look fun, what with the snow and one tiny bar seeming to be the only place in town anyone could go, so quite why I thought that sort of landscape one country over would be awesome, I am not sure.  Nevertheless, the idea had wriggled its way into my head.  I suppose even all that snow was bright and cheerful next to the unrelenting browns and oranges of late 80s decor, which is when the fireplace was from.  (You could life the glass pebbles off and move them around.  I still don't see why.)

A bit later, Due South came on TV.  That was a show.  Humour, friends who would do anything for one another, a half-wolf who would chase a car right across Chicago.  It didn't matter that it was set in the Windy City, or that the protagonist was clearly not an accurate representation of all Canadians (or any, probably, unless they really do learn to taste mud in Mountie school), but it still reignited my interest in Canada.

I had a similar interest in pre-Soviet Russia, but even my SciFi obsessed brain was fairly sure I wouldn't be able to get my hands on a time machine.

My interest never came to anything, partly because I have always loved Britain, and I am already here.  Plus, I hear it is really hard to get a decent cup of tea anywhere else, and the one week I went without tea is a week I am told no-one in my house wants to live through again.  Partly because they're not sure they could - live through it, that is.

Just recently, though, I have been hearing about the Canadian standards of living.  It seems, from what I am told, that the place has excellent healthcare, is very much into equal rights and has some epic scenery.  I mean, not the Lakes, but you can't have everything.  More than one kid from my school has been moved out to Canada over the last few years.  It seems to be a thing.

I am not saying I am about to spring aboard a ship and sail off to a new life in Canada, but it has crossed my mind.  I would much rather try Canada than Australia, though an ex-neighbour tells me her daughter, who has been in Oz for just over a year, loves it out there.  New Zealand sounds good, too, though I may be basing that mainly on The Almighty Johnsons.

Of course, it would mean leaving behind tea, the Lakes, British teashops (spotting a theme?), some people (though some of you live abroad a lot of the time, anyway, and the internet is how I communicate most.  Hell, some of my good friends these days are people I have only met online.), that butchers which makes the really good sausages, and my orangery.  There could be some other things, too, but I am having trouble thinking what they are.

The Earth is just so big, and the Doncaster part of it is not exactly thrilling.  Trying somewhere else out for a bit does hold a certain appeal.  We shall see.

How Much?

On our evening dog walk up and round a dark and gloomy hill (well, gloomy except for the ever present glow of Doncaster and its environs, anyway), we fell into talk of one of our favourite books series - A Song of Ice and Fire.

This is an excellent topic, worthy of much revisiting (though it is not the inspiration of the title of the blog) and allows for many sup-topics.  We can always get more mileage out of comparing the HBO show with the original texts and discussing the reasons behind those changes.  Evaluating which version works best and in which ways is always good, too.  Adaptation to a different medium requires change, after all, so we do not subscribe to the notion that any change is automatically bad, though some stump us.  I am not sure I will ever understand why Season One has a sex scene playing in the background of a speech by Littlefinger which isn't even in the books and which did not add to the narrative in a way which was necessary for me.  However, there can be many reasons for anything to be in a TV show, and it is perhaps just that I would rather watch Littlefinger being sarcastic or Tyrion being sarcastic or...well, there are a number of options for sarcastic characters, aren't there?  Almost as many options as there are for dead characters.  But, I digress.

Another sub-topic is the ever entertaining game of trying to predict the outcome of this work by a man who is on record as hating to have a predictable outcome.  Tonight, we discussed the imagery in the scenes where Danny is in the House of the Undying Ones.  As with many great fantasy novels, certain things are seeming a lot clearer now we know what happens later, and therefore new ideas are springing up.  A certain wedding seems to have been foretold...

The purpose of this blog, however, is not to discuss theories for this novel.  I know there will be many websites and threads devoted to that already, even though my own experience of such threads is mainly from the hour upon hour I have spent reading feverishly through Wheel of Time posts.  That Robert Jordan - a total master of foreshadowing.

No.  In this blog, I am wondering about how many hints are needed for it to be a satisfying read.  Back in the day, people wrote in and complained about Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, arguing that she had not played fair by concealing an essential clue from the reader.  There had been no way, it was wailed, for the reader to work it out before the denouement.  Now, this seemed odd when I first heard this, as I had never thought the point of a murder mystery was to work it out for yourself, but that is because I did not exist back when people felt his way about their murder books.  After the legacy of so many reinventions of the murder and mystery books, including those, such as Strangers on a Train, where the whole point is we know fine well who the murderer is going to be and are on the ride with him as he tries to wriggle out of it, it isn't such a clear-cut expectation.  Not so to many of Chrsitie's readers, it would seem.  (If you haven't read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I heartily recommend it.  Not only because my mum's maiden name is Ackroyd - as that is less likely to interest those of you who aren't me - but because it is a great twist.  Also, Poirot grows the vegetable marrows.  Or tries to.  He and Sherlock Holmes should set up a smallholding.  Holmes, of course, will tend the bees.)

I've also read The Da Vinci Code and, whatever else you can say about it, it keeps you turning the pages.  I think, sometimes those of us still working on getting published forget that this is a vital ingredient and not a skill everyone has.  Set up one little mystery, answer it as setting up another, repeat.  More than once, I honestly turned back a few pages to check what I had taken to be the reveal of a little mystery, because it was now being revealed again.  It seemed that that first reveal was still supposed to just be a clue.

All of this makes me wonder how much information is the right amount.  I have read some books with classes where they have been up in arms because it does not have a 'proper ending'.  Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is especially likely to send the kids up in flames over this.  To me, this book has a perfect ending, by which I mean it seems fitting and right for the book.  It is satisfying.  Not knowing is partly the point, after all.  That is one of the themes of the whole book, not being able to be sure.  However, I am less sure about a couple of other novels by the same author.  Great writing, language skills which make me shiver, but one or two times where I have been left unsatisfied.  Now, Atwood is something special, so maybe I was meant to feel that way.  It is also totally valid that these endings just don't sit as well with me, but work for others.  Books do not have to come to a conventional ending, after all.  They just have to have an ending which is considered right for that book.

It must be the same with the amount revealed, and where it is revealed, within the book.  I am addicted to writing stories where things seems to start in the middle and information is dripped in very slowly.  I like this.  Wherever possible, I prefer not to come out and state anything.  I need to watch this does not tip over into being so vague that nothing makes sense.  (I'm working on it.)

So, how much is too much?  When G.R.R.Martin finally reveals his ending, will we be left yelling 'Oh, come on, George.  There's subverting expectations and then there's just taking the piss', or will we be looking back at the clues and kicking ourselves?

In many ways, I suppose it doesn't matter, as long as we enjoy the ride.  He is letting us ride a-dragon-back, after all.  I'm willing to let a lot go for that.  (This will all change in a heartbeat the minute you kill off The Mother of Dragons, Mr Martin, and I am still not accepting that last scene with my other favourite in it.  No, I am not.  You know who I mean.  Lalalala - didn't happen...)

RANDOM THOUGHTS BLOG!

(Because by day 22 of the month of blogging, I am running out of coherent thoughts, especially when I do not feel well.  Seriously, all I have managed to do today is take naps on various surfaces.  And cough.  Lots of coughing.  I am starting to think that the cough syrup actually creates coughs.  It is certainly doing very little to help get rid of them.)

Random Thought Number One: I wonder what the people I really admire would like to be, given the choice.  Are the darkly mysterious people secretly sad that they aren't wacky and bubbly?  Do the cheeky people with the quick-witted yet surreal comebacks really want to be smooth and serious?  Some of them may be totally delighted with who they are as people, but I wonder how many.  It must be annoying if you see yourself as dangerous and alluring and everyone else sees you as a mad Tigger type creature.  I want there to be a survey.

Random Thought Number Two: In a continuation of Random Though Number One, how many people with a really strong 'look' would really love a different look?  I would love to be able to wear long, flowing cardigans with those sleeves which drape over your hands, and multiple scarves, and long arty skirts, but I would end up looking like a crazy pixie person who had escaped from a secret underground bunker and gone on a spree through a market place at night on my way to freedom.  You know, instead of being casually and artfully stylish and fey.  I am also pretty sure I could not pull off a full-on ball-gown, which is just all kinds of upsetting.

Random Thought Number Three:  Shiny.

Random Thought Number Four: Given the number of women I have spoken to in the last year who all exclaim that they 'don't do heels and dresses', where are all these women who do do heels and dresses?  Am I just missing them?  Do they not, in fact, exist?  Are they made up by the media?  Are they really aliens?

Random Thought Number Five: Why did the people who had this house as a new build think that black wallpaper was a good move in the living-room?  It is looking more and more depressing to me the closer we get to Halloween.  Whoever they were, they should be banned from making further wallpapering decisions.  Or any furnishing and decorating decisions.  I think the stuff they had in here when we looked around had been bought as a job lot from Ikea, including all of the artwork.  I do not understand 'artwork' which is just to match a colour scheme.  That is not artwork.

That is all for tonight.  I make no promises that tomorrow will be any better.

I was a bit stuck for a blog-topic today.  This whole blogging every day in October thing is tough.  Gods know how I'm going to handle NaNo next month.  By just pointing myself at the Scrivener document and madly typing nonsense, I suspect.

I've come up with a title, but as of yet I have no idea what it will be about.

One thing I do know is, I am hoping to stay clear of the kinds of lines we get in so many songs, particularly, but not limited to, romantic ones.

We just had a slightly odd conversation about the lyrics 'why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?' with the point being made that it rather depends, romance levels wise, on the types of birds involved.  We figured if it's vultures, then they are probably turning up in the expectation that the person being sung to will soon die and provide a meal.  That is, of course, unless the vultures are used to following this person because anyone he/she likes ends up dead, and it is the singer who should be worried.

Many supposedly romantic songs seem, to me, to be disturbingly more to do with breaking-up or with stalkers than they do anything I would consider romance.  How many songs are about someone watching their loved on?  Phoning them up at all hours?  Knowing every single thing the subject of the song gets up to?  That isn't love.  That's obsession, and it's both unhealthy and illegal.

Then we have the songs where someone insults the rival love interest.  Also wrong.  It smacks of a very disturbed person, frankly.

Left to myself, I am more likely to listen to the ones about loss, mostly through the loved one having died, but that is me and my obsession with death for you.  I also like some where the singer has let love slip away and is mournful but, and this cannot be stressed enough, not stalking their ex.  Nothing wrong with regretting losing someone, but don't stand outside their window watching them shower whilst you sing about it.  Creepy.

The next thing you know, you'll be making clay busts and phoning your victim only to drop the phone when they answer, and there where will you be?

There are also the songs which feel to have used a phrase bank to come up with the lyrics.  'Forever' and 'together' rhyme, you can almost hear them thinking, 'awesome.'  Except for the part where it really is not, because it is too cliched to care about.  Don't get me wrong - some songs use lyrics and rhyming pairs which have been done so many times before, but it is right for that song.  It works.  Other times...  Well.  It had better at least have a catchy tune, that's all I can say.

Personally, I would rather have something a bit different or, sometimes, just something massively catchy.  I love the song which basically just sings 'blue' on repeat (Iron Man 3 had me in the first few seconds, because it plays this song.) and I find 'The Fox' wonderfully entertaining.  (Mind you, 'The Fox' is just generally funny and witty in its own special way.  Ylvis's song about Stonehenge may be even better.  Watch out for their use of rhyme.  Beautiful.)

This is not to say that I am devoid of feeling.  I mean, sometimes, yes, I am.  For days at a time.  Don't judge me.  I do love some very moving songs.  It's just that they tend not to be about stalkers, or at least it is cloaked better than a song which states it is watching someone over and over and over and over again.

I am pretty sure that, recently, the singer of Fun tweeted his confusion over one of his own lyrics, asking how high he must have been to write that.  It could be a fake tweet (I am not pretending to be a journalist, so I am not going to go and check) or a joke, but it is a fair comment.  The line in question talks about lips building castles, I believe.  One of the things I love about Fun is the weird lyrics, though.  Every now and then, some esoteric and deeply felt meaning swims up out of the plethora of odd word combinations, and I honestly don't care that it is probably more an ink-blot moment, with me projecting my own ideas and feelings into the song, than it is the divination of truth.

Truth is what you make of it, and I have made it through an hour and a half journey by playing 'One Foot' on repeat.  Funnily enough, that song contains a lyric about just needing a better place to die, and it really cheers me up.  But enough about my fixation on songs which are about pain and death.  Maybe I can blog about that another time.  This one was supposed to be sparked by romance songs.

To conclude, I would love it if we had fewer songs about stalkers and obsessive 'love', unless we can develop a trend where dragons sweep down and take out the unhealthily fixated singer mid-song.  'I am watching every move....arhghgh!  Get off me.  It burns!  It burns!' may not scan, but I would find it entertaining.

Having just watched a YouTube video of a guy singing sections from loads of Disney films whilst pulling exaggerated faces, I am reminded of how much I love those Disney films.

I haven't seen them all.  I have yet to watch Tangled, though I hear/read good things about it, and I only ever watched The Little Mermaid once (but then, that one always upset me in the Hans Christian Anderson version, so I am not overly inclined to rewatch Disney's variant), but I have watched many of the them.  I have even watched a few of the sequels, though they are rarely anywhere near as good.

Actually, I listened to a podcast the other year where a comedian was discussing the Disney sequels, and much of it included the line 'and then, because of some plot...', which means that we now use the line 'because of some plot' whenever discussing something in a show which seems to only be there as a plot device and which does not make much sense on its own.  I choose to give the Disney sequels a good bit of credit, therefore, for this handy phrase.  Probably faulty logic, there, but the Vicks vapor-rub turns out to have a stronger impact on the brain than I remember it having.

I always used to say that The Aristocats was my favourite, but I think I was just in denial.  Even at the time, I knew my real favourite was Robin Hood.  I watched it on repeat.  I sang along, and spoke along, with all of the lines.  The scene with the whole town being in jail made me cry every time.  (Shut up - I may threaten to sacrifice people to the Elder Gods on a fairly regular basis, but I am basically soft-hearted.  Well, when it comes to animals.  And when I don't need any magic to work.)

The whole underdog nature of it was delicious.  The friendships, the skill at archery, the fact that every person in that town seemed to be able to find Robin's camp, except for the people who were after him...  It was all good.  Right from Robin Hood and Little John, walking through the forest, up until 'Outlaw for an inlaw', which even at 6 I knew was a terrible joke.

Later, Disney had a revival in brilliance and made my other three favourites - Beauty and the Beast, Alladin and Mulan.  The song in which Mulan learns to 'be a man' could possibly get me riled up for war.  And I have got to love the dragon.  If I don't, he may call dishonour on my cow, and my cow can't take such an insult.

Oh, but I forget the greatest one of them all...The Lion King.  Scar will always be one in my list of top characters.  His sarcasm and bitterness keep me warm at night.  He should have won.  I call for a rewrite.

The stage version is even better.

This was basically an excuse to waffle about Disney for a few lines, but it has also made me want to dig out my DVDs and watch a whole bunch of them.  I don't feel I watched Hercules enough times and I was borderline addicted to the spin-off tv series for a while there (bless late night cable channels).

I am not feeling well.  This is not really a massive surprise; it is half-term.  Half-term may as well be renamed 'The Time of the Virus'.  This means that not a lot has been done today.

I have, however, just spent a bit of time sitting with a towel over my head, whilst leaning over a bowl with hot water and Olbas oil in it.  It felt very weird.  And I got called a budgie.  Pretty sure that having a towel over my head does not make me a budgie.  I feel sure feathers are involved in that.  And millet.

My intention was to say more, here, but having this virus is making me very tired, so that is all.  Here's hoping I can get to sleep before 5am tonight.  (Does 5am still count as night?)

Sometimes, you are trying to focus on something, to take in a message or complete a task, and an image or word will strike a chord in your mind and start an entirely unwanted and surreal tune from which you cannot escape.  

I say 'you'.  I mean 'me'.  But maybe some of you, as well.  What do I know?  I can only here the music in my own head.

Today, I was shown a diagram which was meant to represent something idea to do with teaching.  I understood the point of the image.  Actually, no - that is a lie.  I still do not understand the point of the image.  I understood the concept which the image was meant to be representing, but the concept was about levels of thinking skills, and to show this to us the person running the course had put three words over a drawing of a fried egg.

The word 'profound' was in the middle of the yolk.

I spent the whole day thinking about the profound egg.  And waiting for the meaningful bacon and wise beans to show up.  

Now, I think in terms of metaphor and reference.  I imagine concepts as shapes and colours and actively feel them rotating in my mind as I sort them into place in my understanding.  I love analogies and keep coming up with new ones, often perfecting an extended one and sharing it with anyone who will listen.

I spent a while the other week thinking about the way we are told to think about targets in our modern work environments and using an extended metaphor of a brick with feathers attached to it being expected to perform in the same way as a fighter jet, which is to say, both would be expected to do the job of a jumbo jet.  It amused me. 

What I am saying here is that an odd image should be right up my street, but this one made no sense and (this is the bit which gets me) I think it was meant to make sense.  Being surreal is a wonderful thing (although a colleague told me today that she is one of the 'most' people who do not get me.  Thanks for that.  I don't get you, either.  I don't get most of humanity.  You are all a bit weird.  You should be more like dragons.), but it has to be deliberately surreal.  There is an art to it.  Judgments need to be made.  

If something is meant to be surreal, it should be surreal and have its own highly specific sort of logical illogic, but if something it presented as though it makes sense, and as though the metaphor links and is not mixed, the it should flaming well make sense and not be mixed.  I am not going to go into details, but this metaphor was well nigh scrambled.  

It did not, perhaps, throw the other people in the room.  I mean, I know a few found it amusing, as they laughed at it, but they possibly didn't then spend the day being distracted by the idea of profound eggs.  Wise eggs, doling out wisdom on mountaintops, after withdrawing from society to contemplate the mysteries of the universe.  But why have these eggs withdrawn?  What higher knowledge or oneness do they seek?  Do they hatch into something greater or is there very eggness and their acceptance of this the true path to ascension?  These are pressing questions, people!  

I feel very unsettled right now.  

This afternoon, a kid asked me if I am looking forwards to Christmas.  We haven't even had Bonfire Night, yet.  The supermarkets are subtly hinting there may be another say cropping up in then next month - something to do with orange and green and cobwebs.  (Is there a spider day?  I do not want a spider day.)

We've already talked about Christmas in my house.  Some basic planning is a good idea, what with the loaded question of where people spend the day.  I honestly don't think it needs to be discussed in casual (and rather random - there was no lead up to this being mentioned) conversations.  Not now!

I want to enjoy damp-leaf season before I have to think about supposed-to-be-frosty season.  It bothers me that the supermarket we go to does already have Christmas cards and decorations on sale.  I think this is one reason none of it seems so exciting or special anymore.  It's diluted,  Spreading Christmas out over several months is just daft.

Yes, part of the reason it is less thrilling is that I am older, but I think it would be better to keep Christmas related things to December, at least.

My telly people just keep making bad choices.  Shooting people in cold blood, trusting the wrong people, wearing Kraken costumes to parties (though that might have been a really great choice, actually).

Every time I think they might have time for a bit of a day off, though, most of them screw it up for themselves.  It's exciting to watch, but I do wonder when they get a lie in.  I feel stressed out if I have to get up early on the weekend at all.  I swear, half of my telly people can't have had a lie in in years.

I found myself standing at the top of the stairs as the kids left school today. I mean I was standing at the top of the stairs at the school I work in, watching the students leave. I wasn't standing at the top of my house stairs peering through a window with a telescope at the nearest school.  That would just have been weird.

A whole bunch of my Year 7s walked past, several cheerily saying hello, which was very lovely, and I found myself grinning back and waving.  Some of the were so joyful (I am thinking more at the fact it was the end of the school day than at the fact their English teacher was loose on the corridors) that my cheeks were starting to feel the strain of returning a similar wattage of smile.

Then, a girl walked past with a can of some energy drink in her hand.  Daft move with four teachers all standing there.  Clearly, she was not expecting us.  We were out of our natural habitat.  She, as a student, has obviously studied the hunting patterns of the average educator, and knew that at 3.30 we should be found in our rooms, picking up bits of paper and muttering about essays deadlines and why that one kid at the back of the room think 'take your book home' means 'shove your book down the back of the radiator'.  Instead, we were there, right in her path.

My face dropped into 'frown number four - disproving with a side order or not-quite-able-to-believe-you-are-doing-that' in a second.

Moments later, I had to switch back to 'dear student - how I adore your very presence' as another lovely young learner walked past and waved at me.

It can give you facial-expression whiplash, this teaching thing.

People talk about the stress, and that is true.  Very, very stressful.  It is more of a constant, low-grade pressure with peaks of more intense stress than it is anything else, but that takes its slow and steady toll.  Then, there are the colds and stomach bugs which you get every term, whenever the little darlings come back from their holidays.  Those are not to be underestimated.  The exhaustion tends to set in on day two of the autumn term and only wane by week three of the summer.  I think that one is largely due to trying to be energetic enough for 30+ people at a time, six times a day plus breaks and lunches.

People do not give enough thought to the dangers of the tone-changes, though.

It isn't just the smiling to frowning shift, or other expressions of the face.  It is also the tone of voice, body language and so on.  Being able to go from hard edged and stern to happy and encouraging as you turn your head from one kid to the next is fun, but tiring.  Sometimes, I forget which emotion I am supposed to be showing and end up giggling to myself.  Often whilst having to look serious.

Sometimes I even get mixed up and look like I am enjoying a joke when I am actually cross.  That one confused me, too.

They do say most of human communication is non-verbal, and I am often having five or six non-verbal conversation at once, sometimes with a seventh, verbal one going on, too.

Not that I am complaining.  I rather enjoy seeing how much I can communicate to the class without having to say it out loud.  It can be a bit of a mime show, at times.

I just need to remember not to speak to my family that way.  They tend to get a bit annoyed if I just stare at them until they get back on with their work.

After the terror and adrenaline of yesterday's mug incident, I needed something calmer to do today.  Now, I have a piano.  I have had this piano since I was small(er) and my granddad used to listen to me practise whilst calling out jokes about my playing.  I got Grade 1 and everything.

I know, I know.  You all need a minute to get over the awe at that one.

In the main, what I remember about piano lessons is that my teacher had a three-legged dog.  And a grand piano in a musty, spacious room which had the sort of doors onto the garden which I always imagined on the houses in Austen's books, all squares of glass and white, wooden frames.  As far as piano itself goes, I remember the scale of C Major.

Well done, me.

Tonight, I took out a book about learning the piano and relearnt C Major (are you even meant to capitalise that?  Liz?  You know piano.), as well as learning F Major (going with a capital letter until I'm told otherwise - it is important to be consistent.), G Major and D Major.

Of course, given we have not retuned the piano in years, I still have no idea what they supposed to sound like, but I do know the patterns my fingers should make.

It was oddly soothing, even with the jarring notes and the head of a small black dog being inserted under my right palm.  Apparently, Pippin does not like the piano.  Either that, or Attic Mug has escaped and she was trying to warn me.

I think I will get someone round to tune the instrument and then it will only be about fifty years at my pace of music learning before I can play a few songs.

I am assuming they do sheet music for Fall Out Boy and Imagine Dragons.

Today's blog is a public service announcement and a plea for help.  A warning, if you will.

ATTIC MUG HAS ESCAPED!

May any gods you believe in save us all.

Is anyone else scared of Greenland?

I spent a bit of time looking down at the world again, today.  On one of those websites which lets you scroll around a satellite image of the globe - not, sadly, whilst held aloft on my very own pair of dragon wings - and Greenland, as it does every time I look at the map, leapt out and shocked me.  

It is just so big.  And looming.  And white.

I realise there is actually more distance between Greenland and the British Isles than it appears there is on a map, but it is still a lot closer to us than I tend to think.  Besides, using that sort of logic which lets certain people I know be scared of sharks no matter which bit of water they have dipped a toe into, there is nothing in between here and there.  

I think part of the problem is the Orkney and Shetland Islands.  Once my eye follows the coast of Scotland and lands on those islands, my sense of scale distorts.  My brain is insisting that they can't really, in the case of the Shetland Islands, be more than 100 miles off the mainland.  It makes me see the distance as less, and, therefore, the distances to other places now looming from the edges of the screen must be closer, too.  Norway being so close doesn't freak me out.  Norway looks friendly, like its leaning over and checking on how the countries below it are doing.  Also, it isn't as big and pointy as Greenland.

Fair enough, Iceland and the Faroe Islands are there, too, but you can draw a straight line from the West Coast of Scotland to Greenland and not hit anything, and to someone who grew up being told the Atlantic was between us and America (and also not being told that the USA is only a tiny part, geographically, of America), Greenland keeps coming as a bit of a shock.  

I feel like I was lied to.  

Actually, I feel like my the bit of world I live in, or at least my brain's internalisation of the things my society has told me, has been lying to me about a lot of the world.  Some of it, of course, is definitely down to my inability to work out distances and to keep facts straight in my head, but a lot of the world map does not really look the way it looks in my head.

So many places are larger in my head because they are the one I have heard about, the ones which figure in the stories I have heard, and others are tiny or else their existence surprises me, because they don't figure in the stories we hear.  

There is also the small fact that I parcel countries up into bundles, and working out that Papua New Guinea is actually closer to Australia than New Zealand is did not sit well in my head, not when I see the latter two as in the same bundle.  Papua New Guinea is not part of that bundle, so it has no business being there, says my brain.  

Noting the places which still have strong legal, political, linguistic or ideological links with Britain also leads to a fair degree of wonder.  Yes, I do know that the Caribbean is all the way over where it is, but I still don't really compute the distances properly until I have just had to scroll across the Atlantic to find it (and yes, I do know that it is really a lot further than the few minutes of somewhat aimless scrolling suggest - just go with me, here.  I'm making a point about perceptions.) 

What I would love is a Google Maps which showed the world at different stages, so I could scroll around the world of the Ancient Sumerian period and check out which places were also building cities.  It would help no end with getting the spread of certain languages straighter in my head, too.  In fact, get on that Google Maps - add a year slider to your map facility.  I could watch the Roman Empire spread and make my brain properly take in that the rest of the world did exist around it, despite what we tend to get told in schools about that time period.  To hear my history teacher tell it, the world really was one of those maps on an old Playstation game, where you coloured in the world as you explored it, so the rest didn't really exist until it was on the map.  My worldview of 100AD ignores a lot of the world, but I did colour in some excellent drawing of men in sandals whilst in the second year of secondary school, so that's all right, then.  

Now, perhaps everybody reading this is clearer on the real shape and placement of everything in the world than I am, but I still find it disconcerting that so much of the way we think the world is, is skewed.  

It happens on a smaller scale, of course.  It took a two hour seminar at Uni during my MA for my tutor to stop marveling at the fact that people, when asked to draw a map of their town, would include the bits which mattered to them and blank the rest.  It seemed logical to me.  Ask me to draw a map of Doncaster and you will get a fairly detailed map of the walks I take the dogs on and then a vague squiggly line to Sainsburys.  I am aware of parks and houses and other shops, but I don't know what connected what to where a lot of the time.  

It did worry me the other year to find a boy in my tutor group didn't even know what Britain looked like on the map in his planner, though.  That is taking the subjective view of the world a bit far.  I am about 99% sure that the one little market town he lives in is not important enough that he will never need to know how to work out where the rest of Britain is.

Clearly, we can't all have a perfect knowledge of where all things are.  It makes me want one of those spinning globes to go in the office, though.  Maybe one with a drinks cabinet built in.  I could stand and sip bourbon whilst I span the globe and got freaked out each time Greenland showed up, looking like it's about ready to drop on something.  

I think we may have more things to drink drinks out of than we have drinks we will want to drink.  Our house has a mug cupboard.  And a second mug cupboard.  And a back-up mug cupboard.  Then, we keep some on a shelf, some in a special 'Christmas mug' box and some are still lurking in boxes we haven't unpacked since we moved house.  One mug lives in the attic.  It is the attic-mug.  If you ever saw this mug, you would know why.  (Sometimes, I think I hear it dragging itself around up there.  On those nights, I huddle under the bed-covers and hope it doesn't work out how to get down into the main house...)

Those jokes about how women have loads of pairs of shoes?  That's me with mugs.  Shoes are a bit of a mystery to me, as I already mentioned when talking about going shopping for a wedding outfit.  Mugs, I know about.  We once went on a day-trip to a town for the express purpose that it had a Dunoon outlet shop.  Good mugs, Dunoon.  Pricey, but worth it.  I especially like some of their ones with sheepdogs and sheep on them.

In the same way that people have different shoes to go with different outfits, I match mugs with moods.  And with times of day, how thirsty I am, how tired I am, which drink it is - Lemsip just can't go in some mugs - it will taint them -  who else is having a drink, the time of year, whether it is a 'being cosy' day or a 'being stylish' day (not a lot of those, but sometimes I like to pretend)...

Over the Christmas period, I greet the return of some of my favourite mugs.  They have reindeer on them.  Reindeer rank lower than dragons on the List of Awesome, but they are still a pretty high ranking creature.  I am only allowed my Christmas mugs during December.  I therefore live for December.  We have a ceremonial opening-of-the-mug-box.  It is epic and all things good.  (It takes the form of opening the box and - this is the special bit - drinking tea out of the highest ranking reindeer mug.  Told you it is epic.  Bet you're jealous of my exciting life right about now.)

I don't forget my friends, either.  Some people have special mugs, which live at my house and which are only used by that person when they visit.  Mum is under the impression that the mugs she is allowed to use are the ones I don't mind being broken, but this is a self-imposed punishment, dating from ONE time she broke a mug, which I am over.  Really, she can use any mug.  Well, most of the mugs.  All right, not the ones with reindeer on them, but that is a rule everyone has to follow, so...

Some times back, I finally had to accept, after repeated entreaties from loved ones (I would love to say they staged a 'mugtervention', but they really just kept asking if I really needed more mugs), that I should stop buying every mug I liked, so I channeled my need for mugs into present-buying.  We may now have reached the point where my friends and family also have too many mugs.  No matter.

We have a slightly similar condition with wine glasses, shot glasses and, as of this week, a set of glasses for drinking port which look like the unholy off-spring of a shot-glass and a tobacco pipe.  You actually drink the port through a little stalk type thing.

There really is no point to this post.  I just wanted to talk about mugs.  And other drinking vessels.  So it goes.

Last year, I had a go at NaNoWriMo.  It was fun.  It was random.  It was a race to get enough words written every night, even if they didn't make sense and there were far too many adverbs.
I understand some people go on to turn their NaNo novels into proper WIPs.  In my case, I mined it for useful back story and characters for my actual WIP, which was only a fledgling itself at the time.  Turning the NaNo into a full story would have been very odd.  I made massive jumps in time when I got stuck - well, when I didn't just send my MC off to another town.  For some reason, she kept going to Whitby.  All the way from Wales.  She must have really liked Whitby.
There were a few scenes I liked and two characters who are now in my WIP, though one of them has assumed another character's name, and then changed hair-colour and changed personality - but it's still him, goddammit.  It also filled in some history about a war, which is important to my understanding of the world of my WIP and may be useful later, if I ever write a sequel.
There were also many pages of people drinking tea, elaborate metaphors which served no real purpose, and at least two kidnappings.  And a house-party where almost no-one had a normal name.
During NaNo, I went to meet up with some other South Yorkshire writers in a coffee shop and spent an afternoon typing away in company.  That was fun.  Lots of fun.  I didn't make it to other meet-ups, as they tended to be in Sheffield and with people who were, on the whole, much younger and not in full time jobs, so they could hang out a lot more and at odd hours of the day.
This year, I have some buddies who I actually know, in real life and/or from writing, and will probably hang out on-line on our WordCloud group and discuss NaNo progress.  I look forwards to sharing tips and prompts if we get stuck.
NaNo really is the time just to let rip and gallop through a tangled plot, not worrying about pruning or shaping.  In my case, I ended up with a wild garden, from which I stole some roses before scarpering, but it was a worthwhile experience and I am happy to be planning on a repeat.
I steadfastly refuse to plan for my novel, of course.  That is the bit which keeps holding me up with my WIP, and that sucker is something I want to get published.  The pressure in that thought might be what is stopping me.  The NaNo experience will not be planned.  It will be the mad growth of weeds and flowers that is was last year and I will enjoy the freedom.  

In my little bio bit on this site, I mention that I am a fan of genre TV shows.  I think.  I say that somewhere on the internet.  With this tendency we all have to shout into the void of the web, it gets hard to remember exactly where things are, or if anyone is listening.

Anyway, I haven’t blogged about TV shows yet, and today marked the return of my favourite one.  Supernatural.  The internet keeps showing my pictures of the first episode and interpretations of key relationships vary wildly.  To me, with my love of meta and analysis, this is all part of the joy of the show.  To some people, however, it is clearly akin to a life or death situation.  When the show seems to be going to way they want it to go, they are all joy and delight.  One slight hint or spoiler to the contrary, and woe is them.

Essentially, these fictional characters have become a vital part of people’s lives.  Now, I get very involved in some shows and a lot of books.  I can become obsessed with them, though often only for one season or even a few episodes.  I have definitely cried at the deaths of fictional characters, or at them having their hopes crushed, and I often teleport to the kitchen, quite without meaning to, when something embarrassing happens to my favourite characters on screen.  I really do not remember either a conscious decision to move or the actions of said movement.  This may be less embarrassing for me than my reaction to a scene in The Almighty Johnsons (another wonderful show – Norse gods in the guise of mortal men and women, in New Zealand.  One recent episode included the patriarch of the family declaring his wrath will be known, and then turning up dressed as a giant, purple octopus.  What’s not to love?).  One scene made me wince, and then next thing I realised, I was climbing up the arm of the chair and over the other side, in some sort of interpretive dance version of a human slinky.  Even the dogs were giving me weird looks. 

So, yes, I do get into these shows. 

I can see why people get so involved.  These characters can come to represent things about your own life or self.  They can reflect some part of you or your situation back at yourself, so of course it is painful when the version of them which lives in your head turns out not to be the one seen by the writers/produces/show runners/studio execs… however many people have a finger in this show-pie. 

Personally, I like to take the precaution of having another show on stand-by, or another book, so I can shift into that world and let whatever upsetting thing has happened in my primary show fade away.  For instance, Burn Notice, with its ever-so-competent spy lead character and tongue-in-cheek humour, is making me feel much better about everything, from other TV shows and real life (and doesn’t real life suck with its plotting and character development sometimes?  I am long overdue for my fashion montage, for a start, and I want to know when I am getting my superpowers.  I have another birthday soon.  Perhaps this time I will find out I have a mystical destiny.)

To write fiction, you need to be alive to the tropes and story-arcs and so forth in what you read and watch, which is why I sometimes find myself considering what they are trying to make me think and how characters are presented to illustrate themes, rather than just getting swept away with things.  We also need to be swept away, at least some of the time.  After all, if our characters are not real to us, how will they be real to the readers? 

It’s just that maybe some of us become so swept away that we lose our footing and find the show or book is more important that the things going on in real life are.  And I am all right with this, in its proper measure.  I feel alive when I am deep inside a created world, buying into the rules and values, charting the journeys of the people fighting and growing in the text.  Sadly, (or perhaps I mean ‘healthily’) I do have to crawl back into the real world in order to find food.  And tea.  Tea is so very important in these things, as it is in all things.  Which reminds me, those hobbits love tea…and second breakfast…  Oh, screw it.  Who needs real food?  I’ll go join Bilbo for an unexpected party.  

What Moves You?

I am a Year 13 form tutor this year, which means helping kids work on their UCAS applications and writing their statements.  I also have to write a statement about each of the 20+ tutees.  Now, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the paths people pursue, anyway.  I have a couple of songs which are about leaving behind something worth being remembered for, or about how you would feel if this was your last day.  They are songs which prompt deep musings about what I actually value and whether sitting in a traffic jam near Bawtry on my way to wrestle young minds into writing an essay is really something I will look back on and feel deeply fulfilled by. 

In many ways, it is.  Not so much the traffic thing.  More the teaching and, specifically, teaching English thing.  I love my subject.  I honestly can’t (not don’t – can’t) understand people who teach a subject they don’t love.  I have heard teachers say that Macbeth is boring (this said by a member of management, thankfully not from my school, in front of students to whom I was about to teach said text), or that sentence structures are boring (well, maybe if you don’t know how to manipulate them for effect, they can be – a bit…  Actually, no.  They should not be boring to an English teacher.  You can be bored by whatever bores you, but why choose to teach it if you don’t like the basic building blocks of it?), and so on.  To me, none of this is boring.  Frustrating, sometimes, yes, when kids aren’t grasping it and you have broken it down and delivered it in fifty ways already.  Even more so when they aren’t trying to learn it.  That is not the same as unfulfilling, though.

For me, it is more a case of wanting to collect more experiences in my life.  A lot of the paperwork and so on in any job is soul-destroying.  There are other things you could be doing with your life. 

At York, I went to the SciFi masterclass workshop with Gary Gibson, and he spoke at length, whilst pacing up and down and losing paperwork (I think he would teach the same way I do) about people who make it as writers having decided that writing is the most important thing to them.  He told us about a friend who lives abroad in countries where the money he earns for ‘writing about dwarves hitting other dwarves over the head’ will pay for him to live in a series of hotels.  And loves it.  Because writing about said dwarves is all he wants to do in life. 

I say, more power to him.

I plucked up the courage to go and tell Gary that I had found this workshop to be the most laid-back inspirational speech I have ever encountered.  I think I got a smile.  Hard to say – daring to speak to people when I feel I may be intruding tends to detach my brain a bit, so that I feel I am only loosely tethered to my own life. 

In any case, it was yet another little reminder that checking my priorities regularly might be a good idea.  No – is a good idea.

I read a fantasy novel once about a shape-shifter (never did read book 3, Jules, by the way, so if you can remind me which series it is…) and the most memorable line, for me, was when the MC kept facing impossible odds, meaning she could never reach her goal, and thought to herself ‘redefine winning’.  She changed her goal (a lot – pretty sure she then leapt of the top of a waterfall – might not be my exact plan) and went on.

Much though I would love to add ‘shape-shifting’ to my ‘to do’ list, I perhaps will just take the idea of redefining what a ‘win’ is for me, as and when it is needed. 

I already have the black and white Border collie (finally – I only read Shadow the Sheepdog when I was, what, six?  Seven?  Hard to say.  In the only picture we have of me reading it, I am holding it upside down.  Though this one can’t herd sheep.)  I have a challenging job, which includes my degree subject.  I have a degree, come to that.  Got married.  Got a house.  Got another house.  Finally sold the first house.  (Thank the gods – not the estate agents – not sure they had anything to do with it, come the end.)  Got an orangery – which is fabulous, by the way.  I’ve tried a few hobbies, made a few friends, been brave and gone to the York festival.  Had conversations at 1am in the bar at York about bad monster movies…  Plenty of stuff, really. 

There is something still needed, though, and perhaps it will never be ticked off entirely, because I am not sure at what point I could say it was done.  It most definitely involves writing.  I am reliably informed by friends who are published that this is not the end, and you will slip back into doubt and desire all over again, but I think I will aim for that goal of being published first, and see where I go from there.

If today really was my last day, I would want to be able to have ‘author’ in my list of achievements.  I mean, I’ve already ticked off ‘be involved in creating the concept for a jellyfish based SciFi monster movie’, so it’s all downhill from there.  Got to do something to fill in the time until I can watch the SciFi channel get that filmed, preferably with actors from Stargate, Supernatural and Buffy.