Tag Archives: trying to be a writer

7 Apr 2024 · 12:25 pm

Respite and random thoughts about faith…

Blimey, this week’s been a bit of a roller coaster. As you know, last week I was having extreme difficulties with what felt like bowel-based armageddon. I’m going to relate the happy ending of that story (spoiler: I didn’t die in the end even though I was genuinely beginning to wonder which would go first, the virus or me). I should also run this with the caveat that it is mostly supposed to be funny, and/or reassuring to those in a similar position. But I have no idea which bits of what I write/say make people laugh. I know they usually do, somewhere along the way, the trick is just to make it look deliberate. So if I’ve misjudged this and none of it is funny at all my humblest apologies. I’ll try and find something laminating-bacon-level stupid to do over the course of the week to make things more interesting. Right. Disclaimer made, on we go …

Having cancelled our holiday I then hot-footed it to the Doc’s on Tuesday again, desperately seeking help but also the referral she suggested to see what in god’s name is going on with my insides. She agreed that the referral was a good idea and suggested I have another go at solids. ‘Rice and chicken … and maybe a hard boiled egg, but not much else,’ she warned me.

‘Can I have the egg scrambled?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, but no butter or milk.’

‘Can I have coffee?’

‘With a meal.’

Woot.

‘With a tiny bit of milk?’

‘Yes.’

God love her. So I went home, made myself a small cup of coffee and had a scrambled egg. It might possibly have been the loveliest thing I’ve eaten in my entire fucking life. Trooper that he is, McOther went off and bought some chicken which he divided, making some into a delicious pasta dish for himself and McMini. I decided I would do my portion with basmati rice, chopped onions and herbs, I also added a stock cube. It was surprisingly tasty.

The next day, I felt human. I went and had the first appointment, an ultrasound scan (clear) and then we collected the cat. I had energy. It was wonderful.

That night I felt so much better I decided to branch out with some different foods. The following lunch I had the chicken and bacon in an amatricana sauce that the boys hadn’t finished the night before on lovely big shells of pasta. I did forebear to have cheese. There were no ill effects or indeed any. Having not ‘BEEN’ for 24 hours, I was cautiously optimistic I might, possibly, have turned the corner. For supper I put lentils rather than rice with my chicken and veg and cooked it in the oven with a tiny bit of cider. It was lovely. As I went to bed, I took my HRT pill and the hayfever one, although with real work to do my immune system had stopped yanking my chain and I wasn’t having any hayfever. My hands had stopped aching too.

I normally take supplements. Not many but taking Magnesium L-Threonate has definitely helped my menopausal brain fog and also made me sleep better. I’d read a few days previously that Magnesium supplements can set off this kind of reaction so I’d stopped them. Feeling a bit awake but at the same time really tired, I took one and went to bed. I knew what to do now, I reasoned. If my bottom unleashed armageddon during the night I could fix it.

It did.

Here’s another useful nugget of information people. If you are having the shits in the night, it’s more likely to be an infection, having them in the day is more likely to be IBS or some other thing caused by your immune system pissing you about. Always useful to know that. I spent Thursday drinking diorolite and thinking I was going to die but manfully started in again with the scrambled egg breakfast on Friday. Supper was chicken and rice. I had no coffee, indeed, I am no longer addicted to coffee. I can now not drink any for a whole day and there will be no headache, which is a bit of a bonus. Let’s face it, something good had to come out of all this tsunami of crap. Come the evening I did not take a magnesium pill.

I slept like a fucking log.

Today I am very tired but I am basically fine. I know I have had something grim, I feel very post viral; weak and feeble the way you do after a really bad go of flu, but my weight has stabilised at 10st 13lbs (about 67kg I think) but I had a tom tit today and it was normal for the first time in about 6 weeks … Holy shit (literally I guess)! What a joy that was! I nearly took a fucking photo of it. But I didn’t because even I am not quite that bad, so instead here’s one of the absolutely enormous shit that pigeon did on my car (and long-suffering sister in-law) a while back.

Pigeon shit down the window of a Lotus Mwhahahargh! What have I sunk to?

And I took a walk up to the market today which feels so much better. At some point I will be having an endoscopy and a colonoscopy (either together in a couple of weeks or separately, starting with the endoscopy next week and the colonoscopy in a month or so).

Any takeaways from this? I probably should have stopped and rested at the beginning but I just. did. not. have. time. And I should have known it was a virus, because it had given my overactive immune system enough to do that the allergies and arthritic pain had all stopped. Well no, actually, I did know it was a virus, I just wasn’t sure if I was going to get better! I genuinely believed it might kill me at one point, because I’m not a drama queen at all. (Yes, that’s terribly melodramatic but, in my defence, I remember my Mum saying the exact same thing after she had pleurisy; as in, ‘It was awful! If I hadn’t had to look after your father I think I’d have happily gone then’.)

Also, I tidied up something I’d got lying about and turned it into a short story which I submitted to an anthology, so that’s grand. And I applied for a stall at the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair, so that was grand too.

Thank you, everyone who gave me advice. It was actually really useful. I listened to/read all the links and stuff you all sent and it gave me things to try.

Now, if I can make this stick I have a target of getting fit and well by 21st when I have booked to go on a metal detecting rally half an hour up the road. Really looking forward to it as I haven’t been out for ages. And I’m going to go back to the gym. Possibly Thursday or maybe a week on Monday.

Other stuff …

A propos of nothing much, on the way home from the market today, I popped into the cafe next to the church to give them a bit of pay it forward cash. They know some of their customers, are really hungry but can’t afford to pay for a meal so you can drop a few quid in so they can give meals to these people for a reduced rate (or nothing). I then nipped into church to light a candle and say thanks for the end of the tsunami of crap. I tend to pay £1 each for them, I’m not sure if there is an actual price anywhere, but I didn’t have any cash so I did the minimum £5 card thing on the doo-hicky at the back which which is a safe 3 up front, anyway, I reckon. There was another lady in there, who was obviously having a bit of quiet time and as I walked back past her I stopped to ask if she was OK, but she said hello first.

I asked her if she was OK, anyway. I always ask this, because … I dunno … because I think it gives people an option if they need or want to say something, but they can also not say anything too, and it’s an important part of the ministry of that particular church, to me, because it’s a place of welcoming and inclusive kindness. Then as I got to the door thought about my remaining candles-in-hand and went back.

‘I didn’t have any cash so I’ve paid for a few candles up front, if you’d like to light one on me you are more than welcome,’ I said.

We got talking and she is new in her faith. She’d been brought up a Christian but it just hadn’t really clicked until recently. We ended up having a chat, which was lovely until we got onto the topic of how stuff sometimes aligns uncannily and … ugh, I ended up telling her the fucking ridiculously long Mother Death story which, even in the abridged version, took far too long. I only wanted to talk enough for her to feel relaxed and comfortable and then ask her about her faith journey, because I love hearing how other people came to have their faiths, possibly because my faith journey is so boring, or because I’m nosey, or quite possibly simply because I’m unable to do anything, even being a Christian, without hyperfocussing autistically about it. But also, because I suspect the lady would have liked to have talked about it, too, and that is far more likely to be the reason our paths crossed. But oh no, no. Nothing like that from shit-for-brains here.

If the good lord sent me to listen to her story, all I did was bloody well tell her mine. Perhaps that’s what he sent her for, to listen … poor woman if he did. I was desperate to ask her when I got to the end of her story but I could see she also wanted to be on her own for a bit too and recharge during her lunch hour. So I felt I should leave her to have a chat to God rather than me.

On the upside, I did make her laugh by telling her that one of the windows looked like Jesus jumping on a trampoline, a little nugget that was pointed out to me by one of the lay readers and she did pop in to church this morning for the first ten minutes or so.

On the downside … I comprehensively stuffed judging when it was time for me to shut up and I didn’t even ask her name. I think it was OK. She gave me a hug anyway. But urgh. It’s really frustrating to have a brain that’s really pointy in some respects and then be thicker than mince in others.

The thing is … I think I do have a kind of calling. Not to be holy particularly or anything, mostly it’s to write, but also to be kind … because my parents are both gone it is left to my brother and I to Be The Light. And I have a very strong sense that I must be the light now … it’s just that my parents made it look so fucking effortless but it’s actually really difficult. I’m not the kind of legend they both were were so … I can’t … yet. I might if I work very hard at it and all the stars align.

The thing is, maybe sometimes the fact I am a cheerful soul who is, to be honest, a bit of a bell-end is something I can use in a good way. It’s just that it’s a weapon I don’t quite know how to wield yet. I think it’s at the stage where it’s still a bit heavy for me, and metaphorically, I’m waving it round inadvertently cutting off the limbs of people round me and gouging walls the way a 6 year old would if given a real working lightsaber. It’s like a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of a rather overenthusiastic labrador … or my cat.

I think if I was to complete a what disciple are you? quiz, I’d be Peter; lovely guy, really sweet and well meaning, totally solid and practical too, but just … a bit of a wazzock sometimes. If he can say the wrong thing at the wrong time he will (God love you I’m sorry Peter but you know it’s true) and he’s just, so sensible and practical and well meaning and even though he blunders on from gaffe to gaffe he learns (unlike me). Maybe it’s because he’s so obviously human and flawed that I think he’s great … maybe we’re all Peter.

But at the same time, when I think about all the things I saw my parents do, the really amazing, treat-your-neighbour-as-yourself stuff, the overriding thing is that they were not embarrassed. They gave absolutely no fucks for social convention. On all levels there was simply the question, what is the right thing to do here? Oh yeh. That is. Check. Off we go.

The first time I saw a stranger in trouble on the street I stopped but I hung back, waiting for others to act. I was too shy to stop and help, myself. But then I shared a flat with someone who had epilepsy and she told me that actually, it really meant something when people stopped to help if she’d had a fit in a public place and was just lying on the ground. So now, if I see someone who looks like they might be in trouble I make a point of stopping.

If someone’s sitting down on the ground looking tired or weary, or yes, drunk, I ask them if they’re OK. Even if there’s a crowd round them I stop and ask (and the one time that has happened, when there was a crowd I mean, the woman on the ground was having a heart attack and nobody gathered round her had thought to phone for an ambulance, they were all just standing there, gawping. No-one was even holding her hand. So although six people had found her before me, I was the one who phoned). If someone’s begging I don’t always give them cash but I try to ensure I acknowledge their humanity and say hi.

Thinking about it. That’s the thing about my Mum and Dad. If there was some guy lying on the pavement with people stepping over him, my parents were not afraid to go over and check that he was merely in a drunken stupor, rather than seriously ill, and pop him in the recovery position if need be. They were never scared to ask people if they were OK, even if it might have made them look a bit stupid. In some cases they were not afraid to do something a bit dangerous, like give a homeless man a bed for the night.

While I looked on, not getting what was happening, my mum ran across the shingle of Shoreham beach and into the breaking waves to save the life of a child. She didn’t stop to think, ‘the parents might get the wrong idea if I manhandle their toddler’ or not even realise what was happening, like me. Maybe that’s the trick, at every level; getting to that point where the part of your brain that knows, ‘I should act/offer help, be kind,’ subsumes the ‘will I embarrass myself?’ awkwardness as the go-to neural pathway.

My parents were never afraid to step up. So I guess I’m getting there. I’ve got to the bit where I give no fucks about asking or offering or helping. But they were also really good at the aftermath and I’m not (unless it’s a crisis. I’m properly level-headed in a crisis but I’m a bit lumpy at the rest). I just need to get to the listening bit faster when it’s not a crisis I guess! Or I dunno … maybe I just have to hope that this afternoon was a time when the good lord had decided that what that lady actually needed, right there, was a well-meaning wanker. Although I’m not beyond thinking that it might have been that the well-meaning wanker needed a kind lady to talk to.

And yes. I think about everything I do in this much detail, which is why I write books I guess. Indeed it’s probably what makes the books alright. And no it doesn’t drive me that nuts. Although this mix of extreme self-awareness—and at the same time none—kind of dumb at times like Peter (sorry Peter) is sometimes annoying and I know I embarrass my very introvert husband constantly. But I can also let it go quite happily; chalk it up to experience, try to learn and move on. If I didn’t, I’d have probably topped myself, or been admitted to a long term mental institution, years ago. Never mind. I’ve got the no fucks bit down, so that’s a start. And tomorrow is a clean slate, after all. I can start again.

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Tagged as advice from writers, author blog, author blogs, faith, faith journey, god stuff, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers

15 Jul 2023 · 12:23 pm

Modern life is rubbish!

This is a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago. I’ve wrestled with my conscience as to whether I should actually post it. Mainly because it’s only going to worry people. I promise we’re all OK, but I do need to vent sometimes. This, being my blog, seems as good a place as any to do that. So it comes with a <rant mode> warning. Naturally, it’s written with a mental voice I use specifically for ranting which sounds like John Cleese doing Basil Fawlty going off on one. If any of it makes you laugh, that is the correct reaction. It is meant, foremost to amuse, but also to inform a bit in that it does genuinely feel like that sometimes.

Since the entire tirade genuinely reflects the way I felt at the time I wrote it, I think that, in the interests of full transparency, I should publish it. And also because I haven’t written anything else, so here it is.

[Rant mode] Modern life is rubbish!

A famous Blur album from the 1990s but also, sadly, very true for me. Or perhaps if I’m honest I should say, I am rubbish at modern life.

Aroogah! Aroogah! Whinge warning!

OK so I’m going to go on a teeny bit of a rant here, because in many respects, I’ve had a pretty rough time of it lately, and since this is my blog, I can sodding well do what I like. But I have a burning question right now and it’s this.

Why am I so unsuited to modern life? Because despite having been invited to sit the mensa test, it counts for zilch since I’m as thick as pigshit when it comes to certain, more mathematical strains of logic. I write numbers back to front and upside down (and add them up that way too) I often mange to look up completely the wrong hymn in church—because I read the number back to front—and my organisational skills are negligible. I couldn’t organise a fart in bed but the most galling thing is that despite knowing this, I still haven’t hit on a way to learn how to be organised. It just … doesn’t.

Then there’s the Mum stuff. The perfect storm of every single thing at which I am shit. I have skills. Are they any use to me for this? Of course they’re fucking not, I need the jot tittle and iota of formfilling and box ticking down pat and frankly, I suspect I’ve more chance of getting to the moon by putting car springs on my feet and trying to jump than I do of bossing that sort of stuff.

Mum’s mortgage money is dwindling astonishingly fast so I am trying to get some help from the NHS with her care costs. Yes, I know, I’m in the UK and the NHS is supposed to provide healthcare free to all at the point of need and yes, it does … except that some aspects of healthcare are more free than others. When you have dementia, it’s classed as a ‘social’ illness and dealt with by social services and presumably mental health services. It is a mental illness but at the same time, it isn’t because the causes of dementia are physical; strokes, bleeds to the brain, or neural diseases like Alzheimer’s, Lewy bodies, Motor Neurone etc which are all caused by physical factors, even if medical science doesn’t always understand why they happen, it’s a physical factor, not a mental one, which causes these outcomes.

Unfortunately, the NHS changed its classification of dementia back in the late 90s and for a whole swathe of people it was too late to plan for any healthcare costs, they just had to hope they wouldn’t need them. Worse, if those people did try to offload some cash after diagnosis, they stood the chance of being had up for avoiding care fees which is called deprivation of assets and is considered to be a criminal offence.

Some folks were lucky and they didn’t get dementia or they died fairly soon into the journey. My parents weren’t. One of the diffiiculties is that, for example, Mum has a house and the logical thing to do, from the point of view of death duties, would be for her to make over the house to us but continue to live there but even if she does this in a way that is compliant with UK tax law, then, since her dementia diagnosis, it would be a criminal offence because that would be trying to leave something to her children rather than spend the last of her and Dad’s assets on the healthcare she was promised for free until it was too late for her to do anything about it. Oh, and because the fact she and Dad have spent around £900k on care fees, to date—that’s right, close to ONE MILLION QUID—one million quid I didn’t even know they had, it still isn’t enough because the bastards want to make sure they strip those assets thoroughly, family antiques, pictures, the house, it’s all got to be sold to pay for care costs, or you have to make over the house to the authorities if they are going to pay (there may or may not be a cap on how much they can take for this. I think it depends where you are).

Yep, if you want to be tax efficient with your will, or try to avoid paying every last penny you have in care costs and give something to your kids … well … if you’re dying of cancer that’s OK. If you have a benign front temporal lobe brain tumour that presents very similar symptoms to the ones Dad endured, that’s OK, but if your affliction is associated with dementia then no. I’m sorry. If you try to do it, then, it’s a crime. Remember people, the D in dementia stands for destitute, and as far as the state is concerned, if you’re not destitute by the end of it, they’ve done something wrong. You’re supposed to surrender everything to pay for your care fees, suddenly, it becomes an actual crime to leave anything for your children or grandchildren.

Because we’re lovely compassionate people here in the UK and when our government screws over our citizens it likes to do it properly. Dementia isn’t a long grinding and hard enough road on its own, oh no, the government and the NHS like to ensure they make it as shitty for everyone concerned as possible. Why help one dementia patient when with a few deft tweaks to the care system, you can ensure there are more and double the assets you strip from the afflicted. Twice the money. Chancellor rubs hands together. Excellent.

As you can see, I’m not bitter or angry about this. Not at all.

Seriously, though. I genuinely don’t give a shit about my inheritance, that’s gone, although I do care about my brother’s half and that he gets nothing as well. What does make me angry is that it’s cost me pretty much everything; the never ending, grinding awfulness of it all has sapped me of any meaningful ability to write books and with that my purpose. It’s cost me being a decent mother, it’s cost me being an attentive wife, it’s cost me keeping in touch with my friends and wider family because it’s such a massive drag on my mental energy that I can only just keep in touch with a few folks. I guess we could just stop with, it’s cost me my happiness in many respects, or perhaps my contentment because in terms of stress, time, sadness, love, pain and god knows what else, it’s blown away any semblance of concentration and mental capacity I had (yes! Stress gives you brain fog, who’d have thunk it). It’s cost my husband and son because they feel it too, and they’ve seen me cry, many times and in my son’s case, at far too young an age. It’s cost my brother and his wife and my nephews and niece just as much.

I fucking resent the price we, and thousands like us, have paid because the illness our parents have endured has the wrong name. It does, indeed boil my piss. Mwahahahargh! I try not to think about it too much.

And fair due, when I say they take ‘every last penny’ they do generously leave you the last 23k. Except they don’t—and it’s not—because there’s a sliding scale of help beyond that and the full package doesn’t kick in until you are at £14k … which, to put this in perspective, is about 9 weeks of care fees.

Anyway, the amount of form filling! As you know, I am always a tower of strength when it comes to form filling, says she, with deep sarcasm. Did I mention that looking after Mum’s finances, healthcare and general wellbeing is a perfect storm of every single thing at which I am shit? And so was Dad’s. And it’s been going on for years and years, and years. And I am so, so fucking tired of my entire life being about trying to boss an enormous collection of all the things I am emotionally, physically and mentally least equipped to do. And Oh Lordy I took McMini to a consultation with a counsellor today and we fleetingly touched on the whole dementia dementor that is sucking away my life and I actually nearly wept. It caught me completely broadside because I thought I was through all that.

Not quite. Clearly.

The other day, I was listening to a programme on BBC sounds about dementia and they were so fucking upbeat.

‘Do you know carers everywhere save the government over £11bn a year?’ they said (or something along those lines). ‘Aren’t you all marvellous?’

Yeh the same way clapping people is so much better than giving them a pay rise and we don’t save them the money, they take it from us.

And I was sat there in the car, bundling along the M25 (it was flowing well that day) shouting,

‘No! We’re not fucking marvellous you absolute pus wangle! We’re fucking desperate, and lost and we have NOTHING left to give and NOTHING left to fight with! And no-one fucking gives a shit! And while I’m shouting at the windscreen like this, worrying the person in the car next to me,’ MTM turns, gives the nervous looking woman in the nissan micra a thumbs up and waves. ‘Can I just mention what it costs US? Everything. Fucking everything. Let me repeat that! It costs us every. fucking. thing. Our social lives, our hobbies, our capacity for coherent thought, our health and in some cases our sanity or our actual fucking lives.’

OK so I appreciate that sounds melodramatic but sadly, it’s true. One demented relative, and you are surrendering to years of sleepless nights and brain fog. Think new baby for years, and years, and YEARS until the lack of sleep kills you.

In a horrible irony, do you know what the result of that level of stress, for 15 years, was for Mum? That’s right. Dementia for her too. What a kindly joy! Thanks God you absolute get. The woman who said, ‘I don’t really care what happens to me when I get old, so long as I don’t lose my marbles.’ is losing her marbles.

Thank you, you to whichever clusterfuck of cucking funts made that decision back in the 1990s because thanks to your intervention she has, indeed, lost her fucking marbles.

Bastards.

Yes! I’m sure I’m entitled to all sorts of benefits and help and Mum gets it, what there is, but I’m too exhausted to look into it. And when I do, it’s for people spending 36 hours a week on care. If you have a part-time job that you can no longer do because of the strain of looking after your demented relative, that means you’re not eligible. If you worked during the school day, you’re not eligible because that’s not 36 hours. It’s a fucking shower! And I’m just running a house, a care team and a life from afar. I’m not even one of the poor bastards at home doing it 24/7 with no let up, no relief and no fucking hope. Waking up every hour all through the night and trying to persuade their demented relative to sleep because they are so … fucking … tired. People with dementia can live a full and happy life but it costs their loved ones everything. And nobody gives a fucking toss.

Then there’s … ugh … other stuff. Other stuff is a bit patchy to be honest. Everyone has a Draco Malfoy (look it up if you don’t know) and McMini is no exception. There’s a kid picking on him at school and for a while a lad who was a friend at one point was joining in, which made it extra specially hurtful. The ex friend has stopped now, thank goodness, but the other lad has continued. Luckily McMini, who was bullet proof on that score, and then very suddenly, not bullet proof, seems to have rediscovered his armour and ceased to care about the Draco Malloy in his life. Long may that continue.

Though the school is being brilliant it’s been tough for him. Hence the counsellor (psychotherapist who does counselling) and I arranged for us to meet to see if a few sessions would help. Things are a great deal better but I still want rule in or our whether or not Mc(not so)Mini might need a few handy coping strategies. Mainly because I doubt I’d be here now, in quite the same form, had I not had a lot of CBT at the beginning of this fucking dementia nightmare. And while he’s coping fine now, the kid who picks on him is still picking on him. So I set up an initial session to meet and see if the counsellor could help.

The first session was on Tuesday.

I forgot.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and their fluffy donkey. Fuck me but I’m a fucking dickwad.

You know what. A few years ago I did an intelligence test, the result was a bit like a spider with 8 zones of intelligence and scores for each. Basically, I scored a solid top 80%-90% in seven of the eight areas. However, in one area—numeracy and certain mathematical logic—I scored below 20%. In an IQ test I scored one point off genius level (on paper, I’m well thick on screen) yet for everything that matters in wrangling my and my mother’s day-to-day existence my fucking enormous teflon-head brain is of absolutely fuck all use. The only thing my intelligence achieves is a keen awareness of how lacking I am in the one single form of fucking intellect I actually need. There are people out there with such severe cognitive disabilities that they are unable to live independently who are smarter than I am in the only area that anyone counts.

All my life I’ve railed against the stupid fucking bigots who say that the only intelligence that counts is mathematical intelligence and discount everyone else whose abilities aren’t a carbon copy of their own as ‘stupid’ because they’re too unimaginative to see the worth in any other kind of intelligence. I heartily loathe those people who aver that only one kind of intelligence is the arbiter of all intelligence and that without it you are thick, much as I heartily loathe the way the morning people have managed to fit the entire world to the way they function and have convinced us all that being a night owl (a logical evolutionary step to ensure some of the tribe was always awake to keep watch) makes you some kind of morally bankrupt deviant.

Sadly, modern life and educational standards are set up for mathematical logic, and nothing else, and it’s amazing the number of people who, when I suggest that it’s possible to be intelligent without being mathematically intelligent, will agree but then basically say, no. Engineering and construction and most stuff runs on maths or is designed using maths they argue. Therefore our world is built on maths and it is the apogee of all intelligence. I completely get that. I get that it’s important.

But we don’t all need ALL the maths to just … you know … live. I mean, for starters, if everyone in the village has one kind of intelligence and is brilliant at building the bridges, who’s going to do the fucking cooking? Rishi’s barking plan about maths until people are 18 … well … it depends what they teach. But trying to get people like me to understand advanced trigonometry isn’t going to happen, no matter how many times you try and drum it into me. It’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

Nobody insists we all play an instrument to grade 8 level and shames anyone who can’t as an inferior or a second grade person. Some people aren’t musical. Nobody gives them any grief. Some people aren’t mathematical. Newsflash. That isn’t a fucking crime. Why this ridiculous insistence that mathematical intelligence is the only thing that matters? It’s bullshit! Surely, unless they want to be a theoretical physicist then, so long as a person can manage their finances, or parse a spreadsheet/find an expert they trust to do it for them that’s all they need.

Yes, we need to understand certain mathematical basics to get by but the way they go on. It’s like saying that only one colour matters or that only one musical note is important. And what will making people who are useless at something keep trying—and failing at it—do for their confidence.

‘You have so much to give, and so much talent but that counts as nothing because this one tiny facet of intelligence (that you’re shit at) is the only thing that matters.’

Is that a healthy message to send to our kids? From one who received it loud and clear at school throughout their entire fucking childhood let me assure you that it’s very much not.

The other day, when I forgot that session with the counsellor for McMini, I hated myself: truly fucking hated myself in a way I’ve managed to avoid since the CBT I did to deal with just this kind of negativity when I was first trying to look after my parents and navigate the absolute craptonne of admin they seemed to generate. Fact is though, I’m just a massive fucking white elephant. I know I am. Normally, I can look away and carry on living the lie that there is some actual fucking point to my existence but yesterday. No.

It’s so hard to be bright, really bright, in a whole arena of disciplines which, while perfectly valid, are discounted by modern culture as worthless, it’s even more frustrating to be smart, but, at the same time utterly, crushingly, mind-numbingly thick at the only subject by which the world gauges intellectual worth … and filling in forms … and admin. Oh I know it’s a them problem (and the fact that I care is a me problem) but it’s fucking galling. It’s not that maths isn’t important, it’s that not everyone is going to use it to an advanced level, not everyone will need to and more to the point, not everyone can. Making them try for years is just going to make them feel shit about themselves and as we all know, miserable people beget misery.

Actually if you want to appreciate what trying to force people to study something beyond their ceiling does just read this. Read this to see just how shaming people who are bad at maths makes them feel. Read this to see how giving people the impression they are stupid or somehow morally lacking, because they are less able at something you can do easily makes people feel.

It’s this idea that because some people are engineers or scientists and are using maths to define space and time, or build bridges, we should all be doing it. It’s like saying that every single person in existence should be made to write a book. It’s like saying, ‘oh we’re having a bit of trouble with the new covid vaccine, MTM why don’t you have a go?’ and being surprised and upset when I can’t crack it. It’s saying that we should all be carbon-copy geniuses (geniai?). It is, quite frankly, a bit fucking mental.

Most of us need to do a tax return, manage a budget and possibly manage a business. Yes, it’s important to know that. We all need to. But just as important is showing people who are less gifted at maths useful stuff like the kind of logic required to parse a spreadsheet that’ll do that maths for them.

It seems a trifle unfair that the zone of intelligence, out of those eight, around which my entire chuffing life revolves is the one in which I sit in the bottom 20% of the population; remembering things, administrating financial matters, filling in government forms correctly, dotting every I and crossing every T as stipulated, and in a timely manner, not being able to see how my situation fits a standard box, sitting waiting on hold because I’m over thinking it.

On top of that, my startling lack of smarts—in the one area which dominates my existence—makes life such an uphill struggle that I have nothing left for anything else after I’ve finished with it all. That’s really where this whole sticking eyes on things cropped up. Because I wanted to write. NEEDED to write, but after dealing with all the shite, getting it wrong, doing it again, missing bits off and cocking it up, all while watching my father and then my mother slowly disappearing in front of my eyes; all while taking their hands and walking beside them as we made our way together into the dark … after that I had nothing left in the tank. But an eyebomb takes a few minutes, little or no energy. I still get to be creative and it cheers me up.

Hence the marked absence of any new writing so far this year. Or last year to be honest. Of course, that’s also the reason I’ve been concentrating on the eyebombing book. Because it’s a different kind of creativity and an easy win … except I did an event on Saturday and there was very little interest in it live … so to speak which was rather worrying after it looking like people were interested online.

This is the first book I’ve talked about on social media where people have demonstrably shown an interest but … The price was definitely too high. Nobody was countenancing paying £18 for the hardback and £10 was clearly too steep for the paperback too. I might try a smaller size and see if I can produce it more cheaply and charge £7 for the paperback and £10 for the hardback. I guess the trouble is that it’s still too expensive to produce a colour photobook for a price that anyone’ll pay. It may be that I need to aim it at a more deluxe audience … gulp … but then the photos should probably have been better. Yeek!

Bummer. It looks like I might have produced yet another turkey.

Never mind. I guess you can’t win ’em all… or any of them, it seems. I should give up already, but that would be easy, and I NEED to create things … and I’m pig-headed. Onwards and upwards.

[/rant mode]

Here’s something a little lighter …

Something for that person who has everything: Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Picture of books about eyebombing displayed artfully

Step into a realm where inanimate objects come to life and a simple pair of googly eyes holds the power to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. This book invites you to immerse yourself in the whimsical and hilarious world of eyebombing; that art of sticking googly eyes on unsuspecting inanimate objects to unleash the joy within.

As you turn each page, you’ll find yourself smiling at the quirky personalities that emerge from everyday objects ranging from lampposts and traffic signs to automatic hand dryers and even dinner. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unusual challenges societal norms, reminding us to embrace new or different things, and look for humour in the unlikeliest of places.

Whether you’re a fan of street art, a lover of comedy, or simply seeking a joyous escape from the mundane, this photo book is sure to leave you grinning from ear to ear. You might even end up stashing a pack of googly eyes in our own pockets and having a go at eyebombing yourself.

To find out more and be informed when it goes on sale, join my eyebombing mailing list by clicking on this link:

https://www.hamgee.co.uk/ebl

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, book marketing, dementia, dementia emotional cost, dementia fiscal cost, full time mum writing, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, massive rant, rant, trying to be a writer

2 Jul 2023 · 6:36 pm

Eyebomb … everything. Publishing news.

Well, that was a hell of a week. In a good way. I’ve shared most of what’s been going on on social media. Normally I don’t do that because … spoilers! This time, because I keep forgetting to write my blog I just thought … sod it! And of course, now here I am, remembering to write my blog, so while last week, you kind of missed out, this week, you get duplicates. Sod and his chuffing law eh? Picture of air freshener canister eyebombed

Since some of this is a recap, I’ll try and make it brief. On Monday this week, the test copies for my next book release arrived. This is a bit of a departure from normal in that it’s a book about eyebombing. As you know, in order to make my posts more interesting I use my own photographs. As you also know, unless you’re new to this blog, those photos tend to be eyebombs done by me. I was hit by copyright trolls a while back so I am hyper-careful now about having any posts on either of my sites that are not my own photos.

For some time now, people have remarked, here and there, that I should make a photo book of my eyebombs, but until recently, the costs of doing so were prohibitive — we’re talking £20 wholesale cost to me for a 30 page book. Or the production side of it was too complicated — as in, I’d need to use some proper publishing software and didn’t have any or know how to use it, so I’d probably have to pay a designer, which I couldn’t really afford.

These two barriers to entry suddenly fell this year when I discovered affinity publishing suite, which is like photoshop used to be. No crappy subscription you just buy it. It’s also just as powerful and, woah! I could afford it. Second, a new player has arrived in the print on demand market which is a bit more user friendly and their costs are keener.

Though still a little unsure as to whether I could make a decent fist of designing a book myself, I had a go. It wasn’t bad so I tweaked my proof copy and sent off for 20 or so which I will put on sale at the St Edmundsbury Cathedral Summer Fair next Saturday, to see if anyone is prepared to pay ready money for them.

I think for world wide sales on this one, I am going to do a kickstarter, mainly because there are a lot of book fans on there and it seems a good place to connect with them and I’m not having much success connecting with book people elsewhere.

This week, flushed with the joy of a new HUP product in my hands, one that had been, frankly, a bit of a shot in the dark but which I was surprisingly pleased with, I went to a street art exhibition at my local museum with a friend. At the end, in the foyer, which is also the shop, I wanted to eyebomb a box on one of the shelves and eventually decided that since I was on CCTV it might be politic to ask. The person on the desk said, ‘I knew I recognised you! You’re the eye lady!’

I’m wtf? I thought. ‘Uh … yeh …’ I said.

They were delighted for me to eyebomb the box and when I said I’d been tempted to eyebomb the exhibition space they said,

‘Oh you should!’

Picture of an eyebombed scaffolding guard at an art exhibion

Yeh that is a Banksey behind there …

And the long and short of it is that friend and I went off and had lunch and then we returned to the exhibition and I stuck googly eyes on a lot of things … although I did avoid the actual exhibits. So then I asked if they thought my book could be put in the shop while the exhibition was on and they gave me the name and email address of the curator and said that I should definitely ask. Which reminds me … I must … you know … ask the curator. Doh. They may well say no, after all they are probably someone of taste and discernment, but even if they do, being encouraged to ask felt good.

So all in all, a good week.

I can’t quite explain this, but I seem to have found my art related creative mojo again. I’m guessing that now McMini is older I’m not using all the drawing art centre of my brain (which is totally a medical thing, obviously) to interact with him, be patient, find ways to cajole him into doing the boring stuff like getting from a to b within a certain time frame etc and also into answering question like ‘Is rain God having a wee?’ although to be honest that’s one I asked, he told me that he’d noticed that puddles disappear after rain and he thought that some of the water must go back up into the sky. But yeh, he’s smart and he used to ask a LOT of questions which I would always try and answer if I knew. And was a genuine delight for the most part, but it did tend to use most of the drawing creativity so if I sat down and actually tried to draw it felt like pulling teeth. It’s rather wonderful to have found it again.

Yesterday I knitted a wine bottle sock for someone. Didn’t finish it in time but it is finished now. I’m also working on a display stand for the eyebombing post cards I’ve had done. Yes there are seventeen cards as well (I’m nuts). I’m making this with card, and a lot of glue, and some spray paint. It’s fun and I haven’t had the resources or energy to do anything like this for ages. Perhaps I am finally post menopausal rather than peri, only the brain fog has lifted substantially over the last six months or so and I am getting acquainted with a MTM I haven’t seen for years; the dynamic one who has a bit more energy and who could, occasionally, remember her own flicking name.

I’ve also been taking Lion’s Mane supplements … don’t laugh … well alright, do, if you want to. But after starting Magnesium L-Theonate and suddenly discovering I could sleep through the night, I thought I’d give Lion’s Mane a go because it’s supposed to help with brain fog. I seem to remember someone said it was good for ADHD (which Mum always reckoned I had) in that it helps ADHD people focus and get organised.

Holy shit! First impressions suggest these things are gold. I have been so fucking on it this week it’s unbelievable. I have done stuff. I’ve made phone calls! I’ve remembered to do things … well … except email the curator of the museum to ask about putting my book in the shop but … you know. I’ve remembered to do quite a lot of things and I’ve procrastinated way, way less! Which is golden. So that’s been a hell of a thing.

At the moment there’s been a lot of Mum stuff so it’s been hard to write … although with the amazing ~~Ruthless Efficiency pills~~ Lion’s Mane pills I’m now taking, maybe I will be able to get back to that soon. In the meantime, I am building the kickstarter and I will make a special kickstarter edition which will list the names of funders in the back and have a couple of extra pictures and t’ing.

So here we are, and a book that I only did because the writing is a bit stalled and I needed an easy publishing win, seems to be rather more popular than my Real Books. Mwahahargh! For example; I’m now understanding, for the first time, how it feels to publish a book people actually want and it’s amazing.

Normally, when I bring out a book, apart from a few of you guys and the nutters in my fan group on Facebook, most people just smile with a slightly glazed expression and say, ‘that’s nice dear!’ Three quarters of the people on my mailing list haven’t even read one (God knows what they’re doing there but that’s another story).

This time, holy shizz! They’re asking when it’s coming out, where they can buy it, how much it will cost … I’m suddenly understanding what it feels like for other authors and why they are so enthusiastic about what they do. Hitherto, my relationship with publishing has been a bit like an addict’s with the substance to which they are addicted. I write because I love it and I have to and I need to share it. Also, a select few people do love my books … when they read them. But the when-they-read-them part is a huge problem because people only tend to read K’Barthan stuff as an absolute last resort, when every avenue of other reading matter has been exhausted and they are literally desperate … so desperate they’ll read anything … and then having finally had to read one of my books, they write and tell me that it was on their to read list for seven years and they read it in a sitting, have read all the other books I’ve written in a week and how come I’ve only written ten? And why aren’t there more? And they want more K’Barthan crack nowwww!

There is no middle ground.

So … yeh … eyebombing. Waaaaay more popular than my actual bona-fide books. Who’d have thunk it? You live and learn. Right now, I’m just enjoying the ride.

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Picture of books about eyebombing displayed artfully You didn’t think you’d escape without me giving the new book a plug did you? Ha! No chance. It may not be on sale yet, but when has that ever stopped me!

Here’s the blurb.

If you are interested you can sign up to my eyebombing email list. At the moment very little happens when you do this, although I’m hoping to send out a series of eyebombing photos at some point. The main impetuous, though is so I can tell people who want to know when the book finally drops and where they can get a copy. So you’ll hear when the kickstarter is launched, what’s in the fabulous kickstarter edition and you’ll also hear when the normal version goes on sale afterwards … and if I do any appearances selling it. To find out more and be informed when it goes on sale, join my eyebombing newsgroup by clicking on this link:

https://www.hamgee.co.uk/ebl

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Tagged as author blog, eyebombthereforeiam, eyebombtheschoolrun, M T McGuire new releases, new book releases, new books, trying to be a writer

21 May 2023 · 6:47 pm

We’re not at home to Mr Cockup. Oh no, no, no, no.

Except we so smecking are. Mwahahargh!

Picture of an amber warning light for an automatic gate with plastic googly eyes on it to make it look like an irritated face.

Yes he’s a bit fucked off.

I was going to do a post about writing this week—and accompanying things—but the accompanying things got a bit out of hand and so I’ve gone off on a completely non-writing related tangent.

Do you remember a refrain from the Blackadder II episode where he’s made Lord High Executioner?

‘We’re not at home to Mr Cockup!’ he tells his team. And they fuck it up, of course, and Baldrick says, ‘Shall I prepare the guest room for Mr Cockup, my lord?’

Yeh, well … Mr Cock-up seems to have taken up permanent residence in the spare room and his omnipresence has affected most events this week. Sadly this time, my inefficiency has impacted on my ‘work’. I put ‘work’ in quotes because we all know that I don’t have time for a real job, since what I do is look after Mum and be a mum. My writing ‘career’ is the thing I pursue in the few minutes a week that I laughingly call, ‘my spare time’.

Here’s the thing.  For the last, I dunno how long, the cunningist of my most cunning marketing strategies has revolved around the crack dealer’s school of marketing. Give them books, get them hooked and then make them pay. To whit, I have been handing out cards … these cards … (see pic).

picture of two business card-sized flyers advertising free books.

The QR codes send people to a page where they can download The Last Word (top card shown) or join my mailing list (other card shown) and grab a copy of Nothing to See Here… In case, like me, readers can’t get the QR code reader on their electronic thingy of choice to work, there’s a link written out longhand as well.

When I changed ISPs a few months ago, I lost my website. I’d run out of space and there wasn’t enough room on the server to back it up properly … except that I didn’t realise that and so when I got the new site up and running and tried to upload the backed up file it told me to piss off.

On the face of it, this wasn’t so bad. I have an earlier back up which contains most of the material I’d want to keep. Also, I used a lot of orphan pages; that is blanks with information about my books etc but without the menu and distractions that might make people browse away before they’ve properly assimilated how fantastically brilliant my books are and ponied up for one. Phnark.

Those were stored on my computer. I composed and edited them in a very ancient copy of Dreamweaver … 2004 ancient, to be precise … and put them backwards and forwards using the ancient Dreamweaver’s integrated ftp. As a result I was able to upload those to the new site and so most of the stuff in my automations should be working as usual. But things with Dreamwever are getting a bit shonky—it being nearly 20 years old and that—so I’ve been attempting to use an alternative.

Anyway, because I’m so organised and efficient (oh ho ho) I made a list and started downloading the code for all the pages I wanted to use … except that then, I suspect, I saw a shiny thing, or something happened with Mum, or McMini needed a lift somewhere and I got called away, and when I returned, I thought I’d finished. What distracted me is immaterial, the point is I hadn’t finished the job that I thought I’d done.

Yes, it turns out I’ve been handing out these cards like confetti and sending people to my site to download a free book to read and all they get is a 404 error.

Mmm, well done MTM. Bellend of the week award anyone? Ah yes, that would be me.

Balls up discovered, I have now put it right and the page for people to go to when they click the QR code is back in position. However, my gargantuan cockwomblery does not end there. Oh, no, no, no …

It now transpires that the QR code on my mailing list sign up cards points people to a sign up page with my list provider rather than on my site. I did these cards when I had artwork but in advance of publishing the book so I had to guess what I’d call the landing page with a view to making it later—when there was a book there for people to download and I’d written an onboarding sequence. I duly made up a name for the landing page, which involved the working title of the novella rather than the one it actually has…

Can you guess what happened next?

That’s right. I forgot to make that page. I forgot I’d made the link. I forgot that was where the QR code pointed but I had the cards printed anyway. Once again, the helpful QR code was taking them to a page that said oops but this time, rather than an oops page hosted by me, it was hosted by Mailerlite.

Mmm. My professionalism knows no bounds.

Bollocks.

In order to have a neat link, I used a link shortener.  Needless to say, in the interim, the link shortener in question, Bit.ly, has drastically reduced the facilities of its free account so I can’t just make a new one for bit.ly/hupbook or whatever because I’m only allowed to use the ones bit.ly gives me, you know; bit.ly/1f*5hio;avew or something equally catchy and easy to print correctly and remember. So what did I do? Well, I just duplicated the signup page I have, and renamed it with the name I used when I made the original link. Simple! But also. Ugh. Head desk.

As you can see, my marketing’s been just peachy this week, say I with such leaden irony that if I decide to move this sentence I’ll need a special, heavy-duty winch. Then again, perhaps my … er hem … marketing prowess has been kind of OK because I can tell myself that I’ve fixed a long-term problem that’s been extant since mid January.  Which makes this a win. Obviously. Snortle.

How did I not spot this problem earlier? I hear you ask, except I probably don’t because I expect you’ve nodded off by this time, but as usual I’m going to pretend, for comic effect, that I did. Er … hang on … oh yes. How did I fail to spot this? Well the QR code isn’t the only thing on there, I have also written out the link … except … it’s a different link which goes to a real page which does exist and will allow them to sign up and download the book. Not a total disaster then but kind of weird, all the same. I’ve left it like that for now because an alternative means changing the artwork.

Going forward (not a phrase I like but probably the best one to use here) people can at least sign up to my mailing list or download a free book with those cards, now. They probably won’t but that’s not the point is it? The point is that they can.

It’s been one of those weeks this week.

Similarly, I ordered a new case for my phone. I needed a wallet case because I like to have a single card in there and be able to go out with just my phone without being caught short of cash. Also, if my wallet’s nicked and I have to stop everything else I can still pay for things in a shop and get cash while I’m waiting for them all to arrive AND I can still buy stuff if I go out and forget my wallet.

However, I couldn’t find any companies that made them for my phone initially and had to buy a normal case—this is me, it has to have a protective case of some sort because otherwise, I’ll smash it. Although even with the protective case I smashed the phone-before-last on day two.

The case it has is great but I have to take it off to plug in a USB stick to download my photos, and as I’m doing the eyebombing book at the moment, I need to keep moving eyebomb pictures from my phone to my computer so, as you can imagine, this has become a sizeable point of pain. I have google drive but anyone who’s ever tried to download anything more than one photo at a time from Google Drive will know a) what a palaver it is and b) that when it compresses the photos into a zip file it leaves three quarters of them out. Massive, MASSIVE ball ache. The USB storage stick is way easier, even if you have to keep taking the phone out of its ruddy bastard case each time. That’s how eager Google is to ensure you don’t bother and pay for extra storage. Money grubbing bastards.

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes.

Having ordered the case, it arrived two weeks later from China and I discovered I’d inadvertently ordered one to fit a Pixel PRO rather than a plain pixel. When I put ‘custom wallet case for google pixel 6’ into a search engine, I have to be very careful that I check the results are not for a Pixel 6 Pro, which is bigger, because no matter what I do, it lumps them all together. I also get annoyingly irrelevant ‘sponsored’ results from companies who don’t make a custom wallet case for a pixel at all. I know I had the right one initially but the internet dropped, I had to reload the page and I didn’t realise it had defaulted back to pixel 6 PRO again. Bastards. That said, it was so rubbish that when it arrived I was almost glad it didn’t fit.

Needless to say, only one other site offering a Pixel 6 (not pro) wallet case popped up on my search results, but apparently they’d changed some vital parameter to ‘custom’ that made BT parental controls ban them. Or perhaps it was because they’re called hairy worm, phnark. Uh yeh … I guess it could be that. Sometime, long ago, in the dim, dark, distant past, we put parental controls on our BT internet access because … you know … McMini.

However, that was eight years ago. We are out of contract and neither of us knows our BT password so we can’t change it. I tried to get this back off BT but was unable to because it was confidential information. So confidential that once it’s been lost, they can’t even tell the actual account holder what their own password is. Likewise, if they spell your name wrong, they can’t change it. I might be able to tone down parental controls via the wi-fi router and I will probably try at some point in the far future, when I’ve nothing better to do.

Alternatively, it might be that only McOther can do it because he’s the account holder and being his mere wife means I’m not secure enough. I did have a secondary account and password which I could do this stuff with but those no longer work, probably because I haven’t used my BT email address, ever.

As far as the account goes, I think there has to be one default email address but we can’t get in because … password … and they can’t send it to us because we can’t get in to read the email. Anyway, they’ve spelled our surname Maguire, the ignorant tossers, so they can fuck off.

Hmm. Sorry. Not ranty or anything today am I? I’m just in a grump because my son has very generously shared his cold with me. Back to my long and rambling story. I just know you’re on the edge of your seat. Mwahahargh!

Luckily, I have data on my phone so I just used that to bypass BT’s draconian system by using my data and my phone, instead. I did try to report it as an error but obviously I needed to know my account name and password for that. Considering I uploaded the artwork, positioned it and chose the text colour using my phone I am actually quite chuffed. See picture attached.

Mmm … K’Barthan swag.

Nothing much else has happened this week other than my opening what, I suspect, is going to be the most gargantuan can of worms. I asked about getting Mum a care assessment for a continuing care grant; mainly because one of her carers’ grandfather had been given it and she told me that, in her professional opinion, he was no more in need of help than Mum. Her mother, who is also on the care team, agreed. I asked what they did, and apparently another family member had contacted an agency who’d done it for them.

Armed with this information, I rang the agency in question but they told me that if Mum is able to speak she isn’t bad enough. The chap there seemed to think that non-verbal was a key factor and told me to come back when she reaches the pureed food stage. I’m a bit confused by that because if she needs help to stand, go to the loo, wash, dress, cook, clean and can’t even use the phone or turn the telly on by herself then surely that’s 24 hour care.  To be doubly sure, I rang the Admiral nurses helpline. Sadly they don’t cover where Mum lives so they won’t be able to help with the process but they were able to advise me and said that yes, Mum definitely had needs that made her eligible for Continuing Care.  Next, I got through to social care at the council who thought I should contact her Doctor. I guess what I really need to find is the local social services number for her and get a social worker on her case. I’m not 100% sure how that’s done, as with Dad I seem to remember it happening automatically. I’ll have to look up his notes and see if I have a number for them from then.

Essentially, Mum needs a care assessment first from the right team. Apparently you can call and ask for one of those any time. Then the results of that are scrutinised closely and financial help awarded … or not. The trouble is, nothing says who you call to get this initial care assessment sorted.  There are parameters and a procedure, but to the outsider looking in the vaguaries of the system are very difficult to understand, at best and at worst, it comes over as deliberately opaque, whimsical and arcane … Mum ticks most things on the list but, as yet, I’ve found no concrete information as to where the starting point of the system is. As a result, I’m not sure who to contact to have the care assessment done. It’s a NHS team, who does the assessment for the actual application, but I have no clue if we need a ‘normal’ assessment first from social services. I’m guessing we do, although I’ve found a thing that says a district nurse can arrange this, too so I might see if I can get the carers to liaise with them.

There are two agencies who will apply for NHS continuing care on behalf of people, and a law firm with the most ridiculous name on earth—they’re probably really good but the name screams cold-calling ambulance chasers. The only one of these august bodies that quoted a price for their work charged £2,500 and some suggest as much as £6,500 depending on what they have to do. I will have to think about whether it’s worth that. No, it’s definitely worth it, for my sanity, to pay someone else to do it for me because this will be a grim project to try and undertake on my own and, like all the Mum stuff, is a perfect storm of everything at which I am shit.

In the meantime, I’ve started filling out the form on the website of the other agency. I’ve already stalled at how much Mum has spent on her care … well … you know … apart from, ‘everything’ but some of that was the day-to-day costs of running the house. She has a state pension so there’s that on top, as well, though so theory, it’s actually a bit more than everything.  Everything with brass knobs on? I dunno.

What I don’t understand is this; while I appreciate that they aim to make it hard for people gaming the system, it would be quite nice to set it up so the people who needed this particular part of the system would have some blind clue as to what, exactly makes them eligible and how it works. There are lots of really clear accounts that explain what will happen when you are already in the system and what the steps of the evaluation are. But how to start the process? Absolutely fuck all.

Carers looking after a sick relative who are seeking continuing care for them, or people who are sick themselves and need continuing care … they’re not exactly endowed with an abundance of energy for administriviatitive shit because they have a craptonne on their plate and are already nearly broken. I should imagine many of them will never get money to help with care, money to which they are entitled, because they are too fucking ill and their relatives too fucking frazzled and burned out to even begin to work out how to fucking apply.

Fuckity fucking fuck! Preparing the guest room for Mr Cockup then, even, also as we speak.

Ho hum. Onwards and upwards.

Astonishingly cheap ebook and audiobook alert …

Yes. Spoil yourself with your good taste (Ambassador) and a wonderful free book. Mmm hmm. If you are looking for a fun novella—to relieve the considerable tedium you may be experiencing after reading this blog post, for example—or if you’d like to listen to an audio book in the car, or at work, or on the commute and you are just fresh out of ideas for fabulous newness … well, you can fix all those things by grabbing a free book.

This book.

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1.

It’s free to download in ebook format from most of the major retailers (except when Amazon is dicking with me) while two and a half hours of glorious K’Barthan audiobook deliciousness is a mere 99p or c from Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Spotify, Apple and Chirp (if you’re in the States). It’s also free to download from my web store.

If you think that sounds interesting and would like to take a look, just go here.

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, dementia, full time mum writing, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers, writers

4 Feb 2023 · 5:09 pm

2022 in Focus, career version

picture of a factory with sunlight shining on it

The Bury Beet Factory in sunset hue … Less Silver Spoon and more Golden Spoon in this one …

This blog post is written over a couple of weeks but I’ve not harmonised the timeline. Instead I’ve left it in as-I-wrote it mode because it seems to read better like that …

This week I have suddenly developed sciatica, or at least a trapped nerve but same end result. It just gradually appeared over the course of Wednesday evening as McMini and I watched TV. Yesterday it wasn’t great but I exercised a lot to try and keep it all moving. This was the right thing to do on paper, but unfortunately, I woke up this morning with the most evil pain in my lower back. It got better as the day wore on with a heat pad pressed against it pretty much all the time, and concentrated itself in and just above my left bottom cheek. Lovely. Lowlights of the week, trying to get dressed yesterday, today and the day before. Friday, especially, my socks were causing too much friction for me to be able to get them into my trousers without extremem pain. When you are standing on one leg shouting, ‘fuck off you fucking bastard trousers!’ at the top of your voice to an inaminate item of clothing you know you are in trouble but when it acctually makes you feel better, rather than an idiot, you know it might be piss-poor day, painwise. Still the only way is up. Except it wasn’t. Although let’s face it, things may improve from here. A friend came round to lunch on Friday which was lovely though, and it did take my mind off the pain.

Having googled myself extensively, if you see what I mean, I’m pretty sure I have what I had last time which is a tight piriformis muscle but I may have a disc pressing on the nerve too somewhere, too. The piriformis is a pathetic little muscle in your arse which, if it gets tight, traps the sciatic nerve, which hurts, which makes your arse clench, which makes it tighter, which hurts more … you get the picture. When I do a specific stretch aimed at helping this it … well … you know … helps. However, when I do stretches to releive a blurpy disk pressing on the nerve that helps too. Knowing my luck I’ve scored a full house. So now I just have to keep doing the stretch and moving around regularly, even if that does involve walking like Clive Dunn. No sitting at my computer for more than ten minutes. Productivity levels may vary. I have some absolute horse pills that they gave me last time which do seem to help but it means no alcohol if I take more than one a day. I did virtual church this morning, which was nice, except they had a collection of some of my absolutely favourite hymns … on the other hand, communion just happened to arrive at the same time of breakfast so I communicated with a glass of water and a slice of Lorne sausage. Probably quite unholy in the grand scheme of things but it helped …

Interestingly, I have been a bit more productive like this. Sitting on the sofa in my office with the omnipresent heat pad and getting up for a little walk round for ten minutes on the hour I seeem to be getting more done. So far I’ve read quite a lot of a book on antique bottles and have been able to look up some of the ones I have and come up with an approximate date. I’ve also written the thank you/Christmas letters I do to keep elderly friends of my parents and relatives to keep them in touch with what’s happening to Mum. Once the first is done, obviously, it’s easier to do the others because I’ve already written a lot of what I want to say and kind of … you know … got it down pat.

Never mind, onwards and upwards. I was going to talk about the year in book sales, although looking at the volume of sales, I am sorely tempted to say, ‘let’s not!’ On we go then …

MTM’s Year out of in Focus 2022

Aims

Ooo! Get me, all organised with my headings and subheadings but yes, despite my efforts, and my business looking like a completely random and chaotic shit-show from the outside (and the inside if I’m honest) I did start off with some actual aims last year. Rather loose ones, to be honest, and I probably hadn’t given enough thought as to how I would achieve them but they were:

Write and publish another book … er hem. Yes. Oops.
Increase my audio sales and see if I could get some sales of soemthing other than my two first in series
See if I could do some face-to-face events and sell more paperbacks.
Attempt to grow sales at outlets other than Amazon and Audible.
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).

Let’s have a look and see how I did then shall we?

1. Publish a book

Yes, that one fell victim to pressures at home but I’m hoping I might finish one in 2023. I won’t be able to publish it because if I do finish, that’ll happen in April after which I probably won’t have time to do much else but if I fail to finish I’ll throw caution to the wind and write another novella in the interim, or extend The Last Word or … I dunno. Something.

To be honest, if I want to get anywhere I have to write some straight medieval fantasy and something about a dorky american bloke in space. I haven’t done anything straight medievel fanatasy wise but I do have a dork in space (not american because america doesn’t exist in that version of reality but a guy who lost one leg just below the knee in an accident). In the meantime, I just have to go with what’s flowing, sigh, which is more K’Barthan shizz. Oh dear.

2. Audio sales

My figures for audio are not as complete as sometimes, mainly because I haven’t got round to finishing the spreadsheet where I log them all. However, this one actually went better than I thought it was going to at the start of 22. Gareth and I share a steady £60 or so from Audible each month but obviously, I wanted to grow my sales on other retailers. I did several promos on Kobo and tied in Apple and Chirp, adding Barnes & Noble as Findaway added those retailers to the promotions section. For future promos I can now add Spotify as well. On the whole, each sale was around two weeks long.

On average, my effots (bookbub ads and the odd post on social media) garnered between 30 and 40 sales of the first book in the K’Barthan Series at 99c during each promo. These were mostly on Chirp but occasionally on my site or on Kobo too. In the first instance, there was little or no readthrough but when I ran the second sale, I noticed there were some downloads of the second K’Barthan book or the box set, although these were mainly from Libraries. Third sale, more read through and even some purchases of later books so things are looking up there. In 2020 I earned about 2/3 audible and 1/3 Findaway.

Overall, audiobook sales are climbing and to my joy the non Audible portion is growing. It is rather wearing to read my royalty statements from Audible and see sums like $395 earned with $90 going to Gareth and I to share 50:50. Worse, ACX are now reducing the prices of books so we sell more. Great on paper, I mean Audible’s book prices are fictional anyway, they are twice as much as everywhere else to make the price of a credit look good but at the same time, the books they are selling a la carte on Audible for £24.99 are piped through to Apple at £10.00 so they know how much audiobooks actually cost. However, they say that the publisher compensation is governed by the published price so if they reduce my books by 20% then presmumably my royalty goes down by 20% too. Other authors whose books have already been reduced have seen this borne out on their statements. I have had the odd very low payment but I haven’t managed to track down if it was a sale or an offer or what … So far on Audible UK they haven’t reduced my books. I am unable to see prices on any of the other audible sites, or, indeed look at them … even in ‘private’ browsing it funnels me back to the UK store. So yes, the Gorilla is still providing 2/3 of the income but only from one book and I am beginning to think seriously about pulling all the others. I just see no point exposing myself to anymore of Audible’s shit than is absolutely necessary. I’d keep one book on there and keep my account so I can claim any new books as I publish to stop other people putting them on Audible. Otherwise, I’m close to just telling them to do one with their contract that reads like an unenforcable software contract and their punishment royalty rates for putting my books in libraries.

On the upside, although the Findaway portion dropped dramatically in 2021 this last year it appears to have gone up again. It’s still only 1/3 which is annoying but at the same time, if I’m earning 1/3 of my income from 10% or less of the readers it goes to show a) how shit Audible’s royalties are and b) that I should keep promoting my wide audio. Oh and I forgot to add sales of my own books which are tiny but were definitely a thing last year (along with Kobo) both of which had very little action the year before … zero on Kobo and a few quid on my store in 21 but some earnings in 22. Gareth and my earnings in 2022 are up by about 20% overall on the year before and that’s with December’s figures missing.

Conclusion: I might be doing the right thing for audio so I’ll carry on and hope it keeps improving and that the wide/my store share keeps growing.

3. Face to face events

This one was a bit of a mixed bag. I didn’t do as well as I have at previous events before lockdown. However, at the same time, I was able to attend a lot of events in a group that wouldn’t have been commercially viable for one person alone. And I earned £349 quid that I wouldn’t have earned otherwise and yes, the others earned way more than that, indeed one earned that figure in one appearance, alone, at the Christmas Fair during which I earned £35 but I’m still pleased with the overall figure. There’s an enormous £8.00 from Ingram Spark, the people who distribute my paperbacks online, on top. I think when I add Bookvault, who are similar to Ingram but much cheaper, I may well find things easier.

Will I do more face to face stuff? Yes because it was fun. However, I may try to be a bit more smart about which events I attend. For example, Ely Cathedral Christmas Market is one I should look at and I will definitely try Bury Cathedral if they do an event for Bury’s ‘Not’ the Christmas Market next year. I must also approach some schools offering to do a library talk, although I have to find out if I need CRB checked first. That’s expensive but might still be worth doing. Overall the most important thing was that barring one bit of one event, where I was a little bit embarrassed, I had fun and that is the main point, after all.

4. Grow sales on sites that are not Amazon

I can only really go on a hunch with this but as far as I can see, the non-Amazon portion of my earnings is growing. Now, admittedly, this could be because Amazon is pay-to-play and runs the most bizarre, opaque and arcane advertising platform so my choice is to get to grips with that one thing, or do everything else. I’ve chosen everything else. I’ve been doing the standard operating procedure with the others, I have a first in series in a free box set, I have a short and a novella permanently free and I have an exclusive story that people get for signing up to my mailing list. It’s OK but not hugely successful. Having looked at other people’s success I have decided to try running a kickstarter. After Brandon Sanderson ran the highest grossing kickstarter of all time, there are a fair few fantasy and sci fi fans on there and as yet it hasn’t been swamped by romance like everywhere else. Doubtless that will come but I need to try and sort one of those out before the Romance authors pile in and fantasy becomes a sub genre of romance on there like it is on all the other sites.

Unfortunately the only thing standing in my way is that I haven’t finished a book. I need the finished article ready to go and then I use it as a pre-order system essentially.

Looking year on year, at the nice easy fix that is Scribecount sales tracking, things appear to be going in the right direction.

In 2019 28% of my sales were off Amazon.
In 2020 it was 25% and I earned three times as much. I also had orders for books from non Amazon outlets where there had been no traction beforehand. I think a lot of that was the Pandemic but also that Amazon seemed to relax some of it’s algorithmic twiddling so people could find stuff they wanted rather than the nearest fit to what they wanted from the stuff in KU or that was advertised. This has since been tightened up again as far as I can tell and my Amazon earnings have dropped accordingly.
In 2021 the percentage of non Amazon sales was up to 33.3% (woot) including 6% from my own store but that may have been skewed by the launch of Too Good To Be True which a lot of lovely people bought from my store rather than any of the retailers. If that was you, thank you another 20% of those royalties went to me instead of ‘The Man’.
In 2022 39.5% of my income was from elsewhere than Amazon. (So close to 40%!) Kobo and Google Play were 12% a pop and my own store was 4.4% although I suspect that was mostly audiobooks (I can’t separate them out at the moment).

2022

2021

2020

I hadn’t really looked at the figures until now but that’s heartening because it is going in the right direction; the non Amazon share is definitely going up. Or to put it another way, the share I rely on from the most morally shonky, high maintenance of the stores is going down. I’m not sure what’s happened to my print sales though, I used to do about £40 a year from Ingram and this year it’s £7. I’m guessing this is Amazon no longer ordering my books in batches of six, which it then bins off for less than it costs me to buy them from Ingram at cost so I always purchase those and put them into stock! Mwahahargh, not that I’m devious or anything.

On the whole that’s a pleasing result though. I’ll keep doing what I do with that one then and hope that I can keep my dependence on Amazon and Audible dropping throughout 2023 and my earnings from other less abusive stores and/or sources of income rising. Also I haven’t posted my print sales on here because I can’t add sum up to the spread sheet as yet.

5. Try something new …

I didn’t do too well on this front. I guess I could call the in person appearances as trying something new because I hadn’t attempted that sort of thing regularly. They netted me the same as I’d usually have earned from my previous single appearence at the Christmas Fair but I do think it’s worth doing more. I bought a stand-up course to help me think about how I would talk to readers in public. I also bought an epic Kickstarter course and have so far got to about step two, but I’m slowly working my way through it with a view to reaching more readers of fantasy and sci fi books. With that in mind this year, I’m definitely hoping to ditch preorders and start using Kickstarter to get sales in advance. The upside of that being that I can give people more than just the book for buying in advance in a way that I can’t with the stores.

Other stuff to try. I’d like to expand my efforts on live appearences with two biggies:

Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair
School visits – time to contact local schools and offer a library talk
Move from pre-orders to doing a kickstarter for my next book, and possibly starting with Googly Joy or Eyebomb: therefore I am, depending on what I decide to call it.
I should sign up as a speaker to the Women’s Institute. I’m not sure how many sales I’d get but I should imagine it would be similar to the library talk I did at my local library, which was great fun.

Conclusions …?

Not many really. I think I’m doing the right thing. I think it’s been good to get out more among the people so to speak. Apparently, as authors get more successful, the profitability of in person appearances drops but at the moment compared to the vaguaries of internet marketing, personal appearances are like shooting fish in a barrel. They are not easy and on a couple of occasions I have been roundly humiliated. However, they are still an absolute piece of cake compared to trying to get some jaded online reader with ten million books they will never look at already parked on their e-reader to open mine and start reading. I won’t do the routine with about the wi-fi free island, the telephone directory and the lavatory because I suspect you’ll remember that but you get where I’m going …

Plans for 2023?

Yeh, there are some …

Last year I definitely made a little bit of progress so, at the risk of sounding as if I’m repeating myself, this year’s aims are pretty much the same:

Write and publish another book.
Continue to increase my audio sales, especially away from Amazon/Audible and try to build on my print sales too.
Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face to face.
Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible).
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).
Try to visualise how I could do these things and break down what I need to do to actually get them done.

Any progress so far?

Yes. I’ve started as I mean to go on. Work out what I want and then break down what I need to do to get there so I have small, easily implemented steps to take listed out and can consult the list and just do them on brain fog days. For something big like a kickstarter this is going to be especially important. I’m listing the stuff I’ve set in motion here so I have a reference document that I can return to, in order to keep myself accountable. Whether it’ll work I don’t know but I can try right?

1. Writing another book

This is where the Eyebomb: Therefore I am, easy win comes in. There will be another book this year and it’ll be that one. Another easy win is a short book; in this case, I’m doing a talk in December about coming to terms with failure. Achieving less by doing more is what it’s called but being a failure is what it’s actually about. Being a failure and being totally OK with that. The talk is schedulued for December 2023 and will run for 30 – 40 minutes online with powerpoint slides. Clearly, by the time I’ve written that, I’ll have pretty much written the entire book anyway, so it’s a case of setting out my thoughts and doing the slides early enough for there to be time to make it into a book. I think I’m going to call it, ‘I fucked this up so you don’t have to’. No obviously not fucked, the Americans will go mad. I’l

2. Increase Audio and Print Sales

The eyebombing book would be a great fit for Christmas markets if I can do it at a stocking filler price, I’m thinking 10″x 10″ hardback for £9.99 but I can take that down to 7″x7″ if that means I can make it longer for that price. I have found a cheaper printer and set up an account with them. Their books are good and so I reckon I’m going to try printing it through them. They also distribute across the UK and in The Great British Bookshop. So I’ll be using them for UK distribution and possibly for drop shipping if I do a kickstarter, in conjunction with drop shipping from Ingram Spark for the Americas, Africa, the Far East and Oceana. Ingram are between £1 and £2 more expenisve per book, wholesale and make me add a 50% margin to distribute whereas I can do 35% with the other bunch so I will definitely be using BookVault where I can.

Another important thing to do is to link my payhip shop to bookvault. I hope to move to an integrated woocommerce store on my website eventually but until I can fix that up, it’s possible to use Payhip and connect it to bookvault for direct sales via something called Zapier, which, I think is free until I make 100 transfers a month.

Likewise, if I can finish the next misfit book I will. I think it’s possible that I could but it will be important to keep up all the other stuff alongside so I won’t feel the pressure as keenly. Yes, in a strange twist of reverse phychology, doing other stuff that brings results at the same time may take the pressure off and help me finish this one. I need to do the carer’s memoir, too, as that’s very now and again, there’s a lot of stuff on my blog and in other places that I’ve already written and can use for that. However, that particular book is probably something I should attempt through trad. Hybrid is the way to go really as a trad deal shows the bigots you are good enough to get a deal and opens doors that will be closed to me forever otherwise.

3. Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face-to-face.

picture of two people smiling in front of a table at a sci fi convention

Yes, I’m going to flex this photograph on you yet again.

I’ve already sent in my application for the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair. Ooo get me! Will I get in? Who knows. They wanted a web address and my HUP website had just gone down so it’s actually quite likely I will fail this year. It’s also a bit of a conundrum trying to add product photos to a pitch, when a lot of the products haven’t been made yet. However, if I get a spot I will start printing up cards and merch over the course of the year; a few things each month to defray the cost pre Christmas. If I don’t get in, I’ll probably still do that ahead of any other Christmas Markets I might do, I just won’t print as many. I’m not going to inherit any money. It’s going to go on care so I need to earn some capital of my own, fast.

4. Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible)

Here’s hoping I can keep the momentum going and hit 40% of my sales being from non Bezos companies. To that end, all I can do is keep trying to find readers on other platforms and continue to advertise to them.

Other stuff, finish uploading all my books to Barnes & Noble direct. I have seven on there and five to do. Then I need to sort all the Barnes & Noble links on my site so they go to the books I’ve uploaded direct. Then I need to contact Barnes & Noble and ask them to move any reviews on other versions to the ones I’ve uploaded and then I need to cancel distribution where I’ve used an aggregator. I also need to sort out the rest of my links pages at Books2Read.com this is a brilliant thing that lets you add all the links to a book for audio, paperback and ebook format. The only trouble is, it’s immensely buggy so you can only do about two at a time, then you have to clear the cache turn the computer off and on again and do another two and so on. So I tend to do a couple here and there when I remember because otherwise it’s so frustrating that I may be forced to smash my laptop to pieces. That would be bad. But really, I have to bite the bullet and do it.

5. Try something new in marketing

Gulp. This year, I may see if I can resurrect my Facebook ads again, perhaps doing one or two aimed at readers on Apple, where I get crickets, or Kobo, which is rather good. Ideally, I’d get them going to my own store and buying stuff there. This is another thing I could use Zapier for, I think … as I can also have books for sale on my Facebook page. Nobody buys them and the store is hard to set up and edit but I’m a great believer in having things available in as many places as I can. Then … I’m going to try a kickstarter. I’m going to do it for the eyebombing book, to start with, because it’s easy to explain what it is and there’s no mashing of genres involved, it’s a humorous non fiction art book. I’ll design it and build it first, then, when it’s proofed and finished and ready to go I’ll do a kickstarter campaign to try and recoup as much of the money as possible. If that works, I’ll try a kickstarter for the next Misfit book again, waiting until all three versions are ready to go before I start … and possibly adding an under-the-table hardback.

6. Try to visualise how I’ll do this and plan it in bite sized pieces so I am able to.

That’s kind of what this post is for … The minute I start writing or explaining it I come up with a very straight forward list of stuff I need to do. But when I sit looking a blank screen or sheet of paper trying to type, or write, it up I find myself completely unable to think. Doubtless something terrible will go wrong because it usually does. Not least, if I get into the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair you can guarantee something will happen to Mum about ten minutes into it and I’ll have to do a mercy dash to Sussex and chalk £275 for the stall (and probably a life time ban from exhibiting ever again) up to experience. If that’s the case, I’ll just have to pack up and leave the stall because I have no back up. Here’s hoping …

In theory I could update myself, and you, on where things have got to over the course of the year but you may well lose the will to live and people will be leaving in droves! So. Instead, why not lose yourself in a book?

Astonishingly cheap ebook and audiobook alert …

Yes. Spoil yourself with your good taste (Ambassador) and a wonderful free book. Mmm hmm. If you are looking for a fun novella–to relieve the considerable tedium you may be experiencing after reading this blog post, for example … or if you’d like to listen to an audio book in the car, or at work or on the commute and you are just fresh out of ideas for fabulous newness … well, you can fix all those things by grabbing a free book.

This book.

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1.

If you think that sounds interesting and would like to take a look, just go here.

Oh and PS … my back has recovered and my knee is getting there. Onwards and upwards eh? A bientot!

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as author blog, author blogs, book marketing, comedy fantasy fiction, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barth, M T McGuire, trying to be a writer, writer parent, writers, writing

7 Jan 2023 · 5:08 pm

In retrospect …

It has occurred to me that I haven’t done a blog post for a long time and when a friend noted it in my Christmas card, expressing concerns as to whether everything was OK I thought that maybe I ought to, so here I am.

Picture of coloured glass table decoration with candle inside and glasses plus another night light in the background First up. Happy New Year everyone … belatedly, I admit.

Second, just to confirm, yes, I’m still alive.

There is a lot going on and I think part of the problem with the blog is that when I come to talk about everything that’s happening … I just don’t want to give that shit any more air time. I’m exhausted, I’m spent, I’m done. I pull up the page with the best of intentions and then, suddenly, when I think about the events I have to describe, everything is grey and dull. The same thing is happening with my thank you letters and my tax return so I need to get my finger out from up my arse. On the upside, I have successfully opened a new savings account which pays a higher, and fixed, rate of interest. So there’s that …

The other thing that has curtailed the blog is that I was increasingly discovering that I only had time to write a blog post and market my books every week and so I dropped the blog in favour of using that time to inch the WIP forward, one tiny, tiny increment at a time. Yes, as usual, glaciers are leaving me standing and I am eating the dust of continental drift, so slow is my progress. On the up side. It is happening. Which is definitely a bit of a thing, woot. I’m having slight difficulty with the timeline but I think that will improve over the next couple of months … once I’ve finished my bloody bastard tax return, of course.

So there we are … what better time to jump back into my increasingly sporadic blog habit than now, with a look back over the year in a post peppered with pictures from the many and varied holidays I went on, which I almost completely fail to mention? Yes. I think it would. On we go.

Where have I been?

You may remember that last Christmas was, to put it politely, a fucking nightmare. I came out of three nights at Mum’s short of breath, sleep deprived—yet still unable to sleep when I got into bed—and with heart palpitations, which was fun. I was also fourteen and a half stones, which is well over 90 kilos and I ached pretty much everywhere.

I wore an ecg for a few days and was pronounced fit but menopausal. Yes the menopause also gives you palpitations as well as brain fog. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving.

In the New Year, I managed to get the tax return done early on in January and then do some writing January as well as February, March and April. Those three months tend to be my window of opportunity and then, by the time the April holidays are finished and we are into May and the Summer Term comes, it’s birthdays and shit, and summer bar-b-queues so peopling edges writing out of the frame until I end up finally giving up and shelving everything over the summer holidays. It tends to stay shelved until either the next year or until I do Nano in the November (more on that later). Meanwhile back to early 2022.

I had been concentrating on rehab for my replaced knee and I was aware that I had pretty much sorted it but that ideally, if I could find a gym to attend for a year, I could push it that little bit further. Strangely, an ad popped up for a local gym on my Facebook feed, but I was browsing a local community group at the time and thought it was just a post so I filled in the form and they rang me back by return. I was about to go skiing so I booked to join up on 30th April and do a try out over the month of May.

Things with Mum were tough, we were still coming out of COVID in that everything took twice as much admin conducted through call centres where management had fired half their staff and weren’t bringing them back any time soon. Worse, I still hadn’t really managed to get back on the dementia care horse after having lock down off and lovely easy runs down to Sussex in the intervening months. It’s all very well but running another house and another person’s life for seven years is actually pretty fucking tiring. I was so weary. I was done. I still am.

There are always points with dementia care when you want to give up and it feels like being dragged kicking, screaming and protesting to your doom. Oh no! No life for you this will take ALL your spoons FOREVER. Into the valley of death we go, where the gas will sit on our lungs and stifle the oxygen out of everything. Mum was getting worse, my heart was filling up, writing was getting harder and harder and I needed an easy win. Since I was getting less and less writing done in the time I had, using that time for something else, said easy win being a case in point, seemed like a plan.

sunset over mountains With the gym initiation booked for 30th April, we went skiing, I did more writing, but not as much as I’d have liked because I was sick as a dog, discovering, on my return home, that I had COVID.

Joy. The Pandemic. Another gift that keeps on giving.

View from the pilot’s seat of a fighter jet.

Yes those are my knees, sitting in a fighter jet. 2022 wasn’t all bad.

It was also Easter and by some unfortunate coincidence, we managed to arrive in pretty much every town we stopped in for the night of the week on which all the restaurants were closed. Not that I felt that well—but the McOther’s threw it off in a trice obvs. I felt post-feverish for about six weeks afterwards.

However, on the up side, when I got back, I was 14 stones 2 lbs—which is about 90kg and about 5lbs less than I had weighed before I left

The gym wanted me to ~~do a diet~~ play calorie pontoon every day by tracking what I eat. I am pathologically averse to dieting in any form but I decided that I could hack it for a month to see if it worked because otherwise, I wasn’t giving the regimen a chance. Counting calories is easier than you’d think because there are apps that help you.

However, it would be even more easy if ONE SINGLE BASTARD CALORIE COUNTING APP HAD THE COURTESY TO USE THE UNITS, MEASURES AND RETAILERS OF THE COUNTRIES IN WHICH THEY ARE SOLD. Can you imagine the uproar if the American site for MyfitnessPal was all in Metric weights and measures?

So why impose their stupid incomprehensible mentalist random bastard system of cups on us poor sods trying to use their app in Britain. How much is a cup? It varies, which is fine until the recipe suddenly demands you measure out half a pint of fluid, or do a fluid cup which is different to a solids cup, or an Australian cup which is not the same as an American cup.

Lovely though the Americans are, it never ceases to amaze me how absolutely batshit crazy they can be and how officiously difficult they like to make life for themselves … they are absolutely germanic about rules, but without the flawless logic. That’s three cups of rice, half a lb of butter, a quart of milk, what the fuck is a quart? and then suddenly, 25 grams of sugar. AAAAAARGH! (Throws recipe book across room!) MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND!

Oops, sorry. Slight rant there. Where was I? Ah yes.

In the end I used the gym’s own app which was bad but gave a bit more of a nod to the UK existing. The only saving grace is that once I’d done it for a month, I had looked up all the things we usually eat, broken down the constituents I was required to track in metric and added them as my own foods. Some of the others also loaded up correctly with the app’s barcode reader, except Waitrose frozen peas which for some reason is a can of Jolly Green Giant sweetcorn from Kroger’s. We don’t even have Kroger’s in chuffing England.

Never mind, once I started eating as much protein a day as they suggested, I was absolutely stuffed well before I hit my calorie limit. At the end of the month, I’d lost weight and was doing my belt up a notch tighter. Despite the food tracking initially doing my head in. The idea of getting a bit fitter looked like it might work as Easy Win for 2022.

Trying to take an interesting view of the avenue de champagne in Epernay.

On the down side. The potential new gym cost as much, per month, as my last gym per year, even so, the easy win was clearly go! I signed up. I’m now 11 stones 12lbs or about 76 kg. I have not weighed as little as this for 25 years. My waist is 5” smaller than it was this time last year and I’m wearing clothes I haven’t been able to get into since 2005. The heart palpitations still pop up occasionally but for the most part, they’ve gone.

There were holidays too. The picture is from our summer holiday jaunting round Europe. First stop, Epernay …

The Mum Stuff.

2021 was a bad run financially for Mum. Carer after carer got sick and couldn’t work, they had been with Mum since 2012 and I felt it only right that I paid them sick pay. It wasn’t as much as they usually earned per week but it was something. But it did hammer us a bit. As a result, by the time we hit 2022 my Mum’s financial adviser got in touch with me and explained that he could no longer manage her portfolio through stocks and shares because there wasn’t enough of it. Anyway … Ukrain. Thanks Putin you absolute melt. So I agreed we should to sell them all.

Mum had enough money for one more year at the end of which she either needed to die in a timely fashion (this doesn’t happen with dementia) or we would have to put her into a home. The thing is, even if she’s living in her house, since it’s just her, she has to sell it and use the proceeds to pay for her care. This rule is the absolute zenith of bastardy but that’s the UK for you, horrid, small-minded pissy little island that we are.

There is healthcare insurance here in the UK but it’s not as plentiful or comprehensive as the US system. On the other hand, the NHS doesn’t treat dementia. It’s very expensive and as we all know, the NHS has been a) gradually run down and b) split into hundreds of private companies, each taking responsibility for one aspect of care the net result of which is that nobody seems to be accountable and a lot of money, time and effort is wasted.

Basically, the NHS palms dementia care off onto social services run by local authorities but they lack the funding to treat it properly either, although Social Services in Sussex were brilliant with Dad, truly brilliant, the parameters within which they worked still entailed taking all Dad’s pension to pay for this nursing home fees. Luckily Mum had some savings to live on, otherwise I’m not sure what we’d have done.

It is what it is.

So I’m sitting here, having spent all but £30k of my parents’ entire life savings, £750,000–yes that’s three quarter of a million quid—on care fees that they believed, for their entire lives, that they would get for free. It will be every last fucking penny and the rest before we are done. For most of the year I drifted, rudderless, towards the waterfall of disaster; glazed eyes staring into the abyss like a deer caught in the headlights. Immobilised by panic and horror, wishing my Mum dead so I didn’t have to break her heart and worsen her illness by taking her away from everything that was familiar; in this case, her home for 50 years.

Then I finally got my shit together and started negotiating an endowment mortgage. I wasn’t sure we’d go through with it but the care team reckoned that if we could keep her at home for another 18 months, she might not know where she was after that and we could move her into a home without it being cruel.

My brother had serious misgivings about keeping her where she was and wanted to whisk her off to a home near him. I think his social services are better than the ones here in Suffolk—indeed Suffolk mental health services are notorious, I think they were second from bottom in the round Britain league tables last time I looked. I had misgivings about moving her anywhere until she was ready. I was also petrified that I’d fall out with my brother—who I have always got on very well with—over this.

View of countryside from a very tall hill in the sun

It was hot … this is Italy

Finally, round about August the mortgage was ready to sign, but of course, the interest rate was rising just about weekly by this point—thanks bampot Putin. I was aware that we were going to lose a lot of the asset we were liquidating. We went on holiday and when we came home, my knee, the one that’s supposed to be fine, gave out. I suspect it’s back of the kneecap. I dunno. It might settle with a cortisone injection. I may give that a go. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll have to see a surgeon. I think the next stage from the injection would be a MRI or whatever it is they do instead if you already have a knee full of metal the other side, and then an arthroscopy.

View looking up the side of a pillar at an ancient church painted ceiling

This is one of the churches in Alba, Italy. It was really rather lovely, as you can see

The knee was the final straw. I was well fucked off. I hadn’t written anything since March because my heart and brain were too full of Mum stuff. My book sales were tanking—in fact my whole literary career, such as it is, was dying on its arse even more spectacularly than it usually is. I remember going up the hill one day and quietly popping into church, lighting a candle and having very strong words with the Almighty about what an utter bastard he was being to me. I pointed out that seven years having to play to a perfect storm of everything at which I am shit is a sod of a long time and that I’d fucking had it. I told it that caring for Mum and Dad had taken everything from me; I’ve no job, no prospects and pea-souper brain fog. I explained, forcefully, that there was nothing left in my life but grey and also it’s hard, when you and your sibling stand to inherit about a million quid each in assets, to inherit nothing due sheer, shite luck.

It’s not like Mum and Dad spent their money, it was taken from them by a government that thinks it’s a really good idea to take a fucking horrible illness that wrecks lives and turn it from a horrific experience into something that will grind everyone involved to nothing. I was so fucking angry. I’m still fucking angry about that one.

Maybe God listened. I dunno.

A few days later bruv told me he didn’t want to do the mortgage but that he’d like to fund Mum’s care ourselves. At this point, I passed on McOther’s suggestion that we mortgage her house to us and that we should bethe lenders. If we did it all above board then then any of the asset we lost in interest would be paid to us anyway, as the lenders. We would be creditors, not family, so what we’d lent would not be included in death duties, which, if we’d just put money in and kept the house un-mortgaged, it would be.

He agreed. Then within days, Bruv was talking about it to one of Mum’s neighbours and they put me in touch with someone who was happy to buy the house and allow Mum to live there until she died. That didn’t work out, there are death duties implications around that, too, which make it tricky to sell the property for less than the market rate. But those two rays of hope were like sunlight in a darkened world where all was monotone and ash.

We have now mortgaged the house to ourselves, all done above board through a legal firm. I left the form at Mum’s for Bruv to sign after I visited, pre-Christmas. He’s signed it but needless to say there’s some giant slew of signatures from me on the end that need witnessed by someone who isn’t my husband or son. So I’ll take it to Church with me tomorrow and get some other poor sod to sign it, at which point, McOther takes it to the solicitors to date and register it.

I think we can manage 18 months between us. Then I think it will be time for Mum to go into a home anyway. Ideally the money will see her out but I doubt life will do anything that kind. It will be really tough to move her, when the time comes, but I hope she’ll be so away with the fairies by that time that she won’t really realise.

Visiting Mum is getting harder and harder because we are losing so much of her, but that permanent sense of dread in the pit of my stomach about her finances has finally gone after seven months. My resting pulse has dropped a few points, accordingly!

A morning glory (NO! Not that type) in Portugal

It was October by this time and after a nice holiday in Portugal, crap weather but lovely food although I caught some grim bug on the plane out which was a bit of a pisser. Then Mum broke her ankle and ended up in hospital. That was quite a lot more of a pisser but I did see my brother and his family which was lovely and got McMini, who is a hulking great teenager now, together with his similarly aged cousins. And we sorted that out and got her home, as you know from previous posts.

Other ‘Easy wins…’

All the same, after that lot I decided it was time to attempt another ~~easy~~ possible win; Nanowrimo.

Briefly, in case you don’t know, Nanowrimo is an initiative where you attempt to write 50,000 words over the month of November. The idea is that this is the length of a novel and you get to write yourself the first draft of your next book over that month. My novels tend to be more like 80-100k so I haven’t ever written a whole novel … although I did manage to finish one once.

For Nano 2022 I had a list of ‘scenes we’d like to see…’ for the book I’m currently writing so I thought I’d give it a go. Obviously, I can’t do anything on Wednesdays, so I always start a few days down on everyone else, the way they all fell this time; five days down. It’s a hiding to nothing a lot of the time, Nano, but it does usually result in my writing 35k. This year, amazingly, I managed the full 50.

Have I finished the story? Have I bollocks? But I am a lot clearer where it goes now which is a bonus.

Christmas was also easier. We were due to visit my lovely in laws this year and so we visited Mum earlier. She has a machine to help her stand up and the carers showed me how to use it. Mum is doing really well with her rehab and can stand on her own now, although I think the machine still gets used, too. Back then, though, it was machine only. She was way more with it, because she no longer had the UTI and chest infection they discovered when she was in hospital with her broken ankle. I couldn’t believe the huge difference that made. As a result, we had folks coming in to help her to bed and help her get up, more to keep continuity than anything.

In normal times we have a carer in at night but this time I did it. Mum was fine, she woke up early one morning (I didn’t) and McOther told her all was well, and to not worry and relax because the carer would be in soon, which she was. I even got a couple of hours out on the lawn metal detecting and found some reasonably interesting things which, I realise, I have not looked at since. Hmm… I know what I’m going to be doing when I finish writing this then.

Three pictures of a huge glass bottle with a cut glass lid from above, side and with cat for size.

The massive carboy, from different angles, with cat for size reference.

Another highlight of the stay with my in-laws was that we managed to make it to a small antiques shop up there that we always enjoy dropping into. I spent £50 (yeh, I know) on a massive jug like they use to put in the windows of chemists stores. I think the correct word is a carboy. I think it’s probably Regency to mid-Victorian but it might be later. It’s massive, and a bit mad but also awesome! I tried to photograph it just now, by draping the tablecloth from my bookstall over some things to make a neutral background. This interesting new soft thing had been on the carpet for approximately 30 seconds before McCat decided it would be a good place to sit and give his arse a really good bath. He gives you a sense of size though. It’s about two ft tall.

Brighton got drubbed but not as badly as the score looked.

By the 28th December, we’d done all the miles and were able to hunker down here. I spent New Year’s Eve sitting on the sofa watching telly with the McOthers wearing my pyjamas and the lovely fluffy new towelling bathrobe Mum and Dad in-law gave me, which made me feel as if I was in a posh hotel!

Since then things have been relaxed, the only blot being that I’ve run out of the magnesium pills I take. I had not realised what a significant difference they make to the brain fog. Oh lordy me my brain is mush right now. I have a new supply arriving on Monday though. So that’s grand.

Summary of the year then?

Hmm … interesting times. Lows and highs I guess. I’m proud of what bruv and I have achieved and Mum is doing really well with her ankle rehab, which helps. And although she’s way more nuts in some respects, she’s less nuts in others.

One of the noticeable things about dealing with the dementia this time is that I am leaning more and more heavily on escaping into my writing. The last time, with Dad, Mum and I talked. I don’t know how much I helped her or how much she couldn’t say but I just attempted to lighten the load and help her carry it, even if that just meant ringing her up with a shit joke or making her laugh.

This time, no assist of that type is required so instead, I am ~~pretending it’s not happening~~ trying not to concentrate the whole dementia mess unless I absolutely have to, and I’m sneaking off to K’Barth instead. Only for short periods of time but quite a lot more in my head. Yep. More ‘scenes we’d like to see’ there. I also have some non-fiction and other stuff to write, more on that story next time as I intend to do a look back over the year with my writing, too. It probably won’t be next week because I have a newsletter to write and the dreaded thank you letters and a fuck of a lot of peopling to do next week—plus McOther is off to Oxford on a work jolly so I have to squeeze the Mum visit in on Tuesday. But who knows, it might be. Whenever it is, I’ll try and make it a bit shorter than this one.

In truth I’d be lying if I said I’d enjoyed 2022. A lot of it was shite, except for the bit at the end and, for the most part, I’ll be glad to see the back of it. But I’d also be lying if I said it had all been awful. There was light as well as shade.

Also, another upside, I feel curiously proud to have got through it. Pats on the backs all round, I reckon. With the McOther’s and Bruv’s help we’ve sorted out epic amounts of godawful crap. That has to be a win, right?

Happy New Year lovely blog followers … Here’s hoping 2023 is a bit fucking kinder to all of us.

On a vaguely book related note …

Graphic book cover with two old ladies silhouetted against a darkened street If you have the remotest interest in any of my books, I have a page on my site where I list all the stuff that’s reduced or free so you can try it out and see if you like it. If you think that sounds interesting (oh yes you DO think it sounds interesting) then click on this link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, dementia, M T McGuire, off topic, trying to be a writer, writer parent, writers, writing

24 Sep 2022 · 12:12 pm

Compassion … so fucking underrated

A picture of the queen This week I was going to write about The Queen, I may not have time to do it justice because I am going to have to write today’s blog post yesterday and speak to you from the past. That means I only have half an hour or so before I’m due to take McMini off to a club. Then, since he’s already eaten I have to come home and eat, then shower and then McOther will be picking him up. Tomorrow, or at least, today as you read this—Crikey! This is complicated isn’t it?—I’m off at 6.30 am to Norcon; and on Sunday too.

The Queen was a reluctant monarch. She prayed that she’d have a brother so she didn’t have to be queen—at that time, a boy took precedence over a girl even if he was younger. She also prayed that her father wouldn’t have to be king because she understood, correctly, that it would do for him in the end. Then she went on to do this thing she didn’t want to do for 70 years. That’s … seriously impressive.

Managing my parents’ finances and watching them gradually losing their sanity is probably a perfect storm of everything at which I am shit. Seriously, if God had set out to give me everything I find difficult he couldn’t have done a better job. It’s all maths and being organised and remembering to do staff, remembering to phone at certain times, sitting for hours on hold, patience, and numbers; a side of my personality which is seriously lacking and an aspect of my intelligence that is entirely absent. If my other brain was like my numbers brain, I’d be living in sheltered accomodation for people with learning difficulties. I’m great in a crisis and so naturally I am given a long-term millstone; a grinding expanse of interminable twilight grey that stretches as far as I can see. I’m one for the sprint, so I have been given the marathon. I can’t bear watching people suffer and so I must. For years.

Thanks for that, God. Thanks a fucking bunch.

Then, of course, I look at The Queen who stuck at it for 70 years, and I’m complaining about seven. Maybe I should rethink my weapons-grade whining levels then. Although not here, because, clearly that’s what this is for. I watched all of the State Funeral, and I enjoyed it too. Oh I know all the miserable republicans will be saying that the money shouldn’t have been spent on the funeral but frankly, I would consider a national event like that more valuable than the pathetic drop in the ocean of public funds the money it cost would entail. Clearly, I lack the miserable protestant fun-sapping outlook to think The Moral Way. President Johnson? In his dreams but thankfully, not our reality. It’s worth the expense for that, alone. I believe it’s actually quite important to have someone in power who doesn’t want to be there. King George VI was a reluctant monarch, Queen Elizabeth II was a reluctant monarch and I suspect Charles III is equally reluctant.

Good.

Sorry Chas but at the same time, I feel your pain.

I suppose it’s hard to see past the luxury but to me, guilded or not, a cage is still a cage. I wouldn’t fancy it myself. Oh yeh, money makes things easier, C.F. my present predicament dealing with the whole Mum Thing, and money can contribute to happiness, but it doesn’t make you happy on its own. Something inside you has to do that.

Having lived in a very small community where everyone knew who I was, even though I didn’t know them, and where everyone felt as if they knew me, and treated me like a long lost friend (lovely in many respects but sometimes difficult) I can imagine what being Royal is like. I lived in a place where everyone expected me to know them the way they felt they knew me, even if we hadn’t actually met before (still touching but also extremely scary) I can tell you that, even from direct experience in a very, very small arena, this kind of notoriety is significantly less fun than people think. If there was no escape? Ugh.

Royals have lots of stuff but only two weeks a year in which to enjoy it. As non royals, the rest of us Brits get four. It’s easy to forget that people with money, or kept by the state, are still human beings like us at the bottom of it all.

Personally, I feel that the debate about costs is disingenuous; a blind to cover the real issue, which is that some nod to a sense of social justice among those in Parliament would be very helpful right now and seems to be distinctly lacking.

Yes. In all walks of life it seems we are still raging at the most vulnerable in pissy, small-minded anger and egging our government on to even greater heights of petty vindictiveness towards the have nots, while it does the metaphorical equivalent of trying to chisel off a fifty pence that’s been superglued to the pavement as a joke while they ignore the huge suitcase of money behind them in the form of corporate tax ~~dodging~~ efficiency. You know, the stuff over and above the 1% companies like Google and Starbucks pay that they’re supposed to be paying.

Also, excuse me but why the fuck are they using my tax money to cap fuel payments? The fuel companies are posting record profits while the vulnerable and poor are choosing between eating or heating. Who should be paying for this crisis? I’d humbly suggest the fuel and energy companies whose corporate greed caused it.

Here’s another example; supermarket petrol. Supermarkets use your loyalty card and credit card transactions as anonymous data to track which products sell best where. They give people a rating based on income, A through to C and possibly D, I don’t recall (it’s a while since I’ve done this kind of marketing). Then they split each group into numbered bands, A1 the richest, A2 less rich, A3 still loaded but not as rich, B1 well-off professionals, etc through to C3 … possibly D3 I have neither the time nor the inclination to look it up for this, a very generalist passing point.

The supermarkets use this information to look at who buys what, where and then provide more of those products in the places where they sell withdrawing unsuitable products for the market demographic in that particular place. There’s no point having shelves groaning with caviar and truffles in a place where most people take home about £20k a year. They can’t afford it.

However, they also use this information to set prices. In areas where they perceive the population as less well off, they will sell the same staple, petrol for example, at a lower price than they will in another area where the population contains a higher number of B and A level purchasers who can afford to pay more.

This is how petrol costs more at Tesco’s in Bury St Edmunds—£1.69 a litre as I write this—than BP petrol does at my Mum’s in Sussex—£1.67 a litre. It’s also why Tesco’s charges £1.59 a litre for its petrol 15 minutes down the A14 in Newmarket. More C-level purchasers in Newmarket Tesco’s, clearly, or perhaps there’s a local garage round there that they’re trying to drive out of business.

Yes, I suppose it depends how you look at this. A Bury resident, might see them as pitiless, profiteering bastards hiking up prices in specific areas, where a Newmarket resident might seen them as kindly benevolent people cutting the prices in an area where people can afford less. They might see it as folks of my ilk, in Bury, who the database classes as better off subsidising those less fortunate than ourselves. If only that’s what it was but I’m afraid it’s a simple case of their being profiteering bastards. They’re not going to sell anything for less than the biggest margin possible and where they can, they’ll carve out an even bigger one … like the energy companies and every other company that gets so big it loses sight of it’s actual customers, the point of its existance, in its bid to grow even bigger, lock people’s spending in with it and no-one else, serve shareholders a nice fat dividend etc.

Frankly, the older I get, the more of a raving pinko leftie I become. I cannot believe we are going to have a recession caused by the corporate greed of our energy providers. There might be a fuel crisis, I dunno, but they don’t seem to have had much trouble providing power and fuel so far. Any shortages have been about logistics rather than scarecity; people panic buying and the stores running out.

How I wish we could re-nationalise the whole bloody lot. Properly. Sure, keep the government at arm’s length and run it as a business but as a not-for-profit or simply a company that is accountable to it’s customers first—the nation in this case—rather than its board or its shareholders.

Maybe it’s just the way I’m feeling at the moment but I’m angry and bitter and everything feels grey.

Indeed, I had a major melt down at the boys the other morning before leaving for Sussex to see Mum in hospital. This was partly because the vertigo was truly appalling. The worst thing was that I woke up feeling fine, but then, as I raised the glass to finish the rest of a pint of water, it suddenly kicked in. The boys laughed and I just lost it completely. I nearly cried as I ranted at them. Not about the vertigo, but just about how I just couldn’t keep a lid on my grief, and how awful I felt about having to hurt my lovely Mum and make her miserable because of the institutional prejudice the State, and the NHS, displays against people with dementia. Because we are going to run out of money. And we will have to sell the house for her care. And every time I think about it my stomach ties itself into a veritable Gordian knot which no amount of breathing exercises and sundry attempts to relax will undo. I think I got so melodramatic that I actually said I wanted to die, and right there, in the moment, I probably almost did. Jeez it’s a fucking hard row looking after dementia people and the NHS and government seem to go out of their way to make it as hard as possible.

Putting the vertigo on top of that was the last straw, I guess. It was a right royal pain in the arse on a Wednesday, too. I was so giddy that accelerating was giving me the spins. I have perked up a great deal since then. But seriously, why no compassion? Why no mercy. Why make it as hard as possible for people to endure one of the most horrific illnesses out there. Oh yeh, because it takes a long time and so it’s expensive. Seriously though, dementia care in the UK needs an overhaul. Fast. And something approaching compassion or empathy in our lords and masters would be a good place to start.

So what is compassion? Well I saw some in hospital the other day; the most gloriously surreal moment but also lovely. An example of someone with dementia being treated, not as a thing, but as a debilitated human, who was worth something. Treated with understanding, compassion and kindness.

While I was sitting with Mum she told me she needed a poo, which involves several staff and a bed pan so I went and got the nurse who told me I should make a sharp exit and sit in the waiting area. There was a little old dear there, who’d been there for some time. She was very thin, with straggly hair and she was cradling a handbag in her lap. I had clocked that she might have dementia because of the handbag and the fact there was often a nurse or carer with her. I sat down and all was quiet for a while until she spoke.

‘You’d better watch your bag round here,’ she warned me.

‘Oh. Thanks. Right. Yes, I will,’ I replied, lifting my bag from the floor and putting it on my lap the same way she had hers. We sat in silence for a moment or two and then she said.

‘Has my friend gone home?’

I guessed she might be making sense of her situation by connecting it with a comparable experience from her past, which is what people with dementia are doing when they have those back-in-time moments apparently. It’s important to say the right thing so they are guided towards a make-sense-of-this memory moment where they are reassured rather than agitated so I answered with a certain amount of caution,

‘I’m very sorry but I don’t know.’

‘Oh. Only she said to wait for her but I think she’s gone without me.’

‘Oh. That’s a shame if she has,’ I said still treading water a bit, ‘I haven’t been here before, though so I wouldn’t know for certain.’

‘She was making up to some bloke, I think she’s gone home with him and left me here on my own.’

‘Oh dear. Would you like me to ask one of the others?’ I asked, looking helplessly over towards the ward desk where the nurses and clerk were in discussion about something. ‘They might know,’ I told her.

‘She said to—’ she began, at which point a nurse walked past. ‘Big boobs and a fat arse, that one,’ she said and then reverted to topic without missing a beat. ‘She said to wait for me but I haven’t seen her for some time,’ then she smiled and said. ‘I’ve not seen you here before.’

‘No, this is my first visit,’ I squeaked, trying not to laugh at her previous comment. Lucky I was wearing a mask.

At this point one of the admin or at least a plain clothes staff, she might have been a consultant I guess, came over and with a smile at me and the lady I was talking to she sat down on a chair the other side of her from me.

‘Hello Edna,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ said the little old dear, or Edna, as I now knew she was called. The newly arrived lady smiled over at me and I tried to smile back in as crinkly an eyed manner as possible so she realised that, behind the mask, I was smiling back and grateful to her for being kind to a dementia sufferer. Edna continued, ‘Has my friend gone?’

‘Yes Edna, she has,’ said the staff lady gently.

‘Oh,’ Edna’s face crumpled a bit. ‘She said she’d wait for me. What will I do now? How will I get home?’

‘Well, maybe you could go back to your room for a little while?’ asked the staff lady. She was so gentle and so sweet with the old lady that I almost wanted to cry (and I definitely wanted to hug her) because … Dad. And Mum but especially Dad because Mum isn’t as far gone as Edna was yet.

‘Should I? What if she hasn’t gone, I don’t want to miss her.’

‘No, I understand. Aren’t you tired, though, Edna?’

‘Yes, I am, very but I think I should wait for my friend.’

‘Why don’t you go back to your bed and wait there, then? You can have a little sleep.’

Clearly the idea of a sleep was very tempting but Edna’s reply sounded hesitant. ‘I don’t know if I should …’

‘Aren’t you tired?’

‘Yes I am.’

‘Why don’t you go back to your bed and have a sleep then? You won’t get lost. I’ll go with you and then, if she comes back, I can come and find you.’

And so they set off, ward lady taking Edna’s arm, shuffling slowly up the corridor, then back, into one of the ward bays and out again … at which point Mum had had her poo, the curtains round her bed were opened again and I was ushered back. I never found out if they got Edna back to bed. When I left the two of them were still shuffling slowly up and down the corridor, looking for Edna’s friend. The staff on that ward were lovely. Nothing was too much trouble and so many of the patients had dementia. Bearing in mind this was a ward to treat infections, the added load wasn’t what any of the staff would have signed up for.

We need more of this. We need compassion, and love and kindness. And I don’t know where it’s gone but we need it back. Maybe if everyone reading this tries to go out of their way to do one kind thing this week. One random act of kindness, it would be a start. Feel free to give it a try if you like. No obligation though.

And now … I must fly because tomorrow I have a six am start. Eeek!

Yep, tomorrow is Norcon. If you are interested, I will be at the Norfolk Showground which is on the outskirts of the city of Norwich, Norfolk, UK, tomorrow and the next day. I will be there, flogging my books to the unsuspecting public and devaluing them by signing them. Except it will be today and tomorrow by the time you read this because … scheduling techology. 🙂

If you want to know more or would like to come along, you can find more information here:

https://www.nor-con.co.uk/

On a completely different note …

Here’s some good news if you like cheap audio books!

Once again, I’m cutting my own throat and having a sale. Kobo is doing a buy more save more deal on audiobooks this September and the K’Barthan Series, as well as Too Good To Be True, are in it. As a result, to make it more exciting, I’ve reduced the first book in the series to 99c on Apple, Kobo (of course) and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada). So if you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap you can find store links and a bit more info here

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Tagged as author blog, author interviews, comedy fantasy fiction, dementia, Events and signings, K'Barth, M T McGuire, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers, writers

28 Aug 2022 · 3:29 pm

Self Care, Hospital Care, Dementia Care

After last week’s rant, two things occurred to me; first that I probably needed to post this week as well, just so you know I’m alright and second; reading it back, I got the impression I might be sensible to do a little self care.

Self care is underrated.

The friend I go walking with one day a week was not around this week and as a result, I decided that, with nothing much else on, socially, this was the perfect time for a bit of self care. For this week only, I decided, Real Life could just do one. Obviously, I still went to Mum’s but the traffic was kind to me and she was in good form. I was also going to go to my metal detecting club meet on the Thursday but had a reprise of the lovely vertigo I’ve been enjoying on and off for a while. The rest of the week, I holed up at home and relaxed.

Self care measures included: writing, reading, going for walks alone, putting aside every single bit of admin and listening to music. We are also all building the same model ME 109 although we’re at different stages. I’ve made half the cockpit, McOther is painting his and McMini has pretty much finished his because he’s so patient … not. Mwahahahrgh. It’s been great fun though.

On the music front, taking McMini’s lead, I’ve recently signed up for Spotify since this seems to be the most straightforward way to listen to my vinyl records in the car. It’s what he uses it for too. Yes there are three people in our house and each one has a separate record player of their own. Jeepers we are such massive spuds. I also use it to listen to stuff that’s too obscure to source anywhere else – although Discogs is pretty good for getting hold of pretty much anything in that respect. So it was that I set about getting my library organised by searching out all those obscure things I don’t have, have lost or couldn’t track down.

About a million years ago I was sitting in a curry house and the background music was a Rolling Stones cover played on the Sitar. I thought it was brilliant and asked the waiter what it was. He was so excited that I’d shown an interest that he went and got the record sleeve, plus two more staff, from out back. They then explained, enthusiastically, that it was a guy called Anander Shanker (it turns out he’s Ravi’s nephew). A lot of his stuff is on Spotify.

What’s it like? Well, if the French electronica group Air added sitar to their stuff … something along those lines. There are also cover-versions; Shanker’s version of Jumping Jack Flash is genius and Come On Baby, Light My Fire is certainly a lot different from the Doors’ version. Next stop the original that Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony is based on by the Gary Oldham Orchestra. I had forgotten the name and I had to ask McMini for that one. He spoke about how he loved the bell at the beginning and it was lovely to see him discovering music with the same joyous enthusiasm that I had at his age. He is totally open to anything so as well as punk and thrash metal, he listens to military bands, bag pipes, Anander Shanker (of course) classical music, ancient ska, Finnish folk songs, electronica … all sorts.

After I’d added the original Gary Oldham song, or Snurds, in flight as I like to call it because if I play it, that’s what I see if I shut my eyes (The Pan of Hamgee whisking Ruth off from her palatial prison the night before the installation, for example). Spotify suggested all sorts of other similar things, and I liked the ones I … well … liked so I could find them again. This is where Spotify is good. I have about 9gb of my own music on my phone. It’s also on my iPad somewhere but Apple refuses to believe I’m not a pirate and has hidden it, only allowing me to play the handful of things I’ve purchased from iTunes over the years. The 9gb of music just sits there, invisibly, taking up space.

Now this is no longer a problem and Apple can ‘do one’ along with Real Life. I can listen on Spotify and the artist gets a tiny royalty for each listen in a way that they wouldn’t if I was listening to stuff I’ve bought on vinyl and transferred to my phone. Also, since most of the vinyl I have is no longer available new the artists get something, albeit a risibly tiny something for listens to the stuff I’ve purchased second-hand. I don’t like Spotify, but I do like that I can use it to fund my favourite artists simply by listening to them.

It strikes me that ‘responsible’ use of Spotify is all good, because it’s giving artists an income, however pissy that income may be, for listens they would not normally be paid for. It’s a pity Spotify don’t pay up front for a ‘new copy’ after every X number of listens, the way some libraries do for ebooks. Either that or pay more per listen, the way libraries do.

I also discovered a craptonne of early Ska and some of the songs by the Petshop Boys which I haven’t listened to for ages because I don’t have them. Indeed I spent the entire journey to Mum’s this week listening to Paninero on repeat conjuring up an image of The Pan of Hamgee being chased which played on loop in my head. He’s wearing a 1920s flapper dress, beads and the most ridiculous blonde wig and he keeps appearing and then disappearing as he runs over a row of peaked roofs with what looks like the entire world chasing after him.

Yes, the sausagewright mentioned in Too Good To Be True has been found. Kidnapped, locked up and forced to make Goojan sausage she is pining for the fjords! She has agreed to make four sausages and then Marcella, the pirate has sworn she’ll let her go but now her captors are demanding more. She has been on a go slow, so they kidnap her brother — Burton Coggles — a quiet, dapper, retired gentleman who volunteers at the local library.

A suitable K’Barthan street scene … it’s really Arras Grand Place.

Unfortunately, no-one in Marcella’s gang, least of all her, realises that the thoroughly anonymous Mr Coggles has a secret alter ego as half of K’Barth’s most famous comedy duo, drag queens Phlange and Knutt. Bitingly satirical and very quick witted, they are not exactly popular with the authorities but are loved by K’Barthans and the authorities recognise that they serve a purpose, in poking fun at those in power in a way that let’s the locals let of steam without them doing anything to clutter up the place or disturb the economy like having strikes, riots, revolutions etc.

Phlange and Knutt being an act, and imaginary aliases rather than real beings, the Grongles don’t know who the people behind the act really are, and the artists, themselves, ensure it stays that way. And yes, they are based extremely heavily on two of my favourite comedy artists Hinge and Bracket. I can’t quite work out if Burton Coggles’ alter ego is Dame Evangeline Phlange, or Doctor Ariadne Knutt. Or indeed, whether it’s Dame Ariadne Phlange and Doctor Evangeline Knutt. Only time will tell.

The mystery to solve then will be a) where is Marcella getting the sausage/keeping the sausagewright? b) What’s happened to Phlange (or is it Knutt?) of Phlange and Knutt? and c) how will The Pan spring Phlange/Knutt and his sister from their prison, on the top floor of a warehouse. d) Why is he springing them? Because Marcella is working with a Grongle Captain and Colonel to become a pliant, malleable (for the Grongles) Boss of Ning Dang Po. Clearly, neither Big Merv nor The Pan (who is one of the first people she’d kill) wants that. But neither do any of the other ganglords it turns out.

More scenes from Ning Dang Po … 😉

Obvs at some point, The Pan is going to be pretending he’s Phlange — to act as a diversion and draw off the pursuit? That must be the bit I keep seeing with the roofs. Yes, the fight among the helium canisters will still take place. Obviously the Grongles will disapprove of Phlange but be even more pissed off with Marcella for disappearing her because the average K’Barthan in the street is convinced the Grongles have mislaid Phlange and there are riots and all sorts of other untidy shenanigans which interfere with the Grongolian owned parts of the K’Barthan economy.

The Grongles don’t like Phlange and Knutt but they dislike rioting and disorder even more. Hence the Grongle Captain will attempt to whack Marcella the Pirate and I think she will whack him and get a laser pistol as a result. At which point, she will meet his superior, oh no, not the Colonel Kay but General Vernon, who will evaluate her, decide she falls short and throw her off a roof in front of a petrified (but hidden) Pan of Hamgee. Lord Vernon, newly ‘elected’ party leader will be lauded for fixing all the trouble so quickly and be elected leader of the house in the K’Barthan parliament … although he might possibly get elected because his predecessor has presided over this and he uses it to his advantage, I’m not sure.

So, writing? Yes. I have made a lot of time for that. As you can see, I do now have some idea of where this one’s going and more to the point, where it’s come from. There’s a fair bit of primping and squishing about on things I’ve already done so they fit in the right places, which I’m still doing. Then I have to work out what scenes are missing up to the point in the narrative I’ve reached and then I can get going on the nitty-gritty. Will it come out the way I’ve just described? Of course not but those are the basic threads, how they are eventually plaited together is up to the characters involved, I’m as in the dark as you until it’s written.

Other self care activities. It was McOther’s birthday and he does a lot of wine tasting. Everyone turns up with a nice bottle, covers it up and then they all try it and try to work out what wine it is. It’s fiendishly difficult but fun and the trick is more about knowing what’s in another person’s cellar than actually tasting the wine. I think I mentioned this a few weeks ago, and that I have been knitting some bottle covers to replace the dodgy socks McOther and friends tend to use to cover up the labels. Anyway, I managed to complete five; one for a friend who was attending and four for his nibs for his birthday.

To my delight, both recipients appeared to be genuinely pleased with them. Alongside, I gave McOther the usual lame presents; peanut butter cups and wine gums because he’s a little bit addicted to both but he was clearly chuffed with the bottle sleeves, as was the interested friend, who was one of a group who came to dinner to celebrate with us, so I’m chalking that one up as a win. I suspect I will need to knit more of them.

On Saturday morning, in a nod to the admin, I sorted out my car insurance for the next year but then … a slight disaster struck. Mum.

Bruv has been staying over the weekend. At the moment the mortgage is on hold because he wanted to evaluate whether or not we should be moving Mum earlier. I genuinely think she’ll be ready to move in the next year or so (as in we’ll be able to move her without her really realising what’s going on) and so do the carers but I’m not sure it’s time yet. Obviously because Bruv has a bigger family and stays longer she presents a very much worse picture for him than she does for me, but she’s definitely getting there.

Long and short, she fell on Friday night — her bad knee gave way and the next morning, when she tried to stand, it was so painful she nearly threw up. She ended up going to hospital, where she is currently staying. They couldn’t see if there was a break or not from the X-ray because she’s so arthritic but the orthopaedic surgeon wanted to have an MRI or CT scan or whatever it is they do in order to try and find out for sure one way or the other.

Serendipitously, a geriatric specialist was there too asking her all the dementia questions, none of which she could answer except her name and that of the monarch apparently. If she got an official dementia diagnosis in passing, that would be the icing on the cake. It’s nice leaving this to bruv and wife although I’m not sure how long before I have to go down there. I’ll visit on Wednesday, anyway.

As I write we are waiting to see if she’s seen by a physiotherapist this morning—if she isn’t it’ll be Wednesday before she is—and also whether she gets the scans etc and they are able to find out more. Then it’ll be a cast or a boot and she’ll need to start trying to walk on it. They’re also looking at her knees. Not that they can do anything about any of it now because she’s far too demented to undergo an anaesthetic.

We’ve hummed and haad about finding her a place in a home short-term for rehabilitation but her care team can do that, themselves, and I suspect she would do better at home. Also unless we can get her into a forever nursing home and hope that she likes it so much she wants to stay, it’s probably not worth doing that. What tends to happen is they send patients to the nearest place with spaces and that might be fifty miles from her village and her friends so it wouldn’t be any use.

So we wait …

It seems like a decent ward, and Mum is in good hands. Meanwhile, I learn that a week of self care is probably essential from time-to-time because I’m OK and without it, I think I’d be doing a lot more pointless worrying.

On a completely different note …

If you are looking to administer some self care yourself by reading for example … or listening, here’s something that might help; a free book.

Yes, Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1 is free to download in ebook format from all the major retailers and you can also get the audiobook for free from my web store.

If you think that sounds interesting and would like to take a look, just go here.

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Tagged as author blog, author daughter, dementia, dementia emotional cost, dementia fiscal cost, K’Barthan Extras, M T McGuire, mtmcguire, off topic, slowwriting, The Pan of Hamgee, trying to be a writer, writers, writing

2 Jul 2022 · 9:15 pm

Siberian hamsters and other alarums and excursions …

Well that was an interesting day. Or perhaps more accurately, morning. But it explains why there has been no blog post until now … that said, ‘now’ will probably be tomorrow (Sunday) in light of what time it is already, and the gargantuan amount of time that the activities of ‘this morning’ involved.

Originally, McOther and I were heading off to a car boot and from there to the garage to get his car fixed. However, when push came to shove we realised he wouldn’t have time to do the boot and the garage so he went to the garage and I eschewed the boot and went to the market instead. I also have some secret knitting that I wanted to do in his absence. More on that story … later.

McCat came running in and to my complete and utter horror, I realised he had something hanging out of his mouth. Something grey, with a tail.

Remember a few years ago when that McCat brought that vole in? I can’t find the original post but it ran under the fridge in the utility room and then to the units where it disappeared and I never saw it again. I always hoped it had found its way outside again but then the room began to smell and it wasn’t McCat’s earth box or McMini’s socks. Yes, it died and I did find a post I did later about discovering its lifeless body in the washing machine while I was on the phone to my mum, six months after its disappearance. If you need to jog your memory, it’s here.

So there’s McCat running about and there’s another chuffing vole with it’s tale and arse hanging out of his mouth one side and it’s head and front paws the other side. It’s squeaking,

‘You absolute cockwomble! Put me down immediately! Ow! That fucking smarts you smecking furry gobshite!’ etc. Actually I have no clue what it was saying but I think we could safely assume that it’d be something along those lines so that seems about right.

Come here you little bastard! I shout (because I’m classy like that) and rushed after him. I’m speaking to the cat at this pint, obvs. not the rodent in distress.

Luckily, I cornered McCat in the hall and because it was his vole and not mine and he was not dropping it at any cost. I was therefore able to pick him up and carry him to the door, deposit both of them on the mat outside, shut the door and lock the cat flap before he could bring it back in.

There was no rescuing the poor little critter now, so it was best to leave them to it so he killed it quickly. I grabbed my kit and ensuring that I didn’t let him in, I went to the market to do my shopping.

Upon my return, McCat was lying on his back on the door mat chirruping and burbling in his most loving manner. He showed me his tummy and it was clear that the dead vole on the mat beside him was a gift. Yes. This was an effort at reconciliation.

‘I know you are head of the house mummy,’ he was saying, ‘but I just couldn’t give up the vole. My natural instincts wouldn’t let me but you can have it now.’

Likewise, I cannot guarantee that was what he was saying but I know the mentalist tabby git so well now that I suspect that was a pretty good approximation.

Naturally, I thanked him for his gift, because it was only polite. Then I explained that it was a lovely thought, but if he didn’t mind, I’d just pick it up with this trowel here and pop it in the dustbin. I thought of burying it but he’d only dig it up again.

I went inside, put away my purchases and I was just bumbling about the house when I heard McCat scampering about. Uh-oh, that was the kind of scampering he does when he’s playing with Mr Squishy (his favourite toy) or when he’s playing with something else …

‘Squeak!’ said somebody, who was very definitely not McCat!

‘Fucking fuck!’ I yelled and leapt into action. McMini had a second vole cornered behind a box in a corner and of course I arrived, grabbed said box and the vole disappeared underneath the book case. But wait, not quite underneath. He was under the large books on the bottom shelf that stick out, leaving a tiny half inch gap between their bottoms and the floor.

I started removing the books but by this stage McCat had lost interest, the absolute bastard, or maybe he’d decided that I’d claimed the vole. Whatever the cause, he’d wandered off. The room we were in was full of places where a small vole could hide, die and then smell impressively. I was determined to ensure that when I poked it out from its hiding place, there were no other crannies for it to run to. In short, despite trying to rescue it from McCat I could have done with a tabby backstop and I’d definitely have preferred to let him kill it quickly it was that or a second round of let-me-die-under-your-furniture.

I surrounded the vole with a wall of heavy hardback books. Got a piece of cloth and grabbed it. I picked it up and took it outside. It looked as if it had had a nasty bump on the head but I left it to recover near the place where I thought McCat had caught it.

McCat locked in, I went out and had a look.

The vole was not well. It appeared unable to move its hands. It was clearly injured, it was squeaking and it was in distress. I rang the vet and explained that I had this rodent that was probably a vole only now … looking at it … I wasn’t 100% sure and could they help.

Clearly if my furry friend was, as I was beginning to suspect, a young rat, I wasn’t too bothered if McCat murdered its family. If it was a vole, I should probably take it somewhere for treatment and leave McCat locked in. McCat’s vet informed me that they had a pigeon and chicken specialist but nobody who was too good on small feral critters. They recommended I phone a different vet surgery, which I did.

I explained that I thought I might have an injured rat but that I didn’t know and though it seemed a bit nasty of me, I felt that, if it was a rat, I was OK about letting McCat out to murder the rest of its family, because there are millions of rats but that, if it was a vole, I’d keep him in. I also explained that I thought it might be dying, that the kind thing to do would be to kill it but that I wasn’t a farm kid and I doubted I could dispatch it cleanly without subjecting it to more physical and emotional trauma. Our cat used to catch mice when I was a kid and Dad used to have to kill the ones she hadn’t quite killed. He was really good at delivering a swift blow to the head but it always used to upset him … not to mention us.

Bring it in, the vet told me and they would take a look at it.

Going back to the ‘vole’ which very much might not be a vole, I decided I’d wear gloves to handle it. Good thing that, because it was a great deal livelier than it had been when I put it out and it bit me as I tried to catch it. Although the bites didn’t break the skin they did pierce the gloves. McOther was home by this time and helped me put it in a cardboard box. I walked up to the vet’s with it and they took it in to have a look.

Turns out I was right to doubt and it wasn’t a vole after all. Just call me Manuel but it was a bona fide Siberian hamster although it escaped the ratatouille so that’s nice. I do know we have rats in our garden, but … yeh. Probably a good thing if the cat eats them then. The rat did, indeed, have some kind of head injury which was making him unable to move properly and they put him to sleep so he didn’t suffer any more.

And the vole last time? Er hem. Yeh. That was a rat and all. Even with a light bite, the vet warned me about Weil’s disease and said that if I start to develop cold symptoms I must go to the doctor’s and explain what’s happened. Me, I’m just wondering what my half-rat-half-human superpower might be.

Other things

It looks alright on the claret one (right).

What I should have been doing this morning was working on my latest and top secret knitting project while McOther was out, which is his fabulous birthday present. OK, this is me, so you know, by now, that it’s not a fabulous present especially if it involves my knitting prowess, which is more knitting prowless to be honest. On the upside, it is something he’ll use and ~~enjoy~~ … he’ll use and at least there’s thought in it. It’s a wine sock. Yeh. Don’t all fall over with excitement.

People who like wine do blind tastings, which basically means you put the bottle in a sock, except socks are a bit shit because they make the bottom of the bottle uneven and more likely to fall over. Enter the um … wine sleeve? Wine sleeves leave the bottom of the bottle clear so it will stand up, no matter how drunk you are when you place it on the table.

I’ve made the bit for the neck of the bottle too short. The bit of metal over the cork can give tasters in the know a bit clue, so I need to unpick five rows of ribbing, add six rows of plain knitting and then do the ribbing bits again. It looks shit flaccid but when you put it on the bottle … yeh, OK, it still looks a bit shit until you get to a claret bottle … then … Oh yeh. Ish.

Oh alright. It’s a disaster really. I decided to use some wool I had left over from making a pair of socks for McMini and a pair for me. But there wasn’t quite enough to get it to the shoulders of the bottle. I didn’t want to buy another ball of wool to do three stripes of fancy knitting so I bastardised another ball of similar wool and to be honest, it almost looks deliberate. I will have to knit him another less bodged one as well, clearly, but this is a nice start.

Other news …

It’s a long time since I’ve mentioned McMini here. But rest assured he is no less eccentric. He is older, and even more sarcastic, but still a delight (to his parents anyway). He did once tell me that he wanted to do the teen thing and rebel against us but he liked us too much. I’m not sure that’s anything we did, it’s just luck of the draw. Luckily there are some people at his school that he prefers to rebel against more.

Anyway, last week we were we’ve been watching the tennis as a family and supporting one player, the underdog, naturally, because we’re British. The audience on the telly were mostly supporting the other more famous player. Between each point there were shouts from the audience,

‘Come on Oojah!’ or ‘You’ve got this Thingy!’ etc.

Then as it all died away after the ‘quiet please’ one bloke right up in the gods at the back shouted something that sounded like, ‘bollocks!’ into the silence.

‘That sounded like, “bollocks!”’ said McMini. ‘Did he just shout, “bollocks!”?’

Next point, same male voice did it again and again, McMini said,

‘I’m sure he said, “Bollocks!”.’

McOther and I admitted, giggling, that it did sound like it and he might be right.

Next up to serve was the player we were not supporting. She threw the ball up and as she swung to hit it, McMini shouted, ‘Bollocks!’ and she served a fault.

She served again and in spite of McMin’s rousing cry of, ‘Bollocks!’ it was in. The lady we were supporting returned it and as the other swung her racket to hit the ball back, I shouted, ‘Arse!’ and it went into the net.

‘Woah! She can hear us!’ shouted McMini.

It opened the floodgates. They played a tie-breaker with McMini and I continuing to shout bollocks, arse and for some reason, follicles. Our lady won. I made a cheer which reminded McMini of an impression I do of Dad doing an impression of one of his teachers dropping dead in the middle of assembly (he yelled ‘eeeeeruuuuuw!’ and keeled over apparently). So McMini adds the part of the story following that which is the boing, boing diddly boing this teacher’s wooden leg made after he’d measured his length.

Despite this coming out of nowhere, I knew exactly what McMini was referring to and started to guffaw at which point McOther who was actually watching the tennis turned to us briefly, smiled indulgently in an oh-here-they-go-again sort of manner and reverted his attention to the TV.

McMini and I sat there crying with laughter and all was right with the world.

It’s competition time …

OK. Have you ever seen extreme ironing? If you haven’t it’s worth looking it up because it’s mad. Here’s a potted summary.

Let’s do our own variant Blog peps! Extreme Reading. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Here’s how it works.

1. Get one of my books. It has to be an actual M T McGuire book. No other authors’ books are admissible. You can use a paperback or your e-thing with your e/audio book open and showing really obviously.

2. Go the area you have selected in which to read in an extreme manner, be it upside down, hanging from the ceiling. Tobogganing down the Cresta run, *sitting in the fountains at Trafalgar Square in your swimming cozzie or whatever.

3. Get photographed in your extreme reading position and then submit your photos to me. I think I will probably put them to the public vote.

* don’t do actual this though. You’ll get arrested.

How do I submit my photo MT? I hear you ask.

Well, I don’t to hear you ask but let’s not complicate this. Let’s pretend, for the sake of making this section that tiny bit more interesting, that I did. Here’s what you do.

Attach your photo photo to an email. You’ll need to give me your name and me some brief details saying where and when the photo was taken (date, place/town and country) and any witty commentary you wish to make about it. Then send it to me by email with the header, EXTREME READING TOURNAMENT, like that to list at hamgee.co.uk. You can send a maximum of two entries and it will cost you nothing to enter.

If you want to, you will be able to share the entries you submit on the Hamgee University Press Facebook page. I’ll make a specific post and pin it to the top so you can comment and add a photo but that’s not obligatory because I totally get that not everyone does Facebook. I wouldn’t do much social media if I didn’t have to.

Small Print: Nothing above 3mb please or Google won’t deliver them to me and a maximum of two entries per person. You may have to resize mobile/iThing photos to get them to me.

Obviously, it goes without saying that you shouldn’t do anything dangerous or stupid. This is an extreme reading tournament, it’s not the Darwin Awards or a game of who dares wins. Happy snapping.

And finally …

The Last Word is available in Audio.

If you enjoyed the short story, The Last Word, the audio of that is also available or at least, still available. If you need it, here’s a quick reminder of the blurb.

When Mrs Ormaloo brings the terrible news to the Turnadot Street Businesswomen’s Association that the Grongles are going to burn some more banned books on the night of Arnold, The Prophet’s birthday, Gladys and Ada decide to Take Steps. They even enrol some of the punters from their pub to help out. The books are in a warehouse being kept under guard. Gladys, Ada, Their Trev and the rest of the group embark on a plan of devilish cunning to rescue as many banned books from the flames as they can. But the key player in their plan is Humbert and there is no guarantee that he’ll cooperate.

Corporal Crundy is determined not to mess up his first assignment since his promotion. It should be easy. All he has to do is guard some books. Yeh. It should be a piece of cake but somehow that’s not the way it turns out.

To find it, go here.

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, full time mum writing, humour, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, M T McGuire audiobooks, McMini, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers, writer mom, writer mum, writer parent, writers, writing

7 Nov 2021 · 7:15 pm

Licensed to chill …

Better late than never this week, yes the blog goes out on a Sunday because MTM was phaffing about too long on Saturday. On the upside, the phaffing involved writing 2,000 new words on Hamgeean Misfit 5. Hoorah. On the downside, I wrote 202 words of it today, and this!

Yep. News this week, I decided, at the last minute (but then, how else do I do anything?) that I’d have a bash at NanoWriMo. If you don’t know what that is, it stands for November Novel Writing Month … actually it doesn’t does it?Well look, that’s what it is, anyway.

The idea behind it is that you write about 1,600 words every day throughout November and at the end you have, 50,000 words, which is a novel. Obviously, the chances of me writing anything on a Wednesday are slim so that’s five days down before we start. That means that if I want to write 50,000 words in November I have to do at least 2,000 a day. Hey, you know me. I like a challenge.

When you’re writing it all on one story it is quite a tall order. My brain takes ages to mull things over and so I usually write several things at once. I might yet do that with Nano and call the results ‘a book’, but at the same time, I want to finish this particular story and this seems as good a time as any. At the moment I suspect that it’s terribly slow and lacking in action but I’m thinking that once I get the bulk of it down I can fix that. Everything I’ve written is stuff I can use, although I did have to move chunks around a lot yesterday to make it work. I guess what I mean is, I’m not so worried about whether or not I’m writing these scenes in the right order (or even the write order, badoom tish! Oh ho ho).

Thus far, yeh, a week in, I’ve managed to write an average of 1,000 words a day because I managed 2,202 yesterday which means I’ve got Wednesday covered. OK that means I’m 600 words a day down. On the up side, this particular book has now reached 17,000 and something words. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen but I’m enjoying finding out. There are any number of bizarre plot strings which may or may not come together into something meaningful. One involves an actor with a colourful past as an all-in wrestler. I like the idea that Marcella the Pirate, who is a key character and a total cow right now, might reform somehow after a run-in with the Grongles and retire from her life of crime as part of some travelling wrestle-tainment show.

Or not.

This was not a good idea.

Other strings involve someone in The Pan’s party getting kidnapped and the plot, or at least, the next bit, revolving around his efforts to free the kidnapped person. It’s kind of a mystery and I like the idea of them solving things by blundering blindly deeper and deeper into the thick of it like the bunch of clueless fools they are. It remains to be seen if my intellect is capable of constructing a suitably mysterious mystery to solve. Probably not. It’s all rather jolly though because I’m just agog to see what happens at the moment.

Today, I also wanted to share some thoughts that have been drifting about in my head for some time now about writing generally, and my career, such as it is. The hurriedly written newsletter I sent out this week seems to have hit a chord as a fair few people replied. There’s a small group who reply regularly, anyway, but there were a couple of extras this time and one sent me a truly wonderful letter asking why I wasn’t famous, which was actually quite humbling, as well as touching. And then a similar discussion popped up with a member of the K’Barthan Jolly Japery group on Facebook who said I didn’t give myself credit over the books and then proceeded to say lovely things about them which had me walking on air for the rest of the day. Woot!

Funnily enough, I remember asking Gareth exactly the same question on Whatsapp while he was doing the K’Barthan Series. It was a question neither of us could easily answer. Why is one artist famous and another not?

Sometimes, it does appear that an artist’s skill at marketing or reading the zeitgeist surpasses their actual ability. But also, I think there are disciplines where the art of succeeding is about so much more than just the artist doing their thing. It’s really hard to talk about this sort of thing when you aren’t successful because you can come over as bitter, or sad or whatever. I feel none of that, surprisingly.

When I look at my books, I’m pretty sure they’re commercial, yet different. Hell, I’m even confident that, if you like that kind of thing, they are good. They just … don’t sell.

Strangely, I have come to realise over the last year that I am completely alright with that.

Perhaps it’s because I write my books for me. Sure, I want to share them with others but I like them. It turns out, they differ from the type of thing most people want to read, but they are the kind of thing I want to read and the kind of thing I like. I enjoy writing them, indeed, I kind of have to. It isn’t 100% voluntary, this writing gig. It’s a cross between a bad crack habit and a calling. I need to do it, I need to tell and share stories. It’s a compulsion and I think most people practising an arts ‘thing’ feel the same way about their creative weapon of choice. I’d say there are very few of us do it because we can, we do it because we have to.

So if we’re all telling stories, why do some people succeed and some people not? Well apart from the obvious things, I mean, in that some books are just terrible, or too out there, or badly presented, or the authors have a higher opinion of their own talent than perhaps they should.

Here’s my guess, or at least, this is what I said to the lovely person who emailed me, anyway. I think that ‘success’—or at least financial and fame-type success—in any arts career is about 73% hard work, 25% talent and 2% luck.

While talent and work can get you to the point where you can turn in the kind of stuff you are proud of and which may even get you earning, I suspect that the thing that gets you into the stratosphere, and household-namery, is that 2% of luck. You can probably succeed with less work and more talent, or perhaps if you put in more work, you can succeed with less talent but I suspect it’s the luck that takes you over the edge.

Luck is the right person encountering your stuff and then telling the right people. It’s Stephen Fry discovering one of your books and mentioning it on twitter, it’s David Gilmour hearing you and championing your work to the record company. I genuinely believe that all you can do, as the artist, is make sure you cover your arse; put in the other 98% of the equation, do the work, do it to the best of your ability, rinse and repeat in the hope that it will be enough, and then learn the other skills; do your best to make the luck.

Sometimes, I do feel that my books are the equivalent of Kate Bush’s music. Strange but good, only without the Gilmour. Other times, I think that I am probably being slightly deluded about my skills as a story teller to put myself on the same plane as someone like Kate Bush. And furthermore, that she would have succeeded without the Gilmour factor and that the ‘Dave’ effect was just the icing on a the cake that was already well and truly cooking.

The thing is, you just put your head down, make your shit and put it out there. Because the more of your shit there is floating in the ether, the greater the probability of Mr Gilmour—or equivalent— finding it. Or that huge review blogger—you know, the one with the thousands of followers who blindly buy everything she recommends—she’s more likely to find your books if there are sixty than if there are six.

It’s just maths innit?

That means, I guess, that one of the biggest parts of success is having a LOT of content available. Look at Julia Donaldson. The Gruffalo hit the big time quite recently with the film and all but it actually came out in the 1980s. I remember my friends reading it to their younger siblings when I was at school. Ditto Michael Morpurgo, who spent a lifetime producing scores of the most fabulous books but became major league when, some years after it was published, one of his books was made into a West End show. Behind those big successes are years and years of bum on chair, head down, create, rinse, repeat.

This is how it should look.

In my case, it does feel, slightly, that the amount of material people cite as essential to gain traction is always the number of books I have out, plus about 30%. When I had one book out it was three, when I had three out it was five, when I had five out it was ten, now I have ten out, it’s twelve. It is what it is; funny in a painful sort of way.

It might be, possibly, that availability everywhere also helps. I’m talking less about KU versus wide as large print, paperback, hardback, french, german, audio, ebook etc etc. If I ensure my content is out there in as many formats as possible it has to help a bit, right? And I have ensured that my whole publishing ecosystem is primed and ready so that, should the luck unicorn fart at the right place and time, and a cloud of richly-scented glittery sparkles float my way, I can maximise the exposure to that magic spangly guffage.

If a gargantuan back catalogue is the way to succeed, it’s unlikely to happen for me. My rate of output is way too slow to play the numbers game. But people do succeed without it. Perhaps I could be like that author who wrote a crime book, put it on Amazon so her family could buy it and woke up five weeks later to discover she’d sold 80,000 copies without doing anything. Oh no hang on, that was a) a crime book and the key word there is crime (or thriller or romance). And b) she was a solicitor writing in her spare time, as so many break out indie authors are—maybe there’s something in the mindset. And anyway, I’ve written ten books now and it still hasn’t happened so I suspect that boat has sailed.

As for making my own luck. Hmm … well. There are about 2,965 people on my mailing list. With every new release that number goes up by about 20. It seems that I cannot break through that 3k barrier until the next two books are out, at which point, presumably, my having hit the holy grail of twelve, the magic traction number will be fifteen.

Certainly, if it’s really true that I need about 10,000 engaged mailing list readers for any of my new releases to be even half visible in the stores—and I’m pretty sure it is—I will have to write an absolute craptonne of books.

Yeh. As, you can see I have a very long way to go. If I’m totally honest with myself, it’s probably further than I’m going to get in this life time.

Do I care about that?

Strangely, not the way I used to. When I started writing books, I thought my stuff was so mainstream and bleedin’ obvious that it would sell by the truckload. I thought a good product was enough and, sure, if I went back to 2010 knowing the things about book marketing that I know now, perhaps it would be.

At the time, I wanted to sell enough books to rescue McOther from his job because it was high stress and he was clearly not enjoying it the way he had at the beginning. Even in my most high-powered job—national responsibility, household name company—I didn’t earn what he paid in tax so between you and me, it was probably a rather ambitious target.

However, this last year, somehow, I seem to have let a lot of that stuff go. Perhaps it’s because McOther is retiring so he doesn’t need rescuing and there isn’t that same urgency. Perhaps it’s because he’s at home now and McMini was at home school for a fair part of the last two years and that’s been really lovely. Maybe it’s that life is easier now Dad’s gone. It was bad watching him suffer his illness but it was also very distressing to watch Mum endure it too. Now he is OK, and though she has dementia, Mum is OK at the moment, since she’s happy enough and ensuring that she is as happy as possible is all I can do. Maybe with less angst about other stuff it’s easier to let the writing angst go. Or maybe I’ve accepted that while success, on the world’s terms, is possible, it’s probably not going to happen, and that’s OK.

Perhaps there is just too much joy to be had in the texture of life to obsess over succeeding in one specific area. And perhaps that single-minded approach is what sets successful writers apart from people who are reasonably talented, but unsuccessful, like me. But I don’t want to miss Real Life and anyway, without it I can’t write. The daft games with the McOthers, McMini discovering the first faint signs of armpit hair and obsessively checking for extra growth and reporting his finds. His endless search for thrash metal records, his ludicrous out there view of the world. The pleasant, gentle rhythm of life casa McGuire or the holidays we have. All that stuff has to be experienced and lived. Not only is it important to me but without it, my mojo is as useless as a car without petrol. Life, living, experience has to go in for any writing to come out.

Anyway what is success if it isn’t happiness?

So will I keep writing. Of course. And without the pressure on myself to succeed, I find I enjoy it better and write more. Strange huh?

Will lots of people start reading my books? Will I earn a craptonne of cash from them? Will they become bestsellers? Will they be made into a film? Will The Pan of Hamgee become a household name? Well … it would be nice but if I’m honest … probably not. But you know what? Amazingly. That’s alright.

As long as I can carry on writing books, and as long as the handful of folks who do read and enjoy them keep on reading and enjoying them, I’m OK with that.

Talking about books …

Which reminds me, if you want to decide for yourself if my books are any good, feel free to read one. You can find a list of them, with links to buy them from the major stores, and mine, at the end of this smashing link here: