This morning I woke up, pretended to eat the imaginary ice cream (green flavour!) that Goblinboy pretended to feed me, got up and fetched Baby Wolfeater from his cot, gave them milk, and went back to bed to snuggle my husband. Dashi joined us, because the best place for a lurcher to be is cuddled on our duvet, and after a little while we were invaded by our small and not so small sons. Then I got up.
It's Sunday, so I abandoned my husband with the small boys, and Dashi and I went to
We might have done something insane. A suspect a lot of you might think so. We have made a mad, crazy, awesome, wonderful, expensive, fabulous, impulsive choice. Again.
Our little Goblin is currently 17 months old, gorgeous, blond, fluffy, blue-eyed, intent on digging in the dirt, playing with his brother Dashi, pointing excitedly at tractors, ‘helping’ water the garden, and getting to know the sheep and lambs at the farm.
So we thought we’d get him a sibling – a real human sibling (wh
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" - British PM, B. Disreali (popularised by Mark Twain, and often attributed to him, in a fabulous example of disinformation)
Today is "Brexit Day". For those of you not in the UK or Europe, this might not mean much. Nine months ago we held a referendum to leave the EU, we votes leave, by a significant but narrow margin. Lots of people are pissed off by this - I'm not one of them.
But whether we stay or go isn't what I want to talk about, what I w
For those of you who don't know, I teach secondary school Food Technology (which is somewhere between Food Science and the Home Economics some of the older generation may remember). For those of you in the USA, secondary school covers some of middle school and some of high school - ages ranges 11 to 16. In this interestingly exalted position, I get to hear some rather odd things. Over the last few years these have included:
16yo boy: "Don't cows lay eggs?"
13yo girl: "Chef... isn't bac
So, I’m going to share with you something I don't normally share much - though my characters share their sex lives with you often and graphically. Several of them are quite the exhibitionists!
But we're not here to talk about the boys, the men, and the demons, we're here for me. Now, people tell you all sorts of less-than-fun things when you get married, about how life in the bedroom slowly diminishes and all of that. But it's not true for us. Three years has already flown by, and everything
Sorry Delia Smith, but One is not Fun. Cooking for one is, after lack of sex, company, and bedtime snuggles, the worst thing about Cris being away is cooking for fucking one.
I would rather not eat than cook for one. I would rather, and generally do, sit on the sofa and eat carrot sticks, chips, and dip, rather than cook for one. To be perfectly honest, I would rather starve than cook for one. I swear there is no more depressing task in the universe.
I don't know how you all do it. I ass
So, my husband has gone away again. Work need him to be in Canada for four whole weeks. He left this morning. Neither of us even pretended to be anything other than devastated. We don't do well apart, over ten years of seeing each other everyday, living together, buying a house and raising our boy together will do that to a couple.
Four long weeks.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more grateful than anyone outside my head could know for the life I have, for the love we share, for the job which of
Today I want to talk about something which mostly everyone thinks doesn't affect me, and much of the time, I am lucky, and I pass by writer's block like a freight train running on a different track while I sit in comfort and tap away on something which more resembles the shinkansen. But to say I have never felt that dread of not starting right, or not finishing, would be a terrible lie.
I'm good at lying, but I don't want to lie to you.
Let's talk about The Last Page, Final Chapters, The
I shoot, I gut, I butcher. I raise animals and I'm OK with killing them. So it should come as no surprise that I like Hunting. And when I say Hunting with a capital H, and because I am, at least technically English, I mean Fox Hunting.
Fox Hunting is not a sport, but an integral part of the culture of the countryside where I'm from. Contrary to popular belief not everyone who rides in a hunt or supports it is rich, or a landowner, or votes Conservative. There are a lot of people poorer than
So let's dive right in and make people angry: I fucking hate most gay fiction book covers and story promo images used online. I detest them. They're shit. I see some ridiculous things, some terrible things, and some things which are generally pathetic. I have beef with people simply taking images from google and shoving them together in paint or Photoshop with no hint of care or artistry. I have issues with shit fonts which look like they were worked in wordart circa 2000. But mostly:
Bolloc
So I made a topic on this over in The Lounge, and asked people about their six Desert Island Books, the ones they couldn't live without. I wanted to keep my reply here too, for posterity, and because my top books have changed over recent years as I have re-found books from my past I am reading to my son. Here they are, in the order I first discovered them.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit - Beatrix Potter Who couldn't love Peter and his gorgeous blue coat? I don't quite know the whole off my heart,
Husband comes home tomorrow. It's been a long time, and it seems like forever since I wrote to tell you all he was leaving. Home tomorrow, and it stills feels like forever away. I have to get through another long night with the bed cold and empty next to me until Dashi jumps up onto it and snugs so hard into my shoulder he practically pushes me out. Another morning walking with the Goblin strapped to my back, trying to convince the teething Goblin to eat breakfast. One more moment when I will ge
The husband leaves at 10am tomorrow morning. I have plans, I have friends coming to stay, I have my family and his family all telling me to come over whenever. I think they think it'll all be fine. I'll be busy, between the Goblin and the dog, we've a lot on. And I have work.
But I see the sunsets and the long nights ahead, and that's where being alone scares me a little bit. We haven't spent more than 5 nights alone in a decade, and he's going to be gone for three weeks. I'm not going prete
"I went to get paint, and I went to that big bookshop, y'know, Saga Books. And they had coffee and places to sit, and I thought what we really needed was to be more like them..."
Yes, I'm back. Yes, it's really me. Yes, I wrote something little, and I though I'd share. Ma thought it was a good idea, but that's not the only reason.
Hello, It's been a while, how are y'all? I missed you guys - you know who you are. So, I'm a parent now. Here are the facts you get, these and no others.
I've been gone for a pretty long time. Hi guys... remember me?
When I bowed out back in March, it was because we were getting prepped to move house. We bought a three bed semi-detached with a little garden and had to leave the big wild - we didn't go far, but houses in very rural Sussex are deeply expensive. We moved the day before my birthday, so I get to say I bought myself the most expensive birthday present ever!
So we bought a house, got some chickens, and in April I finally got the
So I've not been about. This is not my fault.
1) our internet got cut off 5 days before we moved
2) we moved house
3) school blocked GA from all school computers
4) despite having moved in on the 2nd May, our internet didn't get connected until TODAY!
Normal people are irrational and grumpy without the web, so can you imagine what my life has been like living with a first-class grade-a bona-fide geek-nerd and programmer without internet? He's been in hell. Oh goody.
The house is b
I should have known better. Really, I should of, but I didn't. I had faith that everything would be A-OK.
We found a house, we put reservation money on it, we could afford it, we got the mortgage, we chose our options, they built my house (and my kitchen) just the way I wanted it.
And then the fuck-up happened.
Here I am, sitting in a land of boxes, with two plates and one saucepan in my stripped out kitchen, and instead of surviving like this for another day, we have to manage for anot
In the lead up to what is already being called, in our household, The Big Move, I am focusing on editing and preparing manuscripts, rather than writing. This is because it is hard to write when you feel guilty for not packing your life into boxes, and secondly because whilst Cowboy Summer waits for covers and one last read-through, I have no finished the 17 tracks of the American Songbook.
Yes people, I said 17 tracks. There are two tracks "Sandbar" and "Marshallville" which will only be ava
So it is that we move into the final stages of editing a novella I wrote, and many of you enjoyed, in 2013. Cowboy summer has since been through the editorial wringer, combed over in fine and nagging details by the lovely Rustle, then nit-picked to within an inch of my life by Kitt. I have lost count of how many times it's been read through, how many times I've stared at the words trying to find errors and fix grammatical issues. Now it is with Vinnie, the man who did the final checks on the pub
We just finished watching The Theory of Everything, about the life of Professor Stephen Hawing and his wife. Afterwards I cried, and I couldn't explain it to Cris. Right then was another moment when I realized how really wonderful my husband was, because he just said he loved me, and didn't ask why a film about a physicist had left his big strong cowboy in tears.
And the reason is this. The film made me infinitely sad, because the love powerful enough to make one person love another even tho
People tell me I write beautiful things, wonderful things, adorable things. And I hope this is all true. But I also write awful things, painful things, terrible things. And these are true too.
There tends to be a lot of discussions about what makes good writing, and so often I find myself coming back to that immortal phrase "Write what you know." I might not have grown up in the hayfields of Texas, or ridden in the rodeo, or fallen desperately in love with a beautiful girl in the back of a t
First off, this entry took forever to write because of all the typos. If any make it through, do forgive me.
I write, it's what I do. And because I spend so long doing it, I am very aware of how I type, the motions I make, and the relationship I have with a keyboard. For a long time now it has shocked and appalled me that most people never think twice about their keyboard. They want a machine with all the fancy specs, but they don't care, or know, anything about the main interface they are g
Cris's grandparents are dying.
I haven't had grandparents since I was 13, and they weren't the type who were around, or who looked after us when we were kids or anything. I was so scared when I first met Cris's grandparents (back when he was still my boyfriend) because I knew how much he loved them, how involved they were in his life, and I was petrified I wouldn't measure up somehow. But it didn't happen, we had ceramics in common, and I got attached to them really quickly. We get on like a
Everyone, and I mean everyone, said that looking for a house would take forever. My sister in law told us to be prepared to look for a year, others said we would see dozens of properties, and good friends of ours said that we were more than likely to need to spent six months firming up our credit rating. This last was especially worrying, especially since we were told that without any loans or regular credit card actions, our credit rating would likely be lower (purely through being non-existent
You ever have one of those days where everything goes just as it should, but all the little things irritate you? Like the rough edge of a finger nail catching on things or a tiny stone in your shoe you just can't shake loose, something tiny hangs around in your brain and puts a damper on all the stuff that went right, all the things you did well, and everything that made you feel good about what went before.
So here are the broken down bits of my day:
The good thing, the thing must first
