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I'm back, getting my creative juices flowing and trying to earn discreetly online. A lot has been happening at home and it's been driving me up the wall. It hasn't been the most pleasant experience and it makes me sad that I've been on and off with all my projects mainly because I'm in hiding with my family. But, I refuse to just stop and give up. I keep holding onto these little bits of myself that I feel matter. In the society I'm in, creativity is a waste of time most of the time. It's rather half-assed. I'd like to believe in the potential of a creative and adaptive mind. I'm definitely brooding something personal. Fights and arguments with my folks just fuel this fire to just be better than all of them, and hopefully step on them when the time comes. I've lost most sympathies for them, which I didn't plan and yet can't help but feel. So I came back with a few story updates. I'd been revising the flow and pacing for some of them, so I hope they're to your liking. I posted updates to my long-running series A Frigid Grasp and His Happiness. So have a read and enjoy! I'm aiming for weekly updates so please follow the stories if you enjoy them.

Most of you don't remember me when I used to write and beta on a regular basis. However, since the majority of my friends and family don't know much about me - and I'm trying to figure out a delicate balance between keeping my mother happy by not blasting "my unacceptable lifestyle" (trust me, this is a separate issue way too complicated for one single blog post) and keeping my boyfriend happy - I wrote a section of this as a Facebook note, and promptly deleted before posting. Two years ago, what started to be a slow process to become serious with my then-ex-boyfriend who I really thought I'd live the rest of my life with decided it were best if we took a step back and allowed each other to date other people. He suggested it would be better so he wouldn't feel trapped. I contemplated that if the relationship needed another person into the mix, then we're not the right match to stay together for the long haul. Two years have gone by and I don't regret this decision. Instead, I reflect on the decision I made, which took two days to formulate, weigh out, and gather enough strength to end things. I don't think either of us were ready to just end things completely, but I didn't think it would have ended well either way. He had too much temptation from moving into a "gayer" neighborhood, and I guess from his raise in status from his startup being bought out, he felt he had to date upwards. I, on the other hand, was ready to settle down, see the world with him, and even started throwing out ideas about engagement (but not to him directly). The strangest thing happened during this time. I was an emotional mess, the one friend who I met online and we chatted in a coffee shop eventually became my boyfriend. My ex apparently thought SF was too bougie (yeah... I didn't understand that either) and moved to Chicago. Two years tomorrow will mark 2 years I broke up, and 2/20 will mark the day I added my current boyfriend on FB. It's so weird looking back at my facebook timeline and have "You became friends with... February 20th" with a picture of the two of us. So yeah, what the hell have I been doing? Well for one thing, work's been crazy. (yeah, yeah, we've all heard this before) I ended up getting promoted to a slightly higher managerial position that now requires me to be suddenly artzy as hell. I now do visual merchandising and I have no art degree! Trust me my color coordination is all over the place and people in the company hate how I can generate numbers for the company without being the artzy snotty stature the role requires me to be. I got a drunk text from my ex that said he wanted to apologize at how he ended things. I'm not sure if I got the closure I wanted, but I think it's safe to say that we're both strong people who take a lot of time to get over something once something's been decided.

“I gave you good script,” Ma to Alan Cocktail Sticks, a play by Alan Bennett The writer Alan Bennett has been very open about how much he is inspired by real-life events. He has written plays and film scripts all inspired by real-life events; he has written several volumes of autobiographical essays, and every year or so he publishes extracts from his diary. I’ve seen and read all of them and enjoyed them so much. In his autobiographical play Cocktail Sticks, about his relationship with his parents, the character of Ma (based on his mother) says, “I gave you good script,” meaning he has used so many of the actual things she said in his writing. I cannot class myself in the same writing league as Alan Bennett, but I take so much inspiration from real-life events. That inspiration seems to fall into three different types. The first is when I want to write about events or attitudes that have made me angry or upset. This is when I use fiction to explore how I feel about a subject or when I want to write about attitudes in order to expose the negative/destructive nature of them. My short story I Always Knew is an example of this. It was the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal and I heard an elderly journalist on the radio saying that he’d always known about Savile’s crimes. My anger led me to explore that attitude, those people who are always “wise” after a tragedy, in this story. Secondly, I can find inspiration in news headlines and real events. Sometimes it a headline and a short news item that inspires my imagination. I don’t do anymore research, instead I let my imagination dwell on those sparse descriptions or even single event and then I fill out the events and with characters I’ve created. Without researching the events any further I can make sure I am not using the people and their tragedy for my own fiction, that my story is a complete work of fiction. A Family Christmas is an example of me using this type of inspiration. There was a mass shooting in America, on Christmas Eve, the year before I wrote this story. I learnt no more about that tragedy but my imagination filled in the blanks and I created a story that explored a theme that leapt out at me from this tragedy. I don’t always search out stories of death and tragedy, all kinds of things in the media can set my imagination off running. I read an interview with the actor Russell Tovey where he said a throwaway comment, but that comment set my imagination off. The result was the story That One Big Role. I have also been researching historical events for a series of stories. These take a lot more research and less of my imagination filling in the blanks, though some of that is still needed. With these stories I want to examine a historical event from a fictional character’s point of view, find the human story inside the facts. These stories do take a lot of work, but I don’t want to stop writing them, the research is fascinating. The Trial of the Century is the first one in this style I wrote. Thirdly, I find inspiration from my own life. It can either be just one small factor that I then spin off into a whole story, or else it can form a larger part of a story, or else I fictionalise something that happened to me as a way to explore what and why that thing happened. Boxing Day 1975 is a short story of mine that was inspired by one event from my life. When I was a young child, on Boxing Day, together with my family I watched the big film on television that evening, One Million Years BC. That was the only part I took into the story, it is certainly not based on my own family but I do vividly remember how my family all sat down together to watch the same television film. I met my first boyfriend in 1987 but our relationship did not last. Our break-up was different, difficult and not that conventional. I used that break-up scene, almost word-for-word from real life, as the opening scene of my story Out of the Valley. I used this story to explore obsessive love and not being able to let go of an ex-lover, none of which was my reaction to the end of that relationship, though this story did go through many rewrites over the years with the wish-fulfilment ending being quickly dropped. Then there are those real-life encounters that play on my mind and imagination and form the bases of some of my stories. Jonathan Roven Is Lost (a story in my collection Case Studies in Modern Life) is a story that started off in that way. Through my job, I saw the effect dementia has on the partners of those people with it. My blog here gives a much fuller picture of how that story was created. For me, there isn’t just one way that I find inspiration, but I guess that is the same for so for many writers, but using inspiration and facts from real life is very important to me, I want my stories to have that taste of authenticity. I don’t use overheard dialog in my writing, like many writers do, because the few times I’ve heard anything decent I’ve forgotten the actual words by the time I get home. But I do use real people in my writing or people’s attitudes and beliefs. I don’t use direct copies of people; I don’t feel comfortable if readers can easily identify the person who was the inspiration for a character. So often I combine different things from different people—the attitude from one person, the clothes style from another and the physical appearance from another. But what really fascinates me are people’s attitudes and beliefs and how they affect their lives and how people’s personalities react in different situations. For me, I find inspiration in so many different ways, so many different things can spark and inspire my imagination, but in the end it is my imagination that forms the story from whatever the inspiration is, though I always work to create authenticity in my fiction. I hope my stories bear that out. I do remember one of the classic things my mother said, though I have never found the right story to use it in. I was in my early teens and had just come home from school one afternoon and my mother was unpacking her shopping. “I won’t buy anymore lemonade, all you lot ever do is drink it,” my mother said. “What should we do with it, wash in it?” I said. “You know what I mean,” she told me. And I did. Happy reading Drew

I hated Sunday afternoons as a child. It was always the low point of the week, the afternoon when nothing really happened. It was those long hours between Sunday lunch and Sunday tea. My parents would go and garden, leaving me alone with the television. There were only three channels and none of them saved their best programs for Sunday afternoons. I watched a lot of old and often not very good films, black and white war films that were all about the glory of fighting, or equally black and white family dramas were everyone was so buttoned up and corseted that barely any emotion could escape. As a child I wasn’t a discerning viewer, I would watch anything to chase away the boredom, and those long Sunday afternoons I would watch anything the television had to offer. This afternoon Martin and I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon at home, watching television. We have the advantage of streaming TV; we can choose whatever program whenever we want to. There’s no searching through three channels and settling for the least annoying thing on offer. As we watched television, I wrote on my laptop. I find nostalgia fascinating but also a little worrying. The romancing of the past until it almost seems like a paradise. My father and his brothers used to do it. They would look back on the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, especially the Second World War, as an almost perfect time. Even as a child, in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, this seemed strange to me, society had moved forward so much, why was the past so wonderful? I don’t want to return to the world of my childhood, technology has made my life so much better, and I don’t see my childhood as some sort of paradise, yet some people are now romancing that time too.

I’ve had problems with the bailiffs, or one particular bailiff company. It’s not what you think, I didn’t owe anyone any money but someone else, who I have never heard of, has been giving out our address as his own, someone who has never lived at our address. For ages I’ve returning letters for him as “Not known at this address.” The three weeks ago we received a hand delivered letter for him, with no return address on it and the envelope was open. Inside was a letter from a firm of bailiffs, saying that over six thousand pounds was owed in fines and court fees. If this sum wasn’t paid within ten days then bailiffs would come to our address and seize property to the value of the amount owed. I was shocked and angry. I rang the bailiff company, straight after reading that letter, but they weren’t helpful. Their attitude was that it was my fault and I had to sort it out, even though it was someone else who had lied. Citizens Advice were very helpful. They told me the documents that I had sent the bailiff company to prove it was only us who live here. They also told me that the bailiff company had to pause the “recovery” until it was all sorted out. They also advised me that I didn’t have to let any bailiffs into my home. I rang the bailiff company back and told them they had to pause the “recovery”. They said they would only do that for ten days, as it was company policy. All the people I spoke to, at that company, had poor interpersonal skills. Nine days later, I received an email from the bailiff company saying that they agreed that the man didn’t live at our address and the matter was closed. No apology or anything for the stress and worry they caused me. The bailiffs were trying to collect a court fine and fees, yet at no point did anyone try and confirm that this man lived at our address. Why didn’t anyone just check that what he said was true? At least I know what to do if it happens again, thanks to Citizens Advice.

On the grass, in front of our house, the crows and seagulls have fallen back into their usual cold war, after all staring at the lorry that came to emptying our rubbish bins. They stand around, glaring at each other, or attacking leftover fast-food wrappers, which the crows always seem better at. Every couple of days the cold war breaks down and they’ll start fighting over something or other, leaving behind the occasional feather on the grass. Before lockdown, the grass was dominated by pigeons, who wondered around in their lost way, with the occasional crow interrupting them. But something changed during lockdown and a flock of crows moved in, driving the pigeons away. Towards the end of lockdown, the crows were joined by the seagulls and the cold war began. The crows are now sitting up on the roofs, of our terrace of houses, glaring down at the street like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, as the seagulls just stand around on the grass. They are back into their cold war.

Last Friday we had a day out. We went to the London Transport Museum Depot, out at Acton (West London), for one of its open days. It was an amazing experience. It is housed in an old London Transport depot and is full of all kinds of old equipment, trains and memorabilia from the London Underground. I have always been fascinated by the London Underground, ever since I moved to London. Taking a train across a city, that travelled only underground, was so new and different. Since then, I have found that the history of the London Underground also ties in with so much of our social history. Then something uncomfortable happened. We were looking at a restored old tube train and a guide was telling us all about it. I realised that I used to travel in that type of tube train when I moved to London. Then I saw they had, preserved, the ticket machines from the same time, the ones I had used almost daily back then. Looking around the museum, I saw serval other exhibits I remembered from when they were in use. I remember things in everyday usage, from when I was an adult, that are now exhibits in a museum. I am old enough to remember museum exhibits when they were in everyday use. When I was a child, exhibits in museums were strange and very old things, things from a different world, an old world that was securely in the past. Now I can go to a museum and find something there that I can remember when it was in everyday usage. Life can be so complicated.