When I’m a Mum

Siblings are important. We fight with them. We say things we could never get away with saying to friends, not without irreversibly damaging the relationship. We’re embarrassed by our parents together.

There’s nine and a half years between my brother and I. I grew up not just as his sister, but his mum too. In a single parent family, it falls to older siblings to sometimes step out of their role. I took my brother to school. I cooked him meals that were nearly inedible. Helped him with his homework. Tucked him into bed after reading him a story. Bought him a PlayStation3 one year when my mum couldn’t afford his big present. But we were also still siblings. I’ve screamed at him. He’s called me horrible names. We’ve played tag between the apple trees in our garden. He’s offered me his last starburst in a small, sticky hand. We’ve whinged about our mum together. We’ve whispered in the dark on Christmas Eve.

You share moments, probably very similar moments to many other siblings. And then there are the experiences that are just yours

Our dad left us together. We’ve been homeless together. We’ve been there for our dog’s last breaths together. There are more. Some more painful than these examples. Some much happier. Some I’ve told everyone, others I’ve kept close to my chest.

I came across this story a little while ago. I can’t remember the assignment, only that I wrote it in first year of university. I’ve left it untouched, unedited from the moment I found it.

Siblings are important. They’re your best friend, enemy, confidant, bully, secret keeper, and family. And this story is roughly taken from a moment in my past. I attempted to step into the head of my brother. My brother who was always playing pretend, who spent so much times with females he couldn’t understand how he was different to us.

*

When I’m a Mum

 

I had Striker right where I wanted him. I felt the blades slide from between my knuckles slowly. Blood dripped from my open wounds and ran down my fingers. It hurt every time, and it always would. For the first time, as I watched the fear sink into Striker’s eyes, I didn’t care.

I grabbed his throat with my free hand and –

‘DANIEL, WHERE ARE THE SPOONS?’

The grin slipped from my face. Ever since the last X-Men film came out, I’ve wanted to be Wolverine so much. I even asked Mum if I could change my name to Logan, but she said eight years old is too young to change your name. I’ll have to do it when I’m older then. The other problem is Mum and Dad won’t let me use knives for my weapons, so I have to stick spoons between my fingers.

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Daniel,’ she said when she saw me.

Mum took my weapons back into the kitchen and I flopped onto the floor with a sigh. There was no point in trying to continue now.

When Dad came home from work I was lining up my cars on the carpet. One of my lorries kept rolling backwards down the slope of the rug, which curled up at the edges. I gave up trying to weigh it down and made the lorry crash into it.

Metal and tyres shrieked and the driver covered his face as the windscreen shattered. He screamed out for help as the world danced in a blur around him. I spun the lorry in the air and fell with it onto my back as it returned to earth and exploded.

‘Daniel,’ Dad said sharply. He was on the phone and he pointed at it dramatically, as if I was stupid and wouldn’t understand.

I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I hit the lorry away and it rolled out of the door that Dad had left open. I could hear Mum in the kitchen making dinner. I hoped we weren’t having salad again tonight. Grandma had been staying with us all last week and she loved salad.

‘You know this is a girl’s toy,’ Dad said from behind me.

I rolled onto my back so I could see him. One of my toys had replaced his phone. It was the pink one with butterfly stickers on the sides that were peeling off in places.

‘This was Sophie’s,’ he said when I didn’t reply.

‘But Action Man fits in it,’ I said with a shrug.

‘I didn’t think Action Man would like a car like this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a girl’s toy.’

I sat up. ‘Why?’

‘It’s for Barbies.’

‘But I don’t want a Barbie.’ I scoffed. William Glover in school played with Barbies. His big brother had told everyone and William got picked on by the older kids.

‘I know that. But this,’ Dad shook the car,’ is a Barbie car.’

‘So?’ I liked cars. My favourite show on TV was Top Gear. I liked it when they wrecked the cars the best, like that time they’d dropped a Mini from the sky and it had smashed.

Dad looked confused. After a moment he bent down and picked up one of my Hot Wheels cars.

‘This, Daniel, is a boy’s toy. It’s made for little boys. See its darker colours and the fire around the wheels and how small it is, so dolls can’t fit in it. Not like this, this is for Barbies.’

‘But I like both of them.’

‘Dad, leave him alone.’ Sophie, my big sister, sat beside me and gave me a perfume scented hug. Like Mum, Sophie always smelled nice. She was hugging me, but laughing at Dad, as he put the cars back on the floor, side by side.

‘I was just saying.’ He raised his hands in defeat.

I leaned out and rolled the car towards me. ‘So, shouldn’t I play with this then?’ I asked, looking from Dad to Sophie.

‘I don’t think that’s what Dad’s saying.’ Sophie ruffled my hair.

‘What are we talking about?’ Mum appeared in the doorway, a towel slung over her shoulder.

‘Dad has issues with my old Barbie car.’

‘Oh.’ Mum’s mouth quivered, like it did when she was trying not to laugh.

‘I was only pointing out that they’re for girls. And you’re certainly not a girl, are you, son?’

‘Stop being ridiculous,’ Mum laughed. ‘It’s perfectly natural. When you’re at work, who do you think Daniel spends his time with?’

‘Barbie and Ken?’ Dad asked and Mum threw her towel at him.

‘Ignore him,’ Sophie said. ‘You play with whatever you want to, Danny.’ She stuck my Action Man in the car.

‘He doesn’t drive,’ I rolled my eyes. ‘He’s Underwater Action Man.’

‘I have some Barbies in my room, I think. If Action Man wants I could –’

‘Something smells good,’ Dad interrupted Sophie. When he passed he picked me up and carried me in over his shoulder so I was hanging upside down. I wrapped my arms around his waist and squealed until he put me down.

At the table we each had our own place, except when Grandma visited. Grandma was Scottish and she didn’t really like travelling down to Oxford; she said she didn’t like English people. Even though I was born here, she said I’m not really English. Whatever that means.

I think Grandma’s a little weird most of the time. She smells like bleach and she always attacks mine and Sophie’s faces with baby wipes. Mum said she did it to her when she was younger, too, but she used to spit on a tissue instead of using a wipe. I didn’t complain as much after she told me that.

‘Bleh, carrots.’ I wrinkled my nose at the plate of food Mum put down in front of me.

‘I’ve not given you many.’

‘Vegetables are disgusting. I don’t see why I have to have any.’

‘Carrots help you see in the dark,’ Mum said without paying attention to me. If she had, she probably would have told me off for flicking one of my carrots so hard it rolled onto the floor. Only Sophie saw and she wouldn’t tell, she just laughed.

‘I don’t want to see in the dark. I want a skeleton made out of metal, and knives that come out of my knuckles. That would be cool.’ I stabbed a slice of carrot with my fork. ‘Can I leave some?’

‘Daniel, just eat them, please.’ Mum said simply, in that tone of voice she uses when I’m annoying her.

I made a face at Sophie, but Mum caught it, and I quickly picked up my knife to cut my chicken. Mum and Dad started talking about something boring that someone really boring had said on the News. I shivered and choked when I bit into a carrot by accident.

‘Stop being dramatic,’ Mum sighed.

‘If you leave them all to the end you’ll make it worse for yourself,’ Dad pointed out.

‘They’re disgusting,’ I grumbled.

‘You’re still eating them and if you don’t stop complaining, I’ll give you more.’ Mum pointed to the pot behind her.

‘You’re mean.’

‘Or maybe I’ll replace the one you dropped on the floor earlier with a big one.’

I gaped at her. ‘You saw that?’

‘I’m a mum, Daniel, I see everything.’

I shared a look with Sophie. Sometimes I believed Mum really could read my mind, or was some kind of superhero. Last week, when I was playing pirates in the living room she found the ornament I’d smashed and hidden behind the curtain. I’d stayed quiet in my room and everything, but she’d still found out and knew it was me right away.

‘And being a mum also means you have to make your children eat their fruit and veg so they’re healthy.’

‘You know what?’ I asked.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Mum and Dad said in unison.

I swallowed. ‘You know what?’

‘What?’ Mum asked.

‘When I’m a Mum I won’t make my kids eat carrots.’

Dad dropped his fork onto his plate and groaned into his hands. ‘I really don’t believe this.’

Mum and Sophie laughed and tried to say something to Dad, but he didn’t resurface from his hands, so they gave up. I didn’t understand what was so funny, but old people are weird. They always laugh at things that aren’t funny, like each other.

I filled my mouth with chips and glared at my plate. I bet Wolverine hated carrots, too.

 

 

The never ending edit

‘It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.’

– C. J. Cherryh

Is it actually a thing to be finished editing? This isn’t the first blog post I’ve ever written about editing and I’m sure it won’t be the last (joy of joys.) I remember reading something (about 90% sure it was a screenshot from tumblr) once on Facebook that went along the lines of:

‘What do you do when you’re finished it?’ – it being your writing, art etc

‘Stare at it until I hate it.’

But how do you know you’ve finished? With shorter pieces there’s a more obvious moment. There are less words to grow to hate, less space for your grammar to stumble awkwardly around. But with a novel, something that’s sitting closer to the 100,000 words mark than the 50,000 there’s this ocean of space. There are so many places for a wrong word or sneaky comma to hide. Finding them becomes a puzzle, one you’ve been working on for months – years – so long the story has become more familiar to you, than the faces of your frankly, quite alarmed family. I’ve lost count how many times my mum’s squinted at me and said, ‘You’re looking very pale.’ It’s because I don’t go outside. Because the glare of the sun makes my laptop screen go dark and sends my iPod into a overheated hissy fit.

But will all of this ever be worth it? Will I ever truly finish something? Or is reaching the finishing line just a myth for creative people? Do published authors feel like their printed babies are finished? Or is it more a case of agents prising manuscripts from their writers’ reluctant hands?

Asking for a friend. Because I’m currently not hunched over my laptop in a dimly lit room wondering…

 

Crippling panic, my old friend

I’ve never been much of a New Year Resolution-er. (If you’re going to make changes in your life, why does the starting point have to be relegated to one moment in the year?) I suppose, I’m also not much of an active ‘changer’ either — I do about as much self-reflection as most people, I’d guess. But I have a tendency to make half-hearted plans to change that I am fully aware are half-hearted when I think them.

Last year it really struck me how long I’ve been out of education. I miss it. I miss the structure, even my procrastination was structured in that it existed around pockets of time where panic would set in and I realised, ‘You really need to actually do something or you’re going to fail.’ I wrote stories when I was meant to be writing essays or studying for exams. And then in my Masters, when my main procrastination story during undergrad became my dissertation, I wrote other stories. Now, my life is filled with Netflix and irritation when the crumbs from the food I’m eating in bed dig into the backs of my legs – It’s always baffled me how jaggy crumbs can be. They’re tiny, but they’re like very very small knives when they’re in your bed.

I realised, there isn’t enough panic in my life. Panic seems to be my motivation for change, not this (much healthier) collective conclusion people seem to come to on the 31st of December. At the same time it hit me how long I’ve been out of education, I started to worry what direction my life is taking. Like most mid- to late-twenty-year-olds, I can nowhere near afford to move out, the idea of being in a long-term relationship scares the ever living be-jeezus out of me, and I’ve been working in the same place for over five years now, a place I started on an eight hour contract and never saw myself staying longer than a couple of years. As soon as this panic set in, I started to write again. I’ve even finished something enough to send it tentatively away to a publisher. My hopes are not high – especially as I had issues sending it. To sum up, they only accepted .doc format. My Mac exported my pages to .docx and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I emailed them and figured out what I was doing wrong like five minutes after emailing. Had to send them back a ‘So, sorry to have wasted your time, but I got it on my own… eventually’ email. I’ve probably sabotaged my MS before it was even considered. Idiot.

But hey, live and learn and all that. I suppose the point isn’t about potentially getting published right now. It’s that I’m actually sending things away again. It’s different, obviously, to sending something away to uni, where you know a lecturer will reply with helpful tips on how to improve, and give you a grade that 99% of the time makes you feel relieved because-uni-is-stressful-and-how-do-I-have-any-hair-left-but-yey-I-passed!?

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m watching an insane amount of TV. I think I’m juggling over ten shows right now. But I’ll take my small victories… I’m writing again. Thank you, panic, I’ve missed you.

 

The writer title

I started writing this blog post a few weeks ago, wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with it, and thus let it float aimlessly in ‘drafts’ for a while. This is, apparently, the story of my writing-life at the moment. Anyway, this post’s focus is on this question:

When someone asks you what you do, do you say you’re a writer?

 Chances are, if you’re a writer with writer friends you’ve asked or been asked this question at least once in your life. I’ve recently found myself thinking about this. It’s a question composed of a confusing tangle of yet more questions. For example, there is what I have affectionately started calling ‘the writer title’ debate, which in essence questions what a writer is – Is everyone who writes a writer, or just those who do it professionally? Is writing something you merely do, or is it who you are? And if it’s who you are, does that mean the art of writing defines you as a person?

Like I said, confusing tangle…

Right now I’m thinking about this question in relation to a specific area of my life. I’m graduating in December, and I’m not going back to uni this year which means for the first time in 6 years, I’m not a student. Suddenly, I have the time to write. I no longer have to use my stories as procrastination – they have served as the perfect distraction from essays, mind maps, reading, research, and tutorial preparation. Now I’m suddenly swimming in time and I’m not using it productively.

Most of the time, this is me:

I’ve always identified as being a writer, but if anyone ever asked me ‘So, what do you do?’ I would always answer: ‘I’m a student.’ Now I have to reevaluate, not only what I do with my time, but what I’m not doing with it. What was once used for procrastination is now being neglected, because I don’t have anything to avoid, except actually writing the stories I spend most of my day thinking about.

As for the writer title, everyone has their own beliefs, and I’m sure I’ve babbled on the subject myself at some point already in this blog (I have scrolled up and down multiple times and I can’t find it, even though I’m about 99.9% sure I already blogged about it. Maybe I just thought about it. Or dreamed it. It’s sad, but my dreams really are that boring.) I for one would never say ‘I’m a writer’ – I’m much more likely to say ‘I’ve just finished uni’ or ‘I work in H&M part-time’ – and not because I’m embarrassed about writing like I once was.

Once, saying something like that would make people – my family – laugh. Y’know, that age old response of ‘everyone can write’ or ‘that isn’t even a real job.’ After years of studying it, I’ve started feeling less uneasy about embracing the pretend people in my life, to accepting I’m one of those people who leans against the wall at parties and thinks ‘I could totally be in my room right now with my pjs on, a cup of tea beside me, writing.’

What I do know is, it’s okay to be mildly anti-social, to watch the social butterfly from afar and think of them as a foreign entity. But by the same token, it’s also okay to be a writer and not write, to take the time to find your footing again. My life has tumbled and rearranged itself into something I haven’t been yet, and that’s going to take a little time to get used to.

Yesterday: Oh, it’s 3am! Sleep? I think not. It’s a much better idea to create a new Disney Playlist.

It’s been a little while since I shared some new art, so I thought I’d pop this up. It’s a picture I drew recently for a friend of mine.Usually drawing doesn’t take me long, most without colour are finished within an hour or two. But I struggled a little – not with Ariel once I’d decided what to do, but when I was trying to figure out what to draw.

At first I was going to draw Rapunzel, but I tell you what, she’s one of the most difficult characters I’ve ever attempted. The end product was so terrible I didn’t even keep it around afterwards – it was quickly ripped into multiple pieces and is now floating in the ether. Or wherever recycling goes.

Disney is, and has always been, a big part of my life. For a while I’ve sort of chuckled about it and thought to myself: I’m 25, surely there’ll come a day when I’ll go to choose a DVD and I won’t seriously debate between Frozen and Robin Hood, before realising it’s my day off and I can totally watch both. Then, last night at 3am (it’s always night if you haven’t been to sleep yet, morning if you’re waking up) when all the good ideas come to you, that I realised instead: I’m 25 and I’m in the process of perfecting this playlist…

Chances are that certain maturity ship has sailed. Far, far away. I draw and watch Disney to chill out. I can hold my hand up and say I still watch Nickelodeon – Victorious is kinda amazing, if you haven’t seen it, you haven’t lived, my friend.

I would also like to point out, my attitude to Disney isn’t exactly the same – no, I still can’t watch the bit when Simba’s dad dies, but that’s a separate issue. For this point, one I shall end this post on, I’m going to leave you in the hands of tumblr:

Once upon a time, there was a Lovely Lady…

I haven’t uploaded a story in a long while, so I have turned this musing into a sort-of-story.

 

So, I was updating my CV today and when I reached the ‘Work’ section what can only be described as an accidental-opportunity-for-procrastination popped into my head. I call it accidental because I didn’t seek this thought out by staring blindly at the wall for fifteen minutes, or typing in ‘cat punches dog in the face’ instead of something remotely related to what I’m writing. Nope, my brain actually offered me this one.

A few years back, I remember reading about this woman (I forget her name) who worked in retail. She started a blog (I forget the name of it) and after making an insane amount of people happy about her observations of the general public, they made a book out of it, collecting together all her genius blog posts into one amusing read. Okay, I never actually read the blog, or the book, I just read an article about both, but it was the idea of the blog that popped into my head more than the actual details of the story.

This woman took her every day experience, one social media jokes about as being mundane and tiresome, and turned it into something that made people laugh, cry with said laughter, and take notice.When I heard about it, I remember thinking ‘I wouldn’t have enough funny, inspiring moments to make one post, never mind a whole blog.’

I’ve worked part-time for years in a variety of places, from shops, to supermarkets, to fast food restaurants (I lasted one shift in that one.) In one of my first jobs a guy – let’s call him Douchebag – shouted at me, to the point where my chin wobbled and I knew I was going to burst into tears right there, right in that very moment. It is the one and only time a customer has made me cry. After that, I got a grip of myself, and I toughened up. If people had asked me, I’d say in what I thought was in all honesty, that it took me years to like the general public again. But that isn’t true.

There are countless blog posts out there about how horrible retail is, how difficult, how mean the public are – and it’s true, people are just plain mean a lot of the time, but they’re not mean all the time. In this same job – a supermarket – where I’d had the unpleasant experience of meeting Douchebag, I also met a woman – let’s call her Lovely Lady. Now, Lovely Lady came into my work every Saturday and because I worked every Saturday at the same time, I always saw her. She’d come in, tell me about her husband’s apathy, her daughter’s marital woes, and her health worries. As an 18 year old, I didn’t have much experience in any of these areas to actually contribute, but then I don’t think she needed me to say anything. She just wanted me to stand with her for a few minutes, and give her a fresh, slightly bigger than usual sample of whatever we were trying to promote that day.

One Saturday I was working by myself, and a customer – Rushed Woman – popped away from my counter while I was preparing her order to grab a few items from the vegetable bit. At this moment, Irritable Woman strode up, and I quickly, but politely informed her that I would be right with her, that I was in the process of serving someone else, but I wouldn’t be long. I was then shouted at for about three minutes.

Irritable Woman informed me I was completely disregarding the rules of the ‘queue system.’ – Yes, I’m British, but I was unaware we actually had rules for queuing – Anyway, my counter argument of ‘whether or not Rushed Woman is standing at the counter, she is still in front of everyone else, her presence at the counter has already been established for her to place her order, thus completely rendering this conversation a waste of time,’ was ignored.

At this very moment, Lovely Lady appeared, just as Irritable Woman told me she was going to put in a complaint about me. Now, this was when my confidence started to waver, just a little. Rushed Woman appeared, collected her order and scuttled away, completely unaware of what had just happened. Lovely Lady had watched Irritable Woman leave, a look of outrage on her face. ‘I can’t believe she said that,’ Lovely Lady gasped. ‘And oh my goodness she’s striding off with purpose, and – oh, she’s actually talking to a manager.’ She turned to me and held up her hand. ‘You wait here, I’ll sort this.’

I could not, of course, go anywhere anyway. A queue had already formed again. So, I went back to my work. A considerable amount of time passed, and I just assumed I’d be getting spoken to later when my supervisor was in. When a manager finally appeared, I thought, oh no, this is it. This is going to be the first time I’m going to be told off at work.

Without waiting for me to say anything he said, ‘I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes listening to a customer -‘ Oh no, is he really going to tell me off in front of all these people!? ‘talk my ear off about how incredibly amazing you are.’

Oh.

There was a look on his face that I can only describe as part-bewilderment, part-amusement. Lovely Lady had apparently explained the whole situation and, without waiting for him to agree with her that yes, I had been in the right, that, no, he wasn’t going to give me a formal warning or fire me, she continued to list every single positive point she could think to say about me.

What, I guess, I have said in a rather long-winded way, is that working in retail can be exactly what it says on the tin: tiresome, a bit soul destroying, mundane, exhausting, and it can make you hate people just a little bit. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, though, in a world of horrible people that will make a stranger cry, or complain about someone because they’re having a bad day, there are other people who balance it out. For the rest of my life, I’ll remember Lovely Lady. She might not remember me, or what she did that day, but that memory does and always will put a smile on my face. It will, without a doubt, always stand out as one of the best moments I’ve had working in retail.

I feel like this story needs to end in the right way so…

 

The End

Growing up

I realised I should probably make some amendments to the page, as this blog is no longer run for project purposes – so the About and How do I get involved pages have been tweaked. Nothing’s changed about the blog as such, but for some reason I think the fact it’s not longer for uni is why my post yesterday lacked some structure. What started out having a direction ended up being about more than one thing. In a way I crushed three different topics in together.

I made a note to keep thinking about Fairytale Corner as a project, something someone will be judging and possibly grade me on in the future… which then set in a little panic about the future. Everything about my life at the moment is about preparation – work for grading, stories for publication (hopefully, obviously), and myself for being a grown up (don’t hyperventilate now.) I thought about when the preparation is over, when I’m finally expected to get up at a normal time, learn how to pay bills, and stop eating cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because apparently that’s not okay.

And I started to twitch, so I abandoned my laptop and went to watch Game of Thrones instead. Of course.

Maybe that’s part of the reason I want to write professionally. Writing means never having to wear anything fancier than what’s socially acceptable to wear when out walking your dog; it’s spending the majority of your time with words and people you’ve made up in your own head; it’s starting your working day and ending it whenever you want, because you’re the boss. Essentially, it’s never really having to grow up. We spend our time having imaginary conversations with imaginary people. And, I’m with Peter Pan on this one.

‘Wonder tales’ and being awkwardly odd

Ignoring the ‘did he, didn’t he’ debate on whether Richard Dawkins said this or not, this is interesting. (What!? A blog about fairytales thinking an article about fairytales is interesting? How surprising, huh?) Bear with me, though. The linkage to this article is more to do with the defense of fairytale, than the theme of fairytale itself.

It feels like many articles I’ve read recently about fairytales are defensive. I blogged about something similar in February: ‘Readerly snobbery. It’s rather mean, isn’t it?’ As a writer and drawer (I say drawer because the alternative label ‘artist’ is not one I’d use to describe myself) I find, even as an adult, I’m defensive about these aspects of my life. As human beings we seem to have this belief that we have the right to an opinion on other people’s lives. We see it everyday, from the large things like sexuality, to the somewhat smaller things like what a person enjoys to read.

Growing up, I’ve always written stories and drawn pictures. I live in my own head. I’m not particularly vivacious, I’m awkward, I don’t really like crowds, and I spend the majority of my time with pretend people who are either shaped by words or pencil. To my extended family, this made me weird. The fact I chose to do my undergrad in Creative Writing was just plain odd. Anyone can write a story, why would you study that!? was said to me when I broke the happy news that I’d gotten into uni.

In some respects, I think we believe we’ve changed. With shows and books introducing awkward main characters, we think we’ve embraced the different. But is the stumbling, clumsy main character any different to the super-popular cheerleader of ten years ago? Both are beautiful, slim (possibly without even trying), heroic, and they always get the unattainable guy.

Ironically, as I wrote this list, I realised it fits mostly every one of the novel ideas I currently have scribbled into journals and scattered through Word documents. Does that completely undermine this entire blog post? 😀

EDIT: Upon reading through this post, it sort of feels like it wandered away at the end with no discernible conclusion. That was sort of on purpose, mainly because a conclusion may have come across very preachy. ‘Let’s stop being so judgmental. Take a leaf out of that girl from Mean Girl’s book… I too wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school. I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy…’ You get the idea.

I’d like to know what other people think, though. Do you feel like you have to defend yourself as a writer/artist/drawer/mime/whatever it is that happens to float your particular boat?

“Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.” – George R.R Martin

I’ve seen so much debate about this lately. Writers seem to have two completely opposing opinions about writing – what I mean is, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a writer who says they’re neutral about the act of writing. I wonder if this happens for others: do some artists hate painting but love having created a masterpiece? Do some musicians hate writing a song, but love playing the finished product?

For me, I love everything about writing. Sometimes, I can’t be bothered, other things take over in my life, or I’d rather just slouch in front of the TV and let someone else’s creativity do the work for me. But I don’t just love having written, I love actually doing it. I’ve been writing some stories and characters for so long I know when the time actually comes to say goodbye – when I can say ‘yup, I’m finally finished’ – I’ll be devastated. And that isn’t because I’ll miss reading about them, it’s because I’ll miss sitting with them, trying to figure out what’s going to happen to them next.

When I get a new idea for a story, I get so excited, so much so concentrating on other aspects of my life that are rather important become difficult. The reason for my excitement is pretty simple, yeah I love the fact I know I’ll not be bored for the next few months, I love the thought of creating another new world, a set of new people, but my initial spark of excitement is down to something much smaller than that – I love the beginning because it means I’m at the starting position again. I love names, so I spend a long time constructing a list of names to go with people. I fill empty Word documents with ideas, random scenes that pop into my head that have no structure or place yet in a larger story. But one day, I know they’ll all fit together. Even if some scenes don’t make it into the final product, none of them are a waste of time because they told me something I didn’t initially know about a character.

I love being a writer, and I love writing. I’m not sure I could do it if I didn’t feel anything except excited about it.