Aug 10
3
A winner! And other random thoughts…
Thank you to everyone who entered my competition for UK readers – all nine of you! I was frightened I wouldn’t get any entries at all and I’d look like someone at a party earnestly suggesting a game of charades, so I was truly thrilled to see every single one of your lovely comments.
Alice from Warwickshire was the winner of the signed copy of Three Wishes. Congratulations Alice! I assigned everyone a number and used one of those random number generators to select the winner. It generated the number 2, which surprised me for some reason. I thought, “How random is that!”
Thank you again for entering. Really. OK, now it’s like I’m tearily hugging all the kind people who agreed to play charades with me.
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I have been writing a scene for my next book where a character is driving home from a restaurant and reflecting on two important events. Those two events were quite hard to write, and I’m not getting much time to write lately, so it felt like this trip home had been going on FOREVER. Every time I sat down at my computer I would think, Oh for heaven’s sake, she’s not STILL driving home is she? It’s a twenty minute drive! I mention this because today she finally pulled up in front of her house. I nearly wrote, ‘She heaved a sigh of relief’ before I remembered that was just me.
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I’ve got into a bad habit of looking myself up on Amazon every morning and then allowing the reviews to decide my mood for the day. A good review gives me a warm glow that lasts about half an hour. A bad review gives me a gloomy feeling that lasts about two weeks. It should be the other way around.
Once I was at a party talking to group of people I’d never met. We got on to the topic of reviews. A woman who was an opera singer said to me, “What’s the worst review you’ve ever got?” I said, “I don’t want to tell you!” Everyone looked disappointed with me. Then the opera singer shared her worst review (something along the lines of sounding like a shrieking cat) and everybody laughed fondly at her, because she was being self-deprecating and funny. I woke up in the middle of the night after that party filled with self-loathing because I hadn’t been self-deprecating and funny like the opera singer.
It’s possible that I don’t respond to criticism very well. Many years ago when I was working in marketing, my boss gave me a performance appraisal. He made lots of complimentary remarks and then he said – tentatively – “My only negative comment is that maybe you don’t respond to criticism very well.” I was outraged. “What? When exactly? Give me an example of that!” I cried. Eventually he gave up and withdrew the comment. It didn’t seem to occur to him to say, Um, THIS is an example of you not responding well to criticism.
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Whenever I’m typing I end up with a whole lot of left-over words at the end of the document. It’s like I’m littering words as I write. There are pages and pages of word rubbish. Here’s an example:
I falling asleep e if there’s Armageddon jack. I’m kee never got forward with a pain th took the two cups, and it all happened so smoothly and to rescue her. Jack took the drinsk. I saw Nathan walk towards her, and take one drink, while Jack carried standing there with . I saw Nathan stand up and pick up Ellen’s bag from ehr, lobent down helping herself to a plastic cup of waterf from a wa
Does that happen to everyone? Or am I just a really messy typist, just like I’m a really messy cook? I need to learn to clean up my words as I go, don’t I?
I will be reading it on holiday soon and it’s torture making myself wait until I get on the plane!
I literally laughed out loud, multiple times.
