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| Courtesy of rubiblogger.blogspot.com |
A belated Happy New Year to anyone reading this! My
resolution this year is one of my best ever and comprises only 3 words:
Have
More Fun!
Last year was full of hard work, determination and effort as I dealt
with:
1) My job being busy,
2) A new steely resolve to get my novel published
3) My husband’s depression and
4) Economising to cope with new financial constraints.
It was all work and
no play, and Sophie became a dull girl. This year is going to be different,
with having fun a day-to-day priority. Because it’s me, the fun has to be
diligently researched and sought out, with plenty of soul-searching to ascertain
whether or not fun is being had at any given moment...
I began the year by booking tickets for a comedy cafe in a
couple of weeks, and theatre tickets to see Warhorse in April (OK so that may
involve tears rather than hilarity, but I do enjoy a good cry). We have
rediscovered games we used to play but have stopped since our children grew up,
and best of all, our dining room table now doubles as a table tennis table,
with frequent games being played. Even the cat joins in when she can be
bothered. I have made a point of having a chat and a laugh with colleagues over
lunch whenever possible instead of slinking back to my desk, and have
instigated trips out for coffee with people I love talking to but haven’t been
making the time to see. On Friday Jon and I went to see a band a friend is in,
and chatted and danced until late. Always diligent with my exercise, I have
bought a dance exercise DVD to mix things up and add a bit of fun to that side
of life (running in freezing, horizontal rain sometimes falls short of the ‘funometer’
minimum mark). I had a go yesterday and although I was hilariously unable to keep up with some of the quick-changing moves (I swear this is a brain reaction time issue rather than fitness!), it was - well, fun! It isn’t necessarily the
activities chosen that matter, and not every outing is a success, but making
fun a daily priority has changed my outlook for the better.
In the meantime, writing has been happening. I finished a
short story over Christmas about an attractive, successful but insecure woman
who meets a homeless girl. Both pregnant, they end up side by side in the maternity
ward, but the homeless girl has a dream birth and a beautiful baby, whereas
everything goes wrong for the heroine and her baby is not what she expected at
all. I have sent it out to some magazines and competitions, so we’ll see. I am
now reworking the beginning of my novel, Unspeakable
Things, ready to send it out to more competitions and agents.
I have also been reading Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl and then Dark Places. Both are incredibly compelling, with twists, turns and
outcomes you just don’t see coming. This is clever thriller writing, playing
with the reader’s tendency to try to second-guess the next step all along the
way. Although we have to suspend our disbelief at times, particularly as the
plot advances towards a conclusion in both stories, we forgive this as readers
because the wondering, guessing and stunning revelations are so compelling and
so enjoyable.
Flynn’s women characters are fascinating too, and I was
interested to see her quoted in a Mslexia
article by Celia Brayfield, Dark Matters,
about expectations of women writers and the trend towards ‘sugar and spice’.
Flynn wrote: ‘... the one thing that really frustrates me is that idea that
women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be
dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there’s still a big
pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and
selfish.’
Celia Brayfield notes: ‘In modern popular fiction for women
the all-things-nice injunction seems to be taken literally in many cases.
Chocolate shops, cup-cake bakeries and shopping – preferably for shoes or in a
vintage department store – are in vogue... They’re given covers decorated with
bows and polka-dots in colours otherwise found on My Little Pony toys...’
As a writer fascinated by the dark side of life, I have
often noticed people’s surprise when I tell them what I write about, but then I
was never the sugar and spice type, even as a little girl, and felt for a long
time that boys had more fun. I was relieved to discover, growing up, that life
was a lot more complex and full of possibilities than the ‘What are little girls made of?’ poem
allowed.
Do discover Mslexia for
yourself if you are interested in women’s writing – it is a gold mine of information,
encouragement and inspiration.
