Contrariwise

This past week I’ve just been surviving: spending most days at work and every evening at the theatre. I’ve reached the stage where I just trudge to and fro, not really thinking about anything except when I can justify eating another doughnut, or why the traffic lights have stopped working at the busy road junction near my place of employment.

Quite unexpectedly ‘ve found myself not just longing for the week to be over so that I can get back to the pattern of activities that passes for normality in my life, but longing to have time to write. This is because I’m a contrary person and if I do actually have time to write I’m always finding alternative things to do. It takes a week of hyper-activity in all other areas of my life to inspire me like this. I did manage to snatch a few moments to update my writing plan for the year. This is not, as the word ‘plan’ suggests, a fully automated set of tasks and targets created in Microsoft Project, but a list written in quite a scruffy fashion in a notebook that’s now falling apart because I’ve been carrying it around everywhere with me. This morning I’ve rashly ordered a new mobile phone, one of the newfangled variety that automatically updates Facebook for you, makes the tea and cleans the kitchen (I hope), so I may be able to use that to update my note-taking technique. However for someone who works with computers I am oddly resistant to the charms of mobile phones, so I don’t really expect to cast aside the scruffy notebook any time soon.

Even more contrarily, I’ve started thinking about my next quirky mystery novel before I’ve finished editing the current one. I may have to write it in July or August instead of waiting until November as I had planned. Watch this space for more information. I’ve definitely set aside April to work on my historical novel (most recent title ‘Song of Vanora’ – this may change several times before I’ve finished).

And finally, because my mind has been roaming freely while I’ve been engaged in all the above mundane tasks, I think I might update my blog theme this weekend. I apologise in advance if all the content disappears in transit!

The eye of the storm

I’ve just realised there has been something quite Churchillian about my blog post headings lately. Must try and tone it down a little: after all, my daily life is not actually a struggle between good and evil, although it seems like that occasionally.

This evening and tomorrow (Saturday) I am in the eye of the storm, when I have a short respite from both set painting and work, and choose for myself what to do, which may turn out to involve some sort of doughnut-fuelled writing frenzy or, more likely, a spell of lolling around in front of the television bemoaning the fact that there are never any good programmes on at the weekend.

The decorating of the set has been particularly fraught this time and it isn’t even quite finished yet, since the director of the show has now asked for a border to be painted on at picture rail height once we get to the theatre. Also I have lost some bits of wood that our resident joiner removed from a door, saying we would need them later for something or other. As my knowledge of joinery could be written on the back of a stamp and still leave room for the complete works of Shakespeare, I have no idea why we will need them later, but I’m sure I’ll get into terrible trouble if they don’t appear at the theatre.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is the last time I agree to being production manager!

In terms of procrastination, this is all good. I’ve also thought of another cunning plan to put off my final edits for ‘Death at the Happiness Club’: after this week at work I think I may want to retire soon, so I need to dig out my last pension statement and try to work out if it’s remotely possible.

I could also spend some time working on my speech for the local youth centre AGM, which is approaching even faster than I imagined it would. This was intended to be a stepping-down-with-regret kind of speech but sadly I doubt if it will turn out like that! Anyway, I owe a lot to the committee: I would probably have never written ‘Crime in the Community’ without all that experience of different people’s idiosyncracies and interactions. I just wish it didn’t all take up so much time!

End in sight

I don’t know why this should be the case, but I often find that everything I’m doing in my spare time has the same or a very similar deadline. This weekend, for instance, not content with panicking about the set for our next theatre show, which has to be finished by Tuesday to give it time to dry before being stacked up ready to move into the theatre the following Sunday, I am also becoming over-anxious about completing the edits for ‘Death at the Happiness Club’. This is despite the fact that the deadline for the latter is self-imposed, so I don’t actually have to choose to finish it by the 11th of March. It would make a lot more sense not even to try, but to leave it until things are generally quieter.

Actually, it isn’t quite true that I don’t know why this should be the case. I’m afraid it’s caused by a personality trait of mine which was identified recently by a consultant who came into my workplace to discuss my results on the Myers Briggs personality test. Apparently I can only finish things if I can see the deadline looming up in front of me like a gigantic wave ready to break. If I don’t have deadlines for things, they just never get done. This explains a lot, including the fact that I can’t bring myself to de-clutter the house, and the fact that there is paperwork from past unfinished projects piled high on my desk. When I was much younger I even had a whole cupboard in my bedroom where I kept unfinished stories. Now, of course, they just live in files on my hard disc or, to be more accurate, on the hard discs of long-dead computers.

March is going to be a busy month, and I don’t think there will be time to walk at Culross or eat in the Biscuit Cafe (even if the Forth Road Bridge holds together, which sounds a little bit problematic at the moment!). So I’m happy to report that I did both these things last weekend.

Inching closer

We didn’t get much time to bask in the glory of our ‘Sparkleshark’ triumph (see previous post) like basking, um, sharks, because it was immediately time to get on with the set for the next show. It is progressing quite slowly because the only people who seem to have time to paint the flats are the ones who aren’t strong enough to lift them on to the trestles for painting. I just hope we’ve allowed enough time to finish.

Yesterday I wasted time trying to find the right tea-set for my theatre group show, only to discover when I got it home not only that it consisted of cups and plates but no saucers, but also that I needed 6 cups and it only had 5 – something that was only evident when I read the play script in detail: it turns out that the 6th cup is a vital piece of evidence.

Another thing that’s inching gradually forward is the editing process for ‘Death at the Happiness Club’, the next novel in my quirky mystery series. This morning I decided I wouldn’t get any further with fine-tuning until I entered the next phase by ordering a printed copy from Lulu. Sometimes it’s only when I see the thing looking like an actual book that I can motivate myself to work through it in the kind of detail that’s needed. So I hastily reformatted the text, uploaded it, made a more or less random cover choice and ordered a copy. I find I have to be careful about doing this too soon, since it can encourage me to think the words are set in stone and it’s no use making drastic changes, but I’m hoping I have a bit of distance from it by now.

Later today I’m going to Culross for lunch so I will take my camera in the hope of finding something I can use for the cover picture. Not that Culross is actually Pitkirtly, except insofar as it is in a similar position on the Fife coast, but I always find myself inspired by going there anyway.

Celebrations!

It’s nice to be on a winning team once in a while so I really enjoyed seeing the director of our production of ‘Sparkleshark’ accept two awards last night at the one act play festival (see also previous post). It was particularly good for the props team to hear the set being praised and to know that our efforts in collecting sweetie wrappers, old newspapers and crisp packets had not been in vain! We also managed to get through to the next round of the competition so the whole thing will have to be done all over again at the end of March.

I suppose in some ways the whole idea of theatre productions competing against each other is rather silly, just as I always find literary prizes a bit pointless. It’s hard to accept that there can possibly be objective criteria for judging these things, since people’s tastes vary such a lot. There are technical issues, of course, but I don’t think winning the Booker prize really depends on a writer’s use of commas or whether there’s a typo on page 157. In both cases the main criterion is probably something fuzzy, such as whether the writer or director brought the whole thing to life. In the case of ‘Sparkleshark’ this was definitely a factor.

A Three Cat Night

I wasn’t sure why there were three cats on my bed until I got up this morning and saw the words ‘Met Office issues snow warning’ on the front page of the BBC news website. I quite often have two cats on the bed, one at my head and one at my feet, but when I woke up in the night I found the third one had sneaked in between my feet and the other cat. Sometimes when there are three of them, one will lie across my legs so that when I wake up I think for a moment I’ve become paralysed in the night, but on this occasion I had just been pushed over to the edge of the mattress.

It’s a lovely day so far with sunshine and blue skies. The wind is slightly chillier than I would like, but it’s a sort of bracing day when ideally I would be walking along a beach or the top of a cliff somewhere by the sea. Of course in real life I’m planning an exciting trip to the library and Sainsbury’s this morning, then to a technical rehearsal this afternoon and a performance of ‘Sparkleshark’ in the Scottish Community Drama Association competition this evening. Last weekend we had to practise setting up the stage in 10 minutes and clearing it in 5. As the props include all sort of odd bits of rubbish (literally) we thought it would be impossible to clear in 5 minutes, but in fact we did it in less than 2. My main contribution to the props this time was to persuade my work colleagues to eat a jar of wrapped sweets and leave the wrappers in the jar – something they turned out to be really good at!

Jacques

 

the weekend starts…

For once I am not going to complain about the weather here in Edinburgh, because there’s really nothing to say about it. We have missed out on the snow and ice this time round. The day is grey but just about warm enough for me to leave the conservatory door open for a while to let the cats go in and out. As I write this I have just looked up and noticed that one of them, Jacques, isn’t even outdoors but sitting at my son’s bedroom window, surveying the scene. A wall behind our house partly collapsed one day during the week and because Jacques is always very interested in what’s going on, he’s probably watching to see if any more of it falls down. In fact I have unworthy suspicions about the part he played in causing it to collapse! Especially as he’s been putting on weight just lately.

 The past few days have been exciting as we watch our short story collection moving up the ‘free chart’ on Amazon (see previous post).  It’s definitely more fun and less stressful doing this kind of thing as a collaborative venture. The highest position it has reached so far, I think, is no.22 but we’re hoping to get it into the top 20.

Later today I’ll be going out to the theatre, and tomorrow I have to go to my theatre group to make sure I’m conversant with the way the set and props are organised for ‘Sparkleshark’, our entry in the local one-act play competition which takes place next weekend at St Serf’s Church in Edinburgh. On the one hand it would be nice to do well, on the other hand we have to do it all over again in the next round if we win! ‘Sparkleshark’ is a lovely one-act play and very enjoyable for everyone.

We’re also currently working on an Agatha Christie show, and one of my tasks for the weekend is to recruit set painters. The usual argument  heated discussion has taken place about the choice of paint, but of course no-one is ever quite sure what it will look like until it’s built in the theatre, by which time it’s too late to do anything very much about it.

Back to the fifties

At some point I usually regret writing a novel set in the past – witness my historical novel; written in 2008 for NaNoWriMo, it has had at least three changes of title, varying amounts of Arthurian legend added and subtracted in the form of prologues, extra scenes, expanded scenes where Merlin is represented by a large dog that looks like a wolf… One day it could escape into the wild, so beware.

Somewhere in the middle of writing my short story ‘A Romantic Quest’, now available as part of the ‘Hearts and Arrows’ anthology just published on Amazon (go to http://tinyurl.com/7qslegs and have a look – it’s worth it just to admire the cover), I wondered if I had made a huge mistake in writing about the 1950s. Although I must admit to having experienced the 1950s at first hand, I found there were lots of everyday things I didn’t know about that period. When did most lifts/elevators stop having these heavy iron gates you had to pull across by hand? What sort of art was exhibited? And (perhaps most important of all) when did ice-cream come back into circulation after being banned in wartime Britain?

Note: the Hearts and Arrows anthology contains a variety of romantic stories by various writers,  so it isn’t all my own work.  It will be available free on promotion for the next few days as a pre-Valentine’s Day treat – make sure you check the price to make sure it is indeed free, since Amazon’s timings for starting the promotion may vary slightly.

Link  to the book on amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/8ysl936

weather forecasting

We have an alternative method of predicting the weather around here: we study the behaviour of our cats. Based on watching their activities this morning, I will be quite surprised if we get snow here in Edinburgh. George in particular is very sensitive to the approach of snow, but today he has behaved fairly normally – though admittedly his standards of normality are a bit different from anyone else’s – by pausing for a couple of moments in the doorway to glance round and sniff the air suspiciously, then going out for a short while, then coming back in and curling up on the nearest bed. This is what he usually does in the mornings throughout the winter months, except that if we do have snow he misses out the ‘going out for a short while’ part and if it’s really cold, he avoids even going near the door in case he accidentally sets foot outside. As he has just gone out again for the second time today, I think snow is even less likely. But of course even a seasoned forecaster like George can be wrong on occasion!

If we get the rain that a human forecaster at the BBC has predicted, I can stay indoors with a clear conscience and edit more chapters of ‘Death at the Happiness Club’. It may be too early to say this but I think the story has started to make more sense now and I am quietly confident of being able to publish it one day.

In the mean-time I have contributed a new short story to an anthology for Valentine’s Day (more information to follow later). I didn’t feel nervous about it at the time I wrote it, but I did have a slight panic attack when I opened the file and started to read, since writing for Valentine’s Day is not really my forte and I was worried that my story would stand out as being utter nonsense compared to the others. I don’t think it is, but I still live in fear that if we get a review it will say something like ‘All the stories were fantastic apart from the one by Cecilia Peartree – what made her think she could write?’. This is similar to the feeling I had when I ventured on stage in a Fringe show a few years ago, and imagined the review saying ‘All the cast were brilliant except the woman in the purple coat - what on earth did she think she was doing there?’ Of course in reality I don’t think anyone would have noticed the woman in the purple coat as she had no lines (I can’t remember lines, as I know from my experience as a pirate in a version of ‘Treasure Island’ performed by our local youth group – don’t ask) and was completely focussed on the important task of not falling off the stage.

what to do with a long weekend…

No, this isn’t some sort of tourist guide that suggests things to do on a long weekend in Edinburgh. Though of course that would be an easy enough post to write since even at this time of year there’s lots to do here: go and see the pandas, visit Edinburgh Castle or one of the many other historic places in and around the city, spend some time in a museum or gallery,climb a hill if the weather is favourable… I must confess that someone who had never visited Scotland asked me recently why she should bother coming here – yes, the question was framed in just such an aggressive way – and I was taken by surprise, couldn’t think of any reason and replied by mumbling something about history. Obviously I need some PR lessons from the tourist board!

Anyway, I am on the second day of a long weekend – I wouldn’t usually choose to have one in January but I have a couple of days’ holiday to use up – and I am not planning to do any of these tourist things. Well, I might go for a walk later, either at the Zoo or somewhere nearby, but only if the temperature rises above -7C.

Instead this is the weekend for tidying things up and getting things done. A doctor’s appointment. Ringing the tax people. Deep-cleaning the conservatory because I seem to have inadvertently invited someone to the house – I usually avoid doing this because it makes me uneasily aware of the chaos I live in, which I can happily ignore for most of the time. Tidying up paperwork. Trying to get the director of a play to agree the colour for the set. Perhaps starting to set up a website for the local community centre.

And writing! I almost forgot. This makes it seem as if writing is something of an afterthought, to be fitted in around everything else. The truth is more complicated than that. I sometimes like to imagine how wonderful my life would be if only I had more time to write. What vast masterpieces I could produce or (more likely) how lengthy a series of quirky mysteries I could release. The truth is that my writing and the rest of my life depend on each other: without writing, I wouldn’t have an outlet for the creativity that is sometimes stifled by my day job, domestic tasks and committee work, and my life would seem very dreary and boring. Without these other things that I often grumble about, I wouldn’t have nearly so much material for my writing and it wouldn’t have that essential grounding in reality.

I don’t usually mention politics here on this blog, so I will just point out that I have ranted about the Scottish referendum on one of my other blogs (see link at right hand side to Sheila Perry Predicts Scotland’s Future’).