Mock Duck

Sorry for Having No Braincells Right Now.

I'm sorry for not entertaining you much on this blog recently.

I was determined not to be one of these types that drone on and on boringly about their book. But, I suppose, what you forget is how all-consuming the process is. Your life shrinks down to the size of...well a small square of bound pages I suppose. I'm just not doing anything much else exciting to tell you about at the minute. I am not even having many interesting thoughts. I am even dreaming about editing my book, which just shows how boring the inside of my head has become. I even had a dream (not book-related) where a friend and I tried to work out a time to meet up - comparing dates and times and unable to find a mutually convenient time. It was - literally - a nightmare. Even my nightmares are dull! Argh.

Maybe you lot should entertain me and we should have a fight about something. That would be fun. But I don't even think I've got it in me to have a fun debate at the moment. I've been meaning to post this piece by Darren Shan about age-banding in children's books. I didn't really know what I thought about this but (I think) I've been won over by the nays. What do you think?

"A spot of Sadomasochism with your box of chocolates, Sir?"

Adrian, my agent, just pointed out that SM4A is being released next Valentine's Day. This made me laugh. And also made me think of The Apprentice's hilarious card episode...But enough of that, don't want to pick up on the disaster of those ecologically unfriendly (in more ways than one) cards...

...So, if you're after a slightly unusual gift for your loved one on Valentine's Day just swivel your eyes to the right.

:):):):) (A few smilie faces as it's sunny. In Edinburgh. This must always be celebrated.)

Drunken Conversation (we thought it oh so witty at the time - oh how we laughed!)

Oh and I forgot to report I went to a party.

Man:  I'm Roy without the S.
Me:  I'm Roy with an S.

Things Happening...

I am about to link to this on the side panel somewhere. But that involves messing about with widgets and, as I can't face too much widget-messing right now (widget-messing definitely to be avoided when in the midst of coldy-lurgy-y suffering - you don't know what you might unleash), I might save that for another day.

So, instead, in the meantime, I thought I'd post it here. Click on this. Thank you Kit at MB for doing the webpage - wooo!

(Very excited.)

(Way too excited.)

(Off to strap myself into strait-jacket with excitement.)

(Well, actually, no it's midnight I might just go to bed instead.)

(Goodnight. )

(zzzzzz)

I Could Get Used to This

Today I am sitting in the garden with the laptop and a huge extension cable (as its battery is now officially rubbish) in the sun, correcting the ms...and I'm loving it. Perhaps because it is the weekend. Or because its sunny. Or maybe because it's a great excuse to get the Geek to rustle up lunch. Whatever. This is obviously the way to do things. Continual weekends, sunshine and a domestic servant: I've got to work on achieving this longterm.

Blog Power. Or Not?

We had a bit of a nice surprise over on Vulpes the other day when we were the only UK bookblog named by Robert McCrum in his outgoing article as Literary Editor of The Observer. He cited us in his leaving article as a responsible blog handing power back to the "common reader". Wow. (Although whether he saw this as a purely good thing or not is more questionable.)

There has been a debate over on Writewords about whether online reviews effects sales. Some people claim yes, others claim no. Others say what does it matter, blogging isn't about sales anyway (which is true, although when we find a really great book on Vulpes it's nice to think it might be get read - although we don't mind if people borrow it  from a library!)

But all the debate got me thinking about my own habits and how many books I have bought or am planning to buy as a direct result of hearing about them on the internet over the past 18 months or so. I thought it was one or two. But when I started totting it up the list began to grow and grow. So, I thought I'd put it up here to prove the power of the internet. This is a list of books I have bought - not been sent review copies of or lent or whatever.

Hearing about them through Writewords Writers' Forum
Prince Rupert's Teardrop by Lisa Glass
Mothernight by Sarah Stovell
Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton
A Gentle Axe by RN Morris
Taking Comfort by Roger Morris

Vulpes Libris
Feather Man by Rhyll McMaster
(At present my Vulpes reading tends to be for reviews and if a review has been done already I think - oh no, I won't be able to review it. However, I do have a growing list of books I want that have been reviewed by others on VL - mainly non-fiction.)

Scott Pack's Me and My Big Mouth
Gents by Warwick Collins
Candy Girl by Diablo Cody
Space Captain Smith

Through Other Blogs and Websites
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower
Married a Pirate by Samantha David
Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumlin
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde


Ones I want
Seven Wonders of the Industrial World by Deborah Cadbury
Belonging by Ron Butlin
Streets of Babylon by Carmina Burman

And also want to mention A Dangerous Man by Anne Brooke which I heard about through Vulpes and was sent a copy by LisaC as a present.

Books I've bought by picking up in a bookshop after reading reviews online

The Flea Palace by Elif Sharak (because Marion Boyars publish it and the Elif Sharak was shortlisted for The Orange)
The Famous Writers' School by Steven Carter

Books I've bought not having read reviews online

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin

Hmm, it's as well that most people have started giving me book tokens as presents. I haven't actually read all of these - although I've read a lot of them. This is in addition to the ones I am sent to review for Vulpes.

But I suppose these are the ones that attracted me/interested me through the internet alone.Obviously not everyone is like me, but I do wonder what the true statistics are. So, Mock Duck readers - how important is the net in terms of your bookbuying habits? What makes you buy a book? What are the most important factors that come into play to persuade you to part with your hard-earned cash?

Hair again

So, I went to the hairdresser again.

This time a really funky posh designery one. One that offered me a head massage and a cup of coffee all at once. I explained my general hair angst and they were incredibly sympathetic. I liked them.

So I got the cut and then was "styled" for a good half an hour. I have never EVER had such glamorous hair. I was embarrassed by how glamorous it was. I wasn't wearing the hair, the hair was definitely wearing me (and I was the one letting the side down.)

I swept out of there feeling like a million dollars - like something out of Charlie's Angels - all shining waves of loveliness atop my head.

It lasted all of 15 mins. By the time I got home all the styling had fallen out and I looked like I had been up-ended in a bucket of grease.

Why? Why? Why can't I be glamorous? It just never seems to work.

The Tragedy of Writing Comedy.

"Hey, that sounds fun!" said a friend of mine upon discovering I had written a "comic" novel.

People have this tendency to assume that if you write anything even vaguely comic that you are there, snorting away to yourself over the typekeys, throwing your head back in uncontrollable guffaws whilst slapping your own knee and crying to yourself, "Stop it! Oh stop it, you're killing me!"

Ok, so, as you write down your first notes and ideas and sketchy first draft you may well be sniggering away at your own audacity, with a large dose of smugness and self-satisfaction thrown in. But then you get a bit more mature and the second time you go over it you nod sagely to yourself and think maybe it would be better with this word rather than that, maybe tightening this, extending that....

...The thirtieth time you go over it you are found, weeping, on the stairs by your long-suffering computer programming boyfriend, who thankfully has no understanding over the agonies you are going through and forcefeeds you pizza instead.

The fortieth time you go over it you are scattering hundreds of slightly altered versions across a large table and minutely comparing them to each other. You then start reading out sentences to your boyfriend. (Reads out sentence) "Is it better this way?" (Reads out slightly different but basically identical sentence) "Is it better that way?"

The fiftieth time you go over it you have lost the plot completely and start obsessing about the exact rules of semi-colon usage.

The sixty time you decide there is something intrinsically evil and unfunny about the semi-colon. (Has there ever been an amusing sentence involving a semi colon?)

The seventh time you go over it you decide it is literary fiction, remove all the punchy cliches and slang and get down to inserting poetic original symbols and images, engaging the reader in all the five senses, and never using a short word where three five-syllable ones from the thesaurus will do.

The eightieth time you go over it you remember why literary fiction isn't funny.

The ninetieth time, you are found sobbing in the toilet crying to the gods - what had ever possessed you to embark on such a path? Why hadn't you realised your true calling was bleak tragedy? -  and threatening to slit your wrists. (More pizza.)

The hundredth time you go over it you think "fuck it, it was better the first time" and go back to version one.

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut through this process.

And More...

Now this one is just bizarre. Not only because of the chaotic peppering of quotation marks all over it, but the idea of people randomly abandoning their kids in supermarket shopping carts all over the place. I mean, What is Going On?? And why *is* that SAFETY in brackets?

They seem a very stern shop, don't they?

No smoking.

No dumping your kids.

No backpacks...

Quote, Unquote

You might remember a while back my complaining about the growing tendency of people on the internet to put things in inverted commas that aren't actually "quotes".

Firstly, I just don't understand the significance of this new use of the inverted comma - what "do" they "mean", what is the point? What are they "actually" adding? Please, could somebody *explain* to me the difference between a sentence such as this one that says *explain* or "explain" or just plain old explain?

I am not some kind of *eats, shoots and leaves* grammar freak, and I don't mind at all how people "use" them in this "loose and free" "emphasising" sort of way. A lot of good friends of mine, who are a lot more learned than I, happily use this technique. But the problem is that, for many, the "Lauren"-style inverted commas have started to morph, unnoticed, into the real sort, and vice versa with the result - that people are happy to seriously misrepresent other people's views - in quotation marks - under the lazy excuse "it's the way I write". (Or should that be *way I write*. Ponder.)  The result is not true direct quotes but subjective interpretations of what someone said put in inverted commas. But, as there is no way of telling the difference, this is basically a false direct quote hence *misrepresenting* what other people said. Plain and simple old misquoting basically. This, to me, is "bad".

Ah the wonders of the internet!! I knew there must be a fellow philosopher of the inverted comma round here somewhere and finally I've found one - in fact I've found an entire blog of them!!!! This is *"very"* exciting.

So, if you have nothing better to do on your bank holiday weekend: take a *look* at "this".

It's ***""**brilliant"*"*"*"*"*!

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/