No News Good News

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN anything here because not a lot has gone on. I didn't have a good Xmas, really. Or a happy new year. I don't know, I must have been depressed, or sick, or something. I don't know.

Hey I just got a comment saying I was delusional because I thought I could get in print. Well... maybe I am, maybe not. Fiction writing is not like blogging. Everything goes through at least two drafts, if not five, six or seven. Here I just tap it in and press publish; there I weigh every word. Fiction is about characterization and dialogue. Blogging is just me reporting every turd I've done. My fiction, you might argue, is just a literary turd ~ and a real steamer of a sloppy one at that! They have almost nothing in common, so you can't really assess my ability to write novels by reading my blog. 

Anyway I haven't written anything for about a month. I finished my first (short) novel in computer-ready form and almost instantly spiralled into depression so bad I couldn't focus enough to weigh up two versions of the same short passage, to work out which should go into book two. I don't know why I got like that. My GP wanted to up the meds by another hundred milligrams, but I don't want even more antipsycho tabs. The ones I'm on are causing enough side-effects as it is.


Er, I don't know what else to say. I feel like I'm under seige. I have this feeling that I need a guard dog. I saw the most beautiful doggie on the Australian Animal Rescue programme. At first glance I thought she was a St Bernard. She was really cute, but she had been bitten by a snake and they couldn't save her. So she died. And she was one of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen. And she wasn't a St Bernard, she was an Akita. I have always wanted an Akita puppy but have never seen them for sale. I have this daydream that one day a stray will come looking for me, and that will be my sign.

An akita puppy. See how cute it is..?? Though I think this one, with the sawn-off legs look, is something of a crossbreed...

I must go. Hope everyone's all right...

Hachiko monogatari: the tale of Hachiko, the faithful dog who never stopped looking for his master...

Calligraphic Black

I'VE BEEN LOOKING for the "blackest fountain pen ink". There are pages and pages of online reviews for brands not available in London. Who are Noodlers? Should I have heard of them? I've never seen their products anywhere...

The standard ink here in the UK would be Parker Quink. But it's nowhere near dark enough. They should call it Quink Dark Grey. I used to use this stuff called Higgins Eternal, but it's eternally even lighter mid-grey than Quink, and certainly not proper black.

The one I'm using now is called Lamy black, but it's still too washy for my exacting taste. I want my writing/artwork to look "like a void in the universe" as someone else put it.

Why is it that rollerball and gel ink pens write so much darker? Is it that because for a throw-away pen they can use a more intense formulation that would clog a fountain pen over time? Who knows. Actually, does anyone really care?

WELL ANYWAY, I'm learning (my own style of) calligraphy, you see. Very slowly. I mean, I  wish I could be as artistic as this (I'm getting in this direction):

or even this (by JRR Tolkien):

But I'm not quite there yet. One day soon I want to learn "real" calligraphy. Did you know you can get work calligraphing lawyers' deeds? I'm serious. For that I'm gonna need really ultra-black lawyerly cosmic ink, y'know the type fraudsters cannot wash off. I used to have an india ink pen, which was really for doodling and drawing, not writing: that produced fantastically black scribbles, but I heard you can literally wipe it clean from parchment and vellum. Not very fraud-proof! Is that true?

I'd also like to learn Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. When my set of TEN books is finished (not just one book ~ ten) and I've got paid however much you get for writing bestsellers these days, then I intend to invest in the Rosetta Stone Japanese course, but you'd need to write a bestseller or ten to afford it. The complete course costs £279 ($449.35)

VIDEO: ISN'T THIS FANTASTIC?

BARBER'S ADAGIO FOR STRINGS

SUNG BY THE CHOIR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

VISUALS BY NASA

DEBS THIS IS FOR YOU

O, and last but not least; THIS is what a real Tolkien manuscript looks like (the one on Saturday's post was by God knows who, but it wasn't JRR Tolkien!)

Isn't it beautiful.

Ukh and that's another thing. I have to learn how to do proper pen-&-ink drawings to illustrate all TEN VOLUMES of my kiddies' book. If I end up publishing it myself. Even if I do get a real publisher, I want them to agree to let me print up limited fine editions myself. So I'm STILL going to have to learn to draw. Wish me luck because I only have a talent for abstract art, not the real stuff. (I would be make a good interior designer of mosques.)

Illustrated: Noodler's ink bottle by Geeky Girl at her blog; homespun calligraphy in black Quink; dwarfish runes on MS by Tolkien, another Tolkien manuscript; mosque design...

Still Writing...

I'VE FINISHED HALF A BOOK. Half a short book. (I'm talking about the rewrites. Version one is finished and lying in a ringbinder as we speak...) WH Smith's refill pad by hand and now it's less of a mess (but I STILL keep remembering little lose ends not tied up... y'know... very annoying).

All this bluster and puff from me about how I "don't want to self-publish" ~ now I'm spending most of my time wondering whether the local supermarkets will take mine in hardback... etc. If I AM gonna print it up myself I definitely want it in proper hardbacks. Even just a tiny print run of 500. Then I'll go round every WH Smiths, bookshop and supermarket in every part of London saying I'm a "local author" and would they take just 25 copies (surely that's not very many, for a future classic of world literature, is it?) Hmmm.

WH Smith, by the way,  is a news agent, stationers and book shop. In many UK towns they're the ONLY book shop left ... What do people do in foreign counties where there's no WH Smiths? Not read or use Amazon, I suppose...

Oh did you know I used to live in a REAL garrat and I DID write a novel when I lived there. I still have the handwritten pages in £1.99 A4 exercise books.

It's not very good though. And it's FULL of drugs. Ukh.

I'm getting my computer fixed soon. So I can be a "professional" writer! I will let y'all know when that happens!

Got to go. I spend every waking hour editing or thinking about editing. (TV blaring away in the background, of course. How very professional of me.)

Once this one's finished I have plots of NINE MORE TO GO!!

Cereal characters: doncha just love 'em!

BTW was I very miserable and depressed last time I posted? I sounded it. Been sleeping 12 hours flat every night, Going to bed at 5am getting up at 5pm. Last night I popped a humungous dose of antipsychotic to knock me out early and was up at 7:30am! You see, legal drugs do have their uses!!!

Illustrated: not my MS but (allegedly) part of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit

Feeling Better: not so depressed/still writing "great literature"

FINALLY the fog of "depression"/whatever you wanna call it (feeling unamused + sleeping 12-16 hours per day EVERY day... yes THAT is lifting. O and when I did get up "early" (eg 8am) thinking how well I was doing, not only did I feel absolute stygian gloom, barely able to function at all, but I'd flop down on the sofa, maybe a couple of hours later, after I'd done all I had to do for the day ~ getting methadone, buying shopping in etc, so the rest of the day was comparitively "optional" then BAM!! straight to sleep and catching up on every single hour "lost" plus EVEN MORE! ~ meaning I just couldn't win. I told my GPs (both of them) and they nodded understandingly. They certainly didn't try and imply if only I had more mettle and forced myself to stay awake I'd somehow be all right because I wasn't all right. The less sleep the LOWER my mood went. It was horrible. ANYWAY this is all finished now and I'm currently on 9 hours. My mood today has actually gone UP. I'm really excited because I found some yummy blue soft cheese (Cambazola) to put in my French baguettes, which I eat nearly every day. Or is it because I'm busily writing the most amazing children's book of all time? I don't know!

Ukh. As for my brilliant writerly idea... I REALLY need a good "literary agent" with whom to discuss this stuff. My family are good, but really just as clueless as me when it comes to the wherewithalls of publishing. I haven't the faintest idea how that industry works and I need someone I can bounce ideas off who is NOT my publisher, because I feel I should produce (and hence publish) my stuff in a certain way, in a certain order of appearance. Maybe I'm sounding a bit mysterious here: what I mean is, I have so very many ideas for stories it'd take me at least the next five years to write them all. That's if I took up writing full-time. Currently I'm only writing ~ really ~ part-time I haven't the physical energy to scribble away at this hobby of mine full-time.

(Most of the time when I'm "writing" I'm actually watching True Movies 2 on Freesat!)

I was watching French television last night (as you do when you're supposedly writing an intellectual novel) and this brilliant prison drama came on called Unité 9 ~ far better than the present-day rehash of Prisoner Cell Block H they're calling Wentworth. I also saw a good courtroom-cum-prison drama Anybody's Nightmare, starring Patricia Routledge (Hyacinth Bucket) on True Entertainment. The real-life story of Sheila Bowler, a middle-aged, middle-class music teacher falsely accused and then convicted of the murder of her frail and elderly aunt. That was really good too.

You know as I'm getting older and becoming an accomplished intellectual novelist, I can watch TV drama and think "no that's a cheap shot; they should have focused more on that character, added an establishing scene here, rejiggled a bit there, done it this other way". + when I read other people's books I'm constantly blue-pencilling other writers' prose  (I do it enough to my own). I got Sharon Osbourne's latest memoir Unbreakable from Morrisons for £10 (Binky thinks this is the biggest self-indulgence, spending £10 on A book!) ~ no ghostwriter is credited, but some of the prose, at its best is top-drawer. Paul Burrel's book A Royal Duty doesn't credit a ghostwriter either and that's amazingly well done, considering the lengthy, convoluted story he had to tell and, in the words of her brother, Earl Spencer: a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds. 

I once tried penning my own memoir ~ a "misery memoir" as my own tale would be labelled ~ and I can tell you it is NOT easy ~ not just recalling your own life in brutal close-up, but detailing precisely HOW and why one thing led to another, what was said by whom and how it made you feel. The misery of my own memoiring made me so depressed that  I gave up in favour of fiction. Then I gave up writing for grown-ups because I was so fed up of the shitty world I would have to portray (+ too uninspired to write anything approaching a full-length book), and, in the end didn't even want to feel obliged to reproduce swear-words in print, that I finally gravitated to children's fiction, perhaps the one single arena of innocence left in this dark and nasty world ...

Ukh, every time I post I seem to be writing the same thing. Yes I'm writing a story. By £1 shop pen, on WH Smiths lined refill paper. But I can't tell you what it's about! It's not finished.

OK I've got to go now. Hope you're all OK. Take care y'all...

Illustrated: (upper) WH Smith's "wide-ruled refill pad" ~ what I use for the composition of great literature..! (middle) Cambazola ~ soft and spreadable blue cheese (lower) Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It, to date, the most successful "misery memoir" of all time...

VIDEO: AGATHA CHRISTIE

Most successful author of all time with agglommerated sales of (allegedly) 2,000,000,000(!!!)
Her detectives Poirot and Miss Marple are still on British TV every single week. Mistress of the "whodunnit"! Her books seem incredibly "creaky" by today's standards but she's very popular on television. Her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple can be seen on British screens every week, and new productions based on her 66 mystery novels  are still being made.
Her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage production in recorded history. Opening in 1952, it's STILL GOING after SIXTY-ONE YEARS!!!

AUDIO: ENID BLYTON INTERVIEW
She was the most successful children's author of all time and one of my favourites. When I want "inspiration" I read her Famous Five books, which are delightfully PI (politically incorrect!)
Her prose might be rather plain, but it's really readable.
Americans seem not to have heard of her, but she's a pillar of British culture. Very famous indeed within these shores!

. 

VIDEO: BARBARA CARTLAND (WITH JAR JAR GABOR (WHATEVER HER NAME WAS))

Barbara Cartland is supposedly the second-bestselling British writer of ALL TIME

(Have YOU ever read one of her books? I haven't!)
In her final years she was knocking out one slim historical romance per fortnight ~ publishing 24 titles per year, each of which would sell a million copies around the world. Frequently appeared on British TV extolling the virtues of vitamins and reprimanding the modern proclivity to sex before marriage!

Literary Brainwave!

I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA for my book. It's like a new version of my story, which I'm going to do...

Which I cannot divulge. It's so good, if I said it here then everyone writing for children would want to copy me and I, of course want to be first...

(What am I saying? Nobody reads my blog these days anyhow!!!)

Ukh despite the brainwaves, I have been feeling pretty terrible of late. Which is a paradox, I know, but that's life... Sleeping on and on and on. And on. And on and on. And on. Oh yeah: and on again. Terrible, I know. Makes me seem really lazy, doesn't it. If I do manage to be in bed by midnight, which is difficult when you've spent an evening slowly ~ very slowly ~ dreaming up silly animal tales, then it is difficult to sleep afterwards. I write pretty slowly ~ less than a page an hour, which works out at an average of just FIVE words per minute... and that's only the first draft...

Anyway once I do get to sleep, which can be difficult because ironically I sometimes feel a bit "high" of an evening, I fall into an abyss of dormancy and am unfit to be revived until a good TWELVE hours later. FOURTEEN, SIXTEEN, EIGHTEEN on a really bad day. Then I generally get up feeling distinctly under the weather...

OF COURSE I have tried forcing myself to rise at eight, and when I do I think "Wow, I'm doing really well..." until I dare to sit down at around 10am and suddenly ~ WHOOSH! ~ sleep overcomes me once more like a stealthy disease and I'm wiped out all day, making up all "lost" time, and often more. + making it even HARDER to sleep at the right time come midnight... Another thing: when I sleep less than twelve hours I usually feel very depressed during the day. Much worse than on a "standard" day... so I can't win. I'm just SO GLAD I'm managing to get this story done. I'm now a good ¾ of the way through (20,000 words written!). Isn't that amazing!

20,000 words, by the way, can I say to the non-writers amongst us, is NOT a lot of writing. To people who don't have cause to think in thousands of words, let me explain. In an adult Penguin Classics style volume (ie fairly closely-set type) that is just 50 printed pages.  In a kiddies' novel (sans illustration) it works out at approx 75-80 pages, not counting blank patches at ends and beginnings of chapters (which can add a lot; that's one device publishers have of lengthening brief manuscripts into books of more impressive length). So really I've NOT done a lot of writing. My book will not by any stretch of the imagination be "too long"! But hey I'm SO HAPPY to be writing it. I just cannot believe I never knuckled down and did this before.

(Well I AM the author of three failed novels, FAILED being very much the operative word!!)

(Actually I CAN believe it. I spent years feeling uninspired and thanks to that maxim "write what you know" I felt limited to tawdry tales of heroin addicts, petty crims, prostitutes and gangsters ... also I did once try composing a mysery memoir. But walking into WH Smiths one day only to see a five-pack of life-tales of woe on special offer. I remember thinking "no way do I want my own life packaged up like that ~ schizoaffective heroin addiction next to wife-beating, anorexia and incest" and so I proceeded no further. Also just the act of recalling my life and having to join the dots into something that made sense to strangers was more disconcerting (or upsetting, if you prefer) than I had anticipated.

Another thing: as a writer you're obviously known for the genre you write in and I did not want to feel I'd have to spend a career putting in repeat performances of druggy tales. Plus, if I did put in a successful memoir, I reckon my "fans" (if I collected any) would want more and more tales from my own life. Fictionalized stories would feel very much like a second best, and I've always wanted to be a novelist, not a memoirist.

As for children's writing, once I turned my mind to this field I had literally an entire page full of ideas ~ all for separate books. More ideas in one hour for children than a lifetime of "adult popular fiction" (the genre I'd always wanted to write in). What stopped me from proceeding was how difficult I found my first attempts to be. The writing just would not flow... So I put it down, assuming that I just didn't have it in me ~ that I wasn't good enough to write for children. 

Children's writing is a rare talent ~ I can see that by the profuse lack of talent that appeared to be on display every time I browsed the kiddies' shelves in WH Smith ~and I just didn't think I had it either. What changed was that I stopped worrying "will they understand this word; is that sentence too complicated for them" (and I haven't got any and don't even KNOW any children) and just sat down and wrote the story for myself. I'm such a big kid anyway there's no difference between writing for a ten year-old and writing for myself . That's how I found my voice...

Anyway, enought said! Gotta go and put more high-grade entertainment to paper...

Hope you're all doing well. Take care folks XxXxXxX ☺

I've written half a book!

I HAVE WRITTEN NEARLY HALF A BOOK! Half a children's book, that is ~ ie 6 chapters; about 15,000 words. I'm aiming for about 35,000-40,000 words, but I keep overrunning (which is far better than being too brief: you can prune away excess verbiage far more easily than making up new content to fill a void).

Well obviously, because it's the product of my hard work and star-spangled brains I think my novel is amazing and will be an instant classic. Well is is very funny. I think so.

For some idiot reason I typed "how much advance children's book" into google and got back a news report from 2004 talking of a £2 million 6-book deal.

As if.

Well mine is envisaged as a series of ten ~ open-ended (that is, the stories do not run from one book to another so you could read them in the wrong order without spoiling any of the fun).

I think it would make an excellent film by the way. If it was done properly... something along the lines of Ice Age or Finding Nemo ~ the same sort of humour. Not so much a "children's film" as "family entertainment".

I wish I hadn't found that article about the £2 million. Thinking about business matters is most offputting whilst one has a creative head on. It is certainly true that since JK Rowling, children's books are taken a whole lot more seriously ... but I can't really imagine my silly story being read by adults on the bus... on the other hand it's not really even a story about children; it's about animals (woodland creatures feature very heavily indeed). Maybe grown-ups would read it secretly on their Kindles... who knows?

I don't like thinking about the business side of publishing at all. That's why I want a literary agent. My family seem to obsess about the idea of self-publishing, but that's not what I want. I would like an editor and an agent who I could phone up and moan to when I'm feeling stuck. Yes I would like to publish my own work in fine editions (ie really expensive hardbacks printed on rag paper with fully-sewn bindings and full colour illustrations, costing £50 to £100 ($79.85-$159.71) each (when I say "fine", I really do mean really extremely fine). But would far rather a "real" publisher took care of ordinary editions and ebooks and complicated things to do with overseas rights. 

I know self-publishing is all the rage, but then I thought "how would I get it in print in German, French, Japanese etc?" Translation agencies charge about £6000 ($9587.72) for a 40,000 word document. And how do I know the translation is any good? To translate fiction you need an experienced literary translator, and I don't know any. ~ Of course I would have to go to literary agents and publishers from abroad. So it seems ridiculous to use professionals for the translation rights but not English, which is by far the most lucrative language. Oh blah blah see I've got to thinking about all the stuff I don't want to. OK I've got to go bye.

Illustrated: British chilren't classics... (Paddington and Rupert being personal favourites)

Fat, Furry Dormice for the Weekend...

I HAVEN'T BEEN BY LATELY because I've been too busy composing my work of Great Literature..! Which is not a memoir. And not about drugs in any way... (Wow!) It's a children's book. More details (if) and when it's finished...

✮✮✮✮✮✮✮

Anyway here's some little furry animals for Furry Friday on Saturday...

A fat dormouse...

(Latin name: Glis glis.)

... Also named the edible dormouse, as the Romans originally imported them to the British isles as a tasty rodent snack!

This one looks more like an American grey squirrel...

A common or hazel dormouse... isn't he cute!!

Latin name: Muscardinus avellanarius.

This is the only dormouse species indiginous to the UK...

... with big glittery black beady eyes!

And quite tame!

... when winter comes he gets very sleepy indeed!

(The name comes from the French dormir, to sleep... il dort...

... WISHING Y'ALL A VERY FURRY WEEKEND INDEED!

Daphne Guinness and The Creative Thunderbolt

HEY, I've been inundated by bright ideas. I have longed and longed for a grown-up, adult novel I could write and ~~ KAPOWW!!! ~~ last night the vision struck me like a thunderbolt!

Yes, I'm still working on the children's book. But my problem with kiddies' writing is that it's about four times as difficult as writing for adults. When I'm on form, I can knock out a page of adult fiction about as quickly and easily as I can write a personal letter. But children's stuff is much harder for me. You have to be more succinct. More captivating. More everything. And I realized that I would never feel complete, as a creative artist, writing for children alone. (How pretentious-sounding! (But how true!!))

I've had lots of good ideas for adult fiction ~ but unfortunately they have tended to revolve around the single issue of drugs. I do not want to be known as a druggie author. If  the book were a success, my readers are just going to expect more of the same, and will be disappointed if I make departures into more "respectable" territory. I know they will.

The other thing I could have done quite easily (or so I believed) would of course be to write a memoir of addiction and insanity. But that would be an even worse move. I've never heard of a memoirist turn novelist successfully. And because I only have one or two memoirs in me, my creativity would be limited to that. I'd far rather pour my horrible life experiences into novel-writing ~ where, shining through the lens of fictional character, the truth can be expressed so much more vividly, and explicitly ~ without breaching my own or anybody else's privacy. It's a paradox that the truth can be told so much better by means of fiction ~ don't you think!

I tried to pen a memoir some years ago. The gimmick was going to be that you expected a story of how I got drawn into this sordid world of drugs ... with an eventual tale of my redemption, cleanness and serenity. But there would be no happy ending. I'm still mired in drugs. I just go on using... possibly until I die...

Then, hopefully, I do, eventually, get another memoir on how I did clean up in the end. If I don't, then I hope my family would cash in by exploiting my life-story shamelessly. In fact, I would be pissed off if they didn't. At least if they do profit financially from my death then my life would have been worthwhile... know what I mean?

For so long I've been looking for a book to read and I couldn't find a good one. The only half-decent (fictional) reading matter of the past year has been Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir (based on the true story of  Lady Jane Grey, who in the mid-1500s, was Queen of England for nine days) and Martina Cole's Faceless ~ about a murderess released from prison after 15 years, trying to put her life and her past into some order... I don't think I'd make a brilliant thriller writer. And much as I love historical fiction (not historical romance ~ I hasten to add) I couldnt' write that stuff. It's too research-heavy. In my view, the entire point of fiction is that it is just that ~ fictitious. Both the stories I'm plotting out are my own tales entirely ~ they require very little research. I'm so grateful for the Muse being with me now. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who was nothing if not prolific, appeared to have nothing but disdain for the notion of "inspiration":

• "There are those . . . who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till--inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting."
  (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, 1883)

 Sitting down daily between 5:30 and 8:00am, he churned out an average 2500 words every morning before setting off to put in a full day at the Post Office. I agree, it's not necessary to be "inspired" to write every day. But inspiration IS absolutely necessary to conceive your characters and their story and to get the process moving. It's that inspiration that has been so lacking in me lately. And that's why I haven't written anything for such a long time...

I have been SO MOODY lately. Either UP or DOWN, but rarely anything in between. I stuck my head out of the window one night, as the Restlessness began, and saw a perfect Full Moon floating in the sky above me. I'm sure the moon has something to do with my mood swings. I mean, we all known how the term "lunatic" derives from the ancient belief that the moon was responsible for mania and madness. And the psychiatrists of today are STILL studying possible links between bipolar disorders and the moon... (manic-depressive illness has also long been associated with creativity, too ~ which makes something of a trinity between mental illness, the moon and the Muse... Hmmm.

O yes, and I kept having these dreams about a character called Daphne Guinness. Now I have long (vaguely) known that such a character is a key figure on the London "society" circuit. But to be honest I just assumed she was a talentless airhead ~ a rich nobody. Then I alighted upon a photograph in Vanity Fair magazine of an incredibly striking beautiful woman in the most amazing fancy dress I have ever seen (not the picture here). And I thought, "wow". So I looked her up and found out she is an artist who designs her own clothes ~ and what wondrous creations they are ... She even has her own fragrance with Comme des Garcons. Not such an airhead after all...

O well I gotta go. Did anyone else see WENTWORTH on Wednesday night? Wow that was hardcore. I was expecting something like an Australian Bad Girls... but this was seriously scary. Very well done, though...

HERE IS THE ENTIRE FIRST EPISODE:~

... and here is the original PRISONER: CELL BLOCK H

FIRST EVER EPISODE

BRILLIANT STUFF!

HAVE AN AMAZING WEEKEND EVERYBODY...

Working Out What to Work At

I'M IN A FUNNY MOOD TODAY ("today being yesterday, Friday). I got to reading books and listening to music and watching Helen Mirren starring as The Queen (yet again) last night and didn't realize how late it was until I saw the foreign satellite box was showing me a time of 2am. Then I went to bed in hat, coat and scarf (because it's that cold and I can't afford to keep the fanheater belting it out all night)... only to wake again at FIVE A.M. unable to sleep. I thought I needed more methadone so I drank that... and went into a long internal rant of the type I usually only make when I have some serious complaint I want to make (usually to the methadone clinic) or some ranting blog piece I want to post but the computer isn't there and I'm rehearsing what I'm gonna say. Or I'm becoming manic. I carried on ranting in a most irritated fashion inside my head till past eight o'clock and then distracted myself by phoning the DSS ("DWP" as they call themselves now) to find out when my benefits are getting paid. Suddenly, at the sound of a kindly human voice, I was most cheerful and chatty. I'm now getting my money on Tuesdays, not Mondays, which put me in terror of the electricity running out on Emergency, so later that morning Binky lent me a tenner.

When I'm on my own I feel stone cold normal. But whenever the phone rings, or I'm in the company of another person ~ whoever that may be ~ suddenly I'm acting and feeling half-drunk: lively and verbiose. I just wish I could keep this good mood going all the time. [And I'm trying to keep careful track of my moods: hence these notes.]

I got to musing about my True Job Prospects (and not the illusiory ones; I mean, if I truly had my pick of professions I'd go for Head of State (obviously ~ and not for a mere four years like a poxy American president ~ it would have to be a lifelong position to suit me... if not hereditary). And if I put my talents to full use, I'd be a bestselling writer. Plus a magazine editor and publisher. And a maker of fine fragrance. And a jewellery designer with lines on sale via Bulgari (for the real stuff) and the home shopping channel (for cubic zirconia). My other ambitions are to design a bestselling board-game and a computer game. To appear in a French film. To release a hit single and make an album. And to become a great poet with my works appearing on teeshirts, mugs, fridge-magnets etc (far better way of making money out of poetry than books! Who buys poetry books nowadays?) And to make bestselling poetry CDs with the poetry performed against a backdrop of whooshing ambience with chirping birds, whalesong etc in the background. These are just a handful of my ambitions. And they are real ambitions. You can think what you like, but with half a chance I will go for them all ~ and I'm fully intending to contrive that chance myself.

But failing that: working for someone else. How the hell am I meant to explain on whatever form I have to fill in (and surely it's NOT the initial application form; that would be just too brutal) that I'm supposed to be a schizophrenic manic-depressive? Who the hell's going to want to employ me then? That's why I need this chat with the temp agency. I'm going to walk in somewhere and give the unvarnished truth (no drug references though, and no medical details except the names of the conditions, of which I have to inform potential employers, in order to qualify for protection under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. So I was thinking about this, and musing on what the hell would happen if I suddenly became manic enough to believe I can say and do precisely as I please no matter who's watching? Or so depressed I can't be bothered to change clothes or shower for weeks on end? And my life and the prospect of anything better seemed such a morass that I switched off and switched the TV on instead...

Somebody somewhere, please give me some perspective on this. I'm not really mad, (...) right~~? I could go mad again... or I could not. I still hear voices every day, but they're not the ultra-real voices ~ utterly indistinguishable from a real person right next to me telling me things wonderful or irrelevant about myself and the world... I know my voices now are not accoustically real. Example: yesterday the following information beamed at me from the pavement: You are looking wonderful! So I told the pavement, Oh yes I know ~ even if I do say so myself! But I knew this was a psychic dream, not the reality of ordinary people. As long as I can keep the two realities: that of relatively low-grade "symptoms" and that of everyday working people, separate then surely I should be fine enough to work amongst the People myself..?

What should I do? Should I follow my heart, my head or my Dreams? I want to commence writing a novel. But which novel to write? I have ideas for at least four that I could pen tonight. And another ten more ready for next year... I'm only hampered by a wavering sense of morality plus my own inextricable laziness. But ~ ha! ~ come to think of it, I know what I'm writing: VALERIE: THE PRISON EMAILS ~ my "respectable" Australian heroin-addicted narcotics-trafficking housewife and mother's outermost rants.

OK so it's all settled ~~ but before I get a book advance big enough to buy a four-bedroom flat opposite Harrods, should I get a "normal" job too? And can I even do one? The more I think about it, the more terrified I am. I remember office politics. And I remember the stultifying culture of enforced "normality" that prevails in the corporate workplace (two of my old jobs were with large corporations, the type of place that uses its own custom-made software so a weeks' IT-training is required before you can really begin...) Akh. Ukh. I don't know I don't know I don't know. And the British system is NOT kind or understanding to anybody who ever needs to vacillate between work and benefits (which I really wouldn't want to do, but face it there's a chance I might HAVE to...) plus I haven't even considered the fact that I'm still on methadone, still sporadically chipping at the Heroin, still not clean from that drug. I don't drink. At all these days. And I touch no other intoxicating substances apart from heroin and caffeine (the caffeine gets me way more out of it these days anyway)... what am I going to do? And what if I have a cup of tea at work and it makes me suddenly go bipolar?

SOMEBODY GIVE SOME ADVICE, PLEASE!

Music ~~~~~~~ Barber's Adagio for Strings
I love this tune...

William Orbit/Ferry Corsten mix



Longer version of the same (sans video)



Sung version by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge with transcendently beautiful, mind-expanding cosmic visuals by NASA



Illustrated: Birds of Paradise animation...

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