Friends Friday - I wrote this on paper yesterday!

I have been learning over the past couple of years that relaxation time can be just as productive as hours spent with head down at a desk forcing oneself to work on that masterpiece of literature.  Time with friends is time well spent, now I know.  It used to be that I would feel guilty being with my pals, drinking huge quantities of tea and devouring mucho packets of biscuits.  But there is truly something restorative about going round to someone's house for a natter.  And even if you don't really need to make use of their healing powers, just putting the world to rights for a bit, at the very least, makes you think about things from a different perspective for a while.  That can be invigorating, if you allow it to be.

Even better if you have friends like mine, who bitch not at all (unless absolutely necessary!) and offer encouragement and praise, for every tiny achievement, by the skipload.  Never do I feel so puffed up and full of myself as when I've spent some time with Sara, Sarah and Sarah-jane (in no particular order - I love you all dearly).  Tremendous friends, and I really couldn't wish for better ones.

This is so not like me.  There was a time not so long ago, when I would tire of people very quickly - that's not a poor reflection on my friends, but rather a negative quality in myself.  A lack of patience and tolerance, which I haven't had to learn to control because it's just disappeared, thank goodness.  And now I can see that there was never anything that I needed to be patient about or find tolerance for.  I have just been a cranky old hermit for most of my life!  No more of that - I've left my cave, and don't intend to go back in it for a while.

And of course, the huge advantage of chatting to lovely people is that when you do have your time to yourself you're very eager to use it wisely.  Well, I am anyway.  I am now able to make use of the odd half hour here and there - a blog  entry can be written in half an hour (a hub can't, a hub takes a good couple of hours of thinking).

Macmillan coffee morning this morning (after a brew at Sara's!), then coffee (and Waterstone's - my poor overdraft!) in town, with Sara, and then tea at Sarah's with Sarah-jane too.  What a lazy and lovely day.  Please understand that I do not spend all, or indeed many, of my days like this (Rev. Roy - I do not, honest, I am not completely lazy, like what you fink I am!).  I am just blogging about it because it's been such a happy day.  And there are more happy days to come - me and Sara made plans today; here come the girls, oh yes.

Sara is actually a terrible friend though, truly.  She practically cudgelled me over the head and dragged me into Waterstone's - I didn't want to go; I only have a Waterstone's loyalty card because I was forced to have one.  And Sara, wicked woman, made me buy two books.  She made me.  But at least I did buy mind-broadening books - one, a beginner's guide to humanism, and the other, Derren Brown's book about the psychology of magic and the supernatural.  Good, good.  Books to read in snatched spare minutes.  I would imagine that I will struggle to understand much more than the words 'and' and 'the' in both of these books, but still, I try.  I'm sure there's a genius locked inside me somewhere - I can feel it fighting to get out, but it's been locked away one of the basement rooms of my mind.  I distinctly heard it once, when I heard the word Brobdingnagian and my genius knew what it meant.

Ugh, whatever.  Wittering again.  :)

Oh, the horror.

This has happened before, but it's REALLY happened this time. I was browsing the Waterstone's website yesterday evening, and came across a book that had me interested and worried at the same time. Interested, because it looked like a damn good story - about faeries, and what they're really like; worried, because it's almost exactly the same story as mine, only much, MUCH better! It looks scary and mega-imaginative, original and compelling. Mine looks very pale compared to this book. And then I start to think that even if I could make mine much grittier (I'm sure I could) and frightening, would it look like I'd just copied my story from the one that's already out? Probably. This is the thing about writing - it takes such a bloody long time! Fine, you come up with an idea; but even for an experienced writer it takes a good year to have a finished manuscript ready. In that year many more writers seem to have exactly the same idea as you and you spot books almost identical to yours popping up all over the place. It's very disheartening.

So, I've got the morning off today, and a whole Day Off on Saturday :) I'm going to have a really good think. I'm going to do some short story exercises and see if I can dig about in my mind and find out what it actually is that I really do want to write. I'll also do some exercises around the characters that I'm already writing about, and see if I can find ways to make them more readable - I think I'm afraid to write characters that people won't like. That's stupid, because every book has to have baddies. And even some of the goodies need to have annoying habits, strange tics and ugly warts, and so on. Noomski said that I shouldn't give up on my book - he's read it and he was surprised by how good it was. He's a bit biased, but he's also honest, and he would tell me if he thought it was rubbish. He tells me I'm rubbish and ugly, fat and annoying most of the time anyway :D

So, hmmm, some free writing this morning I think. After a bath :)

This is my bridal wreath, by the way :) It's in one of the borders in my garden. It's looking splendid right now, all foamy and bright. It only flowers for about a fortnight though, and then it looks quite drab, lol. But I think it's worth the wait for those two weeks of loveliness. I took this photo on my phone - amazing!

All better now :)

Ah, *deep contented sigh*, that's better. I've fixed myself properly now. I had a bit of a malfunction on Thursday, but yesterday I took charge. I took myself into town in the morning, when all the boys were at their places of education, and had a tiny bit of retail therapy. All necessary - it actually wasn't procrastination (for once!). I bought a book of squared paper to help Thomas with his maths (Parents' Evening on Thursday - was very, very good and positive; Mrs Powell is wonderful and sensible and has nothing but sympathy for Thomas's struggle with maths. We have made good plans to help him, and Mrs P is very supportive). And I bought an Encyclopedia of Spirits. Yes, I have. An Encyclopedia of Spirits, you did read correctly. It's research, for my book :) I'm writing about faeries, elves and such (Tolkien-type elves, not Disney ones!), and have been noticing huge gaps in my knowledge of folklore and mythology. This is the book I've been looking for. It will hopefully give me a wealth of ideas for characters and little sub plots. I've been working on basing my story in faerie 'fact', if you will. It would have probably been easier to completely invent my own world and history and language, so that a reader couldn't question it too much. But that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to explore centuries-old supertitions and beliefs, and give them a link to the present. My kids believe in faeries, and so do I ;) The story is about what's been going on in the faerie world since most people stopped believing in them. There's not a right lot written about faeries though - other than passing comments or stories in history books - so it's been difficult to find out what people did actually believe a couple of centuries ago. This encyclopedia seems to be the missing link for me. I have high hopes that it can give credence to my story (yes, I do know that faeries are not actually real - I just want people to be able to get lost in the world I create while they're reading, and not find that things jar and bring them out of the book).

So, I took myself to Starbucks after the trip to Waterstone's. I got stuck into the writing-of-the-book for a couple of joyous hours. It was very productive. I did some brainstorming for a bit, and then started a new chapter. My story is getting nice and big and complex now :D Just what I wanted.

But what a difference a day makes, eh? It's a true sentiment, that. I was proper miserable on Thursday, but yesterday I woke up looking at the world from a different angle completely. It was weird to lose control of myself the other day, but I don't feel bad about it at all - I'm looking back on it now with interest. I can see what it was about and can file the rubbish away, just keep it in the reference section for use when I need to identify negative thoughts next time. Hopefully I won't need to use more than one filing cabinet for negative stuff. I'm going to need a bigger mind-office as it is to accommodate all the positive and floaty flowery thoughts I have!! (Blurgh - pass me the sick bucket!)

Oh, I also bought a Buddhist book called The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. It's a guide to meditation, and is about slowing down time and enjoying every second. All good. I started it yesterday, and it's excellent. I've been paying attention to my breathing today, and I'm not very good at it yet, but I can already see what an amazing thing meditation is. The whole thing is still rather bizarre to me, but I like it, and I'm going to stick with it for a while and see what happens. (I do hope I'm not getting preachy with the Buddhism - I'm not expecting anyone else to try it, but it's in my life right now, so ignoring it in my writing would be odd. Try it, or don't: it's up to you!)

Oh, one more thing - Sport Relief was last night. Now, those videos of suffering children put the whole world in perspective, don't they? Makes me see even more clearly that I have no right to be unhappy, and that I must always be grateful to be alive because nothing in my life will ever be as bad as it is for millions of people in the rest of the world.