Jolly Hockey Sticks! – The Truth about Boarding School

Reblogged from St Mallory's Forever!:

Boarding school (definition): an education centre, usually in the form of an old manor house or castle, where students live all year round. Most of their time is taken up with practical jokes, driving the matron batty and chasing each other around lacrosse pitches. Common phraseology from the students inclues “rather” “awfully” and “jolly”. Alright, who let you lot at the Enid Blyton? Strange, really, that here in the UK – where we have a relatively large concentration of boarding schools, relative to some …

Remember that novel I’m co-writing? Over on the St Mallory’s blog, Charley’s giving us an insight into boarding schools, just one of the things we’ve got going on over there. Be sure to follow us for more! =D

Destroying Beautiful People

I’m not actually going to destroy beautiful people. I’m going to try the ‘Beautiful People’ thing, with a character from my novel Destroying, and also Returning. Her name is Bronwyn, I rant about her a lot on here, and she’s probably one of my favourite characters that I’ve ever invented. Ever. Like, ever.

1. If your character could be played by any actor, who would it be?
A young Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper from Torchwood). Or somebody else equally awesome and equally Welsh.

2. Does your character have a specific theme song?
 No, but she’s fond of the band Chameleon Circuit and I can see her knowing all of the words to the track Teenage Rebel. I also listened to my ‘death scenes’ playlist a lot while writing her.

3. What’s their worst childhood memory?
Visiting her parents in a mental hospital – she hated that.

4. If your character had a superpower, what would it be?
Lol, she already does. Kind of. She’s a Shifter, so she can Shift stuff (like time! which is awesome. and also matter and stuff). She wishes she had the Watcher’s gift of turning things invisible, and thinks pyrokinesis would be cool.

5. If your character crashed on an island with a bunch of other people, how would your character help the group survive?
She’d Shift them all to somewhere else. But I can imagine she’d just Shift herself and abandon them.

6. Are they married? If not, do they someday wish to be?
She’s like nineteen. I should hope not. I doubt she’ll ever get married, not after what I did to her at the end of Returning, but it’s possible. When I’m all famous and stuff, if you guys want to write fan fic in which Wyn gets married, go ahead. I shall read it and laugh.

7. What is a cause they would die for?
Pretty much anything. She doesn’t care very much.

8. Would they rather die fighting valiantly, or quietly at home?
Fighting. She doesn’t want to die with tubes in her.

9. If someone walked up to them and told them they were the child of the prophecy, would they believe them?
Yeah, probably. She’s egotistical, but more than that, she’s had enough weird things happen to her for that to seem pretty normal.

10. Do they prefer the country or the city?
 Country because there are fewer people, though it’s easier to hide in the city.

These questions come from Further Up and Further In, whose blog I found via Charley R!

There are new questions every month(?) and… stuff. Yeah. Head over there, ’cause I don’t know what I’m doing and am just trying to cover up for my lack of inspiration for posts.

NEW NOVEL!

Okay, so this is exciting for me. I’m writing something new. Like, totally new. And I did that a month or so ago but that was nothing like as cool as that, and also fizzled out after just three chapters because I didn’t get around to writing it. But this is going to be different.

(And I will go back to that one when I have finished. I promise.)

What’s this one about?

Well. Am I allowed to give you pictorial clues?

I’ll admit this has NOTHING of the mood of the book in it, but it’s a freaking cool picture, and if you know what it’s a picture of then you’ll know what my book is about. If you think you know, leave me a comment

The picture below is a bit of a big clue. It also fits more with the book itself (but the one above is delightfully arty), and gives a clearer impression of the storyline.

I’ll leave you with those – guess what I’m writing about this time!

Pictures via Google, as usual.

Outlining My Outlines

I had a comment on one of my recent posts:

Do you structure your stories or just sit down, start typing and let them grow organically?

Good question – especially since some days, I can’t think of  anything to write a blog post about! And today is one of those days. So, I’m going to address this question, even though it’s going to lead to a longer post than I really feel awake enough to write. *sigh* The things I do for you, lovely readers.

In the past, I’ve been what’s generally known as a ‘pantser’ – somebody who writes by the seat of their pants, doesn’t plan anything, and just sees what happens. It’s a fun way to write as you’re constantly being surprised by the plot, and you also tend to write faster as you want to know what happens next. However, it has its disadvantages. You’re more likely to get stuck halfway, and the editing afterwards is HORRIBLE because you have to sort out all the pacing that didn’t really work.

However, I have also written to proper outlines. It never worked out for me.

What I tend to do at the moment is a bit of a combination of the two. I started writing from an idea I had, and I wrote a couple of chapters. Then I sat down and thought about what I’d written and what could happen next, and wrote a brief three-line outline for each of the next three chapters. I wrote the first two of these – so still had an outline for the third left – and then outlined the next three.

This technique has some massive advantages if you’re like me and you don’t entirely know how you’re going to finish the book or who the murderer is, as it doesn’t require you to have the whole plot hammered out in advance but it means you always know what’s going to happen now and so are less likely to get into a hole while writing – you can just keep going. Always planning two or three chapters ahead also means that if you write more than you expected, you don’t run out, which is why I’d counsel against just outlining one chapter further.

That said, I didn’t use this technique for Watching, Destroying or Returning, my three favourite novels that I’ve written at the moment. Watching would have turned out very differently if I’d had an outline.

I started the thing in January 2010, wrote four chapters, then forgot about it completely until mid April, when I started writing it again. I couldn’t remember what I’d intended to write before, and without an outline I couldn’t recall that, so I turned it into something that is probably completely different from how the original would have turned out (especially since the old title no longer fitted at all and I had to change it). The others were the same. Returning in particular was interesting, because I wrote most of it on a boat in Norfolk / staying with a French family in France, and so it was all fragmented and in a notebook and I had no reference notes or anything and had a lot of [XX LOOK THIS UP] notes in the margins

Note, I’m talking about first drafts. Edits are a completely different matter.

You may know that I’ve rewritten Watching about six times now, and when I was starting the sixth draft just before Christmas, I knew it was going to be a major edit. I wrote an outline for that. I got about half way through, as until the end of Part 1 the only major change was the character of Mel, who now existed in the first half and hadn’t previously, and then sat down and basically, talked to myself on paper.

No, seriously. If you open my writing folder and go to the section labelled ‘notes for ‘Watching’ and ‘Destroying’ rewrites 2011/2012′, the first line on the piece of paper (save for the title), is this:

And the first thing I am going to do is outline what plot I have to go.

There are some points when I do appear to be talking to myself:

Oh, good, he can heal Leah’s arm. Yeah, cool. He does so.
Well, this is cosy. What next? Oh, fight off the midnight invasion by Courtiers ….

…. and so on – don’t want any spoilers here, ha ha!

This outline (which is actually from Chapter 10 of Part 2 onwards) is about a page and a half long, and I generally just followed a train of thought on the paper. Some things made it into the draft, some things I left out or modified. However, it did help me a lot. I was writing very quickly, while ill, to meet a deadline, and it was useful whenever I got stuck to be able to pull out the piece of paper and see that if I just got past this bit, I’d get to write whatever came next, and to KNOW what came next.

With Returning, while I was writing it I kind of had an idea how it was going to end, and what that would do to the characters, but it was just a question of whether or not that would fit. I’ve had things in the past that I’ve thought would be a great ending but in the end weren’t right considering what happened next. Returning needs a lot of tightening up and editing, but I’m keeping that ending. It was so painful and devastating and I wrote it in a notebook sitting on a bed in France and halfway through the most emotional bit my French penfriend came in to tell me it was dinner time and I had just completely forgotten how to speak French because that was my world right then and I have never felt that way about writing ever since but I hope I will some day. Yes, that sentence was four lines long. Bite me.

The novel I’m working on at the moment doesn’t have a title, so it’s harder for me to reference here. However, the first page in that section of my folder is titled Outline and has a three-line summary of every chapter from the Prologue to Chapter 8. yes, I know, you shouldn’t have prologues because readers skip them, whatever. Point is, I wrote the prologue before anything else and it was perfect but too short to be a chapter, and I wanted the actual book to start a couple of weeks later, so that became a prologue. Don’t shoot me. I ignore your literary rules!

Mwah ha ha ha.

Generally these chapter summaries sound very dry and uninteresting, although I like the sound of Chapter 5, since it starts with “Lunch with the contract killer!”. For those wondering, I’m currently halfway through chapter four, and have been for a couple of weeks.

I hope this answered the question. I don’t outline overall, but I look ahead as I go along so I always know what’s going to happen in the immediate future, even if I don’t know who the murderer is

Brought To You With A Northern Accent

“We’re not actually Northern. We’re from the Midlands.”
“We’re from South East London, you’re North of us.”

I realise I kind of abandoned this blog for about five days without any explanation for my absence, so I have opened this post with a transcript of a genuine conversation I had this week while on a course with the Royal Artillery Band. The so-called ‘Northerners’ were a couple of other teenagers whose accents we were all imitating by the end of the week – completely accidentally.

Before anybody begins to mock us Londoners for being very ignorant and very Southern, there were actually some genuine Northerners on the course. One was from Manchester. One was from Edinburgh, and that’s not even in the same country it’s so far North. Actually, she’s from Fife, which is even further away – she’s at uni in Edinburgh.

Anyway, I do have a proper reason for not being around. I was on this course, without a computer, and typing on a phone is EFFORT, okay?

Highlights of this week!

• Playing in a concert with the RAB. This was pretty epic, because we were listed in the programme and everything and it made us all feel like proper musicians, even if it was obvious to the audience that we weren’t since the rest of the orchestra was in uniform and we were in civilian clothing.
• Going to see the Woman in Black. It’s terrifying. It’s just such a jumpy film, and the whole way through there’s just texture music and suddenly BANG something jumps out of you. I’ve read the book, but this was so different that I never knew what was going to happen. It even ends differently. My friend Lydia screamed most of the way through and it was funny until I got to the point where I had to join her… I just couldn’t hold it in any more.
• Accidental accents on the bus. Words like ‘bus’, ‘up’, ‘Mum’ and ‘three’ no longer sounded like they were being said by Londoners, and we couldn’t do anything about it. It was hilarious – every time Eleanor said oop instead of up, her reaction would be, “What is WRONG with me?”

Lowlights of this week!

• No access to computers and to all you lovely people! Okay, but seriously though – I may be able to read emails on my phone, but I can’t archive them and replying takes so long it’s not even worth it, so when I got home I had a whole pile to file that I’d already read and about thirty new ones demanding my attention. Effort much.
• No privacy. Seriously. The room we were in was tiny with nine of us. SOOO looking forward to my own bed tonight.

But that’s enough of my rambling, rather useless posts. Shinier ones with pictures coming when I find the cable for my camera.

I Would Say I’m Weird But I’m Not

I often complain to those who know me well that my sister is very scathing and dismissive of a lot of what I do on the internet and frequently makes comments about my blog right when I’m not really in the right mood to answer her politely or even coherently, and so I’m taking quite a risk writing this as there’s about an 80% chance she’ll read it. However, some of what she says does have substance to it. Often she’s only pointing out things I noticed myself, although sometimes it’s something that hadn’t occurred to me.

We were discussing what people say about themselves on their blogs. Here’s a challenge, readers: go to the blog of any young writer you know, any teen with novels on their hard drive, and look at their bio.

“Most people think I’m weird.” “I’m quite a loner, possibly because of my eccentric behaviour.” “I lack the sanity that goes along with being a normal person and instead have a writer’s insanity.” “I’m weird.” “Generally, people think I’m a freak.”

These are examples from the top of my head, as I’m not picking on anyone in particular, but the fact is that young writers seem to feel it’s necessary for the world to know that they’re not normal. I was the same. My bio used to say that. I’m pretty sure I updated it, but I’m going to go and check it right after I publish this post in case I’m just being blatantly hypocritical.

One of the rules your English teachers impose upon you (and you never really know entirely what they mean) is show don’t tell. You’ve heard that, right? Well, it’s the same with your biography on your blog.

If you tell us that you’re a young writer, we are going to assume that you don’t have the same hobbies and personality traits as your peers, because otherwise the entire generation would be writers. If you tell us your favourite books and they’re all really difficult classics we’ve not actually heard of, we’re going to assume that you don’t have much of a soical life, since you wouldn’t have had time to read them otherwise.

We don’t need you to reiterate that you’re weird, by the way.

Recently, I was in charge of setting up a blog for St Mallory’s Forever (click to visit the awesomeness), the young adult boarding school mystery that I’m co-writing with Charley Robson and Saffina Desforges. I was writing the ‘Meet The Authors’ page, and wrote about myself. What was I supposed to say?

I could say I’m a nerd. But everyone says that, it hardly means anything any more. And since one of my main hobbies is reading… well, that’s obvious. I like Sherlock and Doctor Who, but do I just come out and start talking about my favourite TV programmes? That doesn’t seem very relevant to my author-ness. Hmm. How can I say that without actually saying that?

Writing a bio for a blog is important because it’s often the first thing people read if they went to the website to find out about you after seeing you mentioned somewhere. Therefore, I put quite a lot of thought into it.

I was talking about my hobbies and what I do when I’m not writing. I also wanted people to know the sort of TV I watch, and the genres that interest me. In the end, I settled on the following -

On top of all of this, she spends far too much time on Tumblr, generally reblogging anything relating to Doctor Who, Torchwood, or the BBC’s recent version of Sherlock.

I’m not sure it’s perfect, but it gets across the fact that I procrastinate (I spend time on Tumblr), and I’m a fan of DW, TW and Sherlock. In addition to that, you now know that I like sci-fi. Plus, if you didn’t know already that I was from the UK, there’s a slight hint here. Although these programmes are available in many other countries, they’re most popular in their home country, the UK. BBC Wales for the win!

As I have the administrator’s rights to the blog itself, I was also responsible for editing and uploading Charley’s bio. She sent me a draft, apologising for the length, and it opened like this:

Charley Robson is an eccentrically-inclined young author with a myriad of strange quirks and an even stranger background.

I know Charley quite well, so I know that she’s not like every other teenage author out there. But do the readers? Most of them don’t. Most of them have never even heard of her, despite the high praise her recently published short story has had in reviews. (I’d link to it, but it would just boost her ego.)

She’s eccentrically-inclined, yes. You only have to stay on the blog for about five minutes to know that – our second post on the site is an interview with her, which says a lot. So, we can cut that out, because you’ll know that soon. Strange quirks will explain themselves. A strange background is intriguing, though – it tells us she’s not just an ordinary girl growing up in an ordinary school. A ‘different’ home life is interesting and makes us want to know what someone has to say, as they can probably tell us something we don’t know.

I changed the first line of her biography, therefore, to read like this:

Charley Robson is a young author with an unusual background.

It not only helps the length issue, but it also says everything that needs to be said, don’t you think? We know her name, we know she’s a young author so is relevant to this book, and we know she’s got a slightly different background that makes us want to hear more.

I don’t claim to be a biography-writing expert, but I’m beginning to learn what you should and shouldn’t say online. It’s quite easy; I just imagine my sister reading it, and work out what to cut out from her imagined reactions.

And anyway, if everybody says they’re weird, doesn’t that mean none of us are? You can’t be different if you’re the same as everybody else.

Sneaky plug in bold to stop it being too sneaky! So you’re probably young writers out there, if you’re reading this (yes, I know there are exceptions). Head over to the ‘competitions’ tab on the right for a short story competition open to teens! I’ll be very pleased to see your entries.

TCWT: Love May Be In The Air…

… but is it in your novel? Or should it be in your novel?

It’s time for the Teens Can Write Too blog chain, and I’m afraid I’m cobbling this together in fifteen spare minutes before school, so it might not be quite up to standard. However, it’s probably an accurate representation of teen writing, since we all seem to be so busy all the time. This month’s prompt is:

What are your thoughts on romance for your typical genre? Do you tend to have a little, a lot, or none at all?

So, I don’t always write the same genre, which makes this one an ‘interesting’ question for me. I write a lot of YA fiction, by which I mean I’ve completed 9 (correct me if I’m wrong!) novels for teenagers, even if most of them were pretty useless. However, I’m also working on a crime novel at the moment, and some of those YA novels were fantasy while others were sci-fi… etc.

My first novel was a love story. It was my NaNoWriMo novel in 2009, and I started out with no plot and no characters on the 7th November – always a good plan, not. It turned into the story of Anna and Matt, one of whom is an alien and the other is half-fairy. So, a love story. Definitely romance in there. I think it’s the only one of my novels ever to have finished with a wedding: usually it’s a funeral, as some of my readers will be able to attest.

My second and third novels had significantly less romance in them. They were based around the story of The Lord of the Dance, and took elements from Celtic mythology and also the history of Irish dance in general. They weren’t very good, but I enjoyed writing them. As far as I can remember, there is no romance in the second of these, and only a very little in the first. It seemed out of place. These are probably aimed at young teens or children, around 10-13, which might have something to do with it. The NaNo novel mentioned above was probably aimed at 12-15s.

My fourth novel was definitely a love story. Watching. It still remains my favourite, as I’ve edited it six times – which is six times more than I’ve edited any of the others. It’s the story of Alex and Jennie, a fairy lover and a gifted human, a Watcher, and even if it doesn’t work out because, well, I like killing characters … it’s a love story. That one I’d aim at 14-17 year olds. Beginning to see the link here?

I could go on, but I won’t. I’ll just say that the two sequels to Watching (Destroying and Returning) both have some romance in them too, although when Bronwyn gets involved it’s infinitely more complicated, much to my distress when I was writing it. Beneath the Branches had romance in it. Figurehead did not, to the best of my knowledge, though I forget. The Quiet Ones did not.

I think romance should be included if it’s necessary. Sometimes, you can’t help it. I didn’t set out with my first novel to write a love story – I had no idea what to write about. It just happened. If your characters seem to be falling for each other and it’s not going to mess up your plot in a bad way (good ways are definitely allowed), then why not? But if you have to force them into it, or if the romance takes away from the storyline, don’t. Just don’t go there.

Also, a pet peeve is the whole ‘just friends’ thing. Just friends? I can’t remember the exact words, but one of my characters, Leah, has a bit of a Miriam moment and she says, “Just friends? It seemed an awful lot to me.”

Friendship isn’t like second-rate love, it’s a fantastic thing in its own right. People can be friends without having to be ‘just friends’. Best friends can be best friends without romantic interest. Sure, if your characters are of a certain age (read: HORMONAL teenagers), then they’ll probably fall for each other, but they don’t have to.

An interesting exercise is to write a novel that doesn’t have any romance, deliberately. To say, “Okay, I don’t want the whole falling in love thing. My characters are going to be best friends and that’s all.” I tried to do that with The Quiet Ones, and to some extent I think I succeeded. It’s a shame the thing needs such an overall edit before it even makes sense to me, to be honest.

So, to conclude – romance for romance’s sake doesn’t work for me because I don’t write romance novels. But if your characters happen to fall in love … well, these things happen, don’t they?

And it’s always more fun to kill them when there’s someone who will grieve.

Okay, sneaky promotion going in here! A message to all teen writers: the Saffina Desforges presents… short story competition is STILL open and will be until the 29th February. I’ve only had a couple of entries through so far, so please consider writing something! The prize is publication, and we all want that More information can be found here.

Okay, whatever, blog chain stuff.

Want to follow our blog tour? Here are the participating parties, day by day

February 5– http://noveljourneys.wordpress.com –Novel Journeys

February 6– http://lilyjenness.blogspot.com –Lily’s Notes in the Margins

February 7– http://kirstenwrites.wordpress.com –Kirsten Writes!

February 8– http://correctingpenswelcome.wordpress.com – Comfy Sweaters, Writing and Fish

February 9– http://delorfinde.wordpress.com –A Farewell to Sanity

February 10– http://thewordasylum.wordpress.com –The Word Asylum

February 11– http://weirdalocity.wordpress.com –From My Head

February 12– http://estherstar1996.wordpress.com –Esther Victoria1996

February 13– http://alohathemuse.wordpress.com –Embracing Insanity

February 14– http://greatlakessocialist.wordpress.com –Red Herring Online

February 15– http://goteenwriters.blogspot.com –Go Teen Writers (Honorary Participant)

February 16– http://insideliamsbrain.wordpress.com –This Page Intentionally Left Blank

February 17– http://oyeahwrite.wordpress.com –Oh Yeah, Write!

February 18– http://incessantdroningofaboredwriter.wordpress.com –The Incessant Droning of a Bored Writer

February 19– http://herestous.wordpress.com –Here’s To Us

February 20– http://teenscanwritetoo.wordpress.com –Teens Can Write Too! (We will be announcing the topic for next month’s chain)

Why We Care About Fictional Characters

It’s funny the way we care about fictional characters. I mean, we know they’re not real, but something inside us cares what happens to them. We want Frodo to destroy the ring without getting killed; we want Jack to let Owen back on the Torchwood team; we want Sherlock not to fall. It matters to us.

Why does it matter to us?

Fictional characters are fictional. They don’t exist, they really don’t. Often, however, they outlive their authors. Walk up to a random person in the street (not one wearing fake ears, the LotR fandom do not count in these circumstances), and say ‘Gandalf’. See what they say. Now walk up to someone else, equally randomly, and say, ‘JRR Tolkien’. You can imagine the responses you’d get, can’t you?

It’s partly because there have been films, and the Lord of the Rings has permeated our culture quite deeply, but there’s more to it than that. How many of us really look at a book in a shop and say, “I’ll buy it because the author has a cool name”? (Okay, I’ve done this. Shh.) We don’t care who the author is, but we care about the characters and what happens to them.

When Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, he got hate mail. A lot of it. As did the magazine where it was published, and lots of people cancelled their subscriptions – and then took to the streets with black armbands, showing their public grief for the death of someone who hadn’t been alive in the first place. They didn’t care who knew that they were upset – it had to be known!

When Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss made Sherlock out to be a hoax and Moriarty an actor in The Reichenbach Fall, they started an internet movement of I Believe In Sherlock and Moriarty was Real. Posters, graffiti, fan art – it took over Tumblr for several days and it is still what mostly comes up on my dash. People aren’t content to let fictional characters be fictional characters, because they care what happens to them. If they die, or are publicly shamed, people care. They want the world to know that they believe in Sherlock Holmes.

Dobby died, and how many people cried at that? (Not me, but I’m the exception.)

Anakin Skywalker’s mother died, and how many people were miserable with him?

Kirk’s dad sacrificed himself in the first ten minutes of the newest Star Trek film for the sake of his newborn son and his wife, and who cried?

We care what happens to fictional characters.

Perhaps it’s because characters are just like ourselves, only better. They’ve not these superhumans, because they’ve got failings we recognise from ourselves, like an inability to conjugate French verbs correctly, a mental block against simultaneous equations, or asthma attacks that always trigger when they’re least convenient. But at the same time, they always find a way to better those failings, don’t they?

They go on to make something of their lives, to do something worthwhile that will help other people. We want to believe we can do that. If the characters with our problems can do it, we think, we’ll be able to do it too. Oh, and how did they get around that problem? Like this? Well, maybe we can try it too. It might not work, but nothing else has either. Let’s do it.

And from that mindset we get even more wrapped up in a character’s emotion, because their struggle is our struggle. If we don’t will them to succeed, no one will will us to succeed. That’s what we think. They have to succeed because that gives us hope that we can, too.

Of course, sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, and that depends on whether the author likes happy endings or they’re as sadistic as me and like to kill and/or torture all the characters at the last minute, preferably following the latter up by locking them in another world away from everyone they know.

But while we will them to succeed, we care what happens to them.

They’re like portraits of ourselves, with the warts, but not the bags under their eyes.

We care, because we know Moriarty was real.

Miriam’s Illness Survival Guide

It’s the time of year when everybody is ill. Your YouTube subscriptions feed is lagging because all of the vloggers you follow are too ill to make videos; blog posts seem to arrive even more infrequently than usual, despite multiple refreshings of your inbox; your blanket is permanently in use and you don’t feel well enough to do ANYTHING. Especially not when it involves being upright.

Never fear! I have the ultimate survival guide.

YOU WILL NEED:

• Torchwood. 
  This is basically non negotiable. However, I’m aware that some people may be incapable of watching anything containing Captain Jack Harkness without fainting from joy, or are in the unfortunate situation of living somewhere where Torchwood is unavailable, or even are too young to watch it, as it is rated a 15 in the UK. In these circumstances, as I like to cater to all audiences, it may be substituted for the more family-friendly Doctor Who, or something of equal awesome like Sherlock.
  (I would hope that intelligent readers such as my own would be aware that in order to watch Torchwood, one will need suitable apparatus)
• Tea
  Again, I like to cater to all audiences, so if you don’t like tea (and I was one of you poor people until November last year, so I will not judge you… yet), you can substitute this for a hot beverage of your choice. Under these circumstances, a Lemsip may be advisable, though not particularly tasty.
• Throat sweets
  (or other medicine)
• A blanket
  This is not strictly necessary, but may make you more comfortable.

A Step-By-Step Survival Guide

1. Put a dressing gown over your pyjamas (do NOT get dressed. Definitely detrimental to recovery) and go to the sink. Fill the kettle with water and turn it on. When the kettle has boiled, make tea (or other beverage).
2. Make your way to wherever you intend to watch Torchwood. Place your mug on a table or coaster elsewhere, and load the DVD. Select an episode. If you intend to be ill for several hours, select ‘play all’. (There are only going to be three or four episodes on each disc anyway.)
3. As the episodes commence, drink your tea. These must be done in this order.
4. When your tea is finished, you should be about twenty minutes or so into the episode, allowing time for the drink to cool. Wait around five minutes, to allow the taste of tea to fade from your mouth, and then take your throat sweet or other medicine.
5. Huddle under the blanket to keep warm while continuing to watch Torchwood. Text friends in shock when Owen appears to be dead. Laugh when he describes himself as a headless chicken who hasn’t yet stopped walking around. Cry at how he and Tosh just seem to be incapable of getting together (but be secretly pleased, because you want Owen for yourself).
6. Watch more Torchwood.
7. Pause Torchwood, fill the kettle, and make another cup of tea.
8. Restart Torchwood, while drinking tea.
9. Rinse and repeat.

And there we go.

If you still feel ill when this is over, return to this blog post.

There. Do you feel better now?

Ill Miriam Is Ill

Normal posting will be resumed.

At some point.

Eventually.

When being upright isn’t, like, way too difficult to even contemplate.

But I did write about a book called Fracture so if you want to read about books then it’s here.