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Saturday, June 27, 2009
Looking forward to the holiday
It's three weeks till the end of term. It's five weeks till Abstract is off work. It's five and a bit weeks till we go on holiday.
I know these numbers cos we are all officially exhausted. Everything I do is taking longer than usual, which means I'm working for longer for less result (so frustrating). I have critique partners waiting for critiques, and books waiting to be written. And even my virtual bookshelf on Facebook is way overdue for being updated. You know things are bad when you can't keep up with your hobby.
Anyway, for our holiday this year we're going for a week to one of those holiday village places, staying in a big static caravan, near to a huge swimming pool, within walking distance of a beach, and with the opportunity to do climbing and archery and eat pizza and go to Starbucks. I'm really looking forward to it! We've never done something like that before, and it's a bit of a gamble, because if you go to one of these places and you don't like the free onsite activities or your fellow-holidaymakers or the pizza and Starbucks and evening entertainment (that last is really a gamble), you're kind of wasting your money.
On the definite pluses, a beach is a beach is a beach, there will certainly be other children/young teenagers there for the girls to make friends with, and hey - Starbucks is always good, right?
And I love caravans. We've splashed out on the most luxurious option for once, with real beds and a nice kitchen and a flatscreen TV (better than we have at home, probably!). And I am so looking forward to a few lie-ins, and going to the pool, and having morning coffee in Starbucks (product placement! send me free coffees, yes?), and going to the beach, and maybe trying out archery and letting the girls try rock climbing, and playing on weird little water-bike-type machines in the pool, and putting on my new pretty RNA conference dinner dress and walking to the bar for dinner without having to have the "who's driving tonight" conversation.
Ooh, yes, new dress. I found it the other day and thought I'd better snap it up before it went. It's cute. Pictures will come at some point after the conference. I need something to cheer me up for the dinner, after all, as I have to give back the Elizabeth Goudge trophy. The side of my computer is going to look naked afterwards.
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| Monday, June 22, 2009
What writers do when they're not writing. With added sparkles!
The first side of my clippykit bag is finished. Look! Proof!
This is me modelling it (if you click on the picture you'll get a bigger resolution):
And this is its close-up:
 The colour doesn't show up at its best on our red sitting-room carpet, but all the same - see, how pretty!
The other side is a work in progress. It's going to have miniatures of my cover art, and my web address in glitter pen across the centre. One side for prettiness, one side for Cold Hard Advertising. Cold Hard glittery Advertising.
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| Friday, June 19, 2009
Some people are so lazy...
...that they just don't blog for days and days.
This week I've mostly been decorating my clippykit bag. It's super pretty. Pics will come!
I've also, around the edges of work and cooking and cleaning cat hair off every surface in the world (seriously, if the cats were bald the cleaning I do would be reduced by approximately seventy-three percent - scientific fact), been working on the sequel to Heart of the Volcano, approving the official Samhain blurb for Heart of the Volcano (squee - the next big excitement will be cover art!), buying my train tickets for the Romantic Novelists' Association Conference in July, and talking about skincare with Kate Johnson.
(Oh, funny. I just Googled Kate to grab her blog link, and found this headline: When it comes to fulfilling the criteria for WAGs, Kate Johnson fits the bill.)
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| Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Understanding racial persecution by way of X-Men
Part of many political conversations taking place at the moment:
Me: The thing is, at the moment the BNP are saying they'd just offer to pay people who are not white to leave Britain. But people who are against the BNP think that if they couldn't get enough people to leave that way, they'd start trying to make them leave. So although at the moment they're saying it's just voluntary -
Sparkler: Like in X-Men, when they said the cure was voluntary, but then actually they started forcing it on people!
Me: Yes! Yes, exactly! (is very impressed)
Given the Holocaust theme that runs through the X-Men films, I think it's wonderful that watching them gave Sparkler an illuminating perspective on the dangers of fascism. And I'm proud she made that connection for herself.
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They came first for the immigrants...
On and off all of yesterday I had this variation of the line from Niemoller's poem running through my head.
I don't want to paint things worse than they are: apparently the BNP actually got fewer votes than they did at the last European election and it was the low turn-out overall that gave them enough of a proportion of the vote to get two MEPs elected. And at the beginning of the Hope Not Hate campaign, the organisers were worried they'd get six or seven MEPs, so the fact that they only got two is obviously a good thing.
But they won their two seats on - in my opinion, even above the expenses scandal and the Iraq war - the issue of immigration. And for so many British people to vote on that - a fear-driven, tabloid-fuelled, artificially inflated sense of threat from "the other", the people who are "not like us", even when "they" are staffing the hospitals and doing the jobs that someone needs to do and contributing to the economy...oh, you can call it "disenchantment" or a protest vote, or say it's Labour's fault, or the fault of the people who didn't vote. But to me, it means I'm living in a country with a lot of people who are either racist or too blinkered (or who read the tabloids too much) to know they're racist. And Niemoller's poem starts going round in my head again.
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| Saturday, June 06, 2009
Immi's beauty tips
Because, you know, just so beautiful.
The thing is, I have really, really awkward skin. The normal recommendations and products just don't work. As a teenager, I was reduced to washing my face with bicarbonate of soda and cooking salt, because everything else just made my skin worse. Nowadays, doctors seem to offer one of the types of Pill which stop acne. Back then, my experience was that they offered peroxide-based gels and told you that it would clear up in a few years (thanks, doctors).
Now, I seem to have finally worked out a good balance of stuff to do and stuff to use. Periodically it all goes wrong and I have to work it out all over again, but right now it's pretty good.
Starting from the inside, working out:
- Water. I know, how dull is that? But I've noticed that when I've managed to drink that prescribed amount of eight glasses a day, my skin looks significantly better. I know scientists are now saying you don't need the full eight glasses a day (for which mercy let us give thanks), but all the same, that was what I noticed. I don't usually manage it, of course. I'm currently trying to have four glasses a day, and that, heaven knows, is dull enough. Someone once told me that not only must I have eight glasses a day, but that whenever I had a cup of tea or coffee or glass of wine I must have an extra glass of water to make up for the terrible poisonous effect of the caffeine or alcohol. Good heavens, if I did that I can only say you'd have to imagine me as a sort of gluggling water-bag - of course, with glowing skin, but would that actually make a gluggling water-bag attractive? I think not.
- Clinique Anti-Blemish Solutions Cleansing Bar. At this point, if you're a beauty therapist, you're probably going (as so many beauty therapists seem trained to say) "Oh no no, Clinique is the worst thing to use, it strips your skin and it's too harsh and it creates blemishes!" Well, no. If I don't use Clinique I get spots. If I do use it, I don't. I cannot see how this is a bad thing. I'm pretty sure a lot of these people's training is actually sponsored by Dermalogica, because they seem to like to tell you how much better that is. And I was all for Dermalogica (hypoallergenic, no animal testing, eco-packaging) until, that is, I found that I was allergic to it.
- Clinique (yes, sorry, I have embraced the dark side) Superdefense SPF25 Age Defense Moisturizer. Oh dear, is that one of the signs of being in your mid rather than early thirties, that you start to look kindly at things called "age defense"? Actually, it's more the SPF25 that I look kindly at - I'm allergic to lots of sunscreens so it's fabulous to have one that's safe for my skin, and that I can just put on instead of moisturiser and forget about.
- Benefit benetint for lips and cheeks. This is wonderful stuff. I'm freakishly pale - if I don't wear blusher people ask me if I'm ill - and most blushers stand out on my skin, looking like, well, blusher on freakishly pale skin. benetint makes it looks as if I have naturally flushed skin - like, you know, a normal person. Let me tell you, a veneer of normality cannot be prized too highly.
- Cover cream. Currently the one I'm using is Flawless Skin Protecting Concealer from the Body Shop (don't you love the names of these products?), in the shade which, if they were not being polite, would be called Freakishly Pale. Because they actually want to sell it, though, they just call it Shade 01.
I'm also trying out, because I bought them as part of special offers, Clinique Turnaround Concentrate Visible Skin Renewer (which promises to "continually unveil brighter, more radiant skin" - yay!) and Neal's Yard Remedies Rose Formula Hydrating Eye Cream, which stimulates "collagen and elastin levels, smoothing and strengthening the skin" - yay again!
But only modified yays, because although I love the way they feel I have not yet noticed that I am brighter, more radiant, smoother or stronger.
So if you, like me, have oily, blemish-prone, 36-year-old, freakishly pale skin, think of this as your public service announcement of the day. If you don't, I can't help you (and in fact I may even hate you a little).
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| Tuesday, June 02, 2009
"Would you like a leaflet? Thank you!"
...is what I've been saying, over and over for most of two hours in a local city centre, giving out anti-BNP leaflets on behalf of Hope Not Hate.
 I met one man who said, "Let me tell you, I'd vote for Hitler before I'd vote for any of that lot we've got at the moment", which I found surprising and somewhat alarming, and another man who told me that Britain was too tolerant and that you could be put in prison for just expressing an opinion, and that lack of respect and knife crime among young people was because of immigration and also because the young people of today don't have the fighting spirit they used to have in the sixties when it was okay to make jokes about the Irish (I wasn't personally convinced that a lack of fighting spirit leads to more knife crime) And that the British Empire was a good thing. Oh, and he quoted crime statistics from the BBC website at me, and when I countered with crime statistics from the British Crime Survey from the Home Office website he told me I shouldn't believe everything I read and that I shouldn't trust statistics.
He was planning on voting Lib Dem, not BNP, though, so I didn't have to use my awesome powers of political correctness to take away his free speech.
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Scented Danger
a Red Riding Hood Anthology story
from Drollerie Press
Within the Darkness
Blood of the Volcano
Shadow-Weaver
A Cloak of Feathers
Linked
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