Riding the Twatter Wave, Tadpole Inspired Art and PhD Progression

I joined Twitter last week, Thursday, as mentioned at the end of the last blog post. I had this idea that I wasn’t going to be micro-blogging every few minutes, like when I changed the TV channel or got a cup of tea. Well three days and 50 tweets later I realised how easy it is to get sucked in. I had to rein it in as I realised that I wouldn’t get anything else done at all. The twatter addiction wreaked havoc with my facebook page once I’d found the app that automatically sent the tweets to fb, and I almost forgot to post a popandcrisps blog this week. What with a major deadline today for my PhD progression report, I really should not have been twatting around on the internet. But that seems to be a pattern for me. The more pressure I have, the more distractions I find.

[Diversion to Tadpole Art]

Also this week as mentioned briefly last post, I have been indulging in some new art. Inspired by the tadpoles (now living in a <==lovely habitat in shade on the patio), I began some ‘dotty pictures’ as Alys calls them. It was her that developed this technique a few years ago and I wanted to have a go at it but never got around. She had read that Australian Aborigine art is made with points of sticks rather than brushes, so she uses the ‘wrong’ end of a paintbrush to do the dots.

Using basic emulsion paints in bright coloured tester pots, she made an amazing moon phases design for a magical board and this week she decided to do another one. As the table was already set up for make’n’do, I dug out a blank wooden box from my art trunk and decided to join in.

I took photos as I was going along so will be posting them to my website in a ‘how to make a frog box’ page on my website art section once I’ve got around to it. It is tadpole inspired in part because the tadpoles were the first things I dotted and also because they are a little bit dotty themselves. Aboriginal art uses the natural world as inspiration: plants, animals, mountains, moon and sun etc. I have a lovely crocodile pic on a bag, which I bought in Amsterdam, so frogs seemed appropriate.

Once the box was done, I had got addicted to the hypnotic effect of dotting (and the welcome distraction from stress of progression report) and searched my brain for other things to dot. Walking the dog by the river I saw piles of flat stones and struck lightening. It’s become something of a production line as this pic below will demonstrate.

I will be varnishing these before putting them outside in the cobbles on the new patio, and saving some for gifts for friends who appreciate home-made presents.

Now The Boy has joined in with his own designs. I love sitting at the table working on some art with The Boy. He talks to me about stuff and it’s nice family time. No stress.

There is something relaxing and meditative about the repetitive dotting. It reminds me a bit of knitting, and the end results look a bit like knitting too, don’t you think? If you squint.

[Back to PhD]

So this week has been a round of dotting and tweeting while one row of dots dry, doing a bit more of my report (and a paper I have to write as well) and back to dotting. My paper, and the majority of my progression report, is about the study I ran this year on the dream-lag theory. This is related to very interesting phenomena whereby events that happen during your day become incorporated into your dreams in a ‘day residue’ effect – noted by Freud. But some events (and there are various theories about why these are different) don’t pop up in your dreams until a few days or a week later – noted by Jouvet. If there is something you’re learning and particularly if it is a practical concentrated task, then dreaming about it might actually improve your performance. This is the nucleus of my PhD topic.

If you’re interested in this then the people to read up are Jouvet (in French but there are translations), Nielsen and Stickgold. There is one study by Stickgold et al that struck me because he used Tetris as the task, and as I was addicted to Tetris years ago and it did pop up in my dreams so this seems very relevant. I also remember dreaming about knitting when I was knitter obsessed at around the 13-16 age and was churning out a jumper in a week. There was no internetz back then and I needed something to do with my hands that was socially acceptable!

I have been dreaming about Twitter since Tuesday night, but have not yet remembered a dream with dotting. Will ponder the significance of this if/when dotting appears in my dreams. And wonder about whether twitting is different to dotting and in what ways.

So the report as I said is due today, and I’m presenting to my progression board in a couple of weeks. I haven’t submitted it yet as I’m waiting for feedback from my supervisor on the draft I emailed to him at around 11.10 last night (once I had finally stopped twattering and dotting and realised that I just had to write the bloody thing). Then I was back on twitter again for one last tweet and listening to The Menstruator’s padcast which was strangely soothing, but not recommended for anyone who is easily offended.

[Diversion to Female Genitalia]

Twitter has increased the number of times I use the word twat exponentially as it is not a word I am accustomed to using. Don’t get me wrong – I am happily offensive with regard to women’s genitalia but prefer the C word as it causes much more offence (though also blocks websites hence my euphemism when writing). I am interested in etymology and note that the C word was not offensive 400 years ago but as easy as pussy is now, and even appears in Shakespeare. Quim was the offensive word of choice back then, and it has all but disappeared from modern mouths, for shame! It does pop up every now and then, and is in Joyce’s Ulysses according to wiktionary. I first heard of quim because there was a magazine of that name edited by Lulu Belliveau and I submitted a story to it, which was published in The Common Denominator (which Lulu also edited) in 1996.

But why am I offensive about women’s genitalia, surely as a lesbian I should be loving and gentle (and all those other things that I’m not going to blog about for fear of blockings)? Of course I am, but when I say I’m offensive, I mean that people hearing me are offended, as people often are offended at the very thought of a lesbian (unashamed living among us!) and my mere existence may be offensive, and *shock* that I may speak openly about genitalia. Twat to that. Dick, prick, pillock, plonker… I could go on but would rather not, are all mildly offensive banter insults yet any reference to women’s bits is Not Polite. And what a lot of people don’t realise is that the word vagina, which as the medical term is what a lot of people use when they are absolutely forced to discuss their bits, is derived from a Latin vulgar expression meaning ‘place to sheath your sword’. As I said to the lovely Sky Arts woman in the tent at Hay last week, while explaining quim as my favourite word, words have this nasty little habit of changing over time.

So yes I am using twat, twatt and twatter often when referring to twitter just because it’s fun to do and for no other reason. I can’t lay claim to the invention of this although I did come up with it all by myself. Once I started using it as an alternative to twitter, I noticed that there are other people already doing that, The Lesbian Mafia being one (although listening to Sandi, it sounds like ‘twot’). I don’t use twat as an insult or threat, like people say ‘he’s a twat’ or ‘I’m going to twat you’ because that is offensive to twats. I’m more likely to say that I’m twatting around like I say fannying around, meaning that I’m faffing or jumping from one thing to another and not really doing anything, which seems appropriate for twitter. But may be offensive to women’s genitalia? Does this imply that they’re not really doing anything? Oh dear, I will have to think about that. *sigh* language use is such a a trickster.

[Back to Twitter]

But what am I twattering on about? I’m not telling everyone what I’m doing all the time but a lot of things going through my mind get tweeted. And I hadn’t realised how compelled I would be to answer other people’s twittering and retweet (when you repeat something that someone else has twittered). People are retweeting my tweets now as well, which does feel good. I also discovered these hashtags after reading the lovely Stephen Fry’s advice and am dutifully posting #followmestephen at least once per day until he sees it and follows me. The thing about following is that it does seem as if a lot of people are on there just to recruit followers. Like with Facebook and Myspace, there’s a popularity contest thing that goes on with people feeling more important if they’ve got a lot of followers. That’s not the reason I’m recruiting followers, I’m one of the people who want to publicise my wares and thinking that this way I will reach more potential purchasers of my book or maybe even a film director who will option it or someone famous who will give me some promotion.

[Selective Following]

I have various theories already on how to best filter for quality follows. First off I followed all the famous people I’m a fan of, so Ellen (2nd most popular twatter it appears), Pink, Terry Pratchett, and my darling Stephen Fry. Then I picked up on loads of LGBT and news feeds to pander to my on-the-button habit and then went after literary people: Penguin, Faber Books and other publishers and small presses like Pocket Books, book-review groups and other websites, newspapers like The Guardian, radio shows like The Today Programme. To see more of any of these, check my tweets for today as I’ve been linking to them.

I found this place called Twitpipe which is amazing. To any internetz junkie just go there to see the sweetshop even if you’re not a tweep (twitter user) because it will hook you with the realtime refreshes. So you type in a word or phrase to one or all of three boxes and it gives you all the tweets currently being tweeted about that. This way I found a load of lesbian book readers to follow. Watching all three flow is like sitting in the foyer at the BBC Wales headquaters in Llandaf watching all the channels on a row of muted TVs. Hypnotic. Wefollow is another useful site where you can go and add yourself with three tags, then search on people using tags. A bit annoying that you can’t search on more than one tag, e.g. lesbian+writer. That would be a good suggestion for an upgrade.

Today is #FollowFriday and I feel compelled to promote my followers. And hope that they return the favour. Tweeps (or twps as I affectionately call them, this being the Welsh for slightly dimwitted) have a tendency to automatically follow you if you follow them, so following these lesbian book lovers got me a few more followers and perhaps potential readers. I notice my number of followers jumping up and down and up again as people follow me and then unfollow me and more people follow me. Perhaps they follow me automatically and then realise that they don’t want me after all when they see my blurb or my tweets. I try not to be too much of a sheep with it and will follow people who follow me only if they look interesting. I initially got a lot of follows from people trying to sell things and porn inevitability and blocked some of these. But I’ve started getting follows from relevant people who’ve obviously seen me following others or seen my tweeps and think I’m interesting. I just got an unsolicited follow from HarperCollinsUK so obvs I am a worthwhile person after all (lol). They probably followed me from seeing me following other publishers. But are we all following each other around in circles?

[Connected]

I started following the people who were following the famous people, but this got tedious. I noticed that a lot of famous people (darling Stephen Fry excepted) tend to follow less people than they had followers so that made me wonder, who are these famous people following? So I went onto who Ellen follows and found a whole load more famous people! Woot. I am not a famous person junkie or anything but I have my favourite celebs, usually authors, musicians, artists or someone who is actually talented rather than being famous-for-being-famous, and it’s nice to have tweets from them streaming past me, makes me feel more connected. And that’s the point of twitter, the feeling connected. Because it’s all about interactivity now isn’t it?

It is not only teens and tweens riding this wave, as with blogging there are a fair number of mature tweeters with things to say about the world and how we may change it. I checked out #hackedu via the Time Magazine article which has a lot to say about comfort social networking as well as the ability for conference ideas to disseminate in real time. Although currently #hackedu is all twps twittering about how they followed it because Time told them to, so not quite sure whether I’ll be able to find any actual stimulating education discussion among all the twpsin.

[Literary]

And it’s not just the bite-sized info, there is also a fair amount of literariness, such as Twitter Haiku. I was inspired to try and write a twitter novel, seeing as you get blooks now maybe there could be a twook? (That is another annoying twatter habit: the propensity to make up new words that begin with tw.) But then I found out that the twitter novel has already been done, several times. I have tried the Very Short Story whereby you have to write a story within one tweet (140 characters inc spaces) and add the #vss hashtag (so in fact it’s 135 characters). That’s fun, my latest one is: They narrowly escape tragic death. After the celebrations they begin to disappear one by one. Only I survive, but is it me killing them? #vss I do wonder though whether that is more of a premise/blurb than a story. But like I said, it’s fun and it gets my writer-juices flowing.

[Back to PhD and close]

I have now heard back from my supervisor and submitted my report. Huzzah! Yip-yip-yip *dancing around the living room*. *falls over exhausted* I always forget how much it takes out of me.

Well I’d better sign off as this has become TEH LONGEST BLOG POST EVA. Perhaps this is due to the 140 restriction I’ve been under this week. I am editing with some sub-headings to make it easier to read. Congratulations to anyone who waded through the whole lot. I admire your devotion to my outpourings.

One last thing to say: I am definitely not joining that second life thing. I am already far too busy in my first life.

Busy Half Term With The Boy (blogging for LGBT families)

One of the things I like about my new status of PhD student is the flexibility to stay at home (or actually not at home much!) with my son when it’s the school holiday. I don’t blog too much about The Boy as this is an author blog and I try to stick to publicity stuff and info about writing so don’t talk too much about personal stuff (fnar, okay: I don’t talk about The Boy). The other reason of course is due to the agreement that Alys and I have that his name is never mentioned online and his photo isn’t displayed, hence referring to him as The Boy which is not the postmodern affectation that some may think.

Another very good reason that I haven’t blogged about every little tantrum and trauma that he puts me through is that I respect his privacy. I don’t blog about arguments I’ve had with my lover or friends who’ve dissed me, and I don’t blog about The Boy. I hope that some day when he’s old enough to blog himself (or whatever new wave twittering goes on in the next decade) he’ll offer me the same courtesy.

So a one-time-only special offer blog about The Boy, or at least about the things we’ve done this week and how much I love the little money-drain, is in order for the Blogging for LGBT Families day.

Most of the time I don’t think of myself as a lesbian mother, although this is a label I have used. Most of the time I don’t think of myself as a lesbian or as a mother, although I live the life, I’m not continually conscious of the role. It’s just normal for me. Perhaps it’s because I compartmentalise things so well and think of ‘lesbian’ as being to do with my writing rather than my family. Only when I’m confronted with someone reacting negatively towards me because they think I have no right to existence or if I do then it has to be under a stone with no contact with children or other good citizens, or if I see others being treated like this, do I snap-to and challenge that assumption. What annoys me is that when people think of a lesbian mother, they’re thinking somehow that we’re different to other mothers, that we’d be doing something inappropriate or abusive towards our children.

Ninety-nine percent of my waking life is not thinking of lesbianism, if lesbianism is equated with sex. Contrary to the opinion of people who don’t know lesbians, ninety-nine percent of my life is not about sex, it’s about working, getting things done and mostly about The Boy. Where is he, who’s looking after him, what does he need, when do I need to pick him up, what will he need for tomorrow, is he happy, has he had enough to eat, is he eating his vegetables, is he asleep yet, how much TV has he watched today… et cet. et cet. ad infinit. People who don’t know lesbian mothers act surprised when they realise this – hey, she really is a mother just like us!

We belong to a great lesbian mothers group here in Cardiff which is mainly babies and toddlers so The Boy sometimes feels a bit out of place, but we like to be supportive and Alys being a midwife wants to be involved and we both love babies and all sorts of reasons. Lots more lesbian parents are around now than there used to be, or is it that there is more visibility? When The Boy was a baby, we fell in the gap between the lesbian network of pubs’n’clubs and the mother’n’toddler groups who stared aghast when we turned up together. Two women? But, but which of you is the mum? Not that I’m bitter, I’m more bitter about the fact that our local Tesco started stocking gluten-free products just when he grew out of his allergy (see, that’s my being-a-real-mother thing again). I’m very happy that there are more lesbians, more lesbian parents and more facilities for us. The more the merrier, and the less likely we’ll get those double-takes. And eventually people will stop asking how he was conceived when they finally realise how rude that is and you wouldn’t ask that question of a heterosexual couple you’d just met.

Since we had a civil partnership, he calls me his step-mum which is a lot easier for both us and the people we talk to. Between us, I’m Mummy Josie, or lately MJ which is more cool, but when he talks about me to other people I’m his step-mum. Having a label like that makes people comfortable, because otherwise I was a spare part. As his main carer when Alys was working a lot and I was part-time, I was just accepted as his mother when it was me and him, but then I’d get the questions about the birth and whether I breast fed and stuff, and would have to say actually I didn’t have him. So then I’d get reactions as if I’d deceived them somehow.

Right I’m straying off the point again now, but you see why I don’t usually blog about this stuff as I could keep on going forever. And I’m not an angry dyke. Or at least I am an angry dyke but the things that I’m usually angry about are how I always get the shopping trolley with the dodgy wheel, or how people who attend the church opposite our house (oh yes, welcome to my personal hell) park their cars across my drive and block me in, is that Christian?

So back to the point, this week has been a glut of make’n’do, tadpole care and festival attending as only life with a ten-year-old can be. Tuesday we went to the Urdd (Youth Eisteddfod and for anyone not in Wales that means a music and arts festival) which was good fun but my feet were killing me when I got home. Wednesday was raining fit to flood but we still managed to take the dog down to the river and collect a bucket of pond weed for the tadpoles currently living in a tub under the sink. And fell down the bank and got covered in mud but had the best time. Then we started painting some Australian style pictures, a dragon for The Boy and frogs/tadpoles for me.

Yesterday Alys had to go to work so we cadged a lift to Bristol because The Boy had a free ticket for @Bristol (free so long as I paid full-price). We took the ferry which was ace, I never knew Bristol was that cool! It was like Amsterdam all over again, with the houseboats and everything. I recommend the ferry definitely, you don’t even pay tourist hyped prices, it’s just a few pounds like the bus. The Boy loved the ferry as I knew he would, and loved @Bristol too. He’d been there with school (hence the free ticket) so he could show me around importantly. I’m continually surprised at how much information his head holds as he is a collector of factoids, but I shouldn’t really be as I know who he takes after. Between me and Alys he hasn’t got a hope in hell of being anything but super-genius.

Today we went to the Hay Festival. The Boy and me and Auntie Carole watched a man called Hugh talking about hedgehogs which was excellent fun while Alys went to a very important and clever writing people thing. We saw the Bookchase man again and told him how much we loved the game since we bought it at last year’s Hay Fest and play it all the time. We also went into Hay town for the ace second hand bookshops that are there all year around and the alternative Hay Fest in the castle where the clothes stall that was there last year (and I got my lovely purple trews from) was there again this year. I got two pairs, hurrah for spending sprees! Also a total of 13 books, 5 second hand and only 2 full price. Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger had to be bought and it’s the first book in a long time that I’ve bought in hardback on publication week without even reading the blurb. Hey, it’s Sarah Waters, do I need to say any more?

I would dearly love to go and see Sarah Waters, Steven Fry and many more, but I took The Boy to hedgehogs and then bought him some more Beano annuals for his collection. I keep telling myself that it won’t be many years before he decides he doesn’t want to hang out with me any more and I’ll have all the time to myself to do my own stuff then. I don’t want to ignore him now and then regret it later. I try to write while he’s in school and after he’s gone to bed and the rest of the time we do stuff, even if it’s just watching Spongebob together or playing board games. We do the things that he wants to do. Which lately often involves me crawling through mud for crucial tadpole reasons.

So I think I’ve earned my mummy points pretty much this week. Next week I shall be mostly lying down in a dark room.

Except right now I feel so full of adrenaline. It might be that Hay coffee…

All of a Twitter
Just tagged on the end of this post is my new Twitter thingy. I succumbed at last and set up the account yesterday. http://twitter.com/josie_henley

I’m a Google common search term!

Searching my name on Google is a little hobby as some readers may already know from a previous post where I mentioned this. I recommend to anyone who has even the slightest web presence to try it out (unless you have an exceedingly common name in which case it’s likely to be tedious as you wade through references to all the not-yous). It is not just an egomaniac thing, but is helpful to see where I’m being talked about, if any of my work is reproduced without my permission for instance and where my book is mentioned. Now it’s on Tesco and other book sites which I’m quite pleased about though no idea whether this increases sales, as it’s not actually in the Tesco stores.

On my website I have a little button ‘Google me!’ in the top left of many of my pages, and I usually use this. However, I was already in Google today so just started to type in my name. And this is where it gets interesting. If you’re a Google user you may know that as you type something into the Google search box, a dropdown appears offering a number of choices, and for each letter you type this becomes more specific. Sometimes this predictive text thing gets on my nerves (especially on text messages) but in this case it can be useful to select one of the options rather than having to type in full.

So when I type in Josie, the first option that appears is Josie Lawrence, who is actually a heroine of mine ever since she first appeared on our TV screens when I was a teen. As well as being clever, funny, beautiful etc. she is also from Sandwell which is close to where I was born, and of course there’s the name-sharing thing, Josie being quite an unusual name when I was growing up. Big disappointment when I found out that her real name is Wendy (thanks a lot Wikipedia!). There are a number of other famous Josies in the list including Josie D’Arby.

Then if I start typing my surname, at ‘He’ I get another list of Josies and Josie Henley is number 5 with 100,000 results (this is my usual username on forums and blogs etc.). My full name, Josie Henley-Einion for those of you who haven’t worked that out (and 2,120 results to date), pops up with the addition of the ‘n’.

So does all this investigation lead anywhere? Well, I am assuming that these predictors are only used for common search terms or for phrases that have results over a certain threshold, so I’m thinking it’s quite cool that my name is in this category. I’ve tried various other phrases that include my name, such as ‘silence by Josie…’ or ‘books by Josie…’ and the predictor text does not come up with my name. I also tried other searches like Casting Pods (my podcast) and came up blank. So it must be significant somehow if I can squeeze some significance out of it. I’ve also tried other writer-friends’ names such as Sarah Mussi (130,000 results) and Susie Day (over three million results, now I’m depressed).

I don’t have a wikipedia page yet (not allowed to write your own or you get banned) so if anyone is a wiki editor then please go ahead!

Talking of Susie, I’ve just finished reading Girl Meets Cake and it is probably the funniest book I’ve read since her last book Big Woo. Actually, it’s funnier than Big Woo, probably on a par with Douglas Adams for my laughs-per-page ratio. I started having to read it in secret because it was getting embarrassing with all the looks I was getting as I snorted and guffawed my way through it.

There was a point where I wanted to clonk the heroine over the head and shout ‘look around you girl!’ but then she is fifteen and if I can remember that far back I do recall that my peripheral vision was mostly clouded by teenage self-obsession. And witnessing the predicaments she gets herself into with all the telling one lie and then having to tell a hundred more lies to cover up for the first one is really hilarious. Deliciously painful. There, that’s my Amazon review title sorted. Very definitely recommended for everyone about 13 and upwards (lots of snogging and references to SEC SEW AL stuff). Plus there’s the added pleasure for those who didn’t pick up who Mysterious Ed was immediately (like I did, *buffs fingernails*) of reading it a second time and laughing at all the very obvious clues a la Agatha Christie. Oh yes.

Taking The Tap Water Challenge

This Volvic challenge (if you haven’t seen the adverts click here for the full glory of it) says that if you drink 1.5 litres of water per day for 14 days then you’ll feel a lot better. Now, I drink a lot of water already, generally in half pint glasses, so ‘better’ might not be an adequate description for someone who is already quite hydrated. More likely it will send me into yet another OCD frenzy of monitoring how many millilitres I’ve drunk in 24 hours (god yes, I did this when I was working nights and took a 1.5 litre bottle (refilled from tap) with me every night as well as whatever I drank during the day). Most people it seems don’t drink that much. Anyway, my point is not that.

My point is that drinking any clean water is going to be good for you. It doesn’t have to be Volvic, and it doesn’t have to come in polluting plastic bottles. And it doesn’t have to be delivered to your door because generally in the UK you already have drinking water delivered to your house, in the form of the untrendy tap. I’m not talking to my US friends here, because I have sympathy with you since I stayed in Orlando a few years ago and was made fully aware of what your tapwater tastes like.

So rather than creating vast amounts of empty plastic bottles for the landfill, increased traffic pollution from the delivery of said bottles, plus whatever environmental effect it has on the ice shelf that supplies this bottled water, why not get a glass of water from the tap? Why not carry a sports bottle around with you that you refill from the tap? It may not be the cool thing but your carbon footprint will be a lot less than if you’re buying Volvic or any other bottled water constantly.

I challenge you to save your money and the environment and take the tap water challenge. It doesn’t have to be 14 days, why not go crazy and change your lifestyle for good?

PS. Have just discovered TAP. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ bout!

Task Avoidance

Yes, it’s the usual reason for blogging – have far too many other things to do. Tomorrow I’m going to Gregynog which is this beautiful house near Newtown which belongs to the University of Wales and I went there nearly 20 years ago when I was a student in Bangor so it’s very exciting to be going back. It looks the same in the photos but may have changed indoors, and I only have vague memories of the bedrooms as I don’t think I slept much when I was 19!

The reason I’m going is because I’m giving a short presentation to a Wales postgraduates’ conference in English lit and creative writing. Somehow I have to connect my Psychology PhD on dreams with literature and make it sound good. I’ve decided to use an extract from Jane Eyre for my analysis. Multidisciplinary me! I’ve got a plan and am writing the powerpoint thing. Hoping to record it for the podcast but if it’s utter rubbish then won’t bother podcasting! Alys and I are going to this conference together as she is the official English PhD student and I’m tagging along. So it’s going to be a little jolly really, and I shouldn’t be as nervous as I am about a ten minute presentation given that I’ve been teaching undergrads for the past few months. My main problem is fitting everything into ten minutes as when I first planned the presentation I thought I’d have half an hour. Sigh.

Wales Book of the Year

Another thing making me nervous and unable to settle to anything is that The Wales Book of the Year longlist is being announced this evening in Bangor. One of the judges for this is going to be at the conference I think. So I’m not sure whether I’ll know if Silence has been longlisted or not when I go to Gregynog tomorrow, but I will probably find out while there. So that might be highly exciting or slightly uncomfortable and embarrassing depending on the outcome. Oh god. One can hope, can’t one? I mean, it’s not too inconceivable to think that Silence might get on the longlist, is it?

Right, I have to stop thinking like this and write the damn presentation.

Oh BTW, don’t tell Alys but I’m thinking of offering to drive Lindsay Lohan home from the club. You never know where it could lead…

–

PS here in Gregynog. Stop. Limited connectivity. Stop. Will say more later. Stop. Did not get longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. Stop. Stop.

Bookarmy.com

My latest addiction is Bookarmy.com, here is my profile page. I’m an author-member so I get a special little B next to my name, which I think is pretty cool but then I always was easily pleased. Anyhoo, the idea of Bookarmy is that it’s a social networking site for readers so they can rate books, write forum posts about books and authors and share recommendations. I’ve seen a few things like this around, not least Amazon but there’s something a lot more fun and easy about Bookarmy. You can rate books without having to write a full review, but they do encourage you to write a sentence or two. You can also list books that you’re currently reading and ones that you plan to read, recommend books to other people.

So this last week I’ve been steadily going through my shelves and memory and adding my favourite books. I’ve got as far as 130 now which makes me the 126th most well-read person on the site. I’m sure I’m not actually that well-read, only that I’m one of the few members so determined to add every single book I can remember loving (not bothering with the ones I didn’t like), and I have a good memory too! Check out my list and you’ll find it’s pretty eclectic including a variety of genres.

Wales Book of the Year

You might remember this from last year, when Danny Abse won but the buffoon that made the announcement announced the wrong name. Anyway, it’s coming up again this year and my book Silence is on the eligible list (don’t get excited, there are about 200 other books on the eligible list). The longlist is going to be announced next Wednesday, in Bangor, but I’m not going to be there. I hope that the Academi website will be updated. Fingers crossed next blog will have some good news.

Local Author is quoted in Local Paper

I have been quoted in an article about libraries in my local paper. I was called by the journalist who’s done an article on me before so he obviously has my name on his ‘local author’ list.

I could have been really cool and pretended that I didn’t recognise him at all from the thousands of other journalists who ring me up daily for their broadsheet pieces. But I didn’t, I’m nice like that.

I was working at home, as I do, and was just about to take the dog out for a walk and already had my shoes on when the phone rang. I was in two minds as to whether to answer because I’ve been getting a lot of silent calls lately. Not the Silence type, more the call centre type. Anyway, I was glad that I did answer because I had a good chat with James about libraries and what could be done to encourage longer opening hours. After ten minutes I noticed Mika cross-legged at the back door so thought I’d better take her out after all.

I scanned in the full piece for my website, but here is the highlight. I know it’s only a brief mention and it may look like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for media output for the blog, but the pertinent point is the ordinariness of this clipping. I am now the ‘local author’ who gets called up to pass comment on something to do with books. The piece wasn’t about my book or anything that I’m doing particularly, but my opinion is considered important because I’m an author with critical acclaim. How cool is that?

Update on The L Word. So Max is pregnant. Who knew? Well, The Lesbian Mafia obviously. What can I say, I’m addicted to this program.

Random Allocations and Lesbian History Month

I was doing a pipl search for myself (yes I am that egotistical and perhaps paranoid as well) and saw a nice variety of references to me, not all from me, including the Guardian, Struggling Authors, Meet the Author and Queer Cymru (although the information they have about my current job is out of date and I must remember to let them know). Then there are a variety of blog posts from various blogs to which I’ve contributed such as Legend authors’ blog and popandcrisps, but strangely not to this one! I’d completely forgotten about my Bebo profile which also turned up, as I’ve probably only used it once.

The only error I spotted there is one of the photos (the blinxx video one) which is definitely not me and looks more like Kate Bush. On clicking it, this turns out to be my ‘Meet the Author’ video with an Airwick advert inserted before it! How random is that? Well, quite apart from the fact that I would not endorse such a product and detest the animated rabbit who just can’t bear to smell her chimera family, nobody asked my permission or paid me for that. Ugh, the price of fame.

It turns out that the person I thought was Kate Bush is actually Monica Ali in a ‘related video’ talking about her book Brick Lane. So I think that’s pretty cool and am quite happy for my book to be associated with Brick Lane and am ameliorated somewhat for the Airwick crap (though I notice that Monica’s video doesn’t have an ad interloper, even though it’s from ITV, grr). I can be forgiven for mistaking her for The Lovely Bush as the image is only a few pixels squared and I went by the hair more than anything.

So anyhoo, as I scrolled down the pipl profile, I found a reference to me in the Border Women newsletter. On investigation I discovered that it was a piece about Lesbian History Month. I wrote this recently for my publisher to send out a press release hoping someone might interview me. I don’t begrudge them using it without actually interviewing me, as this is all grist to the publicity mill and I know how difficult it is for voluntary magazines to fill space. And I’m quite chuffed that I’m referred to as an ‘up-and-coming’ author in the byline to the article. I’m only glad that I do these regular checks on my name (I have a google alert set up as well), otherwise I might not become aware of my publications!

I sent the link to Legend and they mentioned it on their blog. If you’d rather read it in the original, click here and scroll to the last page.

So then, this got me thinking about Lesbian History Month again. I reread the things I said in the article about visibility and how our history has been obliterated. I remembered the LGBT history articles I’ve written for Velvet and Planet Sappho and the story I wrote for Legend’s 2007 collection 7 Days, then started wondering how soon it will be before I am lesbian history myself. Now I’m old enough for the OLN, I’m sure it won’t be long before some nubile young dyke turns up to record my oral history. Or was that just a dream I had?

Seriously, according to the editorial in the Border Women newsletter, LGBT History Month was mentioned on the local radio station, following which someone rang in requesting a month to celebrate ‘short people’ and their history. As the editorial says, “since when have short people been systematically beaten, shunned by their families, risked their friendships and jobs or – most tragically – murdered for being ‘short’?” In terms of lesbian history (and currently in global terms), may I add raped, imprisoned, tortured, executed, accused of witchcraft and had their children stolen or killed and a myriad of other human rights abuses? A sobering thought for short people. Given this, who would be a lesbian?

Random linkage from this (as well as checking that I used myriad correctly) to The Lesbian Mafia where last year I listened to Sandi interviewing the fabulous and lovely Leah deLaria (show 9). One of the things Leah mentioned was how she sat watching a gay pride march and this fat bald white guy sitting next to her said how he’d like to see a fat bald white guys’ march. She told him, you’ve already got that all year round, it’s called Wall Street. Right on, sister! But yeah, we get this sort of thing all the time, even from people who should know better. A gay male friend of mine on hearing me talk about Women’s Day mentioned how there is no Men’s Day. I told him yes there is, for 364 days of the year. You have to tell them.

The next random linkage is me remembering why I love Leah deLaria so much. She’s sexy, funny, clever, has a beautiful voice and oh my god, did I mention sexy? It is entirely possible that the character of Jackie in my novel Silence is partially based on my hazy memories of seeing Leah on TV in the early nineties.

PS forgot to mention The L Word! Unbelievable that it’s back on with no prior advertising and thank goodness we were random-clicking on Tuesday night or we’d have missed the first episode of the new series. JENNY’S DEAD! It’s true. I’ve been hearing about this since I do have my ear to the ground and the US is ahead of us, like with Lost. But when I first heard (on The Lesbian Mafia) I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke, but now I know it’s true. It’s also really weird seeing how many of the actors have had plastic surgery and the characters have had complete personality transplants, because recently Alys and I have been watching our L Word DVD collection of the first 4 series to combat L Word withdrawal. I know, I am particularly sad when it comes to this programme.

Patient Engages in Writing Behaviour

I’ve been ill for a week now with something that started off as a simple cough and cold and turned out to be lesbian flu again. For those who don’t know, lesbian flu is a very rare mutation and has a worse prognosis than man flu, resulting in the patient almost dying. Of course I struggle on because if I’m not teaching, shopping, cleaning the house then it generally doesn’t happen. Alys is still recovering from a general anaesthetic, it apparently takes six weeks for the drugs to leave your system. Most definitely no-one else is going to write the novel or blog for me. Even my facebook status only has one word. This is because I clicked to change it to something lengthy about how grotty I was feeling when I was overcome with a coughing fit and only managed to type the word ‘coughing’ before I collapsed.

So anyway, now I have your sympathy, here is something interesting. I’ve been marking undergraduate essays for the past few weeks and am appalled. I have to say that I have found the occasional one with references and correct spellings, but this is rare. I cast my mind back to the essays I wrote in my first year undergrad state (20 years ago *gasp*) and yes, they were mainly written the day before the deadline, they were often written while hung over during a lecture, but they were always clearly written with long reference lists, citations in the text and checked for spelling. The first two were handwritten as I hadn’t found the computer lab, then once I’d got the hang of typing up my essays they were printed, but this was in the days before an automatic spellchecker. It was most certainly before the practice of copying large chunks out of wikipedia and trying to pass it off as your own work. I cannot believe that students still think they can get away with this when they know that we scan their essays using Turnitin.

Here’s the thing: I was never taught formally how to reference my work. I was told to read journal articles and emulate the academic style when writing my own essays and research projects. So I learned how to format references at the end of an essay and citations within the text as a by-product of learning how to write in the third person and other aspects of the academic style, following careful study of published work. I try to explain this to students now and they stare at me aghast. What, we actually have to go and learn something for ourselves without being handed it on a plate? Obviously this is pejorative and some of them seem to have got the hang of it if their essays are anything to go by. But these last few weeks have been a real eye-opener for me. I may have previously been on the fence as far as the ‘falling standards in education’ debate goes, but not any more.

One of the positives that has come out of marking these essays is that the topics have reminded me of some fundamentals in psychology. Being first year undergrad essays there are some very basic points being made. As a high-minded PhD person it’s easy to get too focussed on a narrow topic. So yesterday I revisited Rosenhan and his 1973 dull empty thuds. I first heard of this experiment at the age of about 16, when I was told a summary (and thought it both shocking and entirely plausible as I’d already had experience of institutions), and again as an undergrad where it was brought up in a lecture, and have been reminded of it several times since but had never actually read the original paper. I decided to rectify that and went on google scholar, downloaded and read it. Oh the ease of google scholar compared to 20 years ago when I had to get out of bed to visit the library (shock) and plough through the stacks section to find the dusty tome I required (horror) then sit in the stacks section reading it because you couldn’t take a copy away.

So yes, Rosenhan’s paper On Being Sane in Insane Places. What this guy did was he got a group of 8 people, psychologists, psychiatrists, post-grad students and others, to pretend to be hearing voices and get themselves checked in to institutions across America, under pseudonyms so that they wouldn’t suffer the stigma of mental illness in the future. In all cases they were instructed to report that they heard an indistinct voice saying the words dull, empty and thud, but apart from that to give their actual history and behave as they normally would. In all cases, these people (12 different institutions) were incarcerated in the institution and not let out for an average of 19 days, up to 52 days in one case. They were given the diagnosis of schizophrenia and on release it was referred to as ‘in remission’.

Initially they expected to be rumbled, but the staff had no suspicions at all about their sanity, even when they were openly taking notes about the functioning of the wards and behaviours of staff. In fact, the taking of notes was viewed as being a symptom of their insanity, one classic comment on the medical record being ‘patient engages in writing behaviour’. I love that, and I think that if one day I write my autobiography, that phrase may well be the title. In particular, this presents the case for what I call symptomising, which is when a person is given a description, whether diagnosis or other label, and everything they do thereafter is seen through the lens of this label. So for instance, when I was ‘attention seeking’ at school, no matter what I did, even if it was sitting quietly as I had been told, this was considered to be seeking attention. My current bugbear is my ‘lesbian’ label. Yes, obviously I am a lesbian and have no shame whatsoever in that, am very happy with it and wouldn’t have it any other way, especially considering that I wouldn’t be with my darling Alys. But there are many things that I do in my life, many things that I say, opinions that I hold and places I want to go, which are about being me, not about being a lesbian. It annoys me no end when people assume that they know everything about me because they expect me to be just like some other lesbian they might have seen, or on the other hand they hear the things that I say and assume that every lesbian they might meet in the future is going to be like me.

Although the staff didn’t pick up that these ‘pseudopatients’ as Rosenhan refers to them, were not actually mentally ill, many of the other patients did. One patient asked a pseudopatient if he was an undercover journalist. There is a lot in this paper that doesn’t get talked about in the summaries, such as how much violence went on in the institutions, from staff towards patients and openly in front of other patients, how a great amount and variety of medication was given out (which the psuedopatients disposed of rather than swallowing) and how they noticed that other patients were also disposing of their medications, how much time the staff spent inside their glass cage rather than interacting with patients. All of these things are interesting. What I find the most interesting is that it took a group of ‘sane’ people to go undercover into a mental institution to find out what it was like to be living in one, when the simple answer would have been to ask a resident. Such was the lack of power of the residents that their experiences and opinions didn’t matter.

We are rectifying that now and many stories from ex-residents of institutions are coming out, either in autobiographical format or fictionalised. However, I think that even thirty-five years on (eek, I am that old!), some of the fundamentals of how we see people with mental illness that this study highlights still exist. For instance, once you get the label, it’s there for good. As Rosenhan says, if you break your leg, once it’s cured you’re not considered to have a broken leg ‘in remission’ for the rest of your life, yet when you get the label of a mental illness, that’s it for you. Bye-bye to your personal power and right to be treated as a human being.

Author’s Notes in Western Mail

This article appeared in the Western Mail magazine yesterday (07 February 2009). Soon after Silence was reviewed in the paper, I was invited to contribute to the Author’s Notes section and wrote this piece. Since then I hadn’t heard back so assumed it wasn’t going to be used. Luckily I have friends who read the paper and alerted me to the fact this morning, and let me have the clipping, they’re that kind *waves to Pippa and family*.

It’s a welcome addition to my clippings which have run a bit dry of late. Part of the drip-drip effect campaign, hopefully a few more copies of the book will be sold! It’s a really good sized high-profile piece so I’m glad for it. The magazine has the TV listings in it so is usually kept for the week, and this is near the back in the ‘books’ section. I think quite a lot of people will see it, and several have mentioned to me that they like the picture.

If anyone else sees an article on or offline about me or my book, please don’t assume that I’ve already been informed. I’d rather have lots of people telling me they saw me in the paper than miss it completely because everyone thinks I already know. I have several other media pieces in the pipeline and no idea when they’re going live, such is the way with these things.

Click here to read the full article scanned in, or click here for the text at WalesOnline.