Tony is extremely considerate. So, knowing he was to rise early this morning, he warned me he had set his alarm, but would try to ensure it did not wake me.

Right.

It's the first day of my holidays. At 8am I come to hearing something strange and jangly. it is a mobile alarm using one of those strange 'tunes' that means the person who owns it either can't be bothered to set a real tune, or doesn't know how to. When it comes to Tony, it is the latter.

I ignore it.

My OH eventaully comes to about five minutes later (I may exaggerate a little), swears violently and switches off the phone. I then hear about fifteen (no exaggeration) key presses, with accompanying noise.

"Darling, what are you doing?" I ask.

"Trying to switch off the alarm." he says.

I could ask why he doesn't simply leave the room, with his phone, and do this somewhere else. I don't because that will definitely wake me up. Plus it will antagonise him, because he is doing his best not to wake me.

He lies down again. I have the chance to go to sleep except that I now suspect he has reset the alarm to go off in ten minutes, which means there is no point in going to sleep as I will be woken again.

Alternatively, he has forgotten he is due to take his car in for a service and that is why he set his alarm in the first place. Perhaps he thinks it has gone off of its own accord, as it seems to so many times, malaicious little critter it is. Always waking me up when that was the last thing he wanted. should I remind him he is due in Coleford by nine? If I speak, I will definitely wake up. If he has remembered, it will make him tetchy because he will think I think he can't remember such things. If I sleep and he forgets and misses the appointment, he will be upset for the rest of the day.

Ho hum. Choices, choices.

He suddenly rises and opens a drawer, pulling out clothing and shutting the drawer. perhaps he has remembered why he set the alarm. He leaves the room, forgetting to shut the door, and wanders off into the bathroom, where he does noisy things which disturb me because THE BEDROOM DOOR IS OPEN.

If I get up to close the door, I will be wide awake. If I don't, the noise will wake me.

It is a lost cause. I get up. :p

A reader in the US, who has only read the first three books, commented to me that the third book is his favourite. Of course, I asked him why?

"Because I get to know the villain a lot better."

I've started thinking about that recently, because it rings true for something that's happening with the sixth book. For a long time I couldn't get a handle on the motivation of one of the villains in the sixth book. The other two were understandable, if not exactly the most thrilling personalities; but this one was elusive. For a while, I thought the motivation was love, as part of a gay relationship. Then that it was infatuation. Then something more complex than either of those. And then, something happened that turned that round completely: not only is it not a gay relationship, it isn't a sexual relationship. And the shadowy character is the lynchpin in the plot. She is also the most exciting villain I've written about to date.

And she's taken a long time appearing. It's been a hard road. I knew, early on in this book, that I had to get to grips with shamanism. Then with Finnish shamanism. (Why? I guess because the 'magicians' of Finland were always the experts in the old Icelandic sagas, in the same way that the magicians of the Hebrides were the experts in the ancient Irish tales.)

I know nothing about Finland, except an abiding love for the music of Sibelius and knowing they like saunas. Or, rather - I knew nothing about Finland. LOL! But it turns out it isn't just finland - I had to find out about the Sami, as well.

So, here I am, months later, with a host of internet sites captured on Zotero, which I regularly consult. I find the mythologies fascinating. But it seems to have taken months to absorb all this. Once I did, the character of my villain and her motivation began to emerge, almost fully formed.

Looking back, it seems as though the villains take more and more of the stage with every book I write. Oh, I was always interested in motivation. But, initially, a realistic motivation and a good plot was sufficient. Now, with the sixth book, it feels as though the main villain is taking over.

You know, if she stays alive, I might even want to write about her again. But, at this stage, I have no idea whether she lives or dies. :)

For the first time in a couple of years, my Department is about to offer training places and promotion boards for people of my grade. Given I've been waiting for 2 years, I shall try both routes. Only problem is...I can't complete the online process for the training places. :(

I know I didn't try last weekend, because I got distracted doing something else. There's only a three week window, but I thought I'd have plenty of time if I did it on Wednesday night. After all - it's not due in until midday next Thursday, so I've got a whole week, right?

Wrong.

For one thing, my boss's boss rang Thursday afternoon to ask me to facilitate the two day conference our business unit has lined up for Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Now I'm a professionally-trained facilitator - being roped up at (effectively) two days' notice when no one has thought through three quarters of the agenda is a nightmare scenario. It meant changing my flight to arrange to have a four hour meeting in Glasgow on Monday with the two other people organising the conference, followed (hopefully) by me being able to put in another couple of hours on Monday night and two hours on Tuesday morning. It should also mean work over the weekend to prepare for Monday's meeting.

So I don't need the online application process to be a terminal screw-up.

I'm not allowed to use one of our networked computer terminals, which is all I have access to at work. If I take my laptop to work, there's no wif-fi access, except in Starbucks. So i wasn't best pleased to discover one of the questions in the application form asked me for work-related information I needed to obtain from work. So on Thursday night, having checked the info I put on the form is correct, I can't access the form. This involves two telephone calls to our HR (I was lucky someone was still at work at 6.45pm) and an email to the software manufacturer. Their faqs are hopeless as all the info relates to browser versions two or three years old.

No email that night. None in the morning before I go to work. Another call to HR. I have taken my laptop with me, just in case. They want me to check my emails again (can't do that from a work computer as it's blocked), so I have to go to Starbucks. There, I have trouble accessing their system. *rolleyes* Eventually I do - the software people unblocked my application and sent me an email an hour or so after I left for work. I submit my application.

This morning I start the online test. I left it until I had the place to myself, as otherwise, with the best will in the world, the OH will forget and interrupt me. given the tests are timed, I can't risk that.

So now I can't launch the tests. Another half an hour of trying to interpret their crap instructions for out-of-date browsers, in order to try three different browsers. Nope. None of them will launch the tests.

Gods - it was all I could do to be polite in my email to our HR. I didn't try in the email to the software support. Grrr!

Yay! As a result of three weeks off work being ill, plus some hard application over the last few days, I have managed to get the fifth book out and revamped some of the website pages.

The tidying up of the design of the other book pages will now have to wait while I visit a couple of places in Scotland and Northern Ireland. :D

There are any number of publishers out there – both on demand and traditional – who will publish books without properly editing them. Oh, the product may look glossy, but it’s easy to tell when something hasn’t been properly edited:

- spelling and syntactical mistakes (OK, so that’s the easiest)
- inconsistency of the spelling of names. The most hilarious example I’ve come across was in a book I was reviewing for a magazine. Diana Paxson is a prominent figure in the US Asatru community. The author of the book managed to spell her name four different ways over about 200 pages.
- inconsistency in the treatment of foreign languages. This will show up by transliterating a character that does not exist in English in several different ways. Plus, of course, all those terrible foreign names!
- Explaining a concept after you’ve already referred to it once or twice.
- repeating yourself in a later chapter. At length.
- general lack of coherent development to the work
- failure to tie it all up properly

OK, so that all applies to non fiction, but fiction can be just as bad. In my neck of the woods, there’s always the problems of

- not giving the reader sufficient information to work out what’s going on (crime/thrillers), and
- breaking any rules you set in fantasy fiction with the wave of a magic wand. (Gods, I hate that!)

OK, that’s just the substance. Then we get on to style. Gee – how tedious can it get? Very!

Laid up with ‘flu, I have spent the time overhauling every stylesheet I use in Open Office, to ensure a complete consistency between the books I publish. Every publishing house has a ‘housestyle’ that includes things likes the preferred typefaces, the heading styles… and whether or not it’s one ot two spaces after a full stop. You may find this laughable, but I have had an all-out battle lasting weeks with a senior editor over that last one. My deputy (who had been around longer than I, and dealing with the senior editor far longer – I was the new kid on the block) told me it was a battle I had no hope of winning. Sod that, I thought. I scoured the internet for pundits to back up my argument that, in these days of proportional spacing, the whole thing was governed by the bloody computer, so it doesn’t matter what spaces one puts in as one has no control over the actual spacing that will result. Oh, I did win. :)

Anyway, the whole point of this is that I now have a damned spreadsheet that details all the settings on all the styles I use, including page set-ups. What a bore! However, it does mean I can ensure consistency of style.

I’ve also decided to be a style fascist. I loathe serif typefaces. I’ve given in up to now, but no more! I have decided to alter my books to my preferred sans-serif typeface. That also, as it happens, reduces the number of pages in each book. And, using a print-on-demand publisher, that affects revenue. in the right way. :D

So, the next problem is : ISBN or not ISBN? But that’s a whole other subject…

Sometime last year I started having breathing problems in the bedroom. So did Tony. Other places I slept in were fine - just our bedroom. Huh.

So I got a new vacuum cleaner and hovered everywhere, including the mattress. I bought large breathable bags to house the textiles we kept in the boxes under the bed. Nope. No better. I decided that the flea-bitten beige carpet I'd inherited with the house had to go. Contacted a builder and arranged everything.

Then all went deathly quiet for three months.

I assumed he'd forgotten all about it, when he rings out of the blue to arrange a date. That was last Wednesday, when snow fell again and he couldn't come. He came today. He was astonished to find we'd shifted all the drawers and moveable furniture into the study, so he and his lad only had three items of furniture to contend with. he told me later that that had basically saved me half a day.

They were finished by half four. I hoovered frantically, moved everything back in, and every now and again go and look at it. I don't quite believe it.

A lovely, light oak style laminate floor. it all fits together so well I can't see the joins. the furniture slides over it without a problem. The builder says the flooring I choose would require a hammer and chisel to give it serious damage. ;)

I've just gone in there again. Squeeee - it's lovely! :D

Despite the frozen wastes of black ice, I'm feeling good as I've accomplished a number of major tasks.

Changed bits of the website, published the fourth book, and regularised the costs of all the books. that last bit means I get less the longer a book is (due to Lulu charging by the page). But there - that should teach me to write shorter books! :p

Now I can spellcheck the fifth book and pass it to the editor. Then - finally - go back to the sixth book and see where that goes.

Funny how reluctant I was to let the fourth book go. That and the fifth book are my favourites, and letting one of them into the wild, so to speak, makes me feel as though I've lost it. I've heard that from other creatives about works they were fond of. How strange it is.

Oh well, I'd just better make sure I produce other stuff I feel like that about. :)

One funny thing - I'd given paperback copies to an online US friend who came to London last month. He and his wife are hard-up, so I didn't want to charge, even to cover the cost to me. He's zipped through the three already and made lots of complimentary comments (though I'm not sure about the one about their being 'mythological' as they include some gods - would a Christian book about their God be regarded as... oh, let it pass! :P ) but he did say he nearly gave up at the start of the first book due to it initially centering on a crime of sabotaging a virgin sacrifice.

VIRGIN SACRIFICE???!!!!!!

We are talking an evangelical Christian here. LOL!

Anyway, when revising the Lulu paperbacks, I was sorely tempted to add a line in the preface to the first book that "no virgins were sacrificed in the making of this book"...

Have you noticed that there are some words you use, and some you don't? If so, why don't you use some words in common circulation? have you ever thought about it?

I don't mean words that are known to be offensive, like 'nigger', i mean ...just some words that aren't in your vocabulary.

Clique is one of those for me, but it's only today i really got round to thinking why.

As a sixth-former, we had a prissy English teacher who banned us from using some words. Like the word 'cross'. "I don't ever want to read that word in your essays. it's a nursery word, and it should stay there. You can argue that Henry V was angry, or priggish, or meloncholy, but never let me read that he was cross. It conveys nothing."

Up to now, the word 'clique' has been, for me, like Miss Chatterton's 'cross' was for her. But now I've thought about it, I realise it's something more, and that more is why I've never used it, and never will.

I first came across it at college, when I was 19. It was a scrawled, angry missive tacked onto the student's notice board. A rant about the cliques. I had to go and look the word up. My battered Chambers, as I look at it now, defines the word as:
[quote]
an exclusive group of persons: a faction: a coterie - [b]used generally in a bad sense[/b].
[/quote]

And that bit I've emboldened is why i don't use it: it's basically a word used as an insult.

I see groups everywhere. I see groups in real life, and online. Some groups I'm part of and some I'm not. I've always avoided (if possible) those I don't feel at home with, and sought out those I do, but I've never labelled those I don't wish to be part of a 'clique'. Not even in my own mind. To me, it was just another group; no different, in essence, for the groups I wished to spend time with. Just made up of diffierent people, with diffierent interests or personalities.

For me, 'clique' conjours up teenage Americal TV highschool series, where everyone seems to be bitchy and throw around insults at other groups, which all look and act the same. Strange. Pointless.

And, it seems, everyday parlence within the pagan online community.

So now the word has consciously entered my voculary for the first time. Oh, I still shan't use it, nor think it of others. Not because I'm particularly austere, but because I really don't see the point of playground insults. On the whole, I'd rather use language to convey meaning, and the only meaning insults convey to others is my own state of mind.

and I think, on the whole, I'd rather appear to be an adult, however badly behaved, than a small child stamping its foot and holding its breath out of pique. ;)

One of the things said of all writers is that we're thieves. We unashamedly write our own experiences into books, but also experiences of others, that we've been party to or told about. We also write in people we know.

Oh, not recognisably. or not completely recognisably, perhaps. And not necessarily as they are. but they're there.

In my first book, 'Marnie' was inspired by my ex-sister-in-law, and 'Vandna' by an old friend. A year ago, I realised with a shock that 'Sam' is based on that old friend's cat. 'Michael' was inspired by Sam Neill in Merlin, and Isolde's werewolf friend 'Liz' is another old friend, whom I haven't seen for years.

In the second book, a third friend in the one-time trio of myself she and 'Liz' appeared as 'Paddy', Declan's irascible elven PA. In the third, 'Nipper', the half-troll, is based on my friend DC (who may read this, but knows about that), 'Valerie' on a close friend (who also knows about it) and the B&B (Paul's house) actually exists, is run by a couple of friends of mine, and is as it is described in the book. (But then, the places I describe, as opposed to the people, generally do exist in one form or another).

In the fourth book 'BlackJack', the villain, is based on someone I knew, as is Mad Mark, the head of the Magician's Guild, and his sidekick, Red Euan. 'Mad Mark' and 'Red Euan' are pretty true to life, and used to tend to wander around together. Unusually, I can't think of anyone in the fifth book based ona real-life person.

And then we come to the sixth. Ah, the sixth. Well, I've known for 18 months about 'Fox', and told the person he's based on (except I didn't know he was gay - the character, I mean, not the real-life person!) And I knew about 'Ishbel' and 'Donald John' for about 9 months. unusually, with those two, I let the real-life friends choose their own names for the characters. But then 'Scarlett' sneaked in, when i was looking for a priest. And that's really hilarious, because, IRL, 'Scarlett' is an atheist!

there must be something easier about writing dialogue and events that include characters based on real people, as the last 5000 words have just flowed. Up to about 23,000 at the moment. if I do my usual length of book, that's about a sixth of the way through. But, at this stage, I never know. will this one run to only the more standard 60,000 words? Will it reach 100,000? Well, we'll see. Eventually. ;)

I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 1545. Nice machine. 4 Gb RAM; 500 Gb SATA HDD; webcam blah blah blah. I thought I'd finally experiment with Linux. I explored the distros, using www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/ which has a handy tool to enable me to choose which might be the best. I settled for Mint, and am extremely pleased with it. Partitioned the drive to set up a dual-boot system (Linux distros burn themselves to a CD and can run from that, or be installed from it. They automatically partition the drive).

OK, the problem is this: I need to run Windows because I use a web authoring programme and rely on previews of browsers to correct problems. I use five browsers: IE, FF, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. of these, only FF and Opera currently have a Linux version. Google is working on it, but I can't see either Safari (Apples) or MS <spit> bothering.

i explored the possibility of setting up a virtual machine. That would enable me to run Windows (and so the web authoring programme and all the browsers) in a handy little box within Linux, and use them at the same time as any linux application. The problem with that is having to assign RAM and HDD space to the virtual machine, which would mean both that and Linux would run more slowly. Hmmm... on the other hand, switching between OSs on a dual boot doesn't take so long. So I'll go for dual boot. That also has the advantage of not invalidating my warranty (and I have call-out problem solving paid for 12 months) with Dell. ;)

Ok - the big problem is that, no matter what programmes I use or how I try to slim it down, the C drive with Vista remains stubbornly at half the drive hsize, hovering around 250Gb. it doesn't need that amount of space, and I want to create a partition to store documents etc that both OSs can use. Anyway, I really resent not being able to control Vista.

So what's the problem? Why can't I shrink that C drive?

Apparently it's because Vista has a nasty way of placing all its system control at the far end of the available sectors on the drive it's occupying.

Right - I am not going to let Bill Gates control my computer. <huh>

So i finally come across the wonderful Geek site: www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume- inadequacy-problems/  now I can sort the situation out in Windows.

But hey - the Geek has an even better solution; how to sort the problem out using Linux:
www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/

Way to go, Geek! I've burned my Live CD and am ready to roll, thoug not until tomorrow. Await the next thrilling installment. Will i entirely embugger (technical term!) my brand new laptop, or will I cut Vista down to size and do what I want with my machine?

gee...I can tell you're all on tenterhooks. :D