Double Your Mid-life Crisis with Half a House

Pistorius is what happens when you bang your head hard.

An entire season has passed since I last blogged as part of the creative writing process tour. Why? Well, I’ve been writing all the words (and sustaining a head injury, but that's another story). I wrote and wrote until I had written an entire novel – not crime, this time, but contemporary women’s fiction. It’s got funny bits and sad bits and sexy bits in it...oh, and a three-legged dog called Pistorius, who leaves tagnutty arse trails around the house, like the outlines drawn around dead bodies at crime scenes, but drawn with poo, not chalk. Would you expect any less from The Horrormoanal Woman? My efforts may turn out to be a literary diamond in the rough or equally likely, the obfuscated work-wank of a partially hearing middle-aged woman, suffering from Dead Beryl inhalation and an uncontrollable addiction to mid-afternoon self-nuptials.

Hot laptop? Hot storyline? Really, nobody needs to see THAT face.

Good job I’ll be getting an office to myself very soon, is all I can say...

Speaking of which, I’ve been busy busy busy in Dead Beryl’s house. While my fingers were flying over the keyboard, builders raged on in the background with an angle grinder and disappointing bum cleavages. Yes, I’m finally having my horrid house renovated and extended. You lucky voyeurs can watch my existential meltdown on Channel 4 on Wednesday 8^th October 2014, 8pm, when I will be appearing, together with the other Richeses, on Sarah Beeny’s excellent property show, Double Your House for Half the Money. 

Ever changing hair colour. Ever diminishing weight. Watch my meltdown on Channel 4!

I have no idea what particular bits of our journey will make the final edit, but let’s just say, living on a building site encouraged more disgusting personal habits and emotional trauma than ten years spent welded by dried in body-fluids to a gaming console, while Zombie Shooter 2 flickers like a strobe on the gore-filled screen. 

Building & writing. Warning! Can cause a ripe intimate savoury twang.

I’m looking forward to seeing the building process on the tellybox, but slightly dreading watching myself and hearing my northern nasal noise on prime-time national TV. I just know I’m going to look like a small clown with a gut. Worst of all, will be if they incorporate the shot of me in a helmet, looking like Otto, the bus driver in the Simpsons. Curly hair and safety helmets DO NOT mix. I should add, however, that the process was highly enjoyable and meeting Sarah Beeny was great. She really is as nice as she comes across in her programmes. 

Stay tuned for progress reports on my building and writing endeavours...

Strops, sex and death: creative essentials for crime writers.

So, there’s a blog tour on, and The Horrormoanal Woman was tagged by the very lovely writer and possessor of amazing white hair, Wendy Storer. The idea is, that I’m going to say a few words, like a bad father at a wedding or a covetous best man trying to show his lifelong friend up in front of a room of 100 drunken, beige people wearing nice clothes from BHS, because really, he would have liked to have knobbed the bride. I’m going to talk about my creative process...except for me, of course, this presents a problem. This blog that you’re reading now, festooned with lurid tales of shitting in baths full of cold baked beans and being fingered on the night bus, belongs to The Horrormoanal Woman. She’s an anonymous type, pictured right, in a snowboarding anorak. You can’t even see her face. And that’s the way she likes it. The one who does all the serious work, however, is her alter ego, Marnie Riches, who wears actual deodorant and nice clothes.

The only good hair day in 20 years.

For today only, for the purposes of this exercise, I shall write as a strange mash-up of The Horrormoanal Woman and serious author, Marnie Riches, because as Marnie Riches, I don't have a blog and as The Horrormoanal Woman, I just sit around swearing and drinking and generally lady-frotting against the flotsam and jetsam of the internet.

So...

What am I working on?

Just like in love, you know when you've written The One. Chemistry is King.

I have a euro-noir crime thriller, Blown Away that is on submission to editors. The book is marbled with so many of my own experiences, and the characters have become so real to me, that I would say it's my soul-book - a term a friend came up with. Rather like a soul-mate. If you’re lucky enough to find a true soul-mate, you cling on for the ride no matter what, don’t you? Because you know life without them will be a poor facsimile of what it would be with them. It’s a high risk strategy emotionally. You may crash and burn. But it’s so worth it, if and when it blossoms into something wonderful. I’ve always felt like this about Blown Away. 

Being on submission is a tricky waiting game and can mess with your mind after a while. When my agent first started sending Blown Away out, I was faced with making a decision. Should I start something new? Should I plan further novels in the series? Or should I just twiddle my thumbs and wait? Thumb-twiddling was never an option. So, for a while, I worked on a high concept Young Adult novel. I got half way through a first draft and then Christmas happened and then I limped on for a while longer and then my inspiration ground to a halt. I switched tack and have started work on sample chapters and an outline for an entirely new adult thriller. But to be honest, my heart still beats strong for Blown Away. My fingertips are poised to launch into the second book in what I hope will be picked up as a series. Time will tell...

How does my work differ from others of its genre and why do I write what I do?

In terms of writing crime, I try to meld well-crafted prose with snappy dialogue and a plot that moves at a blistering pace. There’s no doubt that my tastes are commercial as a reader and my writing is too. I want to thrill. I want to be thrilled. I like to punctuate the darkness with lighter moments. Humour is often frowned upon in the crime genre. But life isn’t like that, is it? Even in the midst of tragedy and horror, life is full of those darkly comedic moments. We can fall in love even when our worlds are crumbling around us. We see it in TV series like, Breaking Bad. Why shouldn’t we read it in novels?

Violence is good in crime, as far as I’m concerned. It ups the stakes. I’ve always been fascinated by chains of events that turn apparently ordinary people into dangerous psychopaths. I’m interested in a serial killer’s modus operandi too. Guns? Strangle and dump, sexually motivated murders? Boring! I strive to make this element in my writing as unconventional as possible.  Best of all, I choose to have really strong, complex characters – many of them women, of course - who are often deeply flawed or anxious beneath their evil or heroic exteriors. I’m interested in blurred boundaries and grey areas. This is what holds fascination for me in life, as it does in fiction.

Different locations and cultures lend a rich, extra dimension to my writing. I have lived abroad and like to travel extensively, finances permitting. The criminal landscape of today is an international one, so why would I ever base an intricately-layered story in just one place? Blown Away is set mainly in Amsterdam, but the action also moves between Heidelberg, London and Cambridge. Writing stories with international reach offers the reader a more interesting journey.

I like to explore racial politics and have at least one major character who is Black or Minority Ethnic. Although I am white, I have a culturally rich, minority ethnic heritage. White, middle class, Anglo-Saxon is not my experience of life, so I write ethnically different characters because they feel familiar.

How does my writing process work?

Well, if I was writing as The Horrormoanal Woman, I would tell you that I wait until I have stinking PMT and get pissed off about something and then I compose a rant. Then I go through it and inject some laugh-out-loud bullshit observations and phrases, which makes me seem a little less like a homicidal old bag with an axe to grind. Writing seriously as Marnie Riches...? Not much different! In savouring the melodrama of life, stories come to me fairly thick and fast. I select the more compelling ideas. Initially, I might do an outline that is about four pages long, before embarking on the manuscript. First, I’ll write a rough draft. I’ll think it’s the best thing I ever wrote. Then I’ll realise it’s cobblers and the characters are thin. Then, I’ll do a second and third draft until it’s better and about five times longer and full of swearing and nookie (which is one of my favourite things to write – always nice to deposit new thoughts in the wank bank - and one of the most excruciating things to have other people read) and really horrible violence. Now, it’s definitely the best thing I ever wrote. By this stage, my agent might tell me it’s still shit, except he wouldn’t actually say “shit” but something like “needs a bit more thought”. I might throw a paddy in the privacy of my own home but I will listen to good advice, go back and take a machete to as much of the text as needs be, rewrite it and finally, produce something good. Maybe. Until the next draft. And most of the nookie and swearing will have gone, because reasonably well-behaved and professional, Marnie Riches is more likely to sell lots of books than that filthy cow, The Horrormoanal Woman.

So, that’s your lot. Watch out for news on Blown Away...

Now, I’ll pass the blogging baton onto two real stars

First, the tremendously inspiring and energetic Martin Ed Chatterton - a fellow north-westerner who shares my passion for crime writing, children’s fiction and general interest in world-domination.

Martin Ed Chatterton has been illustrating and writing for thirty years. His children’s books have been published in more than a dozen languages, and have won or been shortlisted in awards in the UK, US and Australia. Mort, his time-travel series is in production as a TV series by Endemol Australia. As ‘Ed Chatterton’, he writes dark crime fiction. He is currently combining writing his PhD with co-writing a children’s book with James Patterson.

...and secondly, the novelist, Emma Jane Unsworth whom I met a while ago through a mutual friend and who shares my keen interest in drinking and swearing. Her word-wrangling is both elegantly executed and funny.

Emma Jane Unsworth's first novel Hungry, the Stars and Everything won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for the Portico Prize 2012. Her short story 'I Arrive First' was included in The Best British Short Stories 2012 (Salt). Her second novel Animals will be published by Canongate in May. 

Back from the dead

I'm not dead. Not really. It's just that I've spent the entire winter doing writery stuff and climbing pyramids and painting and chasing chickens.

I've got the first four books in a historial adventure series for 7+ year olds coming out with HarperCollins Childrens in July 2013. It's awesome. I did have a picture of the cover here and told you the name and everything, but then a friend pointed out I might terrify children who google it, so I took it down. I'm writing under a pseudonym and it seems I have become a man with a cat and a keen interest in Dr. Who. I bet he doesn't do as much ironing as me.

The other thing I did earlier this year, instead of blogging, was move house. I have acquired the home of Dead Beryl, so called, because her name was Beryl and she is now dead. She popped her clogs in what is now my bedroom. I like to think she died in her sleep peacefully and there is nothing malign remaining in the house, apart from a slightly perplexing smell of fish in the kitchen cupboards and a lot of dust that makes me sneeze at least 8 times per day; technically a full orgasm.

Dedicated poo free zone

Beryl's downstairs toilet is so bright, one can only think of sunshine, although the seat is unbearably cold and means I cannot poo there. Her kitchen can only be described as crenelated and brown. Best of all, the honey pine clad ceiling in the bathroom puts me in mind of Finnish porn saunas, so Dead Beryl should be glad that her taste in decor is being celebrated on the internet as a thing of retro glory and erotic inspiration.

Evil chicken. Why the fuck are you in my garden?

One of the things we have recently come across in the new, old Dead Beryl house is a chicken. The chicken appeared one day in the garden, scratching around. I was perplexed because it had a head and feathers and wasn't wrapped in cellophane. I did wave a jar of Patak's curry paste at the stray chicken, but it refused to get out of Dead Beryl's flower beds. Eventually, I resorted to bullying a local child, who is an expert on living-chickens-that-have-never-seen-the-inside-of-an-Asda-chiller-cabinet, into shoving it though a hole in a neighbour's hedge. But the chicken came back. I have still not decided what to do with it, but there are always thai dishes that would do it real justice. Alternatively, I could give it All Bran and then squeeze it, rather like an icing sock, over my borders, as chicken manure is very good for plants.

Finally, despite the fact that I have a fear of heights, life-threatening piles, varicose veins and fat knees, I climbed a pyramid in Mexico. It was very high up and windy. As you can see from this photo, I ended up with hair that made me look rather like a cross between Arthur Scargill and Lady Gaga. This was almost topical, since Thatcher died the following week and had a face that looked like it had been poked, stupid hair and an active dislike of Comb-over King, Arthur Scargill.

Quietly shitting oneself needn't look unstylish. You too can look like a hirsute Scargill with fatter knees.

As I have blogged so infrequently recently, I'm thinking of posting one chapter per fortnight or even per week of a sweary comic novel I started writing some time ago. I guess the novel will most appeal to women really, and since the women's fiction market is pretty dead at the moment, it might be more fun to publish the chapters here than to finish the book and try to get a deal for it. I'm working on other things now, after all. The story is called Not for Profit. It is truly the work of The Horrormoanal Woman and not Marnie Riches, as it is full of filth. If enough people like it, I will finish writing it and give it to someone in AM Heath, my literary agency. Watch this space!

I'm off to try for another poo in the toilet of strong sunshine now...

Funny Rollercoaster

Like many writers, I observe people very closely and take inspiration for my writing from what I find.  Occasionally, I find beauty and greatness.  Sometimes, I find shallowness, conformity, bigotry, one-upmanship, ignorance, chippiness, lack of charity and absence of humility.  Mostly, I find a combination of good and bad.  Sometimes, what I see disappoints me but I do see the humour in the layer of bullshit at the bottom of life.

Personally, I don’t like to boast publicly about the good things in my life because there will always be someone out there who’s got a shittier deal than me to cope with.  So I moan and generally try to take the piss, make people laugh, expose the ridiculousness of everyday life and some of the flaws in the people I see.  This is the writer’s way and having seen Ed Byrne perform last night, this is the comedian’s way too.  

I have been a fan of good quality stand-up comedy for decades.  When I lived in London, me and the husband used to go to The Monday Club at the Tattershall Castle.  This is a big old boat moored on the Thames.  There, they host a comedy showcase night, where up and coming as well as established talent cut their teeth and new material on an experienced audience.  Over the years, I saw Ross Noble, Shappi Khorsandi (she was bloody terrible twelve years ago but has greatly improved since), Stephen K Amos and many others who have since become household names and there were also some comic greats like Andrew Maxwell, Daniel Kitson, Jeff Innocent and Ian Stone who unfortunately haven’t.  Think Ed Byrne looks fresh-faced?  We went to see him do a gig in Reading about twelve years ago and then I saw him again last night.  He’s a consummate performer.  I’ll also never forget (although I try) the time Jimmy Carr was a new name, supporting Daniel Kitson at an Edinburgh Festival warm-up gig in Clerkenwell’s Comedy Cafe.  Carr was bloody terrible and although I think he’s great as a TV show host and ad-libs very well, I still can’t stand his 1970’s style Bob Monkhouse-esque one-liners.  So stiff and formal!

In any case, I feed off comedy intellectually and I try to make my own writing for children as funny as possible.  Making people laugh is such a tricky and skilful art.  It requires great discipline and most importantly, requires a truly miserable bastard to do it properly.  Only the brutally honest, anti-social arsehole can sit as an outsider and find the funny in everyday things, the woefully crap and irritatingly ghastly.  You have to have the troughs of the emotional rollercoaster to see the negative and turn it into comedy gold and then you have to have the heady peaks to perform or write it with enthusiasm and energy.  I’m not talking about the rollercoaster of the bi-polar here.  I’m talking about the full range – both highs and lows - of normal adult emotion. 

At the weekend, I had a debate with someone about writing critically about life.  And my thoughts are this: nobody wants to hear streams of tambourine smacking, flag waving, evangelical bullshit about your life.  If all you do is boast: how brilliant you are, how fucking genius your children are, how immensely gymnastic and fulfilling your sex life is, how firm and fragrant your turds come out, how fast and quality your car is, how well paid your job is, how lucky you are to be God’s chosen Alpha Male or Female and how gorgeous you are, inside and out, then people are going to want to punch you.  You’re lying.  Plain and simple.  And nobody wants to hear that shit.  Life just isn’t like that.  Optimism should always be tempered by healthy cynicism.  And for those people who do only see the anodyne, the bouncy and the fluffy in life, perhaps you are emotionally crippled or on valium.  

For me, it boils down to this: Should I report to you in this blog that my car is sparkling clean and howls like a rabid beast down the road, inspiring envy in all?  Would that be entertaining?  Would it be truthful?  NO!  The truth is, my car is OK, but the interesting aspect of it is the litter all over the carpets.  I call it kid compost.  The fact that the interior smells of farts is also more interesting because as a family, we are prodigious farters.  Should I boast about my 9 year old daughter coming top in science and having great bone structure?  NO!  The truth is that she can lay claim to both of those things but it’s more interesting to report that she is an untidy little fecker, whose bedroom is carpeted wall to wall with dirty tights and knickers.  I expect her to start her own Dale Farm community in the back garden any day now.

So really, in the yin and yang of life’s experience, should I write only about the happy, sunshiny bits that are intensely personal and that might make some other fucker, worse off than me, feel like a piece of shit?  Or should I write the stuff that everybody recognises?  The spots, the flab, the bald patches, the embarrassing smells, the irritation, the angry outbursts, the mortifying faux pas?  Should comedians just come onto the stage and talk for two hours about how great life is?  Would that be funny?  Would it air on channel Dave for the next ten years, if they appeared on Mock the Week, praising the positive aspects of the current Governments’s fiscal policy?  You, the reader, can decide...

Buckling under the guilt

This week saw me punching the air triumphantly in a style normally only seen in schmaltzy 1980’s films like Top Gun.  No, in fact, I didn’t just punch the air.  I whooped like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (except in that film, Julia Roberts said her legs were 44inches long and I look more like a celebrating hobbit.  Also, I’m not a prozzy unless you count the time I gave my husband a Popozogolou to get him to fix the shower door).  

I was celebrating because my agent decided that my manuscript, Zeeba Marple, which is for children aged 9+, was finally ready to go off into the blue yonder into publisher land.  I have been working on that bloody novel since last November, so it’s almost a year’s labour.  It has been lovingly crafted with as much fun and imagination as possible.  It has been written and rewritten and rewritten until it’s so polished, you can see your chins in it.  It has had feedback from the savviest minds you can imagine and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud that I managed to pull my ravaged mind through the dark pureed-Weetabix years of drooling with my children in front of Teletubbies and Mr. Fucking Tumble back into the sunlit lands of intelligible adult conversation and hummus.  I am a creator.  I am an author.  I am more than my empty holdall of a belly and bingo wings.  More than just Mummy.

 

But there lies the rub.  I am WRACKED with guilt.  I am CONVINCED I am a slightly shit mother.  Why?  Well, I think there’s some kind of evolutionary burden of guilt for women who try to juggle quality parenting with professional success and without the luxury of hired childcare.  If you’ve tried to burn this candle at both ends, you’ll know that I’m telling the truth.  This is how it happened to me:

 

Four years ago, my writing passion was reignited, after more than a decade on the shelf.  I had been renovating two houses – a great career if you’ve got kids who see the fun in playing in building sand at Jewsons - but work had finished.  The housing market had collapsed and so had my intentions of being Sarah Beeny Mk II with more disappointing boobs and a rubbish accent.   Feeling at a loose end and not yet ready to go back to working in an office, I wrote a simple fairy story for my daughter.  She loved it and so did I.  I became quickly addicted to the creative fix that writing offered.  It was like hobnobs in crack cocaine form.  Better than that.  My brain was thawing out and it had survived its cryogenic-hibernation-through-having-babies intact.  Cue Julia Roberts whooping.

 

But I was skint.  So I went back into an office part-time, reluctantly resurrecting my fundraising career, which I thought I had successfully killed dead and replaced with power tools and the ability to talk Plasterer fluently.  Suddenly, I was balancing a three year old, a five year old, a part time job WHICH I LOATHED and my new obsession.  I was DEFINITELY going to be a published children’s writer.  This was it.  Definitely me.  I was going to show my children that with hard work, you can achieve anything.

 

But gradually, the more into writing novels I got, the less I could pay attention to my children as they clambered all over me, talking gibberish and smearing marmite on my dreams.  I was in the room physically  – perhaps more “there” than most parents but my mind was travelling through the Frankish Empire and flying with big bat wings through fantasy landscapes.  I was in the tunnel.  If Sid on CBeebies wanted me to pay attention, he was going to have to get his man-meat out on national TV for me to notice.

 

And so it has continued, this sub-standard parenting.  I must be doing something right, of course, because my children haven’t got nits.  They’re loved and can walk and eat vegetables.  But they still talk shit at me at high velocity and volume.  Now, more than ever, as my writing career really steps up by several notches, I am forced to triple-glaze over when they try to zap through to my tunnel with their laser-attack of spoken bollocks bullets.  And the guilt: it’s getting far worse.  Soon there will be book tours and possibly trips all over the world.  I will have to leave them to eat Daddy’s poisonous cooking overnight or longer.   He may not check that they’ve wiped their bums properly.  But it’s kind of...tough shit.  I have to relinquish control just for a while and the very fact that I think that kills me too.

 

I have no solution to this common problem of juggling.  I am going to keep writing as well as I can.  It’s who I’ve become.  And of course, I’m going to keep trying my best at mothering.  My children are still at the centre of my world, even if I do wish they’d shut it when I’m editing.  I would rather shoulder this burden of guilt and be an excellent writer with mildly neglected children than be an excellent mother with neglected dreams and a heart full of regret.