'It fell off in my hand!' says one of my sons, bringing our floor brush to me in two bits ('Erm, I'd sort of been leaning on it, and I was really comfy, then it kind of broke and I nearly fell on my BAD ARM....'

'It just broke!' my kids chorus when I open the case of my (admittedly old and knackered) sax and find it lying there in a billion pieces.

Things 'just break' around here. It's amazing - as if there's some other force at work. One time, J's favourite jeans SHREDDED THEMSELVES with a pair of scissors. It's amazing what they can do with denim these days.

xx

Agh.... so I FORCE one of my sons out for a cycle even though he'd rather stay home and be glued to Runescape on the PC. And next thing, I'm being summonsed back from the park by J, announcing that our boy fell off his bike and is about to be taken by ambulance to hospital.

You know what? There are far worse things than a broken arm but I never imagined quite how the accident would alter the family dynamics. On a practical level, injured son is spending vast amounts of time at home, and therefore so are his brother and sis, unless J is home at the time. Which makes everyone feel very trapped and a bit grrrr....

I also suspect that they are a tad jealous over all the attention he's getting. One evening I took to waggling his x-ray print-outs in their faces and shrieking, 'Look! Look what happened to your brother! How would YOU feel if your bone had popped out?' Am not proud of that. Have probably mentally scarred them. Anyway, fingers crossed the cast comes off on Monday, just in time for our hols in France. Cast is now a grubby, manky old thing and not the 'badge of honour' people said it would be. My son hates it.

AND SO TO WORK...
I have (ha!) three days to finish a draft of new book before our school summer hols start here in Scotland. Which is obviously not going to happen unless I come over all Barbara Cartland and dictate it to a 'secretary'. Self-imposed deadlines can be great booster and motivator but can also send you into despair, so I think I'll conveniently forget about this one and blame my son for breaking his arm!

It never would have happened if he'd stayed in and played on the computer, like I said he should.

xx

Electrifying bank hol...

With Jimmy away on a highly cultural (pfff) jaunt to London and Kent with his pals, the kids and I had four days to fill. I was determined not to resort to mega-swanky days out - the kind of all-singing, all-dancing excursions which they love of course, but which I try to keep for 'special'. Weather was brilliant - it's been amazingly hot for most of May - so lots of picnics, playing in Skirling Woods, spotting oyster catcher chicks near the river in Coulter... all v Famous Five-ish and dampened only by daughter receiving a shock from an electrified fence. Yow!

Have to admit, I do get ranty when the kids lose things. A trail of possessions is forever left in our wake. So when Son One casually said, 'Um, can we go back to the river today? It was great...' I was a tad suspicious. A dazzling light shone directly into his eyes soon revealed the truth: 'I... um... think I left my er, Swiss Army knife there... ummm...' We returned and it was STILL THERE. It did not join the billion Swiss Army Knives Lost.

And so to work....
New mummy lit novel is coming along at a sprightlier pace now. I took part in a reading last night along with members of two groups - the Biggar Writers and Writers' Bloc (a highly entertaining and diverse Edinburgh-based group) and came away feeling inspired by an excellent mix of poetry and prose, all highly inventive stuff. Poets amaze me! I feel ridiculously self conscious if I even try.

Thought I'd end with my fave things about bank hols...
- no packed lunches to, um, pack
- no cajoling children out of bed
- not being googly-eyed after a day spent lashed to the PC
- fresh air!
- no haring up the street at 8.55 am with homework/gym shoes/glasses forgotten
- not having to cram all the must-do jobs in at the end of the day

When the sun shines...

...it's SO hard to keep a book flowing along. A writer friend says he hates the hot weather, but I don't, and right now the blazing sunshine is temping me away from the keyboard and out into the garden. Some strategies I'm currently toying with:
- Lowering my daily target word count so I feel less pressurised. Actually, this has nothing to do with the sunny weather. It's something I've decided to do due to stressing out over ridiculous self-imposed deadlines. After all, writing is supposed to be fun... isn't it? My thinking is that, if you achieve MORE that you'd planned, you feel happy and mighty chuffed with yourself - rather than cross, scratchy and a dismal failure. So: less is more... (am aiming for 1000 words a day at the mo).
- Writing in a notebook in the garden. I normally write straight onto the screen, but have found that some pen-and-paper scrawling can help to unravel plot problems.
- I had an idea about getting up and starting work at 6 am so I can knock off early and enjoy the sun. Needless to say this hasn't happened. I am enjoying writing this book though. And I'd rather have it finished, and be pleased with it, than be pottering in the sunshine. Honest.
F x

Sleepover party

Tonight we have six extra children coming to stay for the night. I fear that I'll scare them witless with my clipboard and attached 'action plan' of what we're going to do, eat etc. Since the boys were toddlers I've figured that the best - or rather the ONLY - way to emerge from a children's party unscathed is to plan everything to the letter. So between this evening and tomorrow lunchtime, my daughter (now 8 yrs old) and her friends will have watched Stardust and Dr Who, painted nails, made their own pizzas and jigsaws, had a midnight feast, a treasure hunt AND a water balloon fight. And they will damn well have ENJOYED IT and tell their parents how GREAT it was.

Hmmm. No wonder one of my sons remarked that he 'lives under a Facist regime...'

post-holiday rev-up...

...after two weeks of Easter hols, which have been v pleasant, despite the shivery Lanarkshire weather. I'm a third of a way into a novel, which feels not very far at all, especially as I'd love to have even a rough, barely-legible draft ready when the kids break up for summer (which is the end of June here in Scotland - eek).

In the past I've dillied around with various ways of cranking up the brain post-hols. Trouble is, I've barely glanced at the book in the past two weeks, and now I'm thinking, Who's Rory again? What the hell happened to Laura's dress? Would be easier, I think, to write continuously with NO breaks, ever, but of course every writer has a real life too, which tends to get in the way. And without those school holiday 'breaks', I'd start feeling quite hermet-like and lonesome. And barking mad, probably.

So... some post-hol brain revving tactics I've tried in the past...
- Don't expect to dive headlong into your writing the first day you have an empty house. Read the last few chapters, tinker about, familiarise yourself with the story again. It's like meeting up with an old friend you haven't seen for ages, and can feel a little awkward and creaky at first.
- Bash out something - anything - just to get into the flow again. Kind of freewriting really, just to limber up. If some good ideas come from it, so much the better. But don't beat yourself up if it's bile.
- Resist all temptation to go back to the very beginning and start editing and fiddling about. I ALWAYS want to do this, when I'm feeling a bit lost and confused. But it's far better to push on to the end. It 'll start to flow and feel natural, and pretty soon, 'The End' won't seem quite so far away.

(Oh, and passing the half-way point - for me about 200 pages - is always quite magical and boosting, I think).

That's the plan, at least! Had better crack on, and try to figure out the heck Rory is again....
F x

Play it again....

A friend has asked me to play sax and flute in a band to accompany our local amateur dramatics troupe. I was chuffed, even though she let slip that the two other two players she'd asked before me had turned it down. Still! Three years ago, the sax was consigned to many an attic as I moved from flat to flat. And now it's being played relentlessly as I try to get the show's darn songs into my head.

It's Me and My Girl. I have the CD and play it constantly in the hope that my brain will absorb it by some process of osmosis. And it's worrying, playing the same thing over and over. The kind of behaviour that's a small step away from wearing your bra on top of your coat. I'm sure I once read about some maniac who viciously attacked a neighbour because she'd been playing Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You' around 800 times a day. I find myself humming the more recognisable tunes - Leaning on a Lamppost, The Sun Has Got His Hat On etc - whilst queuing in shops. God help me if I start doing The Lambeth Walk in public. In our small community, that kind of behaviour can get you on the cover of the Lanark Gazette.

Another stressy aspect: when to practise? We're in the midst of Easter hols (still!) so little chance during the day. At the first sax-honk my daughter starts pounding her piano, trying to drown out the horror of it all. I could get up at 6 am, but what kind of traumatic effect would that have on impressionable children? Ditto late at night. Unless I muffle the sax by stuffing it full of jumpers.

Which, unless I can get these songs together over the next three weeks, might be a wise tactic on opening night...