*sings* "My name is Talulah..."

squeaky is a bad blogger. *shame*
i haven't blogged for far, far too long, i know.  but honestly, there hasn't been much going on.  there appears to be something growing out of the silt which is, at present, about 11,000 words long.  it's coming very, very slowly.  and i keep hitting walls with "OK, smartass, what happens next, then?" scrawled all over them in dripping red paint.
but it's coming.  the working title is utterly crap, and there's already a lot that needs poking, but i still have a connection with it, and ideas for what happens later (without any idea of how i'm going to get from here to there), but it's coming.... :)

-

and now, since the end appears to be in sight, the sad and terrible story of Isobel, our poor, abused camper.

Isobel has been with us for about four years.  and we love her.  she has given us much joy (and occasional frustration - like the first time her sliding door fell off, but never mind that), and has been astonishingly reliable.  she's carried hubby to work every day, and he and i all over the country to watch ravens, and wolves (the latter only in a safari park, sadly), and long, long walks in deserted woodlands, and so many other places.  she has been a true and faithful friend.  but she was getting rusty.  so we decided to give her a new set of clothes (i.e. a new paint job), and get a few things repaired and spruced up.
we took her to a local place, which shall remain nameless (insert copious and acidic swearing here), as they were VW refurbishment specialists, and the work they showed us looked pretty good.  they quoted us a price we could afford for replacing panels, getting rid of the rust, taking her back to the bare metal and respraying, and we saved hard for several months.
she was to be purple on the outside, and we were going to redo her insides in green.
she went in at the beginning of november, and was supposed to be in there for four weeks.
six weeks later (we didn't mind waiting, these things take time, after all), we finally got her back.  it was two days before christmas, and the spanking new purple paint was a fantastic christmas present.  we were thrilled!  yay! :D

five weeks later, it all went tits up.

rust started showing through the new paint.  not just a little patch, either -  all over the bloody place!  we were horrified!

we took her back and showed the guy who runs the garage, and he gave every appearance of also being horrified at the shoddy work.  apparently, the reason it had taken six weeks was that "Dave The Paint" (the sprayer who does all of their paintwork for them) had been having one or two personal problems when he did Isobel's work.  really?  no shit!
well anyway, we were very understanding - people do have problems, after all - and garage bloke said he'd get it sorted, at no extra cost to us.  too bloody right!
so off she went again.  i will leave out the description of the shitty fucking deathtrap car he loaned us, or what a nightmare we had getting temporary insurance for it, or any of the myriad other things that happened, each one sinking our spirits lower and lower.
we missed out on our first week's leave this year, and the second. 
THREE MONTHS after we took her in for the second time, the work still had not even been started.  apparrently, DTP was very angry that we had dared to complain about his dreadful, shoddy work.  go figure - we're so ungrateful.  *shrug*
we finally demanded that garage guy return Isobel, and the money we'd paid him.  the cheeky bastad tried to give us 900 quid less, saying work had been done on the body of the van.  hubby, on the verge of tears of anger, frustration and sorrow, pointed out that she was now in a worse state than when she went in.  her door locks no longer worked, the speaker cables had been carelessly cut when they removed the doors, all the interior window trims had disappeared, and the rust was even worse, with paint flaking off all over the bloody place.
he returned Isobel and, a couple of weeks later, we finally got all of the money back, but were now faced with the question: "What now?"  find somewhere else that would charge us even more and be just as likely to rip us off?
Why bother now?
i can't adequately convey the trauma of this whole story here.  she was our pride and joy, and those scumbags had fucking RUINED her.  she no longer had that spirit of joy that made us relax as soon as we sat in her.  she was, to us, a flat, dead thing.  a moving cavern of metal, and nothing more.
we decided the time had come.
we were ready. 
"we shall buy a bay window". 
one of the ones you see all over the roads of Cornwall in the summer.  a proper VW bus.  not a splitty (the really old ones with the split windscreen), since they're really, really expensive.  but we worked out that we could just about afford a bay window, with a pop top.
so we started searching the interwebz.
there's a place we found down in Oxfordshire.   they buy and sell and do up campers, and they do really, really good work, on site (bonus!).  but they were a little out of our price range.  so we started trawling through the classified ads on vwcampercrazy.com.
we saw a few we liked, and even went to look at one (which was pink! XD), but there was one ad that really caught our eye.  however, we couldn't get hold of the guy, and the ad was a couple of weeks old.  we thought it might already have gone, since the good ones tend to go really quickly, but a week later, the guy finally got back to us.  it was still for sale, and he was happy to keep it for us until we could get to see her.
yesterday, we drove all the way down to essex (three hours!), just to see it, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be a wasted 360 mile round trip.

it wasn't.

we've found her!  we've found our new baby!

***HAPPYDANCE***

her name is Talulah, and she's GORGEOUS!!!

look-->

her bodywork is immaculate, without a speck of rust anywhere (apart from a teeny tiny patch on the passanger footwell - easily sorted), and her interior is fantastically well designed, hand built, and, again, immaculate.  i should probably mention that the paint job and interior were both done by the lovely guy that's selling her to us, and quite obviously with a great deal of love.

she is a dream!

now we will be on tenterhooks for two weeks until we can pick her up.

WE CAN'T WAIT!!!

and poor, abused Isobel?  she's going to a new home, where she will be loved and appreciated.  she's going to go and live with The Most Wonderful Woman In The World and her lovely chap.  this makes us happy, too.

*smile*

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procrastinating

i'm currently trying to get around to writing the next part of Deathdream.  however, since i have absolutely no idea what happens next (other than one or two vague ideas involvng cobbles and rooftops and walls...um...), i thought i'd write this instead.

i'm still trying to work out how the writing part of my brain functions.  so far, it seems to be, rather like the rest of me, fairly erratic.  i seem to go for days not feeling it, then get a quick burst of a day or so, then nothing much again for a bit.  check the posting dates and times of deahdream and you'll see what i mean.  in between, though, i seem to get these occasional flashes of what can only be described as "Other Stuff".

(hmmm...that's an awful lot of "seeming"... *editor-self raps writer-self over the knuckles with a wooden ruler that goes "byoyoyoyoyonnng"*)

take this morning, for instance.  i was suspended between waking and sleeping and, as has happened to me before when i've been in this place, the germ of a story sidled into my head.  not a very long one though.  i suppose it would more-or-less be categorised as "flash fiction" (which is, BTW, a term whose meaning i'm still only hazily familliar with...).  the weird thing was, i was actually dreaming in words.  i don't mean i was dreaming a voice telling me the story, i mean i was actually watching the words appear before my eyes, overlaid on the scene they were describing.  which, of course, didn't strike me as the slightest bit odd at the time, since i was dreaming, and these things don't. 

but it strikes me as somewhat odd now.  encouraging, but odd.  because this is kinda sorta how i read.  i see the words, but i also see the pictures...

forgive me, i'm rambling.  i'm also, as it happens, cursing myself, since i could remember every single word when i woke up.  and it seemed coherent (which, let's face it, so often isn't the case), and i didn't write it down.

damn! damn! damn!

and now, thanks to the usual distractions of a busy day (doing little but reading), most of it has disappeared back to where it came from.  i am kicking myself so hard at the moment, because i can remember the basic shape of it, but not the linguistic nuances that made it more than just words strung together. 

it's gone flat.

***

just as an aside, it occurs to me to wonder if that's where i keep my story silt, between the shores of sleeping and waking...?

nothing to see here..move along, please...

today, i find myself with a feeling that i appear to have had for most of my life.  desperate to write something, but with no idea of what to write. 

oh, the joys of blogging! 

to be able to write about nothing much if i so wish, just to assuage the desperate need to write!  at this point, i refer you to the note under the blog's title - please feel free to wander off and watch paint dry - i won't hold it against you - how do you think i feel?  i have to live in here.

when i was a kid and overtaken by this urge, i would get a picture book of fairy tales i had, and copy out the tales until the need to use paper and pen or pencil to make words was quietened for now. 
actually, now my mind is wandering off the path and wondering if i am cursed.  this thought tends to occur for many and varied reasons in my day-to-day life, but in this particular instance....a (fledgeling) writer, wants to write, in fact needs to write, but completely devoid of inspiration or the kind of mind that can pull together random elements and put them togethter in unusual and unexpected ways, and use it to tell a story to amaze/amuse/pull forth emotions/whatever.  also - a writer with nothing much to say about anything, if i'm honest. 

or maybe i'm just an inveterate chatterbox with a stationary fetish?...

hmmm....

well, anyway, like i said - less even than usual to say, but when did that ever stop me?...  the first stage of editing the WIP is finished.  i've fixed the spelling, the wonky sentences, and argued constantly with the spelling and grammar checker over whether or not a sentence is too wordy, or should/should not end on a preposition.

...by the way - WTF is a preposition anyway?!...

and hubby has read it.  this is a first, him not being someone who generally reads for pleasure.  and he says he enjoyed it, which, of course, pleases me immensely. :o)  he was also kind enough to point out one or two plot holes and inconsistencies.  these, i will file away for later.  having lived with the blasted thing for the last 5 months, i'm far too close to it and, frankly, heartily sick of the bloody thing.  it's a disappointment to me, especially after the first one.  however, i already have another couple of ideas settling into the silt for next november, so maybe i'll just leave them there, and see what occurs.  or maybe they'll make themselves into short stories between now and then. 

because i thought i might have a go at short stories next.

i know, i know - short stories are hard.  really hard.  and that's good.  i want a different challenge, and i understand short stories can be wonderful learning experiences  for an author a writer (feels weird and presumptious to refer to myself as an author - i'm just someone who wants to write).  personally, after this last one, i hope i can give myself a few lessons in cutting out the waffle.  it also means i'm gonna have to tune my brain in to the odd details of the world - the things that pique my interest.  a word, a phrase, a situation, an incongruous juxtaposition of ideas.  i'm going to have to have my writer head on most, if not all of the time.  it will be interesting to see if i can keep that little entity that sits at the back of my brain (on a three-legged stool with a pen poised over a reporter's notebook) alert, and watching.  i wonder what she'll come up with?  i also wonder if she'll notice things that i don't, and poke me as i'm writing?

gods, i hope so...

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smells and sleep and stories

yup - smells.
see, i was going to blog about sleep, and how i don't seem to be getting enough at the moment. 
but smells come first at the mo.  this evening, i smell of violets and lemons and patchouli.  that's because i went to Lush today, to stock up on one or two much-needed items (and, as usual in Lush, one or two that just said "you need me" - whatever they happened to be...) however, the reason i chose to go *today* in particular, is that i had a really shitty afternoon.  things just kept on comin', and getting worse and more bloody irritating as they did. by a quarter to four, i'd REALLY had enough. so (and gods bless the joy that is flexi-time!) i called it a day.  in a foul mood, i thought i'd head for lush as i had the time for once, and was getting really low on some things.
oh! i am sooo glad i did.  the smell in that shop is just...*sigh*...heavenly.  and i've noticed before, i immediately feel better when i walk through the door. i.m.m.e.d.i.a.t.e.l.y.  and after my bath tonight (with my delicious Space Girl bathbomb and lovely new violet-smelluing Daddy-O shampoo and Sexy Peel soap - guaranteed to make you feel good, just on its own), i feel - MUCH better.  almost drunk, in fact.  coz, y'know - there's certain times when us girls (through no fault of our own) feel really, really crap (the girls know what i mean, right?).  but i've found that smells can help.  and at other times, too. 
aromatherapy? maybe. 
but i think it's a very personal thing.  for instance, the most wonderful woman in the world's favourite smell?  poplar trees in bloom?  it HATES me.  i mean, it REALLY hates me.  makes my nose feel all crinkly and weird inside.  but, then, we're all different, after all.  with similar chemicals and cells and stuff washing around inside us, but such vastly different mixes, you might as well compare graphite to diamond.  both carbon, but the similarity ends there.  same with taste and sight and, well everything.  nature is such a wonderful thing. :)  oh, yeah, and i was listening to the new album by The Imagined Village, too.  also sold in Lush (0.o).  to go with the bathbomb - "inspired" by one of the songs. yeah, yeah, yeah.  even the organically tree-hugging Lush and TIV aren't above marketing. *grin* and why the hell should they be?  everyone's gotta make a living somehow, after all.  good album, though.  and the song's great! sort of an updated version of "My Mother Said I Never Should..."  lovin' Eliza Carthy.  just lovin' her.  if i could be anny singer/musician/whatever, she's the one.

and now, to sleep.  briefly (if i can ever be brief about anything!)  my body clock seems to have reset itself to wake up at 5 am.  by the gods, it's annoying!  by the time i'm just about ready to drop off again, the alarm's due in about 20 minutes!  GAAAH!!!  hate this.  not getting enough sleep.  at. all. 

this morning, though, i woke up with the germ of a story.  dunno if it was a whisp of a dream or what, but it was kind of an image of a set of twins.  one magical, the other not.  but, the non-magical one is more magical than the magical one, in a way, because everything comes as a quality of her, rather than the magic.  or something.  that one needs to settle in the silt for a while...grow some roots.  along with the vampire, and the incubus and the succubus.  this could take years, but i'm happy to have them there, just kind of...barely simmering...i guess.  it makes me happy in a tiny but important way.