Cat nap

Flad is so old and stiff that he can't curl up into small ball the way he used to. So we decided to treat him to the biggest cat bed we could find. However, he doesn't quite seem to have got the hang of it, does he?

A shock and a knock

The shock was a complaint about my work. The knock was to my self-esteem. I am still trying to come to terms with both. Here is what happened...

About three years ago, an old boyfriend I hadn't seen since 1981 tracked me down on the internet. He has a high-powered job in the Intelligence services and had started writing thrillers and asked me to appraise and edit them for him. We agreed on a fee and the work began. He was a new, raw writer with a tendency to over-wordiness and an inability to get under the skin of his characters, but he wrote terrific, authentic-sounding scenes and his plots were very good. A few drafts later and he had a much better grasp of writing techniques and his work had improved considerably. However, after several tries, he had failed to find an agent or a publisher.

Ten months ago, I proof read the final version of his first book and last week he decided to send it to a publisher who had expressed interest in the first three chapters. Yesterday, I received a withering email from him telling me I had done a rotten job and that, on re-reading his manuscript, he had found loads of typos and words omitted from sentences. I was horrified. I always do a final read-through before sending a job off to a client. I recalled that he had made a few changes to the book, which he had discussed with me, but he insisted that the version he had found the errors in was the same one I had worked on.

I was terribly upset. I won't say that proof reading is my favourite job. Writing is what I enjoy most. Creative editing of other people's work comes second. Proof reading is, to me, the equivalent of ironing, my least favourite housework chore, the reason being that by the time I am at that stage, I have already been over the book several times during the editing and rewriting process and, unless there is a gap of a couple of months and I am coming to it afresh, I am, quite honestly, getting slightly bored with that particular story. I think an author should bring in a pair of fresh eyes to do the final check.

Perhaps this is where things went wrong. Maybe, knowing the story so well, my eyes skated over it too fast and I missed things. But I doubt it. If I am being paid for something, I like to do a thorough job. So last evening I emailed him three times, asking him first, to send me some examples of things I had missed (he was adamant that he was reading the same version of the book that I had proofed for him); second, offering him his money back; and third, apologising as grovellingly as I could.

I haven't heard a thing. I am very upset, wondering how I could have done such a sloppy job. It's not only my professional confidence that has been knocked, but my personal confidence, too. He is (was) a friend and the fact that he is so angry with me, so scathing about my professional abilities (I have been editing and proof reading for a staggering 43 years!), has damaged our friendship. I don't think he will ever want me to work for him again. No wonder they say that you should never mix business with friendship. I once wanted desperately to buy the flat in Camden that a friend was selling, but she refused to sell it to me for fear that if I was miserable there because the neighbours were noisy or the freeholders causing problems, I'd blame her. She said she would never sell a home or a car to a friend. I think 'never work on a friend's book' should be added to the list. I am certainly never going to do it again.

The self-publishing lottery

As I am planning to go down the self-publishing route myself, I read every article I can find about it. It really is lottery, a rags-to-riches dream. The Mail On Sunday's (I only buy it for the word games, honestly!) Live section this week contained an interesting piece by Rob Waugh on self-publishing success stories, the main interviewee being Hugh Howey, who went from stacking shelves to a seven figure salary with Wool and its subsequent sequels.

I subscribe to an interesting daily newsletter called Book to Book ( b2b@booktrade.info ) and this morning it contained a link to an American blog called Salon which carried a feature by would-be bestseller writer John Winters on his attempts to promote and sell his e-book. Its wry, self-deprecating humour made it an enjoyable and empathy-provoking read, so here is a link:

 http://www.salon.com/2013/04/02/im_a_self_publishing_failure

Having read it, I don't think I shall be rushing to make a promotional video! Yet still I wonder about what makes a good e-book and what doesn't.

Since getting my Kindle at Christmas, I have bought, or downloaded for free, quite a few books, several of which were recommended by fellow authors, and although most of them have been carefully edited and checked for typos, one in particular (no, not yours, Eileen; that's in the first class category!) shocked me because of the number of careless and avoidable errors it contained which spoiled a potentially gripping story, because the glaring mistakes - spelling and punctuation errors and phrases left hanging in the air, seemingly unconnected to the sentence that contained them - soon dominated my attention, to the point where I was playing spot the error rather than spot the plot twist.

I know that few writers can afford to pay for a professional proof reader or editor, but surely they know someone whose grasp of the English language is a bit better than their own and who will, for the price of a pint or two, go through their manuscript with a read pen? Yes, you spotted the deliberate mistake. It's a homonym, a word that sounds the same as another but has a different spelling and meaning. In my job, I come across similar errors all the time and I'm sure the good old Spell Checker is to blame a lot of the time. All it takes is two or three such glitches to make the reader doubt the author and lose their trust in the story, on the grounds that if the author can't be bothered to get their spelling right, then perhaps they are incapable of writing a good plot and unworthy of being paid £3.99 for the benefit of the doubt!

My bedtime reading at the moment is Proust. Having avoided In Search of Lost Time (my French isn't up to A La Recherche...) all my life, I put it on my bucket list and am now on pg 47 of Volume 2. This is writing as done by a scientist/surgeon peering at life and emotions through a microscope. No writer would get away with being so long-winded these days and taking three pages to describe the scenery by a river. Neither would they get away with writing paragraphs that are three pages long. Reading it is like watching paint dry very slowly and speculating on the former existence of the paint bristles trapped within. But by God, I'm sleeping well! Throw away the Zopiclone. Proust should be prescribed on the NHS for insomniacs everywhere, but don't, DON'T, whatever you do, try and read it on a Kindle. One paragraph will last for ten small Kindle pages, you'll lose the plot and be found in the morning babbling wildly and trying to spread marmalade on your e-book reader. If that's not Bibliomania, then what is?

Digging up the Ancestors

A lady who lives across the street kindly offered to spend a few hours in the library researching my family tree, something I have always wanted to do but found I was absolutely no good at. Having tried and failed to find my grandparents on the 1901 census, I had given up.

My maternal grandmother was called Lucy Savage. She said she was related to old pop singer Terry Dene through his wife, Edna Savage, who was also a singer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Savage). Oddly enough, I spent several years vainly pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter and warbling away in obscure clubs and restaurants, so perhaps I inherited a smidge of the musical gene.

At first, my neighbour opted for the wrong Lucy Savage, but had an instinct that the details weren't correct, so now she has found the right one and, to my great joy, has unearthed an ancestor bearing the truly amazing, Dickensian name of Asquith Beedle! He was a glass-blower in Castleford, Yorkshire, and married a lady called Rose Pollett.

What I want to find out about now is my grandfather's family. I'd like to trace the Dickinson line back to see if my mum's tale of them having lived in Standish Hall, Wigan, Lancashire is true. She told us that my grandfather used to visit the family vaults in Standish every so often. However, the hall doesn't exist any more, having burned down in the 1920s and the land it stood on is now a pig farm. No reflection on my ancestors, I hope!

Coming back to life... slowly.

I postponed my birthday meal (b-day is tomorrow, folks!) until a week today, as so many of us are ill. This latest bug seems to be taking its toll. I don't mean the sickness one, I mean the hacking cough, streaming cold, earache and deafness one, which I have had on and off for the last six weeks. I spoke to a fellow sufferer today who told me that a friend of his brother's took a whole month off work with it and just stayed in bed! An extreme case of man-flu if ever I heard one.

My head is still a bit swimmy, my sinuses see-saw between the runs and the bungs, my ear hurts and I feel slightly in another world. My appetite has gone and I feel extremely tired. I went down to the shops today, only a ten minute walk, and on the return journey I felt as if I were climbing Mt Everest. My legs ached, I was panting for breath and I had no energy at all.

So, knowing that I can't feel much worse, I am about to welcome another fellow sufferer and her partner into the house (she went to the doctor and got antibiotics but they haven't helped at all because it's a virus) and open a bottle of wine. It's kill or cure time!

Midnight lurgy

When I started this blog, I intended to write about all my health problems and my attempts to fix them by trying various remedies and seeing what worked and what didn't. To the relief of most of you, probably, I have ended up hardly mentioning health matters at all! But this post is, I'm afraid, all about being struck down with a tummy bug, so avert your eyes if you are feeling at all delicate.

Having had four weeks with a ghastly cough, I was delighted when it finally went. But my delight was short-lived when Mr Grumpy caught a cold and gave it to me a fortnight ago. On Monday, I was just starting to snuffle a bit less and was beginning to make arrangements again. In fact, I had things booked in for every day this week and was wondering when I was going to be able to fit in my latest editing job.

When I flopped into bed around 11.30 on Monday night, I felt fine. At just after 1 am, I awoke and didn't know what was going on at all. The whole room was not spinning, but whirling round, as if I was on some ghastly fairground ride, and I was so boiling hot that I thought my body was going to explode and I was spontaneously combusting.

I was very scared. I don't think I have ever felt quite so peculiar and unwell. I even wondered if I was dying. Wondering if I needed the loo, I lurched there, clutching furniture as things were still whirling. Then I started to feel nauseous. The only handy receptacle was my plastic waste paper basket, so I emptied out all the tissues, receipts and packaging material from my latest Amazon splurge, and rang Mr G on his mobile. We both keep our phones on all night. We've slept in separate rooms for several years now because of my insomnia and his snoring, and since his strokes, we both decided we should stay in phone contact in case he had another one in the middle of the night. But this time it was I who was in need and he who was too deeply asleep to hear the ringtone. (Turned out he'd switched it to Silent, the b******!)

Clutching my waste bin, I staggered up the stairs, hauling my way up the banisters, world still whirling, and found him asleep with Flad. He took a lot of waking. In fact, I wondered if he was dead! But finally the bedclothes heaved, his head emerged from beneath the duvet, the temperature having gone down to only 7C indoors, and he kindly got up and sat with me for two hours in the living room, listening to my groans, both of us swathed in blankets. By now, I was well and truly suffering from what can only be described as a 'both ends job', if you know what I mean!

I wondered if I had caught the Norovirus, but he felt my head and said it wasn't that as I didn't have a temperature. I felt as if I had been poisoned. I had terrible stomach pain, but not the cramps you get when you have a gastric bug. He and I had both eaten his home-cooked shepherds pie and he was okay, so it couldn't have been that. The only thing I had consumed that was any different to him was a tiny plastic container of something called Tipples. A friend had given me several at Christmas, I'd discovered one at the back of the fridge last night and had drunk it and had merrily remarked that it tasted a bit like sick. Many a true word... Mr G pointed out that, if it contained cream, it could have gone rancid and upset my stomach. He had made porridge a few weeks ago, not realising the milk had gone off, and he had been very ill, too.

By 3 am, we had both decided I wasn't about to snuff it, despite my getting heart palpitations. So he went back to bed and I was left to cope alone with the hell of frequent attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea. I found two Immodium Melts and took those and after one more attack, that particular end of my body stopped misbehaving. In fact, it has probably stopped functioning forever, knowing how strong Immodium is! I was still sick a couple more times, then was finally able to fall into a coma-like sleep, propped upright on several pillows, only to awake with a completely stiff neck and horrible headache, which I've still got.

As soon as the chemist's opened, Mr G went out and bought me some Dioralyte rehydration sachets, the unflavoured sort, thank goodness, as I couldn't have stomached blackcurrant, and I sipped my way through a couple of sachets of that. By the evening, I felt able to nibble a plain digestive biscuit. Today, I feel very feeble, my cough is back and I can hardly sit down as the whole of my undercarriage feels as if it has been scalded, then scrubbed with a Brillo pad. Every time I have a pee, I have to lean far forward to ensure it doesn't touch the painful areas. It's misery, but I hope I shall be okay by the weekend as it's my birthday on Sunday and friends are taking me out for an Italian meal on Saturday night - though one of them has now been felled by bronchitis. Oh, miserable winter days! It's been too cold, too long. I've almost worn out my thermals! Roll on, Spring.

I am now trying to summon up the energy to change my bedding, something I think all of us want to do when we've been ill, to get rid of the sweaty, germ-ridden sheets and swap them for some fresh, clean new ones. One odd thing has resulted from my spell of illness, in that a spoonful of sugar in my tea tasted so awful that I have cut down to a quarter of a teaspoonful. Maybe the diet starts today!

Happy Mother's Day!

Although it's now almost eight years since I found my daughter, having been separated from her for a bleak 36 years,  getting a Mother's Day card from her is still a terrific thrill. This year, she has proved that she truly is her birth mother's daughter by sending the kind of card I would have sent my own mum, all three of us sharing the same smutty sense of humour! It bears a water colour picture of a colourful rooster and inside she has written, 'I thought you'd appreciate a big...' (fill in the word yourself!).

Mr Grumpy loves the website thedogsdoodahs,com, which has a great range of cards for all occasions, many them quite ribald, plus templates that enable you to design your own. He send me one from Flad to me and inside it reads, 'Fank u for cuddling me.' Aaaah!

I hope all the mums reading this got their well-deserved quota of cards, flowers and warm, loving wishes today.