Pity me. I’ve been struck down in the prime of the bank holiday with some sort of head-achey cold hybrid monster.
I had planned to be up early this morning and run over to Brockwell Lido for a swim. Instead I’ve been lolling around feeling sorry for myself. My throat feels as though it’s got a shard of glass stuck in it, very specifically on the right hand side, at the top. My head has been banging so badly that last night I didn’t sleep at all. Instead I wasted Sunday’s daylight hours asleep on the sofa after painkillers finally kicked in. My nose is running on and off, and my skin feels super-sensitive and sore. It’s a bit of a let-down as bank holiday weekends go.
On a mental torture front (ok, I might be exaggerating a bit now) I’ve been paying the price for getting Coffee Monster the Star Wars Saga on blu-ray at Christmas. I’ve never seen the prequel trilogy – I didn’t even see the original three films in full until a couple of years ago. Dear God, it’d be as painful as my throat if I wasn’t having quite a lot of fun ripping into it. “You’re not like sand,” is probably the worst chat-up line I’ve ever heard in a film.
Also, you might have noticed (or not) that I’ve changed the design of the blog. I wanted something cleaner looking. So here it is.
I’ve bought so many books in the past couple of weeks that I’ve put myself on a book-shopping ban for the next month. The most recent book I’ve read (and finished) is Shelley Harris’s Jubilee, which was outstanding and surprisingly tense. As I recall, when I finished it, I told CM that if it had been written by a man, if the cover wasn’t so cheerful, it would probably be up for awards all over the place. If it had, say, Ian McEwan’s name on the cover, certain literary review publications would be all over it. Actually, Joanne Harris said all of this this morning, and better: http://joannechocolat.tumblr.com/post/84707533631/capitalize-this
In other news, I had a crack at this month’s Visual Verse offering. They put the May picture up just as my lunch break started at work. It was grim weather, and I was staying at my desk, so I pitched in (and accidentally sent my poem twice. D’oh.) If you want to have a read of my effort, head here: http://visualverse.org/submissions/hid-well/
Apparently I broke the record for sending something in (40 minutes). I’m quite pleased with the result, though with the usual space-and-hindsight I can see where it needs fixing up. I think this is also the first time that people who know me (or read this blog) (apart from the poor friends of mine who are deliberately tasked with reading drafts of stuff I write) have the opportunity to read something I’ve written that’s not, er, this. It’s had some gratifying reactions, which is nice and positive and confidence-boosting and all of those things.
(For people not familiar with Visual Verse, it’s an online anthology of sorts where the site provides a picture and writers use that picture as a starting point for poetry or flashfiction of under 500 words, to be written in under an hour.)
In other other news – the Sci-Fi 48hr flash fiction contest results came out. I wasn’t listed, but I’m looking forward to reading the winning pieces when they go up on the site (and congratulations to the winners, of course!)
And now, I’m going back to my lozenges and paracetamol and crappy chamomile and honey tea and, for one time only, chocolate cake. If you can’t have chocolate cake when there’s a razor blade stuck in your throat, I don’t know when you can.
That was a) metaphorical and rhetorical and b) a more horrible image than I intended. Sorry. Night.
Bookworms and Coffee Monsters 