Walking through late night London

I'm having a week of culture this week - I went to see Tango por Dos on Wednesday night at Sadlers Wells which was truly brilliant. I have to say I know nothing about tango (apart from the image of two people marching across the dancefloor with red roses gripped between their teeth, which needless to say, did NOT happen on Weds!) but it was full of evocative music and sex appeal. I have to say though, there's only so much accordian one person can take, and after two hours of it, I'm more than happy to not listen to any for a good while. The women were incredible - doing the splits and then pulling themselves back to standing with legs still straight - they must have nutcracker inner thigh muscles!

One of the things I most enjoyed about the night though was walking home through the centre of London. As I've got older (for that read: go out less, drink less and don't stay out as late) and have had less and less time for myself with no pressure on me from someone else, I have started to love wandering through London, watching the buildings and the rest of the world go about their nocturnal living. It has a strangely introverted appeal; it makes me feel like an outsider, viewing from within my own private space, untouched by what's going on around me. The end result is simultaneously calming and poignant, there's something quite touching that I can't capture in words about people totally absorbed in their moment, while the architecture around them holds steady as it has for the past hundreds of years.

Enough of that though, because tonight, high culture (of sorts) beckons in the form of the ENO production of The Mikado - my christmas present from the boyfriend, finally come around. I'm extremely excited about this, not least because we've just spent the past month in some sort of hideous DIY hell doing our bathroom and various other jobs around the flat (which now I may say does look quite splendid). As a former "little girl from school" in my own school production of the Mikado, I hope it lives up to the exacting standards we set back in St Aidans High School back in the late eighties!

Fame at last

Found myself mentioned in a great blog this weekend: Gaping Void - how exciting! Building up my "web profile" - though I'm not sure what, if any good has come of it yet.

My obsession with YouWriteOn continues apace, though I've found a new one now too: Litopia which is an online "writers' colony" set up by an agent, with the intention of fostering new talent. Admission is by approval only, which naturally I passed! so I'm getting to know the good folk on there too. Only trouble is, in between having the most hideously busy week at work and doing our bathroom at the moment (think dust, gaping holes in walls, flushing the now open-plan loo with a bucket), reappraising my manuscript is taking a back seat so far away it is in the next car back!

Had dinner with a friend last week who is an editor, she suggested looking at the very dusty book I wrote a few years ago, which is languishing (as it probably should be) in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. It seems the genre has come into fashion and in an ironic twist of fate, could be my ticket to the big time rather than the newer (and in my opinion better) book I've just written. All that effort for nothing eh?! Still it's worth a try, if I can build up the courage to get it out and look at it again!

Ooh, I feel an obsession coming on

It's only been 2 days, but already I think I'm hooked on YouWriteOn. I've read 2 people's sample chapters so far, plus another 2 are waiting in my "reading assignments". So far, one has been excellent, one has been ok, and 2 (the ones that I've yet to start) look bloody awful. It's great though, because it gives a real sense of the general standard of writing that agents get as submissions and also an idea of how they must feel when they have to plough through the hundreds of sample chapters that arrive on their desks every week. Of course, there is also a teeny weeny bit of schadenfreude in it too, and a smug inner feeling of knowing that mine has got to be near the top of the pile in terms of quality (not of course that it's done me the slightest bit of good so far though!)

Otherwise, I'm staying very much in my cocoon - the extremely nauseous feeling that woke me at 5am on New Year's Day is still haunting me and it's so bloody cold outside that all I want to do is snuggle on the sofa by the fire. So much so, that I deliberately left my running kit at home today in order to stop myself from being tempted to go for a run!

I have to say I'm actually quite disappointed it hasn't snowed so far, and it doesn't look like it's going to now either. Princess O was very sweet when she was going to bed the other night and we were talking about building snowmen. She was getting upset because she didn't know how to make a snowball and wasn't big enough to roll it and make a snowman - ahhhh.

Happy New Year!

Back at work after Christmas, very depressing. At least work is quiet after the hideously busy few months preceding (hence no blogging).

Another year rolls round, with the inevitable list of resolutions, which for me reappear each year with depressing regularity (must get flat stomach; get book published; become all round super-woman with perfect work/life balance etc etc.)

Looking back over 2007, I fear I have achieved precisely zero of the above, and after the bingeing on chocolate, cheese, food in general, sherry (don't ask!) port, wine and champagne, with a few Baileys thrown in for good measure (just to prove I will drink "grain" as well as "grape") I look more like a six month pregnant elephant, so the flat stomach element of the resolutions is probably further away than ever.

Nevertheless, it's onwards and upwards (or possibly just sideways) with the blog/book enterprise. I've joined a new Harper Collins group called "authonomy" which is an online forum for aspiring writers to post some of their book and get readers to comment - a democratic slush pile, apparently, but also perhaps, a time saving device to stop the juniors at HC having to wade through thousands of hopeless manuscripts in the hope of finding a booker winner, which invariably never happens. Almost like getting us to do the hard work for them (not that I'm being cynical of course, because it's all about consumer power and word of mouth in the age of web 2.0)

This has also led me to discovering another website with a similar aim: YouWriteOn . Again, writers post their books, and readers read and comment. It's not affiliated to any publisher, but some agents and publishers do look on it, according to the information on the home page. So I will no doubt join that one too, and hope that another tiny voice of mine calling in the online wilderness will add to the others and be finally heard.