Festive recovery is progressing well – I’ve had two complete days of doing very little-to-nothing and looking after myself and I’m feeling all the better for it.

I’ve got a voucher-splashing trip to Borders planned for the morning, under the guise of taking my Dad over to show him how fab it is, and I’ll be merrily spending my way through the delightful vouchers supplied by K’s big bro and troupe. (Happy now?;-).

I’m still not entirely firing on all cylinders, but I’m finding it much easier to get around at the moment – albeit always tied to an oxygen cylinder or concentrator – and I’m not nearly as breathless as I was yesterday or the day before, which goes to prove two things. 1) that doing plenty of physio and getting plenty of rest really works and 2) TOBI, the nebulised form of the Tobramycin anit-biotic, really does do it’s job spectacuarly well, as I only restarted it on Boxing day (it works on a month-on, month-off basis).

Also had an interesting conversation with O2 yesterday.  I’ve been thinking a lot about getting hold of a Blackberry phone/email device thingy, mostly because it’s a fair assumption that this year I’ll be spending a good deal more time in hospital and that being the case, it would be great to have access to my emails from my bed.  The hospital as it is doesn’t have workable or affordable internet access, so a Blackberry seems ideal.

What it would mean is that while I’m laid up with nothing much to do, not only can I carry on communicating with my friends without running up an insanely huge text message bill, but I can also carry on with most of the work I do for the Trust, which is handled largely through email with contributors, designers and the “bosses” there.

Now, I’ve seen a few really attractive deals on O2 for Blackberry Pearl phones and contracts to go with them, namely one which tell me that if you sign up to a £30+p/m voice contract and £10p/m Blackberry Tariff, you get the Pearl for free.

So I phoned and spoke to O2 customer services and told them that although I’m only 9 months into my current contract, I’d like to add the Blackberry Tariff and get the Pearl.  Fine, they said, that’ll be £220. 

Now, bearing in mind that the phone alone is advertised in Carphone Warehouse at the moment for £199, this didn’t seem like a fabulous offer.  I told them so.  They told me that since I’m not due an upgrade, there’s nothing they can do. 

I outlined my history with the company – loyal customer for over three years, no problems or complaints, no other issues – and suggested that perhaps, since I’m only 3 months away from the end of the contract, maybe they could budge a little on the price of the phone.  I didn’t say I wanted it free, just a little leeway on the £220.  But no, they don’t do it and no one there is authorised to.

So I thanked them politely and hung up, redialed and went through to the option on their phone menu saying “If you are less than happy”.  I outlined the situation again and got the same response – nothing they could do because I was outside the upgrade window.

At this point, having reiterated the fact that I’d been loyal for 4 years, never missed a payment, never raised a problem with them, never kicked up a fuss about anything, I let them know I was feeling like a mildly undervalued customer.

In fact, it had occurred to me whilst talking to them that it would be cheaper for me to go down to Carphone Warehouse, take out a new contract – on exactly the same terms as my current one – plus the Blackberry tariff, get the phone for free and pay out the remainder of my contract with them than it would be for me to get the Pearl through them.  I told them.

At this point he put me on hold and came back 5 minutes later telling me that having spoken to 2 different departments, the 2nd one told him that if I called them back on the 4th January, they would do the upgrade for me.  Just like that.

Interestingly, when I asked what department I needed to speak to when I called back, he told me it was the “Safe” department – the people you talk to when you say you want to cancel your contract.  So being a “valued” customer isn’t enough to get you benefits and deals as part of O2 – you really only matter when they think you’re going to defect to Vodafone or Orange.

Still, who am I to grumble, as of January I’ll be my own personal walking office – marvellous!

Since I started this blog in late November, I don’t think I’ve gone three consecutive days without posting, but I figure I’m allowed a mini-holiday over the Christmas break, if for no other reason than nobody’s likely to be reading it anyway, unless they got a new laptop for Christmas and are testing out their Wi-Fi.

 This year’s celebrations have been entirely in keeping with the whole of 2006 before it: a total roller-coaster.

Christmas Eve was a wonderful day of chilling out and seeing friends.  In fact, over the previous two days I’d caught up with a good number of friends, some of whom I’ve not seen for a while and some of whom I haven’t seen as much as I should recently.

On Christmas Eve two of my oldest friends came round to see me, which was unbelievably cool.  All three of us are really quite rubbish at staying in touch, but whenever we do manage to meet up we have the best giggle and always pick up right from where we left off – something which I think marks out a true friendship amongst the ranks of acquaintances we make as we go through life.

It was brilliant to catch up with them and find out what they’ve been up to, although I always find it hard to update people on how things have been going for me.  Luckily, the more tech-savvy of the two of them has been reading the blog, so she was pretty clued up and had, I’m guessing, filled in our techno-phobe friend on the drive over.  It’s difficult to talk about how you’re feeling when it changes so often and talking about how hard thigs have been can be a really downer on any conversation.

We had a great few hours chatting, laughing and generally messing around.  They’re both doing really well and always seem to energise me creatively when I see them.  They’re both actresses and talking to them always reminds me of the passion I have for writing, performance, theatre and film – they always inspire me.

Things started to go awry that evening, though, when K woke up at midnight and spent the next 12 hours hugging the toilet.  A few of our friends and relatives have had a vomiting virus over the last week or so and our next door neighbour had it on Christmas Eve.  Her husband and son came over in the evening and that must have been where K picked it up from.

Once she had stabilized enough to not be sick for 30-40 minutes at a time, Mum ran her back home in order to keep her quarantined away from me.  One thing I really can’t afford right now is to go 24 hours without eating, and any kind of a bug is bad news, but it was horrible to have to separate ourselves after all the planning we’d done to get through Christmas together.

What that meant, of course, is that our Christmas plans were totally shot.  I think K was more upset about it than anyone, but it was really hard to be without her on Christmas Day.  That’s now 2 Christmases in a row she’s been laid up in bed, and we had wanted so badly to celebrate together.  It also marked our first 6 months together.

We did what we could to make the most of the rest of the day and carried on as normal as possible, down to just the 4 of us in our family unit again.  It was really nice, actually, but having been up all night with K, I was completely shattered.  I slept for nearly three hours in the afternoon and then we went up the road to a friend’s for Christmas dinner.

It was a really lovely meal and we all had a lot of laughs, but after a couple of hours I was past my stamina levels and had to get Mum to bring me home.  They all stayed on and played games and drank copious amounts, while I chilled on the sofa with my Christmas DVDs.

Things picked up again yesterday, when K had managed to keep some food down and was really just struggling with energy levels from having had no food the day before.  She managed to come over to join us with Dad’s sister and her Gang in tow.

We always have a fab time when my Aunt comes down – our two families are so similar in sense of humour and shared piss-taking that there is almost endless laughter whenever we’re together. 

Three days of busy-ness were really taking their toll by the evening though and my chest was tight and protesting at over-working.  We had a second-mini Christmas to share presents with K – we’d saved all the presents to her and from her to open when she was with us.

By 9pm I was beyond shattered and had to take myself up to bed, where I promptly fell asleep by 10pm and slept almost completely solidly through until 10am this morning – my body is getting much better at taking the required rest when it needs it.

This morning, my chest is still protesting a little, and I know a good few physio sessions are going to be called for, as well as a full-on sofa-day to let my body recover properly from the stresses of the last few days.

I’m really impressed with how I held up over Christmas actually.  It was a lot tougher than I expected it to be, but looking back it was bound to be difficult as I was fitting more into 3 days than I done over the previous 2 weeks, so to expect it all to be plain sailing was perhaps wishful thinking.

Now it’s time to start planning energy-saving for New Year so I can make it to midnight to welcome in 2007 – the year of the Transplant.

Today’s been a really good day for me and I’m really pleased with myself for it, too. 

Yesterday, apart from slumming it on the sofa trying to urge my chest pains to go away, I spent the afternoon writing another article for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site – this time about Transplantation.

Em and Em, the partners in crime behind Live Life Then Give Life (from whom you should all have bought a T-shirt, not to mention signed up to the Organ Donor Register), organised another big publicity push for Christmas, which I sadly missed out on because of all my recent email hiccups and account confusions.

So, in order to still be doing my part, I mentioned the campaign to the guy who’d contacted me about writing my previous article to see if he was interested.  He said he was, so I spent the afternoon writing up a general summary of the status of transplant in the country and the various different systems around the world.

What I’m most pleased about it that he particularly wanted to stir up a bit of debate about the subject and if you go and check out the article online (here), you’ll find a lively exchange in the comments section underneath, which is really good to see.  Except maybe for the comment about my hair…

After being in the study working all afternoon, my chest was protesting a little again so I stayed on the sofa watching a movie in the evening and headed to bed at a sensible time. 

Better than anything was the fact that I got myself comfortable (not always possible with chest pains) and slept solidly through until 11am this morning – 12 hours sleep being something I’ve not enjoyed for as long as I can remember.  It was blissful to wake up and discover I’d been out like a light all night.  And it’s really recharging, too.

What I’m most pleased with today, though, is that I’ve stayed true to my promise to chill for the next few days before Christmas and have done very little again today.  I’ve been massively helped by the fact that I’ve had friends round to see me most of the day, which is good for sitting on the sofa chatting and not having to move or do other things.

But I’ve also been really good at doing physio sessions and stopping myself from “popping out” or sitting in the study at the computer for too long, or at the table in the kitchen reading the paper – all of which have a tendency to put extra strain on my chest and induce pain here and there.

Fingers crossed, I’ll be able to carry my discipline over to tomorrow, when I’ve got a little more planned, but am hoping that when I’m not out of the house, I’ll either be in bed or on the sofa doing nothing at all.  And K’s back from her parents’ tomorrow afternoon, so she’ll be around to police me.

Had a really good giggle last night when I ventured out with the fam and K to watch my bro enjoy his birthday pressie from earlier in the year with 10 minutes fly-time at Airkix indoor skydiving centre in MK.

It’s unbelievably cool – a little plexiglass bubble one story up above a pair of jet turbiney things (that’s their trade name, obviously), which serves to suspend people mid-air as if falling at great speed from a plane.

My bro, the sicken sports fanatic that he is, got on amazingly well.  He did 4 “jumps” of 2.5 minutes each and manged to learn 8 out of 10 techniques of flight.  His instructor told us afterwards you’re supposed to learn one per flight, so he’d doubled the expectation and mastered most of them within his 10 minutes.  I really hate him sometimes.

Mind you, it was hilarious to watch him with his little cheeks wibbling away in the uprush of air.  He even managed to dribble upwards.  It feels a little odd when you watch people do it, because you’re the other side of a plexiglass window about 2 feet away from them, so if they lose control a little, they endup nearly head-butting you.  Nervous laughter abounds amoungst the spectators getting a little weirdly close to people the don’t know in zoo-like conditions.

It’s an amazing thing, though, the Airkix centre and I have to recommend it to anyone as a gift, or even as a treat for yourself.  It’s not cheap, I know that much, but it looked like so much fun.  I was extremely jealous, but I’ve got something else to add to my list of post-tx “must do’s” now.

After we watched his diving antics, we all headed off for a nice Tex-Mex dinner, which went down wonderfully.  By the end of it, though, I was exhausted.  Is wasn’t until we were in the car on the way home that K pointed out that I’d woken up at 6.30am that morning (no reason, was just awake and couldn’t nod off again) and without a sleep in the afternoon, it was no wonder I was a touch on the snoozy-side.

This morning I woke up even earlier, 5.30am, with roaring chest pains.  After my last little pointless jaunt to casualty with over-exuberant pre-diagnosis, I decided it best just to grab some painkillers and immobilize myself for the day, so I duly took to the sofa in true grumpy-lunged sulk.

Watching the sky-diving and at the restaurant I’d gone without my O2 and I think this is my body’s way of telling me that it was distinctly unimpressed with my choice to move around quite so much without additional support. 

I’ve been a lot more comfortable this afternoon than I was when I woke up, but I know a chiding chest when I feel one, so I’m sworn to “good boy” status for the next few days to make sure I can make the most of Christmas.

It was also pointed out to me today by the lovely Lady K that my last update vaguely referred to things going on in April without any real expansion.  Apologies for the vagueness, and I promise I’ll post with full and inclusive April updates shortly, but for the record there will be a fundraiser for the CF Trust through the MKT Activ8 Youth Theatre by way of a mainstage performance in the middle of April.

More to come, so watch this space….

MUCH better day today, as I was sure it would be.  Well, semi-sure.

But my body’s been decidedly responsive and I’ve managed to pass through an entire day with remarkably high energy-levels and not very much in the way of breathless episodes and other nastiness.

I slept pretty well, which is always a good start, and didn’t lie in bed too long this morning, which is something I’m increasingly persuaded is a bad thing in terms of momentum for the day.

This afternoon I ran K over to an appointment in Northampton and used the spare time to visit Suze, my partner in crime from MKT, from where I’ve sadly been completely AWOL for the entire term.  It was good to hear that all the work they’ve been doing is going fabulously well and that plans for the show in April are really rolling along.

I’m desperate to get back there and get my creative juices flowing again.  The workshops really energise me – working with kids and young people is so inspiring because of the way they see things and tackle problems.

One of the things I always fall back on when I tell people how great it is doing what I do is how much we can learn from children.  The most important thing in a 6 year-old’s life is whatever they happen to be doing at that moment in time, and that’s absolutely the way that we should all live out lives.

The trouble is as we get older, other stresses and worries crowd in and take over the freedom and innocence we enjoy as children and everything becomes more complicated.  But working with the younger groups at MKT has really helped me keep in touch with the old adage of living every day – and moment – for what it is, not what it could, should or has been.

The older groups at MKT simply serve to drive me forward creatively.  There’s nothing so powerfully motivating than seeing a group of people you’ve worked with for a long time learning and growing and expanding their experiences and outlooks on life, and to be challenged in your beliefs and understanding of the things around you. 

They push me to better understand myself and my ideas and to make sense of what I’m trying to communicate, to them or an audience or anyone else.

And working with Suzanne has given me the opportunity to be involved in a whole load of things in a whole load of capacities that I never would have had chance to do were it not for her faith and trust in me and what I can (or can’t) do.

Needless to say, I miss it mightily and I’m yearning to go back.  What’s fantastic about today is that having spoken to Suze and caught up on life, the universe and everything (sorry about the house!) it’s helped me to remember just how much I do want to still be part of what’s happening and it’s making me more determined than ever to get a grip on what my body’s doing and learn to play it properly so I can get myself back into sessions, even if it’s only for a couple of hours a week.

So today has also proved to myself that although bad days come along once in a while, but that they will always pass and be replaced by a good day.  I’m lucky in that it’s turned around quickly this time, but even in the blackest of nights it’s important to remember that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel – and you know you’re going to get there in the end.

Here’s to April.

The meal was nice – and everyone enjoyed it (including me) – but it was WAY too much physical activity cooking it and I left myself feeling really quite rubbish.

K cooked the starter and the pudding, I did the main, and it was clearly not a cleverly thought out plan.  What I should have done was chosen something that needed preparation and slow cooking in the oven so I wasn’t standing over the stove for half-an-hour odd while it cooked, but could have sat and rested.  More fool me.

It was a lovely dinner and it was great to sit around with the whole family and just eat and chat (pretty much what my family does best).  By the end of the meal, though, I was shattered and my chest was really tight, so I took myself straight up to lie down on the bed.  I thought it would just be for a little while and I’d be back down, but in the end I was settled there for the night.

Today’s been another pretty rough day, paying the price for the over-exertion yesterday.  I’ve been pretty low all day, just feeling a bit pissed off with the seemingly endless merry-go-round of exertion and recovery.  I know it’s what I should be used to by now, but it still grates that I can’t do things two days in a row or if I over-stretch myself it takes me days to recover.

Still, I’ve been trying hard not to be too gloomy about it all and had fun this evening playing a game with my bro, Dad and K.  I won, which is rare for me, but still managed to prove myself stupider(!) than the rest of the family by trying to play at being banker.  I should really know that maths isn’t my strong point and if I want to avoid getting annoyed with myself should give up the job at the start not try to bluff my way through it again and again.

I can see, reading what I’m writing just now, that the sunny-side of my disposition is struggling to get through;I’m taking everything to heart and being downcast about pretty much whatever’s going on today.  It’s just a bad day, though, and everyone has those. 

Doubtless I’ll hit the sack tonight and get a good night’s sleep (I feel exhausted) and things will look much brighter and sunnier in the morning.  These feelings never last forever, it’s just a matter of buckling down, acknowledging the rubbishness and ploughing through it to tomorrow.

For all the forward motion I’ve been making recently, the pendulum was bound to swing back.  I’m sure someone far more intelligent than me said something once about equals and opposites and all that kind of thing, but I have better hair than him, so I can’t be bothered to quote him properly.

Still, after confidently striding forward and warning myself strictly against doing too much too soon, I spent this afternoon in bed after, well, doing too much too soon.

I hasten to my own defence to say that a) I spotted it early and nipped it in the bud and b) actually the hour-or-so I spent in bed on Neve (hmmm… maybe not such a clever idea to name the NIV after all – that could get a little confusing) and the extra session of physio have done me the world of good and this evening I feel top-notch.

Yesterday I went to Oxford to finish IVs – that’s a grand total of 5 weeks all together, my record for recent times.  My chest is a lot better and my lung function was hitting the 0.7/1.4, which is about as high as I go these days.  For those of you who work in percentages, that’s very roughly 20%/25% predicted.  More encouragingly, my SATs were running at 93% on 2 litres O2, which is unheard of for my since around August.

I’m coping pretty well off-oxygen now.  I’m still using it almost all day, but I can cope with wandering around shops (ok, Borders) without it for an hour or so, which is good.

I try to justify it by saying that it makes shopping a whole load easier not having to lug a cylinder around the shop with me, and I reassure myself that I’m good and have it in the car when I’m driving and wear it all the time at home, but if I’m truly honest with myself, it’s still very much a vanity thing.

K and I decided we wanted to cook dinner tomorrow for Mum, Dad and my bro, who’s home for Christmas, to thank them for putting up with me for the last few weeks (well, not my bro, ‘cos he’s not had to cope with me invading his life, but it seemed a bit mean to cook for everyone else and not him when it’s in his home…).  So we had the cunning plan of hitting Tesco’s late last night to avoid the crowds.

At 8pm we thought we’d got it right and BOY were we wrong.  It was still heaving and in one despairing moment of realisation I stood at the threshold of the store in Kingston and realised that it was WAY too huge for me to wander round, especially at the end of a long day.

It’s always a little dispiriting to have to acknowledge your limits – especially when things are looking up again.  But I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t just try to “soldier on” through the shop and completely wipe myself out, but instead called it a night with two bars of Toblerone and headed home.

I think, actually, our late-night jaunt is probably the crux of what lead to my energy shortage this afternoon and, again, I’m pleased I spotted it and took action (or rather, in-action) to combat it without trying to soldier through.  I feel much better for it physically and it’s given me a boost in my mental confidence to know that I’m learning to listen to my body again.

So tomorrow I’ve prescribed myself a day of rest, doing nothing all morning and afternoon and plenty of physio so that I’ve got energy enough to help K whip up a storm in the kitchen and give Mum and Dad a proper thank you.  And my bro, I suppose…

In the last two days I’ve come to a shocking personal conclusion: I’m an addict.  Twice over.  I’m now – 100% officially – addicted to Sky+.  And I’m now – 100% officially – addicted to Borders.

Nuts.

I don’t watch much TV – hardly any at all when I’m not around K.  She’s a terrible influence on me because she’ll watch any old rubbish and claim it’s interesting, happily squidged on a sofa all day long.  Ironically, I can’t get her to share my passion for films because she doesn’t have the attention-span for them.  Hmmm…. there may be something in this “MTV generation” theory after all… but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, I don’t watch much TV – maybe an hour a day, possibly two and it’s usually specific programs that I want to watch.  I’ve never been much of a sofa-surfing channel-hopper.  Well, OK, I was once upon a time, until my brother began to tease me about my being able to win Telly Addicts on my own and I started having nightmares of Noel Edmonds in family-knitted garish Christmas jumpers.

So it used to really bug me when I’d look at the night’s listings and discover that the only two things I really wanted to watch were on at the same time.  Or, more particularly annoying, given it’s infrequent occurence, when I had something planned which clashed with something important.

Since moving back to Mum and Dad’s, however, I’ve been blessed with the genius that is Sky+.  The best thing in the world about Sky+ is it means I don’t ever, EVER have to watch daytime TV.  Even if I do have those days when I really can do nothing but sit on my butt on the sofa and veg out, I can record a whole evening’s worth of vaguely-entertaining fayre, without having to resort to the daytime schedules of not-even-close-to-entertaining pap.  Or Neighbours (which is another category altogether).

Most of all, what I love about it is being able to watch things whenever I want to.  For example, I’ve developed a new routine whereby I keep myself busy for most of the day, but permit myself a “lunch hour” in the middle of the day to grab lunch and sit and do nothing.  Which means I can record things from the night before and catch up with them today.

All of which is a really long way of going about saying that I watched a really interesting programme today.  But actually, I’ve been prattling on so long about the genius of Sky+ it seems pointless to go into my new-fangled theories on positive thinking and instead I’ll save it for another day and come back to it fresher and less Sky+’d up.

Back to my addictions, though.  Borders: the wonderful world of literature and other stuff that’s descended from on high (read: opened a store in MK as opposed to the nearest one being in Oxford) and plonked itself slap-bang in the middle of my everyday life.

I’ve been there 4 times now, 3 times in the last week and for a combined total of around 4 hours and I still don’t feel like I’ve managed to have a really good look around.  I maintain, in fact, that I still won’t until I’ve settled myself into a comfy Starbucks chair and flicked through an un-bought book for half an hour, finished my coffee, put the book back and come home.

The great thing about Borders, and what really stands out when you walk in, especially for someone like me who loves books, is that it’s just so wonderfully full of books.  I mean, they’re everywhere.  And not just in a regular book-shop kind of way. 

I mean they’re EVERYWHERE and “everywhere” goes on for absolutely AGES.  It’s the biggest biggest biggest book-holding space in the whole widest world of Milton Keynes and is so spectacularly amazing it makes me positively dribble with excitement.  I can almost smell the print.

So now I can’t keep myself away.  I have to have my Borders fix.  Twice in two nights I’ve been there for an hour between 8pm and 9pm, just to wander around when it’s not full of silly people doing silly things like trying to shop for Christmas presents when I’m trying to be there and just enjoy the SPACE.  Inconsiderate little so-and-so’s.

It is mildly – only mildly – concerning what effect this could have on my bank balance.  I’ve been fairly good so far – so far – at keeping my wallet in check and not splashing out, but it’s only a matter of time.

I see Borders, and my addiction to it, as rather like one of these new Super Casinos that are due to be hitting our shores sometime in the near future (you know, the one that should be in Blackpool that the Government are making everyone think they might put somewhere else, just to spite Blackpool and take away it’s “UK’s Las Vegas” tag, as if that was something to be proud of in the first place).  You think you’ve got it under control, and that you’re winning.  But sooner or later the situation’s gonna change, everything will turn around on you and you’ll find yourself completely wiped out.

Mind you, at least when I’ve cleaned myself out, maxed out my credit cards and had to lock myself in the flat and barricade the baliffs out I’ll have something good to read….

I’ve been making myself chuckle this afternoon as my procrastination levels increase.  In fact, I’ve found a whole writers self-help website devoted to aiding folks like me to get down to the nitty-gritty of actually churning something out.

The last couple of nights I’ve hardly slept at all.  Monday night I was up until around 3am before finally dozing off, sleeping through till 11am save for an hour’s break in the middle around 6am to do much IVs.  Last night was worse – I didn’t manage to sleep at all until after my morning dose.

Oddly, it doesn’t appear to be your regular, run-of-the-mill, thinking-horrible-thoughts kind of insomnia.  Rather, it’s just that as I improve health-wise my brain is staying resolutely five strides ahead of my body.  So while I can’t do much physically during the day, my brain is aching to be put to use and if it’s not (as it hasn’t been) then it settles itself into manic thinking patterns when I hit the sack and keeps me wide awake, no matter how much my eyelids beg to differ.

So today I have been resolutely trying my best to a) stay awake all day and not take my usual afternoon nap and b) do things with my day that will make my mind feel like it’s had if not a real work out, at least a little bit of a gentle jog.

It struck me when I was  writing out my Christmas cards this afternoon that getting myself writing would be the most obvious method of productive mind-occupation, so I set that part of my brain that never stops whirring creatively to spin on ahead whilst I wrote, corrected and re-wrote the cards that kept being incorrectly filled in due to my non-multi-tasking man-brain.

Perhaps what I needed by way of a spur, I figured, was to tackle a branch of writing I’ve not tackled before – something different and fresh and intriguing to me.  I’ve written plays and I’ve written screenplays – I’ve even finished some of them, too.  So why not try something more narrative – a short story or similar?

In fact, it was the Stephen King interview I watched yesterday evening that provided my spark of inspiration – if I wanted to stir my creative brain and really test my mettle, why not try what writers used to do when they needed to churn something out (albeit usually for the cash than the creative momentum) and knock out a classic piece of pulp fiction?

Pulp fiction is that stuff that used to be known as Dime-Store Novels in the US and is more commonly known these days as Airport Fiction – that kind of crime-based, semi-plotted, under-characterised pap that you whistle through when you’re lying on the beach in the summer months trying not to remember that it’s only four more days till you’re back at work.

What better, I thought, than to pin myself down to knocking something out which needn’t have any literary merit at all, but merely serve as an exercise to show that a) I can still write and b) I can make myself focus on one thing for at least the space of time it takes me to write a chapter or two.

Of course, we all know that my mind doesn’t work like that.  Instead, I set off researching into pulp fiction and it’s current place in the literary world: is it still written, published, sold around the world?  Could I, conceivably, sell my mini-opus for publication when I’m done with it?

And research it I did.  I even answered most of my questions.  Which was annoying because it meant I had to come up with more questions so I didn’t have to actually start writing.

Surfing through the myriad writers’ websites dotted around the ‘net, I came across various tips for getting into good writing habits and avoiding said procrastination.  Eventually, I discovered an entire website devoted to a 30-day programme to help writers get organised and write.

That’s right: a 30-DAY PROGRAMME.  That’s an entire month’s worth of tips and exercises designed so that, at the end of the allotted period, you’re set to go write your masterpiece.  30 (Thirty) Days.  To get organised.  To AVOID procrastination.  It’s so funny, I can’t even do it justice with a smart-arsed quip.

Needless to say, I shall be sticking point-by-point the programme and ensuring that I don’t achieve ANYTHING by way of productivity before the New Year.  After all, if I don’t pay attention to the site I found, all my hard research work from today will have been for nothing, won’t it?

On my usual daily tour of my favourite websites today, I stopped in on my friend Em’s blog to discover the following paragraph, which so neatly encapsulated the to-ings and fro-ings of my mind and body at the moment I thought it silly to try to reword it to enlighten my readership and decided instead just to lift it wholesale and try to pass it off as my own.

“Sadly after 22 years I still don’t quite seem to have got my head round the concept of “improving” as opposed to “magically cured and reinstated with working lungs” and so the minute I feel a turn around I start jumping around and doing lots and then am surprised when said behaviour doesn’t go down well with my lungs which were (for want of a better phrase) breathing a sigh of relief that I was finally operating on a level they can maintain. I mentioned to my physio that you’d think I would have learned by now, she neatly sidestepped this remark by laughing politely and neglecting to comment.”

Sadly, my sense of duty and honour (and the knowledge that we have enough mutual friends for it to be highly unlikely that I wouldn’t get caught) meant I just couldn’t bring myself to fully commit to the stealthy liberation of the text.

I’d like to say my conscience was pricked by the knowledge that Em managed to write it from her hospital bed and went to all the trouble of emailing it to a friend and getting it posted for her, but I know if I did that then she’d eventually read this and send my huge screaming emails and numerous phone calls berating me for jumping on the pity band-wagon which we all so deplore.  Plus it’s also untrue, for that precise reason – pity is a trait all people should deplore. (Doesn’t that sound like a high school philosophy essay question? Pity is a trait all people should deplore: Discuss)

At the end of the day, when someone says what you want to say better than the way you wanted to say it, it’s best to hold your hands up and admit defeat than drive yourself barmy trying to best something that you can’t.

If you needed any proof of that, just take a look at what a complete and total load of waffle I’ve written trying to justify lifting a paragraph of a friend’s blog in order to help explain the challenges of getting back on your feet.

I think I should go and lie down.  Maybe this plagiarism lark is too heavy for me, after all.  Next time I’ll stick to my own drivel.