You Called It!

The results are in. A winner has been chosen and my next novel, until submission at least, has a title.

Thank you! I never envisaged I’d receive so many entries to my What Would You Call It? competition, nor that it would be so illuminating. Those little asides you sent explaining why you chose one title and not another? They were gold dust.

One title won by a fair few votes, one was 'Marmite', my original working title was more popular than I’d have thought it might be and none of the titles heralded no votes at all.

I suspect that, Her Place, which gained the fewest votes, was a little too vague, even obscure. Note to self: intriguing, perhaps; nebulous, no. I had a titter about my wild card: Meatballs. You certainly felt strongly for, or against, that one. I agree that it could be misleading, dangerously so, because no, this story isn’t a farce and I wouldn't want people thinking it was. Whilst there may be some farcical elements, laugh a minute it isn’t - I’m not that clever.

So, who won?

All the votes for the most popular title were put into a hat. Actually, strictly speaking, it isn’t a hat, it’s a laundry basket. It’s one of my household’s not infrequent, ‘internet fails’. We have a fair few of these. Next time I’ll post a pic of the ‘minute yellow trug’ and there’s also the doll’s house sized – it seemed such a bargain – bottle of Shiraz.  

So, the winner! My hubbie, to ensure absolute transparency, pulled out one name from the hat/laundry basket, and that name was: Liz Carr. Congratulations, Liz! If you could email me your contact details and choice of either Glass Houses or Tea and Chemo, I’ll get a signed copy to you forthwith. And please don’t forget to let me know to whom I should sign the book.

The winning title? This Remarkable of Days and I am absolutely thrilled with it. 

Although, as with many titles in my experience, it does have a question mark hanging over it: it’s knowingly grammatically incorrect. I would hope that people would assume this was deliberate (surely a mistake wouldn’t get all the way through to the title of a novel? But then, stranger things have happened...) and there is certainly a strong reason for this wording. However, some potential readers might be put off right there and then by the suspect grammar. Can I risk this? If not, I’d have to consider changing it to: This Most Remarkable of Days and whilst I’ve been spinning this around in my head, the more I think about it, the more I like the quirkiness of the winning title of this competition. For now, it stays and I’ll keep you posted on that. By the way, if you have a view on this dilemma, please do share!

Meanwhile, here’s to a version of This Remarkable of Days making it to a book shop near you some time before too very long and that, aided by a stellar cover, not only will you feel compelled to read the blurb and later the book, you’ll stick with it (almost) to the end, when you’ll see where I was coming from when I slipped Meatballs into the list 😊

The Lost Edit

I'm not prone to losing things – words perhaps, marbles certainly, but not actual 'things'. I'm far too obsessed with time wasting to be able to cope with 'looking'. Tick, tock, that clock goes, tick tock, another few seconds of valuable life spent in the futile search for a key, only to be repeated tomorrow. Nope, that's not for me. My key goes in my bag, maximum time spent on life – I quote (yes, I'm a joy to live with.) But sometimes, very occasionally, I lose something. Properly lose it – not, in the car, under a pile of papers, in a different bag, under a cushion, absent mindedly placed in the fridge instead of the cleaning cupboard, kind of losing it. No, proper losing, the, I am going mad type of losing.

The object in question? Half a ream of paper. The half is filled with scribbles and post-its and ticks and smiley faces. I have lost an edit, or more precisely, half an edit. The half with all the comments I haven't yet typed up onto the document, the half I've pored over for hours, the half which will have to be entirely re-done.

It isn't even my own writing. Although I'd like to be clear at this point, just in case the writer in question is reading this, the edit never left the house. It will appear again, of course, just as soon as I have re-scribbled the final remark which brings me back to the point when the edit first disappeared.

Meanwhile, I am cutting my losses and moving into damage limitation phase. The search has been officially curtailed at two hours and fifty minutes*. I have printed out a new hard copy but, ever the optimist, I will start from where I left off, kidding myself that the fairly-elves will flutter by, wink as they drop the offending missing extract into my lap and whisper, 'Hey, we enjoyed that,' moments before I finally admit defeat and re-commence editing the fated first half.  

*Now, when I say, two hours and fifty minutes, it isn't strictly accurate. Yes, my Saturday morning slipped between 10am and almost 1pm and I am no further on with this editing task, and a whole lot further behind. However, a few choice items did appear as I threw my study upside down and it would be a little misleading to pretend a few moments hadn't been spent marvelling in them. There's the photo – I have so few – of my half-brother and half-sister from over twenty years ago. One of them may have recently celebrated their 30^th birthday, but I still think they're cute. And oh, how proud were we all of that snowman, standing almost up to my knees.

Next up were four packs of pen refills which had slipped inside a ruled notepad. I thought I'd bought a lot lately, but assumed I'd been working hard. There were the inevitable coins (although disappointingly, no notes, not even in the pockets of coats I found myself looking through which would barely hold a folded sheet of A4, let alone 250 of them) and a girl can never have too many emery boards, hand lotions and cuticle softeners, uncurled paperclips (it's a dreadful habit, along with chewing my nails when I'm really concentrating) hair bobbles, old diary pages (now shredded) new books - ahem – which I'd forgotten about (do NOT tell the hubbie or the authors) and chargers. I'd had a big cull in the summer, clearly not big enough.

And then I found this. I didn't find it exactly, everything in its place, of course, but I had forgotten it was there. There were letters from my school friends when I'd taken a 'year out' in Germany as an au-pair and they'd gone to uni while I was seriously questioning what I'd done. It's hard living with a non-English speaking family when, A-level in German notwithstanding, you're barely able to say your name let alone ask for theirs. Suffice it to say, the disconcerting beginning had been all but forgotten but thank you Helen and Rachel for cheering me up in the early days.

I did a couple of seasons of tour guiding 'in Europe' in my early twenties. (I wrote about life as a tour guide with no sense of direction, here) and some of the American holiday makers sent me beautiful, long and lyrical thank you letters after their trips. They were a short story in themselves, and remain mementos of a by-gone age I've long since discarded. I'm glad I kept them. Although incredibly touched by their efforts, I'm sure I didn't appreciate back then how precious they would grow to be over time.

There were even some letters to myself. I wrote a diary from the age of 13 which was wonderfully cathartic. I wrote it until, aged 23, I had a Forrest Gump moment, deciding that my diary and I had been through a decade of loves and loss together but suddenly, I didn’t want to write it anymore. And I never did. But sometimes, very occasionally, I'd write a letter to myself instead. They were how I found some calm in a few iconic moments in my early adult years.

I was flicking through some of these letters when I found a scribbled note on Mr Men headed paper which looked like a letter but was merely a few rushed bullet points. They were based on an exasperating experience I had getting back from Birmingham train station one day, and the people I'd met along the way. Those notes were all I had of an idea for a novel.

Until today.

I have since written over a thousand words and am seriously considering bringing the current manuscript I'm working on to an abrupt halt and working on this instead. My instinct is telling me to do this and my instinct told me to stop what I was writing once before and write Glass Houses in its place…

I shall leave it there for now but let's just say, far from a lost morning searching for my lost edit, my Saturday is turning out to be very fruitful indeed.

Although, forgive me, if I have just one more look in the 'edit in progress drawer.'

*Update* I scribbled this blog post down a few weeks ago. The edit is now done and submitted. The Lost Edit has still not returned. Meanwhile, the Birmingham inspired novel has become all-consuming and I now have 15,000 words of the first draft under my belt. I cannot tell you how happy I am that the Gremlins stole my work that fateful Saturday.