Some days the sun shines

There is a bar in Summertown called Joe's and today we tried it for lunch. David had tagliatelle and I had Caesar salad, and both were so good we were almost weepy with gratitude. We topped the meal off with chocolate pot, creme brulee and two coffees. The cappucinos were frothy right down to the bottom of the cup and tasted most marvellously of coffee - not an experience to be had in either the local Costas or Starbucks, where the coffee tastes like tainted hot water with a scum of froth on top. On the way back, we were approached by a willowy blonde bearing a tray of taster cups outside Starbucks. What? Starbucks touting for trade? 'Yuk! No thanks!' I said. 'I know what that tastes like.' 'Try Joe's,' David told her. 'The coffee is great there!' A beautiful blonde speechless and nonplussed, a corporation witheringly, publicly and loudly dismissed? Oh, God, it felt good! So good! And the sun is shining today.

Advice for Young Writers

I teach creative writing to American students studying at Oxford University. Among this year's students is one who is a star. She writes so brilliantly that, after reading her latest offering, all I can do is sigh with pleasure - and not a little envy. For some time I've been encouraging her to submit work to publishers but she procrastinates. Today I found out why: she is scared of her own future.

In college vacations she has worked for literary agents and publishers, so she knows the business from the inside and is painfully aware that these days the usual trajectory for a successful novelist is to begin incandescently and then peter out in a shower of sparks. Gone are the days when an aspiring novelist's career was nurtured by editor and publisher. My student knows the game and knows she doesn't want to play it.

God help us - what do I advise her? Any ideas? Publish under a pseudonym until she feels she is at her prime and then burst upon an unsuspecting world fully-formed? It's one way, but I'd be grateful for any serious ideas. It really is a problem for the twenty-somethings with real talent.

BT Compensation

Back in the blizzard of IT failure that afflicted us September to November last year, we had a week without the phone working. At first BT denied the fault was theirs. When the fault was at last tackled and fixed, they admitted it had been caused by the engineer installing broadband a couple of years previously.

I had a look at their website regarding compensation. Not only had we suffered the consequences of a week without the phone, but it had cost us a great deal using a mobile to call their 'free' helpline. The BT website was difficult to navigate but it seemed that compensation would be offered on a sliding scale and comes in the form of line rental rebates. When I googled the subject, however, I heard the howls of the disaffected: it was obviously going to be a great test of patience to pursue the matter. But I pursued it.

Here follows a list of what happened next but remember that weeks if not months passed between each stage.

1. I filled in the form on line to register the complaint.
2. BT phoned (Indian call centre) and offered compensation of £11.65. I rejected this as derisory and asked for the matter to be referred to a manager.
3. Another call from India - back to square one.
4. A letter from English address, saying 'we are happy you've agreed to 50p as compensation.'
5. I wrote to that person at that address.
6. A month later I get a call from someone trained to RSC standards of acting who absolutely seduced my ears with her apologies on behalf of BT. Compensation offered - £40. Accepted.

I was on the very point of following my New Year resolution ('Seek Alternatives') but now I shall stay with BT a little longer.

If you got here by googling 'BT Compensation' you want the address, don't you? Here it is:

Jillian G Lewis
Customer Service Director
BT plc
Correspondence Centre
Durham
DH98 1BT

Good luck! Don't let the bastards grind you down. . .

Last Night I had a Dream

My philosophical friends look down on dreams as the products of idle minds. My psychological friends keep records of them and try and plumb their symbolism. I stand somewhere in between, or I did until the dreams stopped a couple of months ago. Now I know how important they are: they are the movement of the psyche as it breathes.

One of my students last term sat in my study coughing and spluttering. I suppose in retrospect I should applaud his strength of will in getting to his tutorial at all. At the time I thought, Oh no. . . and, sure enough, I was coughing a couple of days later. That was November. Here, in mid-January, I am still coughing. In that time, the dreams stopped, psyche stopped breathing.

I write between the solstices and it's always tough with the run-up to Christmas plunging you into a completely unnecessary busy-ness. This year it was tougher than usual but at least the coughing - which was viral - began to abate around mid-December. Richard Surface put me on to a book, one of those magical, self-motivational, life-changing books we all need now and again. This one is called 'The War of Art' by Stephen Pressfield. It begins by describing the enemy, which at first he calls 'Resistance' and, later, 'Ego'. The book goes on to describe the role of the Muses. It is an exceptional book which I wholeheartedly recommend. I began reading it on Christmas Eve and the results were immediate: at 11.15pm, I got off the sofa and went to Midnight Mass for the first time in eight years. Three days later, I quit smoking, but by then something else had begun to happen and it had become impossible to smoke anyway, but this particular quitting was easy. I had Resistance in my sites and knew when to take a pot shot.

Somewhere in the book Pressfield says that the Pro always turns up for work, even when he has 'flu. Well, that must be man 'flu; by the day after Boxing Day, I had woman 'flu. By the end of that week, that precious week of the year which is more or less All Mine, I had just enough breath in me to call the doctor.

'Blow in this,' he said, handing me a tube, and I couldn't. 'Asthma,' he said, 'triggered by a chest infection.' So then it was a ten-day course of antibiotics, a five-day course of steroids, and introduction to life with a puffer. The steroids were interesting: I started to dream again and feel creative. For five days, writing flowed. Before and since it has been like making a cake without ever adding liquid, just forever rubbing in more and more dry ingredients. Yes, I'm a pro and I've turned up every day, but for many days I was back in bed within the hour without the energy even to read. But the steroids helped.

Saw the doc again two days ago when the antibiotics finished and he's put me on a 'preventer', which is a brown inhaler. I had a couple of puffs before going to bed last night - and then I began to dream. I began to dream about my book and its characters, listened to them saying crazy, anachronistic things and even in my sleep exulted. I woke up several times to check the clock to see if I could get up yet and, at 6am, allowed it. I haven't coughed yet and here I am, writing a blog for the first time in months.

My next read is going to be a book I saw reviewed in Resurgence about story-telling as a healing art, how stories relate to different organs in the body. I'll give details when I've read it, but for now I'm intrigued, for this much I know: the airways and perhaps the lungs relate to psyche, pneuma and spiritus. It is not accidental - how could it be - that the Greek and Latin words for soul, spirit and Holy Ghost relate to breathing words. For the last few weeks I've not only not been a writer, I've barely been human: Muse-less, dreamless, God-less. It was one of the unhappiest times I've suffered and, if it's all over, then I am mightily relieved and grateful. Thank you God and Science for the brown puffer.

Just a little postscript. The reason I quit smoking very suddenly and without preamble was a) because I couldn't breathe properly and b) because I knew the full implications of that. Whether or not smoking was killing this body, it was definitely choking the Muse - and that was enough to stop.

E-Buyer Beware continued

Well, may be today is the day the computer arrives, one which will stay with me for a couple of years at least. The last one went back eleven days ago. Despite agreeing with E-buyer's technical help that it should be replaced, it went to the repair shop (again). We started phoning this Monday. 'Well, we need three working days after receipt of the machine.' 'You've had them.' 'Yes we have, but our repair technicians don't work on Mondays.'

I have to get up early to use the internet on David's machine. On Tuesday I went and had a lie down after lunch, but soon woke up to the sound of David bellowing like a maddened bull. 'Get your supervisor! Don't give me that standard guff! GET YOUR SUPERVISOR!' The girl in customer services was a stolid defender of her company. She was obviously beginning to repeat the standard guff like a zombie. In a voice that lifted our roof into the air, David began to shout at her to look at the records. LOOK AT THE RECORDS! Our records must be as long a ladder by now. But she did look at them, at last, and subsided. We were right. We had been promised an exchange. She'd see to it right away.

On Thursday we had an email from E-buyer to say that the HP Compact was out of stock. I wish I could scream, or swear, or feel the need to break things. But I just stand there looking, at most, slightly glassy-eyed. That's philosophical practice for you! Well, it keeps me sane.

Guess what, we phoned E-buyer and spoke to several departments. The upshot is that a Fujitsu-Siemens is on its way, and I'm rather glad it's not an HP Compact. I have developed a morbid distrust of them which is neither philosophic nor rational - well, it might be rational.

I wasn't going to let E-buyer go without trying a haggle. What I wanted was for them to say, 'Oh look, you've had such a shocking experience with us - I mean, not having a computer for two months when you run a small business must be terrible - that we're not going to charge you the extra £14 for the Fujitsu.' In that, I failed. Companies with rock bottom prices are institutionally incapable of haggling. May be companies with rock bottom prices should be avoided. But the last girl we spoke to readily agreed to send it 'next day delivery' for no extra charge, so I won on that one. 'Thank you, so kind,' David breathed into the phone.

E-buyer Beware

This is a note posted to the ether in case anyone looks there to see what happened to me. Since early September I've been absent from cyberspace and out of touch with most of my friends. My old Evesham computer suddenly died on me. It happens. It shouldn't happen when the next thing on your pile of things to do is to load up Acronis back-up software. So I had to crawl in shame to the wizards of Cowley and ask them to retrieve data from my hard-drive. Then began a series of daily calls from a Pole called Michael. 'Bad news, I'm afraid.' Each day the news was worse than the day before but, if I'd like to leave it until Saturday, Deep Wizard, Chris, would have a look at it. It seemed like a long time to wait, but I waited. On Monday Chris phoned. 'I have good news.' He had cloned the hard drive and set in a separate case. I went to collect my life's work from him with relief and gratitude.

Meanwhile we had ordered two new computers from E-buyer. Given that David's old computer was an Evesham of the same vintage as mine, that seemed reasonable. Two new HP Compacts duly arrived, Vista downgraded to XP, which is what we wanted. I set mine up and revelled in its silent operation (the Evesham exacerabted my tinnatus to a maddening degree). So, being a reformed character, I plugged in a pendrive at the end of a day's work, and the machine didn't recognise it, said it needed a driver. I don't remember the order of events clearly now. Just to note that in that period my phone broke and so did the printer. My friend the astrologer, Darby Costello, had been predicting financial chaos in the second half of 2008 as Pluto moves into Capricorn. As the banks began to topple, I phoned her to see if Pluto was behind my sudden difficulty with anything with a plug. She thought no, that Mercury was square to my Sun. Mercury moves fast - all that should be over by now - but six weeks later, as share prices plunge, I'm not yet set up with a fully functioning computer.

When my HP went back to E-buyer, I took David's and set that up. Couldn't get broadband. A nice man in India helped me solve the problem - the device was being shown as unknown in Device Manager - but unfortunately I didn't take a note of the solution. That was a pity, as almost everything with a USB began to qualify for a yellow question mark in Device Manager. At the end, cut off from the internet, no flash drives working, and no CD-writer installed in the machine, it was IMPOSSIBLE for me to back up. I'd had two weeks of functionality. It was a divine interval obviously created by the spirits attending the Wrekin Trust, for in that two weeks we got 'Awakening Consciousness - selected lectures of Sir George Trevelyan' off to press. When the computer died on me, I had two vital files on it. Only two. It cost me £75 to get Deep Wizard to retrieve them. Then back went the machine to E-buyer. Meanwhile the replacement for the first had arrived. Can you guess the rest? Well, I'm working on it now, but it's going back on Monday as my external hard-drive will not work through its USB ports.

Our contact with E-buyer has been, on rough estimate, at least 10 hours of telephone calls, waiting in queues at 10p a minute for technical support. Do the maths (I can't - I'd be sick). Yesterday David waited in a queue for 40 minutes and, when it was down to one ahead of him, the line went dead. When he redialled, there were 6 ahead. Forty minutes later, he got through only to be told to phone another department which, by that time, had gone home. He phoned this morning: they won't collect now until Monday. I have to wait until it is received back before they send out another. I'm used to that. Used to waiting. Used to spending hours and days loading up a machine with programmes and data only for it go phut.

In the past six weeks I've mostly been living life without a desktop, getting by with my little old laptop (not connected to internet). As using that is physically painful, I don't use it much. The result? I have so much more time! It's been a revelation, the way a computer eats time. Whether it's sending emails, building databases, actually doing some work, browsing in Wikipedia and elsewhere, playing games, it EATS my time. I go to it first thing to see what emails I've had overnight from America (usually it's a bunch of spam); I go to it last thing to see what's come in during the evening (yep, usually more spam); I fiddle; I play; I pay bills and order vegetables.

I've enjoyed my prolonged break. Will I have the power to resist the new machine (provided of course that it functions)? I doubt it, but I can hope.

So, if you've wondered whatever happened to me in the autumn, that's it. We would like to escape PCs forever but it's difficult. We certainly won't be going back to E-buyer.

Text blocks (or how not to present your work)

When you send your manuscript out, it should go in its Sunday best. It's the equivalent of an interview, after all. More and more these days I receive people's novels laid out in text blocks, and I scream when I do. What is a text block? This is. Now listen up while I explain a little about HTML. That's the code behind webpages (or will be until XHTML takes over soon). Every element is tagged, including paragraphs, and the standard styling for that tag is that the paragraph will be followed by a double-line space and will not begin with an indent.

Here we are, text block number two. So, this new habit of writing novels in text blocks I took to be a consequence of emails, the style of which may have been influenced by websites. But perhaps not.

Text block number three (once known as a paragraph). When I was tutoring at the Oxford University summer school recently, the most advanced student, who is doing a PhD in creative writing, presented his work in text blocks. I screamed. 'No one,' he said, 'in all my years studying this subject, has ever mentioned it. Quite the opposite. They insist on it.'

What? He went on to explain that he's studying creative writing academically, and academic papers have to be in text blocks. Given that the internet began as a means of academic communication, is that the source of the rot? It seems likely. After all, it almost makes sense given that the composition of essays is often thought of as building blocks of ideas, each paragraph representing a single unit of thought, building block on block to your thumping conclusion. And what academic essays tend not to include is dialogue.

It's when we get to dialogue that this format looks really ridiculous. After a block of exposition you suddenly get very spacy speech, and if a novel is dialogue rich, the visual impact is just dreadful. Subtle things, words on the page. As poets know, how you arrange them is important. Text laid out in blocks does not invite the reader in to a long and fruitful fictional dream. Instead it makes her blink involuntarily and possibly even unconsciously as she tries to imagine people not speaking in dialogue so much as alternating monologue.

'What?' she thinks, 'is this all about?'

'Did you say something, dear?' asks her husband, muting the sound on the TV.

'No, just mumbling to myself,' she says, and pushes the earplugs in deeper.

See what I mean? In between block paragraphs, you get this odd interchange between characters which has no flow. So please, have a look at your precious manuscript. Could you not make it look a little more like a book?