Saying that I am bad with computers is like saying that fish aren't very good at climbing trees. I have the feeling that Einstein said that before I did but I'd be happy to take credit for it if that isn't so.
Writing is a full time occupation and I'm not talking eight hours a day. Every living flaming breathing moment it rears its head so I try to get away from it. I can't do that when walking, cooking or listening to music but I can usually keep the thoughts at bay when I attempt computer games.
I started a long time ago with Angry Birds and bought every one which came out. I have now run out of options, I'm so sick of it. I did play solitaire, spider solitaire, and freecell but this week I came to the end of my patience and decided that I must brave the Apple store and find another game to play.
I therefore downloaded Leo's Gold which is meant to be suitable for six year olds. I did think it was a bit advanced for me and this proved to be so because having paid for it and downloaded it I couldn't get it to start.
I went into Stormfront and they told me I needed an appointment. I have spent two and a half thousand pounds with these people and I can't even get email on my main computer and the last three times I have bothered them - this is over a number of months, I don't think I'm a bloody nuisance - they have made life difficult for me. So I thought I should ring Apple and maybe they would help because I had convinced myself I had paid for something which was not working and it was nothing to do with my sheer bloody incompetence. I kid you not! Talk about self belief.
After fifteen minutes I got through to some lovely American guy and we had a discussion during which he told me that he didn't have time for games. He had no idea what I was talking about, I think it was my lovely northern accent that defeated him. We did eventually get to the point where he said that he was the billing department and if I was not happy he could refund my £4.99. My daughter thought I had lost my mind, fussing about less than £5. She was right of course but I cannot let go. Eventually Michael put me through to a lady whose accent I did not understand.
She tried to take control of my computer and either she failed or I failed because eventually I let her off the hook.
I couldn't really complain about this service because Apple rang me back three times the following day. In the meanwhile I had figured out how to work the game, cancelled my appointment so reluctantly made by the people in the shop and ignored their calls until they gave up.
I was very happy for the next two hours which I spent trying to get Leo anywhere close to his sodding gold and failed. Every time I picked up a gold coin and got fed up I had to start at the beginning again and I couldn't for the very life of me get past the first few obstacles and the trouble was that the skill was a stupid one - though presumably not by six year old standards. It was just a case of wiggling buttons until you got what you wanted and so on and so on. And so on.
Bored.
So I tried for other things. I found a lovely game offered by Michigan university which is Grumpy Snowmen, that was fun but quite short so I got past that. I tried to download Krabby Kats and didn't understand a word of it and then a game with Birds. You are meant to get them safely to rocks and not on to the ground. I have never met anything as annoying. I wanted to throw my laptop through the window which is the whole point. They want you to buy to skip levels. Understandable and I would have considered this if I had been offered something similar at school.
So, I don't know what to do now. I could learn to play the piano which I seriously considered except that we're back to music. I could read. I do so much reading. I'm left with replaying Angry Birds while watching Eggheads and sighing that I may never get any further with my games. They look pretty, they are in full colour, how enticing except that I am bored with them.
At five o'clock this morning I woke up not feeing very well, shivering and blowing my nose and yet there it was, the first thought of the day and it was all the do with the book I am writing. Is there no escape?
Sunday, 15 January 2017
Thursday, 5 January 2017
PTSD and what happens afterwards
If there is an afterwards. The trouble with mental conditions like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is that the majority of people have never experienced it and I do think coming secondhand to these things is difficult. How could you imagine any of the huge experiences in life if you have never come through them? How does any writer ever cope with stuff like childbirth, grief, sex? Yet our experience of such things is always unique.
I have used all my experience in my books and yes, secondhand and with observation many other people's experience too and I suppose that's what I writer does and that's what makes it so exhausting.
So should I be sorry for all the things I have gone through? How could I be when hopefully it changes and enriches my writing but the cost has been huge and almost killed me.
My agent said that one of the men in Nobody's Child, my book which is out at the moment is good. He has come back from the first world war with PTSD, of course it wasn't called such at the beginning but the reason that I write about it with confidence is that I've been through it. I know what's like when you cannot walk downstairs, when you look up at staircases and think you can never go up them, when your bed is the only place you feel safe, when the world is huge and full of terrors and you have panic attacks even in your own home which you thought was your defence against the world.
I know what it's like when your physical symptoms agonise you night and day and where the only place you feel anything positive is in your dreams. And that isn't necessarily typical. Many people have no refuge in their dreams.
In my new book The Guardian Angel the main bloke in it ( I hate the word hero) he's just an ordinary kid when he goes to prison for fighting with and inadvertently killing another lad or was it inadvertent, since he hated him? The reader is left to decide which I think is only fair. Being born under the sign of Libra, even though I claim to hate such daft ideas, I have a balanced view or like to think I do of life.
I didn't know when I began writing that he was going to be a convict, I didn't know there would be a series of letters between Zeb and Alice, who owns the sweetshop in Stanhope. It was only when I read about what prison life was like then and it was so horrific ( this is in 1855 ) that I actually had to water it down to get what I wanted which was the idea that this man could actually start again.
Up to now I haven't been in prison, except two visits to launch books of somebody else and this was women in prison but I have no doubt that it is still a horrific experience. Back then people were hanged, transported, starved, beaten and died and nobody seemed to care very much.
Durham prison is just up the road from me so I used what I read from there and it was so awful that I couldn't imagine people doing such things to others. They still do of course, we live in a stone age, no matter how we believe that we are civilised. We abuse one another, kill one another, steal in all kinds of ways.
Hundreds of millions of people have no clean water. The most basic of human rights I would have thought. We lived in a ghastly horrible place in a ghastly horrible mess.
Writers try to interpret this. I found it very difficult writing about Zeb and his prison experience, what was left of him as a human being when he got out. He didn't understand freedom, he had forgotten kindness. He was only alive because he was very young when he went in. You can say what you like about fortitude in such instances but it's sheer bloody genes which ensures most things and so he came out alive but a mere scrap of a human being.
He is saved by other people and mostly by Alice Lee, the sweetshop owner, who is a decent woman among all the idiots around her. If it hadn't been for Alice Zeb would have chucked himself in the river and the river is so convenient in Durham.
He leaves behind him his friend, Eli, the rat and as Zeb says later, 'Rats are better than men.' Eli in some ways is the best person in book. He doesn't betray anybody, he doesn't kill anybody, he would steal bread if he had to but Zeb shares. When I think about this book I think about Eli, sharing Zeb's bed in a tiny prison sell, and listening when Zeb pours out his woes. Eli sits there polishing his whiskers, no doubt grateful not to be a ghastly shitty little person as we all are.
I have used all my experience in my books and yes, secondhand and with observation many other people's experience too and I suppose that's what I writer does and that's what makes it so exhausting.
So should I be sorry for all the things I have gone through? How could I be when hopefully it changes and enriches my writing but the cost has been huge and almost killed me.
My agent said that one of the men in Nobody's Child, my book which is out at the moment is good. He has come back from the first world war with PTSD, of course it wasn't called such at the beginning but the reason that I write about it with confidence is that I've been through it. I know what's like when you cannot walk downstairs, when you look up at staircases and think you can never go up them, when your bed is the only place you feel safe, when the world is huge and full of terrors and you have panic attacks even in your own home which you thought was your defence against the world.
I know what it's like when your physical symptoms agonise you night and day and where the only place you feel anything positive is in your dreams. And that isn't necessarily typical. Many people have no refuge in their dreams.
In my new book The Guardian Angel the main bloke in it ( I hate the word hero) he's just an ordinary kid when he goes to prison for fighting with and inadvertently killing another lad or was it inadvertent, since he hated him? The reader is left to decide which I think is only fair. Being born under the sign of Libra, even though I claim to hate such daft ideas, I have a balanced view or like to think I do of life.
I didn't know when I began writing that he was going to be a convict, I didn't know there would be a series of letters between Zeb and Alice, who owns the sweetshop in Stanhope. It was only when I read about what prison life was like then and it was so horrific ( this is in 1855 ) that I actually had to water it down to get what I wanted which was the idea that this man could actually start again.
Up to now I haven't been in prison, except two visits to launch books of somebody else and this was women in prison but I have no doubt that it is still a horrific experience. Back then people were hanged, transported, starved, beaten and died and nobody seemed to care very much.
Durham prison is just up the road from me so I used what I read from there and it was so awful that I couldn't imagine people doing such things to others. They still do of course, we live in a stone age, no matter how we believe that we are civilised. We abuse one another, kill one another, steal in all kinds of ways.
Hundreds of millions of people have no clean water. The most basic of human rights I would have thought. We lived in a ghastly horrible place in a ghastly horrible mess.
Writers try to interpret this. I found it very difficult writing about Zeb and his prison experience, what was left of him as a human being when he got out. He didn't understand freedom, he had forgotten kindness. He was only alive because he was very young when he went in. You can say what you like about fortitude in such instances but it's sheer bloody genes which ensures most things and so he came out alive but a mere scrap of a human being.
He is saved by other people and mostly by Alice Lee, the sweetshop owner, who is a decent woman among all the idiots around her. If it hadn't been for Alice Zeb would have chucked himself in the river and the river is so convenient in Durham.
He leaves behind him his friend, Eli, the rat and as Zeb says later, 'Rats are better than men.' Eli in some ways is the best person in book. He doesn't betray anybody, he doesn't kill anybody, he would steal bread if he had to but Zeb shares. When I think about this book I think about Eli, sharing Zeb's bed in a tiny prison sell, and listening when Zeb pours out his woes. Eli sits there polishing his whiskers, no doubt grateful not to be a ghastly shitty little person as we all are.
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