Saturday, June 24, 2006

My first time..


Three weeks ago I took my fragile ego in my hands, scraped my courage together, sent up a prayer to the Muses and sent off a short story for consideration to TTA Press. I waited, bated breath, worrying, until finally, on Friday morning, I peered down the passage and spied the envelope ...

I ran there, like a maniac, almost killing myself as the door was in the way and my momentum was just too much. So I slammed into the door, startling the sleeping dog into fits of anger and loud barking. Nursing a knocked knee I grabbed the gnawed upon post, courtesy of the dog, and limped to the diningroom. I ignored the large envelope and first checked the bill from Orange. Pheg. They are sending £54 back into my account. I thought "hey, it can only get better."

I steadied my nerves by making some tea. I had a light rich tea biscuit first then tore open the envelope. Out came the story, all eight pages of it, a registration form to subscribe to their various books and lo! my first ever rejection slip.

I read through it. It was standard fare, or so I have read - thank you for submitting your work but after careful consideration we will not be proceeding to publish your story...

So I sat back and giggled madly to myself. Giddily I rang FG at work. Told him about the fact that we are getting money back from Orange and hey presto! I have my first rejection slip. We both started giggling. It was SO cool. I know, in theory, I should be hugely disappointed and stuff but the sheer fact that SOMEONE ELSE besides wordweaver, FG and Viv had read the story, had taken the time to seriously consider it for publishing was such an unbelievable rush. It was amazing. It was druglike. I felt ontop of the world. Who cares that they aren't publishing it. They READ it! It is a fab feeling.

Ye gods, can you imagine my reaction if they actually decided to publish it?

Subsequently, I have come to realise that the story might belong somewhere else. A magazine I had bought at Forbidden Planet has EXACTLY the kind of stories in it that mine is about...I know, for an aspiring author I just messed that sentence up so badly...but hey! I have read all nine stories in the magazine and will visit their website and see what their submission guidelines are.

Hey presto - happy shiny girl!





Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Mummy is the word...

FG came home today with an interesting tidbit for me.

A 1600 year old mummy has been discovered in Peru a little while ago. Archeologists and other types are puzzling over the find. The burial itself was unusual as the Moche people used to leave their dead for the vultures and animals to devour - the circle of life thing - and they hardly ever buried their dead. They found the mummy on a mountain known as La Bruja - The Wizard - and they discovered that not only was it buried so deep underground, beneath ground cover, stone, logs, vegetation and several other layers of "deterrent" materials to keep people out. Or it in...

Once they located the body of the mummy they found that it had been wrapped in approximately 27 layers of fabric. As they unwound these bandages they found weapons beneath them, tucked against its body. They assumed a warrior king. They were wrong. They unwrapped the mummy some more and found beaten sheets of copper and gold, keeping the body in shape and once removed they discovered vibrant beads and a weaving tool of some sort. Which puzzled the scientists even more. They uncovered and unwrapped more. And found a young female covered in tatoos buried with all the honours and more of a king and warrior.

The mystery is now to find out who she is and where she fits in, in the Moche world. She is an enigma, an unknown quantity.

Scholars now have to re-evaluate everything they knew about this race of long-dead people.

The discovery of this young woman, xrays revealed she was no older than her mid-twenties and that she had borne at least one child, has really tickled my imagination. Who was she? Why was she buried? There are anomolies in the items found in her grave. Statues and paintings on the walls never seen before. She is a mystery. Her existence is a puzzle.

Suddenly the creative juices are flowing and I am thinking...what if she was buried on this very sacred and special mountain La Bruja as she was seen as the reincarnation of a goddess? Goddesses all over the world have dual personalities. Artemis and Diana acting as virginal beauties, protectors of the weak and woodland animals...yet at the same time some of their attributes are protection in childbirth and protection to brave men in battle.

I googled the find and found that one chap strongly believes that she is a Buddist monk who travelled from the East. Strange thing is, the items found with her bear strong resemblance to protector demons from Buddist temples.

I doubt we will genuinely know her origins or what she was doing in such a remote place, buried with ancient weapons and such funery finery. I feel sorry that they took her from her burial place. I understand that research needs to be done, I am just wondering if they will ever put her back, like the natives of the Altai Mountains are requesting to be done to their Ice Maiden.

She had been removed a few years back - found with the skeletons of horses, weapons, a vast amount of treasure and jewellery and last, but not all, weapons of war - from her resting place in this mystical landscape in Siberia. Since her removal there has been drought, earth quakes and other natural disasters. The locals are clamouring to have her back, believing that the Spirits demand to be appeased, they want their own returned to them.

Anyone who hears the story and does not feel a shiver of awe, does not feel their heart beat a bit faster and their pulse quicken with the sheer imaginative possibilities of these stories, is a stone.

The story of the Moche mummy is one of the articles in this month's National Geographic.

This is a teaser snippet from the NG mag. Happy reading!

The Moche didn't embalm their dead. Most corpses decayed normally, leaving bare bones as the only proof of lives extinguished. In a very few instances, though, nature and human reverence worked together to preserve the deceased as a mummy. This was the fate of the tattooed woman whose elaborately wrapped remains were discovered last year at a ceremonial site called El Brujo—the Wizard—on the north coast of Peru. Rising to power a thousand years before the Inca, her people created a sophisticated culture now known for its fine ceramics and masterful metalwork.

A recent autopsy revealed that the tattooed woman had borne at least one child and died in her late 20s, but no trace of what killed her was evident. Her untimely demise must have shocked her people, who laid her to rest in full regalia at the peak of a temple where bloody sacrifices were performed (National Geographic, July 2004). Her body was daubed with cinnabar—a red mineral associated with the life force of blood—wrapped in layers of cotton cloth, and entombed in thick courses of adobe. Then the dry climate of the Moche's desert realm desiccated her body. No other Moche woman like her has ever been found.

"Based on our preliminary study, we think she was a ruler," says archaeologist RĂ©gulo Franco, whose work is supported by Peru's National Institute of Culture and the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation. If so, she may revolutionize ideas about the Moche, whose leaders were believed—until now—to be men.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

That old chestnut




We are all obsessed with it.

If its cold, we want sun, it if it rains we want it to fall straight down with no wind, if it is sunny, it's too hot.

I can shake my head in amazement.

But what amazes me even more: employees over in the Met office and other weather offices around the country. WHY oh why would you blurt out about giant massive life threatening storms about to hit the capital? At a specific time like 4pm. When it would rain for an hour, heavily, flooding areas.

Do you know something we don't, i.e. plugged into Mother Nature's brain/God's brain (choose whichever you prefer and delete the other one) and if you do, they quite obviously lied to you, didn't they? I am still waiting for our massive storms, of thunder and lightning, of destructive hail stones. And funnily, I could get home this evening as no storms occurred to interrupt the journey.

Ah yes, done it now, haven't I? Tempted fate and no doubt a storm that would make the special effects in The Day After Tomorrow look like the effects used in SupermanII, will hit, destroying the planet.

The concert, the music...


tralaaa laaaa!

This Saturday is the long awaited Foo Fighters concert in Hyde Park!

Does a crazy mad jig. Whoo hoo.

Can we wait? Well, that doesn't matter, we have to. But it is going to be soooooo cool - Motorhead and Queens of the Stone Age opening. Yeeehah = a lot of noise. I am doubting my own hearing for the Sunday afterwards. Or my ability to speak.

Rock on!

Thursday, June 08, 2006

I can see your lips move...

As an English speaking person, who no doubt speaks English better than native born English speakers, using correct grammar, very little slang and with little enough accent, it genuinely astounds me that people (read work colleagues) take me for a retard.

I might not have gone on to university when I left school– I would have dearly loved to, but a) it was too expensive and b) the bursaries I applied for had me shortlisted and when push came to shove, they chose one of the previously disadvantaged applicants as that was the way the cookie crumbled back then (and still does). I did however do four years of my BA long distance but did not have the lump sum it took to write the final exam (it was more than my salary for three months AND I was living on my own due to my unforeseen circumstances relating to the passing on of my mom).

I have completed and am the proud owner of my internationally acclaimed Diploma in Property Finance, which I completed in English eventhough it is not my first language. I even did my BA studies in English. I have probably read more books than all my team together on more diverse subjects, not blinding myself or is that fooling myself, into believing that if I only read biographies of important people, I will look intelligent and people will think I am sooper douper. I pick up new software programmes really fast and tend to think outside a box when there is problems, finding a solution to them. So why oh why….am I …

sitting here, in this specific Hell Dimension today and wondering to myself why I am being spoken to in a loud slow voice generally reserved for Specials and People Who Are Travelling in a Foreign Country Who Know that the Locals Do Not Understand English, by a greying smelly man with the worst halitosis imaginable. If I look up, as he hovers over my shoulder to make sure I understood his inane instructions (and its not like I haven’t done this a million times before, and its not like he actually knows what I am doing on software he has never used before as he is a technophobe) I look straight into the bristles growing out of his bulbous nose and I think to myself “Holy phuck, Batman, get those trimmed or burnt out and back off before I hit you in the delicates with my elbow because you are standing WAY TOO CLOSE.”

Shudder.

I am not – as my one sweet colleague pointed out after I scowled at said boss in a nasty face deforming way – feeling the love today.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Almost Citizens!


Ah.

Tomorrow this time - 15:53 we would have had tea with the mayor, sworn our allegience to Her Majesty the Queen - all in order to become British Citizens.

Why, oh why? I hear you cry!

Well, so that we could travel and go places without having to worry about bloody visas all the time. It is exciting. This is what we have been waiting for six years. Soon, like Cheesy, FG and I will be able to visit far flung places, take pictures and experience new cultures and such. And because we won't be spending hard earned cash on visas it can be used for tatt and food and tours. Whoo hoo.

We can't wait!

Oh right. Only one sleep more. Snh snh snh.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Attention to detail...

I read somewhere during/before the releases of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that Peter Jackson was utterly obsessed with attention to detail. To the extent where, when Gandulf went off to do his research at Minas Tirith and he sat in the library there, going through all those scrolls and maps, practically all of those untouched scrolls and parchments in the background had text on it - eventhough it was not to be used in the scene.

I am finding myself doing that at the moment. Being obsessed with making sure I have the correct formulae for my young exorcist/paranormal investigator to use when confronted with a ghost, the right language, turn of phrase, locations. It is hard work. I know, in the end that it would help, once I sit down and write the blasted novel to have all this information at my fingertips but...I am scared.

I am scared of using too much of it - if I do, I will be a bit of an anorak, showing off all my learned knowledge (a la Dan Brown), if I don't, it might seem that I am doing my "magic" on the wing. Conundrum. Where do you draw the line, where do you see the balance. I know wordweaver will pipe up and say "shutup with the whining already and just write it, fix it up later.." and I know where she is coming from but! being the procrastinator that I am, I am wasting my time googling every phrase I find interesting, doing research on Milton quotes, checking out Dante...Catholic saints...and it is vastly interesting. I am thinking of selling my services to the Beeb even!

Grin, but this Sunday, I think will be the big day when I will start at page 20 in the existing novel and rewriting and start showing - not telling - my research and dropping my poor young character into a whole load of trouble.

SNH SNH SNH