Gratuitous launch party post

OK, so I wrote a book. About 21 years ago, mind you, but I did write it and the very brave Punked Books have published it. In fact, they opened a new Children's imprint for me - Grimoire books. I swear, I did NOT drug them.

So on Thursday The Big Green Bookshop were brave enough to allow me and a bunch of varigated friends into their premises to launch the thing.


OK, so this was a launch for a book I wrote over 2 decades ago. I'm over it. I'd given up on it. It will never make me rich. So this is like, blah blah blah. Right? So I was being all blase about the entire thing until a few weeks ago when I realised I should probably take it seriously and invite a few people. Beg a few people.

So I did. And then I got Very Nervous. By Thursday morning I was essentially a bag of nerves and by the time I got to the bookshop I was pretty wired. I had, however, bought 2 cases of wine for the occasion. This was a good thing.

People started filtering in around 7 and by 8 the locusts had already demolished a case of wine and numerous packets of Wotsits. I did a reading from the book. I tried to make it interesting. People shuffled. But they clapped at the end... I guess that counts.


It was kinda like getting married, launching one's first book. I mean, it might happen again; who knows? One makes a major public committment to the book, the publisher, everything is rosy, all one's mates come out in support and by the end of the night one can't remember anything except... er... that it was a shedload of fun. Then it's just you and the book, heading into the sunset.

There are people to thank. Parents. Sibling. Spouse. Friends. Agent. Publisher. You know. The usual. I'll thank them if the damn thing ever wins anything.

I think it went well. We drank a case and a half of wine. The shop sold out of their copies of my book, the lovely Kevin from Punked (Grimoire) had to unload extra copies from his Bat-Case and then I think some of those might have been sold. And possibly signed. I think I signed some things. I hope they were books.

These are some of my besty friends. That's me on the left with the big schnoz and the target on my boobs.


I had a steaming hangover the next day.

Anyway, so that's it, the book is launched. God bless her and all who sail in her.

Now buy a copy.

Please?

PS, I'll be selling and signing at Witchfest International on November 6th. Put on your duds and come along. You know you want to.

Eeek!!

Prompted by the lovely DJ Kirkby whose second novel 'Without Alice' has appeared on the Amazon Bestseller list, I thought I'd venture on and see how my children's book The Green King is doing...

...and I'm up to 106,000th on the list! OK, this is not very high, admittedly but considering I was 1.3 millionth a few weeks ago and 306,000th a few days ago, I reckon I may have sold another book.

AND - STOP PRESSES: THE GREEN KING IS AVAILABLE ON KINDLE: right here for all you techno-bods...

Thanks everyone!

The launch is tomorrow, I will spare you the tedious begging to come and join me for a glass of wine - if you do fancy it, details are here.

One day I might actually write about my son. At the moment, all I have to tell you is that on weekends we are spending considerable amounts of time on the BMX track where I get all puffed up with pride as the seasoned BMXers admire his bravery. He can now make it up all but the 3 steepest hills by himself and we've been invited for proper training next weekend... finally, my potato is turning into a bean-pole - with all this cycling he's becoming leaner and stronger... my little boy is really growing up... sniff...

All about meeeee!!

This post is all about... meeeee!!!! Me me me me me. Or rather, my book.

No WAIT!! Don't go!!!! Sheesh.

Seriously, this will only take a moment and you can scroll right on down to the toy give-away just underneath this post. Seriously. I promise. It won't hurt.

Anyway, so I sort of have a book coming out. It's called er... yes that's it over on the right... it's called The Green King. It is an actual book and not followed by the letters IPA; it is not therefore a beer. Or a pub. No, it's a children's book in fact.

No no no, don't bugger off quite yet, I'm about to invite you out for a drink. Settle down a moment.

A drink? Yes, I'm launching the Green King, with wine, at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, North London on Thursday October 14th, 7pm to 9pm, which is in no way nearly in a week and I am in no way panicking about it not even slightly. Not at all. So there.

OK maybe I'm panicking a little teensy bit.

Anyway, so I'm inviting you all, yes you! All 2 of you who have read this far... there will be some wine and a few little munchie things (cough cough crisps cough). Yes, my hospitality will be unparalleled. And there will be juice, just in case there are actual children, or people who perhaps want to get up one day.

A bit about the book perhaps: it's aimed at children 8-14 but, apparently, the odd grown up has been known to read it and, shockingly, quite actually like it. Or so they say...

And, if you do know any children of around the right age, you might consider it a wild-card Christmas present? Hm? And in case you're wondering if the child in question might actually like it, here are some excerpts from actual letters I got from a class of 9-year-olds, to whom I read bits of it the other day:

• “I liked your book the Green King I think that it will be a best sellers list” – George, 9
• “When it comes out I am going to buy it” – William, 9
• “Your book is realy good and adventures” – Megan, 9
• “I like mystery books and yours is the one” – Ellie, 9
• “I loved your book it was amasing” – Jamie, 9
• “I loved your book and it was awesome, it was the cind of book that I love” – Reegan,9
• “The whole thing was absaloutly brilliant” – Alex, 9
• "I thought your book was great. I really enjoyed it" – Harry, 9

...Harry continues on, bless him.... "However a few improvements are maybe:

• pictures
• a d.v.d. to go with the book"

Yeah Harry!!! Go get those film rights!!!

OK, so I would seriously be over the moon if anyone fancied making the trek up to the shop and downing a few vinos at my expense, maybe even buying the book and making the bookshop happy and, most importantly, saying hello so I can put a few more faces to bloggers.

Oh, and there will be air-kisses too! I go left then right, just so you don't get confused.

Please won't you come? And, er, bring someone?

Hmmm?

And if not, the book is available either here on Amazon or from the publisher here or from the link in my RH menu. I'm loving watching it climb the rankings in Amazon - I went from eleventy million to around 40,000 in one day after reading in the schools. Am now back down to 306,000 so help!

...that sort of day

We had plans today - involving, unsurprisingly, the BMX track - which were rained out. The entire day was pretty much rained out to be honest. I woke up with Charlie's feet in my back and as I shifted out of his way I woke the cat.

Waking the cat means instant access to cat-paw hell. First he sits beside our heads and swats us in the face. This escalates rapidly into a quick-march across our heads, back and forth and back and forth. He then goes for the soft parts - eyeballs mainly but he's recently started stomping across my nipples every morning and occasionally the frog's balls. He's also worked out that waking Charlie is the best way to get us up and so if Charlie is in bed, Charlie becomes the main target.

This morning however he interrupted himself halfway through the process in order to be sick on the floor. Shortly after I cleaned it all up I realised that he'd also taken a poo on the bed; a much better way to get me up as it turns out, particularly as he'd been pawing me in the mouth and I had a sudden, over-powering urge to scrub my face with bleach.

So that was us up and looking glumly out the window at the bucketing rain. Not getting to the BMX track was OK as it turns out, which was a surprise as Charlie has been wearing his new full-face helmet everywhere this week in anticipation of his next go around the circuit. He's worn it to bed, to nursery, and, hilariously, in the playground like some sort of mini-Stig going down the slide. He's still quite wobbly on the bike but really gaining in confidence; I was actually quite looking forward to watching him go.

Anyway, so my little spudlet voted with his tum and instead of lurching out into the cold, we washed the sheets and had a rainy-day sort of day which, it turns out, involves a lot of cake; a pleasant diversion from the cat's insides.

Holy crap

Fuck me. I have to show you this. This is, no shit, my son on his new bike today, going around the local BMX track 20 minutes after we took the stabilisers off.

Sadly all we had was an old phone with rubbish resolution but I had to post this up in the general spirit of being gobsmackingly proud of him. And yes, he is wearing a helmet. And knee pads. And that's the Frog paddling helplessly behind him.


Anyway, that's me regurgitating all over your screen. Over and out!

yucky

I'm finding this whole Motherly love thing absolutely shameful. The whole thing is a living cliche - how much a mother loves their child; I mean, who wants to hear about that? If you're a parent, you already know, if you want to be a parent, you can guess, if you don't, you don't care.

I spend a lot of my time telling my son off for various things... sometimes I stand back and listen to myself, it's disgusting. 'Don't do that; you're making me cross; you're making me sad; take that off, put that on, do this, stop, say please, say thank you, put it down, what are you DOING???'

I pretty much spend the rest of my time beating myself up about it. A friend of ours has been berated by his brother for the amount of times he tells his daughter off; the brother feels that no-one has the right to tell a child what to do. I can't actually remember the outcome of the conversation, either the brother has no children or his kids are a nightmare; either way we all laughed heartily at the story... but secretly I bet we all doubted ourselves.

Mums confess things to each other. How we shout at our children, how we sneak up on them at night and cuddle them when they can't squirm, how we secretly like it when they fall over and need comforting; how we lose our cool, how frustrated we get. How guilty we feel all the time; about loving them too much, neglecting them, spoiling them, feeding them crap, forcing them to eat things they hate; guilty about secretly loving them clambering into our bed after a bad dream, about how sometimes every word they say is like a knife in an exhausted brain.

It's good, the confession, it shows us we are all the same, that maybe we have nothing to feel guilty about. But it's hard, really, to admit the truth: we are mothers; we did it to ourselves. Mostly.

Anyway, so nobody needs to hear about it, which is why I'm not telling you about our day today; except that it was lovely. At the end, I got told how much my son loves me. There were a lot of 'really's in the sentence. It ended in 'a lot'.

That's what's become of me. Who would have guessed?

Fizzing over.

One of the odd things that have happened to me as a result of writing this blog is that companies offer me things. Things to write about. Occasionally, if I think they are good things, I will write about them. I know this is less interesting then, for instance, hearing about me being pulled naked from the sea; but frankly, that's something I'm rather hoping won't happen to me again; ahem.

Click here for a sponsored review of the new Sodastream

Toys R... er... everywhere...

This is sort of sponsored by Toys are Us, who keep sending us boxes of toys to test.

A review of the Jolly Octopus game - all the charm of a classic and regularly played with - click here for more

Postman Patsy

Charlie has decided he is a postman. This is not, unbelievably, because he's just been given a book about a postman called Charlie (which arrived in the post today from my Uncle Peter) but because... well because for the past 2 weeks he's been obsessed by the post.

What this means practically is that on getting home in the evening he picks up whatever flyers he finds in the hall; says 'I'm just going to be the postman, OK?', then high-tails it heart-stoppingly back outside and shuts the front door behind him.

If one opens the door to chase him, one is met by a small screeching demon brandishing flyers (and we're not even at the Edinburgh Festival) and demanding one goes the hell back inside.

I'm reduced now to peering out the front window and cracking open the front door when he's out of sight so I can peer down the street like some mad stalker. I did grit my teeth one evening and count to 20 before opening the door; when I peered through he was standing right outside talking to two concerned-looking ladies .

"Are you lost?" asked one while the other patted his back reassuringly.

"This is my Daddy's car. He isn't home yet!" he said, randomly

"You poor thing" the other was starting to say (I think) as I burst through the front door with the largest fake smile pasted onto my face that you have ever seen. "Oh, he's just playing postman" I shouted, much too loudly. "I was watching THE WHOLE TIME through the window" I babbled as they backed away slowly in opposite directions...

Ah yes... two random women connected in a moment of mutual humanity over a lost child in the street... how bloody wonderful...

Hasn't stopped him playing though.

Spuddy 4th Birthday

It is nigh upon midnight on my son's 4th birthday and I am propping my eyes open with matchsticks I'm so tired.

It's been an enormous day - in the end there were 21 children here, although not all at once and some of them were younger siblings... but still. 21 children. Twenty one. Children.

We also hosted an all-day play-date for 4 of them as part of our 'nursery is closed, let's all look after each other's kids' rota. Luckily one of the Dad's was over offering support or I would have been under the table by noon.

The mistake, I think, was getting the kids doing party decorations at 10am; by the time 11am rolled around all they wanted to do was eat cake and have a party; making them wait until 3:30 when everyone else got here was perhaps a leetle draconian. Still, it was a day.

It's beyond cliche, any mention of how much a parent loves their child and so just assume I've laid down all the cliches for you here, just sicked them up and rolled them out to pulsate pinkly in the light of the laptop screen... Yes, it is true, I love my son... and today he really shone.

He was, in the main, generous with his time and his toys (to the point where many of them are broken or thrown to the wild winds... we will never have a party in the house again), he cleaned up, he helped out, he led games and was among a small coterie of the best behaved children. He didn't push or throw, tease or bully, he didn't snatch or hog; he was a total gent and I'm a whole other hill of cliches proud.

4 is quite grown up, it turns out. Not as grown up as it seems when one is 3, ie, he has discovered to his chagrin that he cannot drive the car or go to the park by himself or ride his new bike without stabilisers or... there was something else he wanted to do today that I told him he couldn't do until he was a grown up. 'So, when I'm 5?' he asked, hopefully.

Still, in the last year he has grown tall enough to reach the taps in the kitchen, the doorbell outside and a whole host of things I sort of reckoned we had another year or two before he could do. He can take things out of the fridge and pour them into cups without spilling, dress himself, wash himself, get in and out of the bath just by stepping over the edge...

Anyway, all to say that he's remarkably grown up, an illusion that is swiftly shattered when one sees him next to any child over the age of 8 and suddenly he looks so tiny and vulnerable that I feel the need to swoop over him and carry him home; something about which he would in general be quite happy about; chances of a carry when one is nearly three foot six and weighs in at 43 pounds are pretty slim on the ground.

So, that's that. He's 4. Happy Birthday, baby bear.