New for 2012, Numbers 2 – 4

Tags

internet bargaains, lunch, new experiences, Paris, police

I’m lumping this together not just because I’m lazy but because they really aren’t that dramatic and certainly didn’t warrant a post each.

Number 2 – Cooking Jambonneau – ham knuckle.  I’ve often seen these in the supermarket but have never bestirred myself to see how they’re supposed to be cooked.  They were on special a couple of weeks ago so in the spirit of the family can eat something different for once I got one and looked up recipes when I got back home.  I braised it in cider and served it with leeks in white sauce for Sunday lunch and it was nice, not fantastic, but good.  However the pea soup made from the ham and cider stock the next day was delicious.

Number 3– Buying coupons from an internet discount site.  I’m going to Paris soon with my daughter and a friend put me onto a site where you’re offered discounts on hotels, flights, spa treatments, dinner deals etc – what you have to do is buy the coupon entitling you to X amount of nights and then contact the hotel to see if they can fit you in when you want to go.  So it’s a bit scary because paying for three

No room at the hotel...

nights in a hotel in the centre of Paris, even with a 45% discount, is quite a lot of money.  But the hotel is in the shadow of Notre Dame and I knew I’d kick myself if I passed it up so I went ahead and bought the coupons.  Then found the site refused my credit card because it’s English so my husband had to pay with his French one, which is what I suppose you’d call a satisfactory outcome.  For me, anyway.  Now all I have to do is nail the child down and get her to say which dates suit her and then I can have all the fun of seeing if the hotel has any spare rooms.

Number 4 – Taking a man out for lunch.  It’s really strange to think that I’ve never done this before, I’ve shared the bill of course and I was in PR and advertising for some years so I used to entertain clients and journalists but for some reason it was always women.  When I first started going out with my husband I wanted to take him out on his birthday but he refused, saying loftily he’d never allowed a girl to pay for him and he wasn’t about to start now.  His noble attitude was a flipping nuisance as I had a pretty hectic job and would far rather have gone out than have to rush home to whip up a birthday dinner.  A few months later we married and spent the first night of our honeymoon at Claridges on the correct assumption that we’d never be able to afford to go there again. After all the bowing and ‘Congratulations Sir, Congratulations, Madam,’ when we checked in there was the inevitable, ‘And how will you be paying, Sir?’  ‘American Express.’  ‘I’m afraid we don’t take American Express, Sir.’  My brand new husband turned to me, ‘You’ve got your Barclaycard, haven’t you?’ and informed the desk that ‘the wife will pay.’  To be fair he then discovered he had his company petrol card on him so the surprised accountant at the firm he worked for got a bill from a five star hotel rather than the normal local Shell garage in Battersea.

The importance of checking facts: gendarme uniforms have been updated.

So last week for the first time ever I took a man out to lunch, a policeman no less,who is helping me with the research for my book.  I’m not writing a crime novel as such but there is a French detective in it and though I looked stuff up on the net the French policing system is so incredibly complicated that I wasn’t left much wiser.  The only thing I did gather was that the two arms of law enforcement, the gendarmes (military) and police (civilian) don’t always get on very well.  Fortunately my daughter came with us to help with translation for, though his English is quite good and my French is passable, the way crimes are investigated in France is so different to the English system that it’s near impossible to find the words to describe it unless you’re completely bilingual.

It was a good lunch, he’s a nice man and I really enjoyed myself.  What he told me is incredibly useful too.  I’m going to have to re-write a couple of scenes in the book and got one section completely wrong but I was spot-on with one element at least.  There really is a considerable degree of- ahem – rivalry between the gendarmes and the police.

Choices, choices

Tags

Liebster Blog award

I’ve been having a lovely time this week not getting down to doing what I ought to due to having the excuse that I had to check out blogs for my five Liebster awards.  The fact that I knew pretty well whom I wanted to nominate straight away is beside the point, the research was still necessary.  Of course it was.

So in no particular order, I’d like to nominate Susie from Desperate Anglo Housewives Bordeaux because she makes me laugh.  And she makes sense.  She’s also keen on food and includes some fantastic and doable recipes.  it was one her posts that prompted me to finally buy one of Nigella Lawson’s books, now an absolute kitchen essential.

I don’t know who is behind Literary Relish  but I thoroughly enjoy her book reviews which cover a nice wide range and are also generally pretty much to my taste.  She doesn’t reveal much about herself but I get the feeling that she reviews her own books and not ones sent to her by publicists so she reviews books that are out, in paperback and affordable.  When you live abroad and have to buy all your books because there are no libraries being tempted endlessly in blogs by the latest hardbacks is maddening!

Again I don’t know who writes Total Immersion – French Style but I admire the author of this blog, set in Rouen, hugely for the gusto with which she’s integrating herself into French life.  And for learning how to bake too.  But I’d check her blog out just for her photos which make me really, really want to visit Rouen again.

I always loved crime fiction, no it’s not a guilty pleasure – it’s one I am completely unashamed of and I’d love to be able to write a crime novel myself but I don’t think I could ever be subtle enough at the plotting.  Either I’d end up with a murderer who’s pulled like a rabbit out of a hat on the last page but one or you’d know who it is from the first chapter.  So I was really pleased to chance on Crimepieces which is a book blog all about  romance crime and is just up my street.

Finally but definitely not least there’s Vanessa from Life on La Lune who is also a writer and blogs about life in France.  She’s definitely not fluffy and starry eyed, thankfully neither is she bitter for that matter, but she’s always interesting, informative and she takes wonderful photos too.

What a nice way to start a day…

Tags

Liebster Blog award

…to log on and discovered that you’ve been nominated for a Liebster Blog award.

Thank you very much indeed Sue from Writing Home and especially for the nice things you said about why you gave it to me!

Liebster means favourite or beloved in German and the blog award  is a way of getting lesser known, or new, blogs more widely known.  As well as linking back to Sue and thanking her (which as a nicely brought up person I would have done anyway!) I’ve now got to think of five other blogs which I really enjoy and which have less than 200 followers to nominate them for the award.  As I don’t really ever look to see how popular the blogs are that I regularly check out this may take some, pleasurable, time, and will of course be yet another excuse reason for why I’m on the internet rather than being upstairs on the speyed computer writing my book.

New Experiences 2012, number 1…

Tags

new experiences, writers forums, writing

I’ve put a section of the book I’m currently writing up on an online writers’ forum.

So what?  I hear a resounding cry.  People do that all the time.  They might, but though I’ve participated in several online writers’ groups over the years, reading other writers’ work, making comments, chatting on the general forums, answering queries as best I could, been encouraging, kept a discrete silence, gently suggested that boning up on correct punctuation would be a good thing, ditto grammar and doing at least a  bit of research when writing a historical novel ect,  I’ve never, ever put up anything of mine for inspection.  Until now.

One of the forum's most prolific contributors

There are two main reasons.  Firstly, I keep my work in progress very close to my chest.  I don’t like discussing it with anyone until it’s finished, the closest that even my family get to knowing what it’s about is if I need help on a specific plot point and then it’s only done on a need-to-know basis.  I’m not obsessively secretive it’s just that I feel that if I started talking about what I was writing to everyone I might talk it out and lose the impetus to go on and write the thing.  Also people cannot help advising you on what they think are improvements to the plot, I’m afraid I’ve done it myself, it’s confidence sapping and you end up feeling that it’s not really your story any longer.

The other reason is that I’m not sure how helpful posting work on internet forums is for someone who is beyond the rank novice stage of need help in differentiating between there, they’re and their (you’d be amazed how many would-be writers do).  Writers are usually very kind to beginners.

Forums by their very nature attract a huge range of people trying to write in wildly different areas and a critique on a young adult novel from John who wants to be the next Lee Child may not be very helpful if he doesn’t have a clue what twelve year old girls like to read.  While he can make some useful comments on sentence structure or that this bit or other simply doesn’t make sense, his comments may well lack depth because he doesn’t know the genre.  And if you’re on the receiving end of his criticism it’s terribly difficult to distance yourself and say, ‘Well he’s got a point there but there he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

More importantly you normally only put up a small fragment of your novel up for criticism, usually somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words.  A chapter, a scene, even a single paragraph of a novel are parts of the whole and I can’t see how you can properly judge a passage of writing out of context.  What might seen dreamily poetic gets downright boring when there’s too much of it, ditto action scenes when you aren’t allowed a break between the flash, bang, wallops, and how can you tell if a love scene is convincing if you don’t know whether the rest of the novel tends towards the Austenesque or is channelling Lynda La Plante.

Even opening chapters need to be read in context.  Initially I opened Something Stupid with my heroine being followed as she walked home from a party.  It was a cracking good scene, if I say so myself, very tight and tense.  I gave the manuscript to my husband to read and once he’d got over his unflattering surprise that I could write something readable he said flatly, ‘The first five pages don’t fit the tone of the rest of the book.’  Once I’d sulked for a couple for days I realised he was right, a real woman-in-danger scene, which this was, didn’t belong in romantic comedy.

I’m not dissing online writers’ communities, I think they’re great, writing is very lonely and it’s lovely to have others who are enthusiastic about the things that you are.  Writers also incredibly helpful about sharing information, whether it’s research help, submitting work, potential markets or a myriad of other things and the critiques can be very helpful indeed.  But just as you’d find it very hard to judge the artistic qualities of a left eyebrow if you hadn’t seen it in situ above the Mona Lisa’s left eye I still think it’s difficult to make a valid criticism of a 2,000 word passage from an 85,000 word novel.

Almost French

Tags

living in France, Paris

I didn’t get 2012 off to a good start reading-wise.  The first off the To Read pile was something that described itself as a “enthralling tale of dark suspense” which seemed perfect for New Year’s Day.  I waited in vain to be enthralled, or for the suspense, dark or otherwise, and finally put my pedant’s hat on and chucked it in the charity pile when I got to ‘she passed a 4 x 4 with two setter dogs barking loudly.’  What else is a setter and barks?  An otter?  A Horse?  Seal?

Then I started next month’s book group choice, set in the Spanish Civil War, and based on my experience with Hemingway braced myself for some fairly gory passages.  Actually the gory passages would have been a welcome change from nothing happening and some of the most excruciating writing I’ve ever come across.  One girl had a plait that swung from hip to hip as she walked, it was intended to show how graceful she was I think, but in this reader it produced an ineradicable image of a drunken sailor lurching from side to side.   I really try hard not to give up on book group reads but when I realised that the thought of picking up this horror was actually making me feel depressed I decided to pass it straight on to the next unlucky soul in the list to read it.

So thank heaven for Almost French by Sarah Turnbull which was published about eight years ago.  I can’t remember who it was on one of the Living In France blogs who said this was really good and in a different class to most of the books about making a new life in France but she was absolutely right.  Thank you so much for I don’t think I’d have read this otherwise.

Sarah Turnbull is an Australian journalist who moved in with Frederic, a Parisian lawyer in his thirties, only weeks after meeting him while backpacking around Europe.  She spoke barely any French, didn’t have any employment, barely knew her lover and knew even less about the people and the habits of the city she was now living in.  She was a true Australian, impetuous, informal, friendly; he was typically French, close to his extended family, formal, used to smart dinner parties where everyone wore black and didn’t speak to strangers unless they had been properly introduced.   What sets this apart from all those other “I came to France and have adapted books” is that she’s remarkably honest about herself.  She comes across as very likeable but you still get the impression that she could be difficult and unbending on occasion, in other words thoroughly human.  There are no neat answers, it’s the story of two people who have to learn to change to make their life together and it’s a wonderful read.  The fact that it’s also very well written is a bonus.

I think I might suggest this for the book group…

How To Fake French…

Tags

humour, learning French

New year, new experiences…

Tags

new experiences, new year's resolutions, Paris, Sicily

Catherine Fox, who wrote the wonderful Angels and Men, was coming up to a serious birthday last year and decided to ward off any suggestions that she might be becoming a stick-in-the-mud by making a resolution to try to do one new thing every week.  As she’s a black belt at karate I doubt anyone sensible would call her a stick in the mud but I’ve had a nagging feeling recently that I might be slipping into a rut and perhaps it’s time to do something about it before said rut becomes a trench.

I’ll have to play  fair of course and try to do things that are really new or stretching my own boundaries.  So reading 52 new books this in 2012 would definitely be cheating as would trying out a whole load of different  recipes as I’ll be doing both of those anyway.  Though I might try making choux pastry, I’m no baker and when I get a new cook book usually don’t bother to even glance through the cake section.

Even if you’ve led a pretty adventurous life you tend to find that by the time you’ve reached fifty or so you’ve actually done quite a lot (even if you can’t always remember doing it.  I had put ‘visit a volcano’ on my to-do list for this year and then realised we visited a little one on our honeymoon ).  There aren’t many classic authors I haven’t at least tried, even for the sake of rut-busting I don’t think I’m prepared to tackle Ulysses, I’ve bottle fed a lion cub and a badger, made a tiger cub purr, driven a steam engine – albeit a half-size perfect replica, appeared on television, walked around the Statue of Liberty, climbed the highest sand dune in Europe, cuddled a Koala and seen a Duck-Billed Platypus (much smaller than I’d imagined).  I’m an adventurous eater so there aren’t many normal foods I haven’t at least tried.  I admit I haven’t ever knowingly had dog, cat, horse, monkey’s

Not today, thank you.

brains, shark’s fin, anything that slithers, insects, eyes or private parts and orifices from any species and I don’t intend to start now.  I’m not keen on feet either.  I’ve never eaten ostrich or kangaroo though…

I’m not interested in new experiences gained from hallucinogenic drugs or cocaine either, I don’t think I’m up to the pilgrimage walk to St Jacques de Compostela  and as I don’t have an unlimited budget, or much of a budget at all, I can’t go to India, go up in a helicopter, have a balloon ride, buy myself a serious piece of jewellery or go down to the bottom of the ocean where it’s so deep the light doesn’t penetrate and it’s very, very strange, something I’ve wanted to do since I was about twelve.  But I am going to Sicily, where I’ve never been, to see my daughter and though I’m not sure I’ll be able to do one new thing a week like Catherine, I’m going to try for 52 new things over the year so at least it averages out.

So far my initial list of possibilities goes like this:

• Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower in the elevator (something I’ve always been too chicken to do).
• Visiting one museum in Paris which is completely different to my normal taste.
• Drive my husband’s 4 x 4 (the thing terrifies me).
• Mow the lawn which means using the tractor mower on quite a steep slope.
  

  I'm sure this will count as "doing the mowing".

  (Fear isn’t involved here, it’s blind terror.)

• Make profiteroles.
• Cook scallops – I’ve always been frightened of bogging it up and wasting rather a lot of money.
• Visit the caves at Lascaux
• Go to one of the places that’s marked on our map as being ‘of interest’ without looking it up to see if it’s worth it first.
• Plant three apple trees.
• Make regular detours to follow those signs that direct you to a tenth century church, a medieval château or a ‘point de vue’.
• Go to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux

There’ll be more added as things occur to me but any suggestions (reasonable ones, children) will be most welcome.