I'm googled out.

As much as I love adventure, I don't love all the administration that goes with it. 

In fact, it makes me pretty cross and grumpy: as anyone who has been stupid enough to try and cuddle me/ text me/ talk to me/ kiss me on the nose in the last few days will happily attest. I'm an absolute nightmare. It's so bloody boring and stressful, and - in my opinion - utterly unnecessary. All I really want to do is jump on a plane, watch a few films and then roll up in a shiny, sparkly Japan where I will be greeted, obviously, by my own personal Geisha-themed musical group and beautiful Japanese man (before being handed bowls of noodles and a nice rush-matted floor to sleep on, which I will reject in favour of a huge bed). But noooooo. Noooo. Adventure doesn't work like that, apparently. I can't just rock up with trainers and start climbing Mount Fiji. I can't just buy a nice pair of chopsticks from Habitat and then start clicking away with them in beautiful candle-lit restaurants. Or wander into a Karaoke bar and start belting out a song I don't know the words to. Nooooo. Stereotyped experiences take a whole lot of goddamn planning, apparently, and it's doing my head in.

They want a visa. And references. And filled in job application forms. They want to interview me on Skype. They want an international driving license. They want to know if my hair colour is natural (kind of). They want me to work out - all on my own, I hasten to add - that my hairdryer and straighteners won't work out there because of a voltage problem. They want me to rapidly learn more about Japanese geography than I do about British geography (done. I don't know where Norfolk is, and I couldn't stick a pin in Manchester, but I know precisely where Tokyo, Nagoya, Shizuoka City, Hamamatsu, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima are, and I know what kind of bears they've got in Hokkaido). They want me to be able to convert pounds into Yen, when all the 0s on the end make me feel a bit sick (I have dyscalculia, remember). They want me to have injections, and projections, and dejections, and rejections. They want bank statements and personal statements and referential statements and statements that don't involve any kind of swear words. I feel like I'm entering some kind of paperwork black hole already, and I haven't even arrived yet.

But it's ok. I'm writing lists on everything - everything: the cat is starting to look at me suspiciously in case I try and write one on her too - and I spend my entire life at the moment typing the words jobs, japan, hair straighteners and oh Good God please fucking kill me into Google. Something's going to click, though. Eventually. Of course it is: it has to. And if it doesn't, it doesn't make much of a difference anyway. I've got my ticket. No visa - so I won't be allowed past the airport barrier - but I'll still make it to Japan, one way or another. Even if I'm a grumpy, tired old mess by then: a mess with frizzy hair and encaphalitis and no means of proper transport. 

All I'm going to say is: there'd better be a beautiful Japanese man waiting for me at the airport with a singing, dancing Geisha band (and I don't care if they don't exist: they should) and a steaming hot bowl of noodles, or I'm turning around and coming home again. Goddamit, I will not be cheated out of an adventure because of bad planning; and I'm not going to let bureaucracy cheat me out if it either. And if I have to write on the cat in order to get there in one piece, then so be it.

Voices

If a book is alive for its readers, then you can bet that it's kicking and screaming at the poor sod who wrote it in the first place.

Writing one book is hard enough. You breathe life into your characters, and then they follow you around willy nilly: pinching you and prodding you and generally making a racket when you're trying to eat breakfast or put your washing on the line. They have no respect for you as their mother, and you have no control over them whatsoever; no control over how much you love them, or how scared you are for them, or how much you desperately need to protect them from the outside world at the same time as you want them to see as much of it as possible. Like children, once characters are created they breathe entirely on their own: existing simply to leave the toothpaste lid off and demand lifts to and from parties now and then. 

Having two books, I've just discovered, is even harder. I've got one, finished book, and another - entirely different - very incomplete book, but - instead of having more creative freedom - now it just means that I've got two sets of characters, running around and sticking their tongues out at each other and at me when I get caught in the cross-fire. Worse: because I'm unpublished, they keep sidling up to me, pulling on my skirts, looking up at me with big eyes and saying "me? Am I your favourite? Am I the one you're going to talk about when you're hammered and trying to impress people at a party? Am I the one you're going to send to agents?" And I tell them both yes, because I don't know how to tell them I rarely discuss either because it bores people and have only sent them out a couple of times because I'm scared somebody will be horrible about them.

Unfortunately, the two books have also created their own little support networks within my family, because I subconsciously picked different people to read each of them. My grandad and my mum read and love Missed Connections - the adult, more thoughtful book - while my dad and sister read the comedy Harriet Manners. Two weeks ago I sent out both manuscripts at exactly the same time, and anyone would have thought I'd just shot a pistol into the air and given my parents little flags to wave.

"Have you heard anything about Missed Connections?" my mum asked a few days ago.

"No," I said. "Still waiting."

There was a pause.

"Somebody likes Harriet, though," my dad said a little smugly from his position on the sofa. "She got a letter from an agent and everything."

Mum glowered at dad.

"Missed Connections is just more subtle," she pointed out. "It's less in your face. It'll take more time, is all."

"Oh, so laughing isn't what people want from books?" dad snapped. "What's wrong with a book you like straight away?"

Mum stood up with dignity and pointed herself in the direction of the toaster.

"You wait," she muttered under her breath, wandering off to make herself a bit of tea. "It'll be Missed Connections that wins the Booker. And then you'll be laughing on the other side of your face, mister: nobody called Harriet ever wins anything, and everbody knows it. Just look at that Harman woman."

Unfortunately, now I'm torn. An agent rang me this morning because she loves Harriet and wants to meet me on Monday. And I'm ecstatic - I really am - but at the same time I feel incredibly guilty. All of my MC characters now have quivering bottom lips and too-shiny eyes, and it doesn't matter how many times I tell them not to take it personally: they do. They keep asking me why nobody loves them too; they keep asking me what's wrong with them. "I can be funny," Mike keeps saying in a small voice; "I just need to have a bit of warning first". And then they all look at me slightly resentfully, as if I didn't do my job properly and should have tried harder to make them wittier, prettier, more sellable. Worse: Harriet's feeling awful about it too. "I'd rather they have it," she keeps protesting to me. "You spent a year on them: you gave up everything for them. You wrote me in 10 days during the Christmas holidays. It doesn't seem very fair." 

To me, they're all beautiful. Not because they are beautiful - all of my characters are, without exception, losers in one way or another - but because I know them completely and love them despite their vast flaws and inconsistencies. But, as much as it hurts me, I can't protect them forever, and I can't force other people to love them, and I can't do anything about how the world sees them. I can't make everybody think that they're beautiful. All I can do is keep believing in them, keep loving them equally, and keep trying to make them clean up after themselves when they've finished making a mess. Keep sending them out there to find out what they can do for themselves. And - most importantly - keep asking them to be quiet now and then, so that I get a little bit of peace and quiet. So that I can grab a few moments, just so - for a couple of precious seconds - I can't hear myself think. 

Directions

"So," my friend asked me yesterday: "what's next for The Write Girl?"
I frowned at her. "You can call me Holly, you know," I pointed out. It's not as if I'm a Pussycat Doll. You can kind of understand why nobody remembers their names: if I had a toned tummy like them, I wouldn't expect anyone to remember mine either.
"Yeah, but Holly's not nearly as mocking," my friend observed. "So what now? What's the next bizarre step in your increasingly farcical life?" (This is how my friend talks to me, by the way. It's why I spend time with her. There's nothing like a permanently raised eyebrow to make you feel like a maverick, even when you're in your pyjamas.)
"Rocking backwards and forwards in sheer fear, I think," I said after a little consideration. "Lots and lots of procrastination. Shouting at people for no reason at all, because I'm generally wound up and don't really have anywhere to put it. Leaving acerbic comments on people's Facebook pages. And dropping beans down the front of my dressing gown."
"Oh goody," she remarked dryly. "We all love Directionless Holly. What happened to your plans?"
"I got scared. Reality came and bit me."
She raised her eyebrow a little bit higher, so I pouted.
"Somebody told me I was being stupid," I explained, "and if I left the country now I'd come back and I'd have no career, no friends, no job, no money, and massive mousey roots because the Japanese don't know how to deal with my hair colour."
"Who told you that?"
"Some guy in a pub."
"Right. Sounds like crap to me. Doesn't sound like the kind of crap you'd normally listen to, either. You might not have noticed this, but you have no career, your friends will probably be sitting on the same sofas watching next year's Big Brother when you get back, you don't have a job, you don't have any money, and - frankly - your hair looks like shit and you've got full access to a number of qualified hairdressers. I don't see what difference 10,000 miles is going to make, apart from a good one."
I peered sulkily over her shoulder at the mirror on the wall of the pub, assessed the situation, pouted, and realised she was right. Which she always is: even bothering with my reflection was a total waste of time, to be honest.

So - at 8am this morning - I got out of bed, ate a bit of toast and Marmite, brushed my teeth, and then booked a plane ticket from Heathrow to Narita, Japan, for the 11th of August. And then, without putting the phone down, I promptly booked an appointment with a colourist.

Just like that, all my fear has gone and everything is back in perspective. I am no longer the grumpy, unbearable, Directionless Holly my friends and family anticipate with dread. I have been shot back out of the dark like an arrow from a bow: into the capable hands of the nice people at Cathay Pacific Airlines, who will give me a blanket and headphones and possibly a tiny little toothbrush that folds in half. I have a plan. I have a goal. And I've got nothing left to do but enjoy my month left in England, enjoy the people I love who I'm leaving behind, and enjoy being able to ask for directions to my hotel without breaking into a game of charades.

This Write Girl finally knows where she's going again. And it's via Hong Kong.

Nah Nah Nah Nah

I don't like gloating, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Actually: I'm lying. I love gloating. It's one of the things I always told myself I would do when I was old enough not to be smacked by my mum for it. "Holly Miranda Smale," she would snap at me when I was wiggling my bottom in the air and shouting a number of nahnahs in a row. "We do not have that kind of smugness in this house, young lady. Now get back in your box and stay there." (Okay, I'm lying about the box too: I had a bed, like normal children. I simply enjoy winding my mum up on this blog, as most of you should know by now. I get daily phone calls from her, demanding that I "clear her name," and it only makes me even more badly behaved. I'm sorely tempted to tell the world she can't cook either, but I won't or she'll turn my laundry pink again.)

So I'm going to wiggle my bottom as much as I like on this one, and mum: you can't stop me. Because... I've stopped smoking. I've actually, literally, properly stopped smoking. At first it was a blip - I thought I'd get over it - and then it was just a bad habit: the desire not to light up after a long day. But now it's been three weeks, and all I've had is two half-ciggies when drunk, and I didn't like them much (Hel, if you're reading this: I know they were yours, and I'm sorry. I did my best to enjoy them, I really did). I tried my very best to keep going, but - just like that - I woke up one morning and I didn't want to anymore. And, three weeks later, I don't think I'm going to again. Just like that.

So you can stick your nicotine patches and your gum and the electronic ciggies that taste of stale kebab. Unless you've got a sheesha on the go, I'm just not interested anymore. And it wasn't hard at all. No withdrawals, no cravings and no sucking on the end of a pen until my bottom lip went blue. Aha. Ahaha. So, mummy dearest, stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Nah nah ne nah nah.   

Jane Austen

The little hole I dug in the bottom of the garden to hide in over the last few days has - I'm delighted to say - hardly been used at all.

While the media have predictably attacked like playground bullies (The Times called me a 'boring, grasping wannabe,' as if I didn't hear worse at school), the people that matter - my friends, my family and the general public - have, yet again, choked me with their unexpected loveliness. My grandad cheered me and waved an icecream spoon in the air until my grandma firmly told him to put it down, my sister reassured me that I was 'very strong at maths', and my friends told me they would happily be seen in the street with me again, although if they caught me smoking Lucky Strikes again in public there'd be trouble. Even more surprisingly, I've received nearly 100 messages from people I have never met and will almost definitely never meet: emails that have been encouraging, sweet, positive, and - on occasion - have made me blush purple. The BBC gently tried to prepare me for hate mail ("losers love being nasty on the internet at midnight, Holly: remember that"), but I haven't received anything even approaching vague cattiness yet ('yet' being the operative word: I'm still waiting). 

What has been so amazing about the whole experience, though, is the sudden realisation that - for every TalkSport radio producer (not DJ) who wants to humiliate a girl - there are a hundred men out there who will risk humiliating themselves to save a girl instead. Every single offer to 'sweep me off my feet' has made me want to cry, because it has proved that romance is not dead, and that the world of Jane Austen - the world I want so desperately to be a part of - is still there, in one way or another: even if it's clad in ripped up jeans. And I can't thank everyone enough. Not just for making the aftermath of the documentary easier, and not just for keeping me out of a hole at the bottom of my garden, but for giving me hope: hope that, sometimes, is difficult to cling on to when somebody is holding up a piece of paper with '7.5' written on it, and commenting on how you kiss (the BBC cut that bit out of the programme, thank God). 

Of course, the romantic coin flips itself over just as suddenly. If one area of your life magically fixes itself, so another part just as unexpectedly falls apart. As if the extra emails pushed his out of my inbox, the boy I adore most - who very recently swept me off my feet - has now decided that he 'needs space' again. (This boy needs space so regularly that I'm starting to think he should consider an alternative career as an astronaut.) He's plonked me back onto my feet just when I was getting comfortable being in the air, and - at the same time as I'm marvelling at the greatness of mankind, and of kind men in particular - he has disappeared again. To do whatever it is he does when I give him space: stick tiny little flags in the moon, possibly. 

I'm not losing faith, of course. Not in him, and not in love. I never do: it's my defining feature. But I can't help laughing at the appropriateness of the throw-away comment that encouraged so much public support and kindness in the first place. While Elizabeth, Marianne, Jane, Eleanor and Emma all got the happy endings we all so desperately want, I accidentally - as a slip of the tongue - didn't say that I wanted to be in a Jane Austen: I said I thought I was her. And Jane Austen died single, alone, and wrapped up in a love affair with every man she'd ever created: men who never actually existed in the first place. 

Which is, you could say, the writer's lot. Or maybe it's just ours: the people who are better with words than they are with life. Jane never lost hope, though - she wrote about love until she croaked it just down the road from where my mum lives now - and neither will I. 

Because this week has reminded me that romance is still out there, ready to sweep you off your feet: and it can still be beautiful and old-fashioned, no matter what kind of trousers it's wearing. 

Sick - AGAIN.

If the immune system is a little coat of invisible armour we wear under our thermals, mine has holes in it and a big gap where the crotch area is supposed to be. The woman next to me at work today spent the entire 9 hour shift apologising for clearly having a stonking cold, but the apologies haven't done much in the way of protecting me from the germs she shot out through her nose in my direction, because I'm dying again. 2.5 weeks after the last time I nearly died, I'm getting back into my sick bed: grumpy, scratchy and generally a nightmare to be anywhere near. I am clearly of a fragile constitution, like Keats or the girl from Wings of a Dove. I need to start taking turns around the garden a little more regularly, I think. Or perhaps spa trips in the Parisian country side where I can convalesce a little more comfortably. 

I wish I could blame her, but I have nobody to point the finger at but myself. By my calculations, it's my cold that's been working its way round the office: I saw it wave at me as it took a spin around the water cooler. It seems only fitting, after all, that - after a short burst of enthusiastic freedom - it's finally mutated and come back home to where it started. 

I simply can't imagine where it learnt that kind of behaviour from.

Sidelines

The beautiful hypocrisy of the media never fails to make me laugh.

This morning, I finally saw a preview of The Best Job In The World BBC1 documentary. I was prepared for the worst: critic after critic has panned it as 'another show about fame-hungry wannabes, humiliating themselves'. 'Depressing,' one writer called it. 'More young people thinking they deserve success for no reason,' another screamed in vitriol from her bedsit. And I was pretty scared, to be honest. I didn't take my teddy bear to the viewing, but you can be damn sure I seriously thought about it (he doesn't like London, though, so I left him at home). 

The documentary's not depressing in the slightest. We come across - by and large - as what we are: young, optimistic, adventurous people, trying as hard as we can to grab life by the throat when it's trying so hard to punch our lights out. As people who haven't given up and retreated to a world of sofa-surfing and family size packs of Doritos; as people who take opportunities, and do our damndest to make the best of them. Not one of us looks fame hungry: predominantly because we're not. None of us applied for the Best Job for fame. We applied because we wanted to be paid a lot of money to write on a beautiful island: no more than that, and no less. And that's exactly how it comes across. We had fun, we had an adventure, we made friends, and we learnt a little about ourselves in the process. Which is more than you can say for the majority of Februarys and Marchs, frankly. 

Instead, it's the critics who have humiliated themselves. In life, there are the people who play, and the people who watch from the sidelines. Not one critic has been able to see the experience for what it was. With negativity, bitterness and - far, far worse - a dull imagination, they have churned out yet again the same little diatribes about 'fame' and 'wannabes': tired diatribes that lack hope, that lack faith and that lack the ability to see a bigger picture. In a country that is slowly slipping into the jaws of a mass depression, the documentary shows people fighting - in their own little ways - against it: to keep believing that good things can happen, even when everything is indicating otherwise. And if it's depressing, it's only through the jaded, miserable eyes of the depressing people watching it. The people who have long given up fighting, and tucked themselves away into their packs of Doritos (I know enough journalists to be able to say this with some authority).

The irony, of course, is that the crime we are accused of committing - a quest for fame - is inherent in the very industry who are acting as our executioners. These critics think that we want people to know who we are, and yet a beautiful hypocrisy shimmers behind every snippy little line they write. Writers, journalists, critics - call it what you like, and I count myself among them - write because, whether they admit it or not, they are seeking their own little bit of immortality, and their own little bit of verification. It's far, far worse than wanting people to know who they are: they want people to know how they think. They want to burrow into the minds of people, and leave a little something behind afterwards. Which is far, far more arrogant than ever wanting somebody to recognise your face. Hiding behind The Sunday Times or The Daily Mail banners are people who think that their opinions are worth listening to: who think that they deserve a voice, because somebody with a lot of money and no sense has said that they're allowed one. Who think that they deserve success because somebody once told them how to string a line of words together and put a full stop in the right place.

Oscar Wilde once pointed out that an artist creates, and a critic destroys. In doing nothing but tearing apart the small, ineffective steps we all took towards a dream, it is not The Best Job In the World candidates who humiliated ourselves: it is the people who have judged us for it. However we come across as individual characters is irrelevant, ultimately. What we stood for - as a group of 50 - was a group of people who were still raging, still creating, still driving towards something: towards anything. And the people who can't see that - who get on the Victoria line and blankly commute back to their television sets and their bored little cats and the partner they don't have sex with anymore - are the people I feel for. 

Because there's a game going on, and all they'll ever do is watch it from the sidelines.