© Tom Banwell

Absolutely delighted to have won first place in ‘Inspired? Get Writing!’ – jointly organised by the very lovely folks at the National Galleries of Scotland, the Scottish Poetry Library and the English-Speaking Union.

You can read my dark (im?)morality tale; published in The Scotsman on Wednesday. Those of a nervous disposition, don’t click here!

After (miraculously!) taking my own advice and becoming more aware of my clicking habits, I’ve realised that the time of day matters a lot.

Basically, the later it gets, the more danger I am in of wasting time:

If I’ve got up at 5.30am to write, I write. But at 8.30pm at night, once all the little enemies are in bed, the household chores are done (well, done-ish), suddenly I’m indecisive.

Should I do the grocery order or finalise that blog post? Reply to that email or tweet that cool link?

Night-time is even worse – I go to check my email one last time (terrible habit) and end up having a sudden surfing burst and getting to bed too late and with that sore screen-burnt-eyes feeling.

So, how do you unblend your online activities?

Sadly this is all about focusing on the task at hand and not getting distracted. I hate that. This is what works for me best:

1. Use a timer – a favourite strategy of mine
   Either on your computer or kitchen timer; that ticking in the background really does help you stay focused.
2. Use a to-do list
   Is it just me who gets bizarrely overwhelmed from time-to-time with what should be a super-easy task? I live by my to-do list and recently I’ve realised that it works a lot better if I put down all the little babysteps instead of things which are actually whole projects.
3. Check for indecision
   If I’m not sure what I should be working on, and flitting between tasks, it’s super-easy to do some random surfing.
4. Have a new media plan
   I know, it sounds very serious but it needn’t be. Think about what it is you are trying to accomplish and what activities you need to do weekly or daily to do that. Mine is: post weekly, to respond to comments, to tweet every few days and to forget about Facebook for now. I’ll probably revise it soon but it keeps me vaguely on track, especially if I get sucked into surfing random strangers on Facebook (Or is it just me who is so nosey curious?!)

What do you do if you realise you getting sucked into time-wasting?

1. Make a new habit – to pause after 3 clicks
   Then look at the clock. Keep clicking if you want to but just let yourself see the time.
2. Switch it off the wifi or go somewhere you have no connection
   Get offline and work there for an hour or two and notice when you feel the urge to surf.
3. Give it a name
   Now that I’ve named the behaviour, I find it easily to recognise: ‘Oh, I’m doing Random Clicking at the moment, maybe I should be doing [insert Task At Hand]‘
4. Be aware of the Task At Hand
   I’m much more likely to indulge in some ‘research’ when I’m actually struggling with a task. If you are having some difficulties, try to pinpoint what it is you need to get on with it – it might be more information, you might not be quite clear on something, you might be revising what you thought you should do.

Now for the fun bit…

1. Reward yourself
   This sounds counter-intuitive but at the end of a task, allow yourself to check something. I love looking at knitting patterns – daft at the moment as I don’t have time to knit – so 5 or 10 minutes browsing Pattern Fish or Ravelry or catching up on Guardian books is always pleasant.
2. Build-in some random surf time
   Accept it – allow yourself a daily fix. Want half an hour to just browse around?  Do it, just do your other tasks first.

Quite hilariously, given the subject matter of the post, when I was working on this post last night, I got terribly distracted by some interesting articles. Here are a few of them – to save for an appropriate time, of course!

Annie Murphy Paul at New York Times on Why reading Fiction is good for you
Jon Ronson at Guardian Books on Introverts
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee at New York Times on the benefits of Bilingualism

What started with a relevant question (is Evernote available for pc AND mac or just mac?) ended up as a hunt for a cool anniversary present for Mr. Enemy, taking in a couple of extra stops on household organisation and ipads on the way.

This took around 10 clicks and about 5 minutes, which isn’t a huge amount of time in itself. But just say – just for argument’s sake – I spend an hour doing this sort of thing (purely hypothetical, you understand folks) – what’s the result?

A feeling that I have worked but really have nothing to show for it.

I didn’t find a suitable present • I still can’t afford an ipad • I can’t  remember the household tips in enough detail to actually implement them.

In fact, worse than that, I often feel worse than I did before – sore eyes from staring at the screen and that horrible sick feeling you have just squandered a chunk of precious free time.

In short, this sort of unmanaged surfing gives the illusion of usefulness but actually, doesn’t give any real satisfaction.

The main problems seem to be:

• The internet is always there (assuming you have wifi)
• It is very easy to blend one’s activities
• Being human (there is nothing wrong with the internet itself, just as there’s nothing inherently evil about alcohol or really good quality milk chocolate)

It seems clear that the key here is to try, when possible, to unblend your activities. And that, dear readers, is the subject of my next post because there is lots to say on the matter.

I’m going to  leave you with  two questions and a suggestion.

Question 1 – what sucks up most of your time?
Question 2 – what is it costing you?
Suggestion – for the next few days, just try to be aware… of your clicks.

Yup, I’m getting all Buddhist over your ass! Check next week for some ideas on how to, y’know, do something about it!

Anyone coming to my workshop & talk at Aye Write & Write Now in Glasgow tomorrow? Feel free to leave me a message or any burning questions you’d like me to answer. Look forward to seeing you there!

I wave them off, practically dancing in anticipation of the bliss of solitude.

• Fast forward 90 minutes •

I’m deep in the world of my novel. Is that the door? Surely not. It can’t be that time already!

I rush downstairs. Children coming through the backdoor. I look at them closely. My children! Mr Enemy follows, only just visible beneath a rucksack, various coats, a couple of bulging plastic shopping bags.

‘I’m so hungry’ announces the oldest.

‘When’s lunch?’ asks the middlest.

The youngest screeches and throws herself onto the lino.

‘I was just about to…’ I gesture to the kitchen table, which is still liberally littered with cereal bowls, bits of lego and a selection of t-shirts recently used to created ninja headdresses (don’t worry, I will post instructions for this sometime soon!)

Mr Enemy looks at me. Patient. Kind. But also hungry and, not surprisingly, a bit fed up.

I worked on a complicated mathematical formula for this:

(Hungry children) + (hungry spouse who is trying to help) – lunch = fewer such offers in future

Having been caught out like this more times than, strictly speaking, is desirable, I have come up with the following:

1. As soon as the family goes, clear the table. Put stuff on the floor if necessary.
2. Set out glasses and water – already the table looks more inviting and crucially, you immediately look less  lackadaisical
3. Peel carrots, put them on a plate, stick on table (something for them to munch on immediately is very helpful)
4. Do not do anything else in the kitchen – there is nothing like a messy house for procrastination.
5. Set a timer to ring 5 minutes before the family is due back
6. Go and do your creative work.
7. When timer goes, sprint to the kitchen
8. Put as many sandwich-making ingredients on the table as humanly possible
9. Get out plates & cutlery
10. Take a deep breath & smile

Even if spouse & children come home a bit early, there is something on the table to eat & drink immediately (ok, it’s only carrot sticks and water but it’s a start) AND it looks as if you have been slightly industrious. Result!

I’m just putting the final touches to the workshop and I am *very* excited about welcoming more writers into the wonderful world of websites and blogging.

So, if you’ve ever wanted your own writer’s website-with-a-blog but…

• you’ve been put off by the cost of setting it up
• you’ve been put off by the cost of making updates after setting it up
• you’ve worried that it’s just too technical and complicated
• you’ve wondered if you’ve actually got anything to, you know, write about

Please come – this one is definitely for you!

You might be wondering…

What’s so cool about this workshop?

• You’ll leave with all the skills you need to add and remove pages, text and pictures
• It’s a gentle introduction – if you can use Word, you can use WordPress.com
• The only thing to pay for is the conference itself and there’s LOADS to choose from

Will I have to know lots of technical stuff?

Absolutely not. This workshop is for people who use computers – just normal stuff like emailing, surfing the web, using Word – but who have no specialist internet knowledge.

Will you speak to me in complicated IT Person language

Really, I won’t. I can be a bit geeky at times but I’m also writer with an MA in English Lit. When I first got started with computers, I was quite honestly thought I might blow the computer up by pressing the wrong key combination. So, if you’re a technophobe, don’t worry, I know how that feels!

Any questions – please just drop me a line and I’ll get back to you.
Ready to book? – WriteNow booking page.

If you’re not ready to actually create a website-with-a-blog, but would still like to dip you’re toe in the water, I’m talking about Is blogging for you? At Aye Write!.

PS Wondering what a wordpress website actually looks like? Well, you’re looking at one right now…

This is a new occasional column devoted to the humble scone, and most importantly, where to find the really good ones.

It is extremely disappointing to find the sort of teashop or café that looks as if it would do a fantastic scone, only to be served a day-old scone, or even worse, a shop-bought one masquerading as home-made. You know what I’m saying.

So, purely in the interests of the scone-loving community, I have decided search out the very best scones and post their details here. I shall of course make it my duty to sample scones further afield from Edinburgh when circumstances permit. And please, if you have experienced scone nirvana recently, share the good news in the comments box below!

What criteria will I be judging scones by? Well, we all have our favourite types but I look for a crisp crust, a fluffy inside, not too sweet, plenty of raisins, and freshly made, ie. that day. In a perfect world, it would be still warm from the oven. I’m not that keen on cream on my scones – sacrilege to some but I’d rather have butter and raspberry jam. Posh raspberry jam. With seeds too.

Yesterday I sampled the scones at the Scottish Parliament Café and most of my stringent criteria were fulfilled. Freshly made every day? Yes. Light, crispy? Yes. And warm too! Plain and fruit scones were available and a cream tea version if you like The Works. Ideally, I’d add a few more raisins to their fruit scone and have raspberry jam on offer as well as the blackcurrant and strawberry. On the subject of jam, I’d ideally swap the individual plastic containers for a wee jar or dish but then, I am fairly fussy about these things. (Or, as Mr Enemy would say, most things).

So, Scottish Parliament Café– definitely recommended. Enric Miralles’ cool architecture and a lovely design exhibition on at the moment. In the photo above there is a card in front of the lovely (large) scone, bearing the word ‘crèche’. If you have children under six, you might just want to check this out…

A quick note on making scones at home – I could tell you my own recipe but then I’d have to kill you and frankly, I’m loathe to kill anyone who reads my blog, and particularly anyone who has made it this far through a post.

However, I was very very happy to have found this wonderful article by Felicity Cloake in The Guardian. Her favourite scone recipe is quite different from mine (lard? Who would have thunk it?) but there’s a veritable wealth of scone information here.

Come across any Really Good Scones recently? Please let us know where!

The other day we had run out of bread and the thought of taking three bedraggled children to the supermarket was too unpleasant to contemplate so this was my solution – we’d make our own dough balls…

I did use the breadmaker for this, by the way  (recipe follows), but I also checked out this apparently easy recipe which I might try sometime with the children. It looks long but it does have video links to handy things like kneading.  (Note to Self – do NOT try this for the first time on a day when we actually need bread…)

After I measured the ingredients out (I cunningly distracted the children with a snack for this – it can be done but generally at the expense of my sanity), it took 45 minutes for the dough programme to run.

Excitement reached fever pitch with sprinkling flour on the table and turning the dough out. Oldest made sausage shapes and twists; Middlest liked cutting it up with a knife and Youngest liked the flour the most. I enjoyed it too; I tried to make a little dough bird and got so involved in the task that I didn’t notice Youngest dragging a stool across the kitchen and finding a tin of cold baked beans, which she proceeded to eat with her hands.

It was a pretty messy business and the kitchen was covered in a fine snowfall of flour, so I got them all to stand on the kitchen table while I pretended to be a shark with the hoover. Don’t ask me quite how this worked but somehow it did.

All the children enjoyed it and an activity which grabs a 6 year old, a 3 year old and a 1 year old is not to be sniffed at. And best of all, we got to eat hot doughballs with lashings of butter while the rain lashed against the window panes.

Recipe for Focaccia dough

• 1/2 tsp yeast
• 300g strong white flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 200ml water

Use ‘dough’ or ‘pizza’ setting on breadmaker. Ideally it should be left for 30 mins to rise after shaping but we were a bit hungry so…

Bake at Gas 5 / 190C / 375F for around 15 minutes, depending on the size of your creations.

But more about flannels later. This post is about one of my favourite subjects – household organisation. Oh yes, my friend, it’s Christmas come early…

Here are a few of my favourite (kitchen) things:

Magnetic pens – £3.99
I have three of these; they stick on the fridge so I can always find a pen. In addition, they are the only grown-up pens in the kitchen as Littlest is a keen artist. Embarrassing but true – I scoured, I mean, bloody scoured the internet for these. Now you know the awful truth. Shhhhh.

A small spatula – £5.00
Leftovers on plates? BAM. Baked bean tin to scrape out? BANGO. Cake mixture to put in pan? HISTORY*.  This children’s spatula set does the trick – highly satisfying and makes washing up a lot quicker too.
* The bowl is so clean afterwards Mr Enemy and all the little Enemies fairly howl with disappointment. So idiot loving mother and wife that I am, I usually end up putting some mixture back in and smearing it back around the sides of the bowl again. Gah.

A spreading knife – £4.50
We make a lot of packed lunches and a knife like this makes the job a lot quicker. When I was given it (Thank you, Mother!) I thought I would never bother to seek out a knife to specifically for spreading. But I do, several times a day.

A cloth collection – priceless…
Mr Enemy struggles with this. In his ideal world, there would be One Cloth. This would be used indiscriminately on children’s faces, muddy shoes, cutlery, the floor, the kitchen table, car tyres and vomit. Here’s my system:

1. A surfaces cloth – kitchen tables and work surfaces
2. A floor cloth – high absorbency thingy, kept in easy reaching distance at all times
3. A microfibre cloth – how did the world turn before microfibre? Really.
4. A face cloth – sew a loops at the corners, put a couple of hooks up inside a cupboard door and it can hang neatly and not get manky. Have a couple in light-ish colours and chuck them into the washing machine whenever you put a wash on.

I mean, how frigging cunning is that??

Happy Christmas!

Earlier in the day, decide what you are going to do with your ‘golden time’ – so you don’t end up (and I speak from extensive personal experience here), frittering it away on non-essential busywork simply because you are Without A Plan. Try to make it something i. easy and ii. fun.

Find ways to make the bed time routine less hectic – We’ve recently introduced Reading In Bed. The Oldest & Middlest are only 5 and 3 so can’t actually read yet but somewhat surprisingly, enjoy being in bed with their side-lights on. At this point in the day, this extra 15-20 minutes makes a huge difference to my energy levels.

Do a 15-20 minute Assault On Mess and Dirt – Somehow, running around around for a short period of time, being utterly focused on my mission to get as much as possible tidied in a short a period of time as humanly possible works for me. I think it’s because when I get tired, I get really indecisive, even about routine things like tidying, so then that final push to get the final household tidying suddenly expands to 45 minutes.

Build in some downtime while the children are still up – I’m a big fan of getting them all in the bath together and having a cup of tea while they splash around. Or watching In The Night Garden with a cup of tea (there’s a tea theme here!) or doing a little knitting instead of trying to get jobs done at the same time.

Once the children are in bed; allow yourself 5 or 10 minutes with your feet up – Read. Knit. Drink Tea. Just take a little time out.  Or lie on the bed for 5 minutes and read – slightly dangerous one, this one, because sometimes the urge to sleep is too strong.

Do only those household jobs absolutely must be done – for me, the kitchen always have to be done but ironing can nearly always be left to when there’s a film on I want to watch.

Consider moving your shower from the morning to after the children’s bedtime – this makes morning less hectic and also gives you a chance to unwind and refresh before you get on with your creative work.

I still haven’t told you the best bit – being a Parent Of Young Children actually helps with readings… I know, I’m excited too. More on this at the end.

Here are some ideas I found useful; some gleaned from Alex’s masterclass, some from a practice session with a few fellow Story Shoppers and some from my own (ahem) extensive experience.

1. Colour your words – figuratively speaking. Alex’s lovely phrase for  savouring the special words in your text: slow down for them, feel them on your tongue, allow the audience to really hear them.

2. Colour your words – my rather literal interpretation – I went through my text with a highlighter (actually a few different colours, yup, that’s how anally retentive organised I am) to show emphasis and to show when different characters were speaking. This  helped me stay on track when confronted with an actual audience. And a microphone.

3. Pause slightly between direct speech and the speech tag – this helps your listeners understand what is direct speech and what isn’t.

Here’s an example. Say you wrote:

“Darling,” said  Jeremy, “Is that your thigh?”

This is how you would read it:

“Darling,” [PAUSE] said Jeremy, [PAUSE] “Is that your thigh?”

It is disconcerting when, as a listener, you suddenly find yourself adrift in someone’s narrative, wondering who is saying what.

4. Read dramatically – yuss sirree! Interestingly, nearly everyone seemed to think they were completely over-thesping things but actually, everyone who tried it sounded much, much more engaging.

5. If you are doing an intro, make it distinct from the reading – apparently at first, it wasn’t clear when my intro finished… and my story started. Sounds pretty basic, I know,  but it’s easy to overlook this sort of (very important) thing when you can’t see yourself.

6. Practice, practice, practice – I have used imovie to record myself in the past; a truly horrendous experience but it did help. I also found it helpful doing practice readings. According to Mr Enemy of Art, I rock back and forth on the balls of my feet when I’m nervous. Hmmm, just a shade quirkier than I’m comfortable with…

7. Say your thank you’s – Is there a sponsor? An organiser? Thank them – profusely! Is there an audience? Thank them!

8. Practice reading aloud – When Alex suggested that reading stuff aloud on a frequent basis will improve one’s skills, a few participants looked a bit quizzical. I, on the other hand, only just managed to stop myself from thrusting my hand skywards and shouting “Miss! Miss! I do that already! I do that every night!” Fortunately for all concerned I was able to contain my excitement. However, it does feel good to be enjoying the bedtime story AND knowing I’m improving my presentation skills…

So the children are now being subjected to a considerably more dramatic readings. My first attempt was met with The Oldest (5) saying ‘You sound funny, Mummy’ (and he meant funny-weird, not funny-funny). However, now they seem to be enjoying it; so am I.

As for my reading, It went just fine; in fact better than fine, it went well.

• Was I nervous? Extremely.
• Did I enjoy it? Yes.
• Would I do it again? In a flash!

If you want to check to see if I paused after direct speech, you can hear me here, link active until the end of September.

PS for more on the subject of readings, a quick internet search came up with Authors Dish on Stage Presence: “Un-Mic Before You Throw Up”