Hoping. Only hoping.







Nothing highlights the best and worst parts of your life to yourself like letting somebody into your home and living your life with you for a week. 





Also: nothing highlights the best and worst parts of your life to yourself like letting somebody into your home and living your life with you for like, you know, EVER, but I'm just not that kind of girl. Compromise isn't in my vocabulary because I'm not emotionally mature enough to develop my empathy for others yet.





This is the bit where I'm supposed to say sorry.





..... yup.





My friend Stephanie arrived this weekend for an intensive writing work-shopping session because UH-HUH. My Heart Beats Only For You (And a Few Dozen Other People) is ready. As I typed that Mama probably died a little inside. I once mentioned that the book is like the blog, only with the rude bits left in. She was all, WHAT OTHER RUDE BITS ARE THERE LEFT TO SAY? and I was all offended because I always thought I was really quite reserved on here, until I retold the story to Calum and he said exactly the same thing.





When your best friend wonders what on earth you have left to reveal, it makes you wonder.




Anyway, in the interest of getting totally excited because the alternative is to hide in a corner and just say over and over again as I rock back and forth and try not to cry, 'Pleasedon'thateit Pleasedon'thateit Pleasedon'thateit Pleasedon'thateit Pleasedon'thateit Pleasedon'thateit, I thought I'd share some of my favourite extracts from the manuscript.



Here goes:





I came to realise that even though heartbreak is an all-encompassing motherfucker of a monster that robs you of your time, your tears, and your ability to feel without battery-operated machinery, when you fall off the horse you have to go get back on it again. And then you ride that fucking horse like he’s your bitch.






* 





... even if I do risk becoming the girl who interrupts you every other sentence to say, ‘Really? Gosh, that reminds me of this time that I was in the orphanage in southern India...’ you can even sit me next to the boring physiotherapist from Bangor for the first course and when she acts like a day-trip to Glasgow makes her freaking Leo DiCaprio in The Beach I can get all LISTEN LADY. YOU HAVEN'T HAD AN ADVENTURE UNTIL YOU HAVE ACCIDENTALLY HAD GOAT POOP IN YOUR MOUTH. 



* 



Calum had lost interest in my life after the trip to the sex shop. He was all, I’M TOTALLY GROSSED OUT NOW, and I was like, YOU BROUGHT ME HERE! And he was all, I’M LIKE PRINCESS DIANA TO YOUR PRINCE CHARLES, SACRIFICING MYSELF FOR YOU LIKE THIS, and I was like, DON’T TALK ABOUT THE PRINCESS OF THE PEOPLE THAT WAY, and he waved his hand dismissively and said, I HAVE TO GO AND FIND MY SMELLING SALTS NOW. GOODBYE. 



 *



FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK.






Do you like it? Good. Then you can stay.



Stephanie and I met in a writing class in America, and she lives in France, and considering I'm British and she's hanging out with me here in Rome we pretty much high-fived as she got off of the plane and said, YEAH FOR INTERNATIONAL AWESOMENESS! But then, in our final email to each other before she came we also declared that this trip, 'would be so creative it'll be like two creative writers getting together and writing creative stuff together' so maybe this whole tale is indicative of something I'm not prepared to admit to myself or the Internet about how I choose to use the English language.



Also, I'm pretty sure most of Stephanie's notes on my manuscript are going to centre around a need to use more punctuation.



Stephanie got shat on my a passing bird today, which I'm told is very lucky, and I choose to believe that  that luck is based around the pleasure and joy she will have from holding my pages in her sweet little hands and is unrelated to the fact that we've been groped by dirty Italian men twice in the past twenty-four hours with one guy doing it REPEATEDLY at the crowded market until we realised that no. It wasn't his briefcase hitting our asses. IT WAS HIS FILTHY OLD MAN HANDS. And no, we didn't know the word for 'pervert' in Italian, so instead I just smacked him.



Anyway, basically this is a blog post about being scared and needing your support and worrying what somebody else will think to something I've worked so hard on. I told my pregnant friend that all I could think about was this sodding book, and she shrugged and said, 'All I can think about is this kid in my belly. Laura, we're both having babies.' Which is basically the truest thing anybody has ever said ever in history. Except that before you leave the house you should take off at least one accessory. When Chanel said that it was pretty true too. I'm looking at you, Sienna Miller.



Here, Stephanie, hold my baby. And then judge my baby, and give me notes on my baby, and tell me how my baby could be better and that I'm a horrible, terrible, ill-informed baby-writer and what on earth was I THINKING in trying to scribe a baby anyway, when there already exists so many babies in the world with no publishing homes? WHO THE HELL ARE MY VAGINA AND I ANYWAY?



Hold me.

Comments

  1. Brett4 February 2012 at 03:24

    Looks good but I have to agree with the comments from Mum and Calum, you were the only person I known who got more risqué after she stopped blogging anonymously. So what you'll say in a book with your name on!!!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Laura Jane Williams6 February 2012 at 01:29

    You know, I figure that's how people know I am always telling truth. Nobody would knowingly make themselves into a screwed up, fails-at-most-things sex-crazed twentysomething if they were making it up. They'd paint themselves as much more sophisticated. Thus, this is all real and that has to be a good thing, right? I HOPE SO. Otherwise the vagina is all for nothing! x

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brett7 February 2012 at 03:30

    So theres no danger of you being a 22 stone trucker from Bradford called Dave.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Laura Jane Williams7 February 2012 at 03:41

    Well, actually...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Everything looks better with my eyes open

An incomplete list of some things I call my 2017 achievements: - saw my first ballet, from the really cheap seats all the way at the back. - cleansed, toned and moisturised every morning, and every night. - bought furniture. - threw a really very good Christmas party. - refused to save the candles for best. - called my mother. - called my father. - interviewed a celebrity. - deleted Facebook. - stopped nannying. - maintained a relationship with the girls I used to nanny - and their mama. - took a month off. - bought £300-worth of sex toys all in one go. - went viral online for falling over. - said out loud that I want a baby. - received a case of wine. - got offered a horse and cart at the entrance to Soho Farmhouse. - went swimming in the ladies pond on the Heath when we had the heatwave. - went home for Easter. - went ginger, and on purpose. - hosted an event about mental health. - did my first lit fest. - took a day trip to Oxford. - saw Titanic at the Royal Albert Hall with a l...
Read more

Above my bed

Image
The metre-and-a-half wide frame has hung empty above my bed since July. I paid a man to hang it. I'd harboured, to begin with, reservations about how my feminism and my employment of somebody else to execute the job dovetailed awkwardly, but after I hit myself in the face with a hammer one night, not understanding the difference between a nail at 45 degrees into a diving wall and a drill with a spiral anchor into a brick wall, I decided the most feminist act would be, in fact, to use my hard-earned feminist money to feministly delegate somebody better qualified to help me out - who yes, just so happened to be a man. I have never looked back.  The room needed something above the bed - that's why I got the frame and had it hung - but I couldn't rush to fill it. It needed to be right. I didn't want a generic Ikea print: they can satisfy the dead area behind the door in the living room because that is a neutral space. Bedrooms - bedrooms must be ...
Read more

Your story is not ready for you to worry about yet

Image
I teach creative writing, and often what happens is that my students repeat my words back to me and I don't understand that it was me who said them first and it's a headfuck. I love teaching. I love communicating knowledge and I love using my skill with words to package information in a way that lands with the other person. I sort of took it upon myself, at the end of last year, to help one of the girls I used to nanny with her 11+ because I could so clearly identify where her boldest missteps were and part of me thought  maybe I am interfering too much  and then her mother cancelled her tutor and asked me to come over instead and you know what? She aced the exam and I know I played a part in that. After, when she called me to tell me how good she felt about what she'd done, I cried. She's working on a novel and she FaceTimed me on Easter Sunday from a walk on the Devon coast to show me some goat poo. That child reminds me to be love. Some people have comme...
Read more