house of 1000 stories

National Novel Writing Month

So yeah, Ii'm participating in NaNoWriMo this year. And this year, I'm going to actually do it. 2,000 words a day is fuck all, when you're unemployed.

CHEKKIT, it's bollocks - I have no plot or anything:


Out of the closet and into the fire - a shit novel by someone who doesn't care enough about anything to be anything else.

Wishing to avoid overusing the word (or should that be letter?) I – but wanting to tell my own story is a bit of a downer. There are so many of us who don’t have a clue. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I mean, there are thousands of things all around us that tell us how to be a kid, how to be a teenager and how to be an adult – but nothing about that transitional period. Nothing that says we don’t graduate from university with a decidedly average degree and slip straight into a job and city life with the one bedroom flat – that’s flat spelt A-P-A-R-T-M-E-N-T, with a Cat and a gay best friend and lots of hilarious dates and shenanigans being an oh-so-liberated twentysomething.

There’s no handbook anywhere that says when you’ve put yourself through uni, worked every hour of every day that you’ll even be able to resort to shitty call centre work. There’s nothing that tells you how to feel when your work in-experienced boyfriend goes and lands a job before you do, his A levels, degree and CV are inferior but seemingly better than yours.

Your cynical best friend living across the hall (in a shared we-still-wish-we-were-students house, we established earlier that you don’t get the A-P-A-R-T-M-E-N-T flat and we must remember we are neither Monica nor Chandler) assures you in his sarcastic yet somehow caring roundabout way that you are overqualified, and that you will both either run away and open a bookshop, quaffing wine all day in the style of withnail and I, or you’ll flit to sunnier climes to start a new life away from life in a norther town. But your belief in this is hindered somewhat by the very point that started your whining, that you don’t actually have a job, and the chances that you can escape to anywhere without your landlord, Mr. Husein (no relation to one time Iraqi dictator turned convict Sadam, although the similarities are quite scary) being able to find you are about as thick as, well, my body of work.

And then the phonecall comes.

That first rejection. That stinging, stupidly acute sting of normality, of the idea that I’m now just like everyone else, just like I always thought I wouldn’t be. I don’t know if any of this is any good, or anything, I don’t even have a concept to work with. I’m really just starting from scratch.

Okay, so this is not my first attempt at writing. I sit here all day, staring at the same old pages on myspace and livejournal, refreshing and reloading all day. Now my housemates have all got jobs, I get quite a lot of time to myself, to (ahem) write and to look for jobs. Of course, in reality what I do is sit around all day wishing for something amazing to happen. Something to rival the fantasticality of Labyrinth, something to out-wonder Terry Prachett’s Discworld.

Today, wake up, as always. Well, not really as always. I was a student for four years, and old habits die hard – some days I won’t make it out of bed in time for Neighbours, let alone get up in the morning. Today though, is not one of those days. I’d love to say it was a day where I awoke feeling different, where I knew today would be the day when something changed (which also coincidentally happens to be the first day of this novel, but I’m not that lucky). Also, I’m not quite late-twenties enough yet to wake up with a cat licking my face or something equally pathetic and Bridget Jones-like. So I wake up alone, again. With my boyfriend in the room downstairs, again. I stick my feet into my slippers (shaped like huge candyfloss monster feet and about five years old, off the market, of course) and half pad, half stumble down the flight of stairs from the third floor into the bathroom.

The joys of sharing a house with three boys. Fuck me. I manage to somehow dodge the piss-soaked carpet around the toilet and kind of hover over the 1920’s vintage (read: old and shit) porcelain toilet for long enough to relieve myself of the night before’s excessive tea intake. Of course, there’s no toilet roll – when is there ever? – so I do the old shake, rattle and roll and then hop over the piss again to the sink. Thankfully, the bathroom isn’t as disgustingly full of mould now I’ve painted over it. Oh yes, none of this cleaning malarkey. Gloss over what doesn’t work, that’s my motto. That’s probably also the reason that I don’t have a job or anything as well, I muse as I extract my toothbrush from the grime on the top of the bathroom cabinet and excavate a few old slivers of toothpaste from the flat, rolled up tube. I’ve got nice teeth. Through the toothpaste flecks on the mirror, I can see that. Shame about the rest. Oh, you’ve heard it all before. Protagonist female of any contemporary work of fiction. Hair just a little bit too straggley, just the wrong side of being brown. Just small enough to be cute and tough, and not so skinny that’s she’s not going to come across as a ‘real woman’. Yep, you’ve heard it all before because that’s what – in my experience – 90% of women aged over 21 look like. That’s why we like them to be the heroines of our literary fiction. We don’t want to read about some skinny blonde with massive tits getting her own way and writing a stunning novel to mass critical acclaim. Oh no. We want someone who’s failing as bad as we are in life. We want someone we can identify with.

So, here’s hoping I’m failure enough for you. I seem to be doing a pretty decent job of being crap at everything I do, lately.

However, I’m not going to beat myself up about this new sensation that people are calling rejection. I pop into the room over that hall from the bathroom to say hi to Jack, only to be greeted with an empty room. Ah, so it must be a weekday, then.

Which means I have the house to myself. Again.

Plodding down the second set of stairs, I flick the kettle on. I’ve got to do something today. I can’t face another day of being out-camwhored on the internet by skinny sixteen year olds. I could go into town, but then again, what for? I have no job there, I’ve asked in every shop from Forbidden Planet (“not cool enough”) to BHS (“too cool”) and so by default, I have no money to spend there. Finding, by some miracle, a clean cup and pouring the water over it, I muse over my options.

Go for a walk - Don’t fancy a walk.

Go on the internet - Bored of the internet.

Write some of my novel - Can’t write anymore.

Clean the house…

Now there’s a thought. I could always clean. The house is a shithole, to be fair. And if I clean up, then I won’t feel as guilty about not going down to the jobcentre and trying to find somewhere to work that doesn’t involve sitting within 20 metres of smackheads and teenage mums (Gotta love the jobcentre).

Cleaning it is, then.

As luck would have it, when I moved in with Jack, Ian and Rob, my mum must have has the premonition (or the good hunch, judging by both their sex and their previous abodes) that they were a bunch of scruffy bastards. Which is great news for me, because she’d kitted me out with the failsafe MUM KIT OF CLEAN which involved everything from washing up liquid and bleach, things which I am quite comfortable and pretty well accommodated with – to things that I would never dream of picking up in a million years including a bug bomb (why would I want to bomb my own house?) and some elaborate canister with a long protruding plastic snout that looks quite sexual. I still haven’t figured out what that one’s for. Some of the pieces of The Kit are just downright exciting, they look like they could do some real damage, or even suffice if you run out of vodka and happen to have some spare mixer lying around. Cillit Bang! Sounds like something you’d get down at one of the posh new bars in the city centre, six quid a drink and bound to make you choke on your own vomit by the end of the night. Amazing.

I reckon it’s time to get kitted out. So what do I do? Let’s see…outfit. I go back up the stairs to the third floor and into Ian’s cupboard. There’s a huge white shirt in there, that I’ve seen him wear once, for his graduation a year ago, so I figure that he won’t mind me borrowing it on my mission. I get down to my bra and big old granny pants and button the shirt up. Next, into my own pit of a room to root around a bit for a pinny, or something that will suffice as one. I worked part time in a coffee shop for three heady, glorious years when I was at university, and the uniform there included pinnies. Scrounging around in the back of my wadrobe, I notice a little hole with a chink of weird light coming through it. I say weird light, because the bulb in my room has been blown for as long as I can remember, and my window....

TO BE CONTINUED.