Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

The recent Christmas and New Years holidays (along with the never-ending Bank Holiday Mondays we get here in ol’ Blighty) have got me thinking. Yes, I do this on occasion. Having worked through the holidays nonstop, including Christmas Day and News Years Day, I began to wonder about those such as myself who spend our lives toiling in alternative forms of labour – ie authors and other creative individuals who don’t take home a regular pay cheque or get requisite days off (let alone sick days). Wouldn’t it be nice if WE got a special day off?

Yeah, I know it’s a lot to hope for, but what’s life without a bit of hope?

You’re probably asking what I was so busy doing that I couldn’t even take a minute to myself. Okay, where should I start? There’s this little matter called a deadline that had to be dealt with. Publishers set them – and it’s your job to meet them. So I was correcting the galleys for my upcoming book Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts (going over them twice, I should add). In addition, I was putting together a book trailer and website for the title, while also working on my new anthology Red Velvet and Absinthe (which likewise has a looming deadline), reading material as it came in and working closely with writers whose material I was keen on (I mean, being an editor does require some actual… errr… editing!). In between all this, I had to keep myself fed and watered, attend to my social networking responsibilities (and they are massive), do housework, and look after a rambunctious young bear, who doesn’t like being neglected. There was also the issue of a new vacuum cleaner that needed attending to (the previous and now-famous one having died on me right after the warranty ran out). Oh, yeah, and I was busy fighting an annoying cold I’d picked up from some germy bugger on an overstuffed tube train in London one night when I was on my home from The Smoke. Imagine the footage you’ve seen of passengers in India clinging vicariously to the sides and roofs of train cars and you get the picture. Though at least the Indians don’t pay the equivalent of a London pub lunch for the price of a tube ticket.

Of course I realise that I’m not the only person in the world who has a ton of things to do and not enough time in which to do them. But when you actually have to force yourself not to send out rejection emails to hopeful short story contributors on Christmas and New Year’s day, fearing it would make you look like “Mrs. Scrooge the Anthology Editor,” you know it’s time for an official day off.

A Facebook friend of mine suggested that maybe two authors should get married and give us a public holiday, a la Will and Kate. Since that seems to work as far as adding to the British Bank Holiday curriculum vitae, I said yeah, good idea. So I thought we can play matchmaker between Salman Rushdie and Jilly Cooper (that should get some notice!). Whether either of them is already married is beside the point. They can always get a quickie divorce in Mexico and hurry back here in time for their wedding.

Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I mean, no one really gives a darn about us poor writers toiling away in our dark and dusty garrets. The public reads our books, but do they care about how we are? Hell no. If we need someone to make us chicken soup when we’re sick do they come running with the ingredients and a cooking pot? Hell no. When they see us on the street, do they drag us into Starbucks and treat us to a latte with extra whipped cream? Hell no. They just use us and forget us. (Hmm… kinda like men, eh?)

No, it seems we’re on our own in a big old scary world without a proper and legally recognised day off. The entire world goes off on holiday and there you are, still slaving away and seeing your life flash before your eyes. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Even my gym kept shutting early because no one wanted to work. Blimey.

So on behalf of all us poor overworked authors, will Salman Rushdie and Jilly Cooper please hurry up and get married and give us an official day off?

I mean, is it really so much to ask?

(before)

I’ll tell you this for free: you just haven’t lived till you’ve visited the Ikea in Thurrock, Essex during school half-term. For those of you not in the know, this is the Ikea located at the (in)famous Lakeside Shopping Centre, a large American-style shopping mall full of the usual retail chains with the requisite disgusting food court and the requisite annoying crowds of shoppers dragging their screaming and bawling children behind them. Lakeside even has a West Ham shop (no surprise, that). Believe it or not, I actually saw a pink tea kettle at a department store in Lakeside. I kid you not. Would you want to drink a cup of tea that came out of a pink kettle? I know I wouldn’t. But plenty of people in Essex do. And no, they aren’t gay men! It’s a Essex girl thing, apparently. (Insert “grimace” emoticon here.)

I had the displeasure of “shopping” at Lakeside once with an ex-boyfriend. Well, I didn’t exactly shop. He only took me there so he could use my wrist to try on watches; he wanted to buy one for his sister’s birthday, and my wrist was daintier than his. I didn’t even get a Starbucks latte out of the gig. Having said that, he did give me his West Ham shirt. I won’t go into that torrid tale; let’s just say that he enjoyed that shirt far more than I did! And if you know anything at all about Essex boys and their single-minded passion for West Ham United… Mind you, I should’ve known the writing was on the wall when he took me to The Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker on an Easter Sunday afternoon. There’s nothing more romantic than graphic images of nuclear annihilation when you’re out with your bloke. Let’s just say that THIS wasn’t the fantasy I wrote about in The New Black Lace Book of Women’s Sexual Fantasies.

As for Ikea (umm… that WAS what we were talking about, right?), I’d finally managed to intimidate one of my loftmen into driving me there. (The begging didn’t work.) Well, you’d have thought you were in Disneyland. Talk about cheap entertainment! Seems like everyone had taken the kiddies out for a day of fun and frolic at the local Ikea. The place was bursting with sprogs (rugrats to you Yanks). If I had been maneuvering the shopping trolley instead of my loftman, I’d have run over a few – and no doubt let out a great big guffaw while doing so. Instead I clung valiantly to my sanity and tried to keep from going beserk. After all, when you’re running short of loftmen (I think I’m going to have to fire one, and the other whom I’ve recently recruited is still having visa issues), you can’t let an opportunity to go bye-bye car ride to Ikea pass you by. I needed to buy a lamp for my bedroom and another for my living room (they died within days of each other – no doubt one of those bonding things you find in long-term relationships where one can’t live without the other). I also broke my very last drinking glass the other day, so I needed a set of new ones. Plus I needed a new kitchen rug, having spilled bleach onto its hapless predecessor. Oh yeah, and I needed some coasters too.

My loftman thought I was a bit overboard in my attitude toward the brats – oops, I mean children. Mind you, I didn’t criticise him for nearly running over an elderly couple in the car park, especially when he thought he’d recognised the man as his old boss. The pair were heading back to their vehicle sans any shopping, clearly fleeing the retail mayhem and thanking their chosen deity that they were done with all that child-rearing nonsense and were now well and happily on their way to their graves. Frankly, I couldn’t blame them. Had I known what lay in wait for me inside the Ikea, I would have taken a rain cheque on the entire shopping expedition and stayed home to do my ironing.

I can hear you saying “Oh, Mitzi, how terribly mean-spirited of you! Children are such a delight!” To that I say, keep them at least 100 feet away from me, if not 1,000! Believe me, I had the patience of a saint trying to get to the department I needed, which inevitably was at the tail end of the store – meaning we had to traverse the entire managerie of this Scandinavian retail warehouse as well as make our way past a hoard of happy breeding families all having a grand day out in gloomy wintry Essex. Were any of these families actually buying anything? Not from what I could see. No. They existed merely to spite me and interfere with my requirement to get what I needed and get the hell out of there. The only thing that offered any respite were a handful of gay male couples out selecting things to feather their nests with. It was obvious they were gay: they were physically fit, good looking, and groomed. No hairs sticking out of their noses or ears or, I’m certain, other locations in which you SO don’t want to see hairs sticking out from. I’ll say this much – in my next life I plan to come back as a gay man. And don’t try to talk me out of it!

After all this murder and mayhem, I nearly wept with relief to experience the peace and quiet of my flat again. Well… except for the fact that I had to spend the next hour fending off yet another proposal of marriage from my loftman, who proclaimed in a rather sinister tone that one day he will marry me. Christ, I didn’t realise I made that good a cuppa – and it was only from a PG Tips teabag, too! Alas, I had to let him down once again, as I simply cannot play favourites with my loftmen. Besides which, I suspect he doesn’t quite believe that a woman can exist who does not desire marriage, let alone harbour the desire to play incubator for the future inhabitants of this doomed planet. I have to admire the lad for his tenacity though, especially since I forced him to go up into my loft again to store some empty suitcases and boxes. But hey, such is life. He left my flat dejected, but nevertheless, warmed by a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

As for me, I’ve got my two new lamps, six new drinking glasses, and six new coasters. And let’s not forget my new kitchen rug!

(After)

No, I haven’t suddenly gone into the business of flogging dodgy goods off a pitch at the market, nor will I be claiming that said goods have fallen off the back of a lorry either. But I did take a little peek at my Amazon Kindle books royalties for my M. S. Valentine novels and wah-hey – I’m now up to thirty bucks! (And yes, that’s in U.S. greenbacks.) Okay, I realise this might only get me a couple of foot-long sandwiches at Subway with a bit left over for a trip to Starbucks, but this could be a nice little earner, as Del Boy would say.

For those of you who haven’t read my previous blog post on the subject (Is the Print Book Destined For Death), my very first Amazon Kindle book The Captivity of Celia was published a few weeks ago, and since then the entire catalogue of my out-of-print M. S. Valentine erotic novels have been re-issued on this platform. I’m so impressed with the Kindle’s ease of use and potential for growth that I’m now looking into putting together a special collection of my short stories and having it sold via Kindle. This electronic reader is growing in popularity, and I’ve no doubt Amazon will develop a version compatible in other markets, such as the U.K. and Europe.

It’s inevitable that as mainstream publishing continues to cut back on the numbers of books they publish, not to mention continues to offer ridiculous advances to fly-by-night celebrities whose books fail dismally in the sales department, legitimate writers will be forced to seek out more and more alternative and innovative ways to get their product into the marketplace. Companies such as Amazon are well aware of the pitfalls we writers face – and they are providing us with the means to take some control over our literary destinies into our own hands. So while a major publisher robs Peter to pay Paul (you being Peter, Paul being the big celebrity “author”), and while hot-shot literary agents linger over a three-hour lunch at Tavern on the Green yet can’t even spare a minute to reply to your emails, at least you can be pro-active as opposed to just banging your head against your computer keyboard.

Maybe thirty dollars is no great shakes, but I’m not complaining. Wah-hey, it’s a start!