I realised on Friday that I'd agreed to do rather a lot of work. Namely, by Monday, I had 800 words to write for More! magazine about how to turn a guy from a crap shag into a good one. I had to rewrite three of the sex advice cards I'd already done because the 'direction had changed' (clients, don't you just just love them) and write another twelve sex advice cards from scratch. I had to put all the camera directions into the Lovers' Guide script. I had an article to do for the Daily Star and over 40 pieces on the Cliterati spike to clear along with the Cliterati and Sex Insider newsletters (well overdue) to write.
So obviously, when I went out for a meeting on Friday lunchtime, the thing to do was then spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around Portobello market. I was supposed to be going for a drinks tasting for a vodka based thing which is supposed to taste 'like an orgasm on the tongue' (they didn't specify whether it was male or female orgasm-flavoured.) somewhere in Portobello but having no grasp of geography, I utterly failed to find the shop where the tasting was happening.
Instead, I spent my time wandering round the market and made the incredibly useful purchases of several cheesy CDs from a charity shop, a huge lace curtain (cos the muslin in my front window is frankly skanky looking and I need something to stop people being able to see into my bedroom) and a 5ft square piece of purple suede (it was £10 and seemed like it could be useful for something, though I'm not entirely sure what having found out that it would take an industrial sewing machine to be able to actually get a needle through it. Then again, I am the world's worst person at sewing so have no idea what I was thinking anyway.
To illustrate quite how crap I am at sewing, I spent hours at school making the cross-stitch 'peg bag' that everyone had to make only to stand up at the end of the lesson to find I'd attached it to my skirt and had to unpick it all. I was six. By the time I got to 13 and had to do home economics I was no better. Everyone else had made their complicated darted shirts faster than I made the 'two hems required' tube skirt because I am utterly unable to thread a sewing machine in less than an hour - which is particularly embarrassing given my mum is a dress designer creating gorgeous things like this.)
But I digress. So, I ended up wasting Friday afternoon then heading home. And when a friend insisted on dragging me out to the pub, did I say 'No, I have work to do.' Did I bollocks.
So, Saturday, I woke up hungover and my computer glared at me in a 'stop ignoring me, you bitch' kind of way. I would have glared back but it hurt, so instead, I went for the 'drink caffeine until I have guts to brazen out computer.'
The computer carried on glaring. So obviously, I decided that now was the time to change the interior design on the flat - which is just a vaguely wanky way of saying 'move everything from one room into another, look at it, realise it will take about five hours to get the flat looking remotely as tidy as it did before I started moving things, realise I will be living in a shit-hole if I don't so spend an age deciding exactly where I should put the blue rug, before bunging everything in the middle of the room into a cupboard and hoping the door will stay closed.'
The computer still glared. It intimidated me. So I decided now would be the time to clean the windows. Because obviously, having not cleaned them for five years, they couldn't wait a second longer.
And then, of course, I realised that the oven was looking in need of a clean...
And once the kitchen was shining and the windows were gleaming, I clearly couldn't let them get shown up by the bathroom.
Eventually, the caffeine kicked in, along with my guilt at doing absolutely no work. So I wrote some stuff. And realised that writing the 'turn a crap bloke into a top shag' article was really quite hard cos I haven't really met anyone who's crap enough to justify an article's worth of guidance. Or even much more than a few sentences, at best. And even that would seem unfair to them. Cue phoning round all my mates saying 'So, men who are crap in bed. How are they crap?'
Some of my friends have been luckier than others. In the end, all we could come up with was:
a) Blokes who are keen on oral but a bit clueless
b) Blokes who stop the foreplay the second a woman is remotely wet enough for sex (if not before)
c) Blokes who are ace at foreplay but just thrust away as if that's all there is to it when they get to shagging.
Even coming up with that took a lot of 'Hmm, well, so and so was great at blah but he could have done xyz better.' So generally, men are doing pretty well when it comes to shagging skills. Which is nice.
Of course, men being generally pretty good in the sack meant that it took me way longer to write the article than it should have done so I woke up this morning to a full working day. And I finally finished everything (well, near enough) at 2.30am. I'm thus feeling rather pleased with myself but utterly shattered. But it rocks to be able to finally make a living from writing. I feel very lucky.
Posted by emilyd at July 21, 2003 03:25 AM