It's been yet another one of those weeks where a million and one things happen and I just sit there, fighting the urge to clutch my hands to my head and duck as more 'life' whizzes over me. So, where to start?
Hmm, well, I now have a full-time - albeit short-term - porn star flatmate. She's decided that she needs to be in London more than she currently is, so is moving into my spare room until she finds a flat of her own that isn't obscenely expensive. I can already tell that she's the perfect person to live with me because not only does she bring me lunch and tidy my flat when I'm on deadline, but she also has an equally insane life as I do.
In the last week, she's got down to a shortlist of three to be on an MTV show (she's waiting to hear the final results) and started writing a book about what it's really like working in porn. I'm helping her sub it, but she's already a dream of a writer. She writes like she speaks, so it comes across really naturally and is dead heartwarming and all that kind of stuff. It's also good for my motivation; she's making her living doing porn and yet still found time to write more of her book than I did of mine last week (I have an excuse - I was writing articles for other people. But still, she managed to fit in *her* day job and still write so I've *got* to be a grown up and follow her lead.) On top of MTV and writing her book, the More mag feature I wrote about her is now out and she's had loads of calls from other mags/TV shows wanting to profile her. I'm dead proud of her .
Other than that, well, actually, it's been quite a glam week. Or at least, I got to fully indulge my author fantasies and spent a night at a book launch for the fabulous Lisa Jewel. It seems that my theory about all authors knowing each other is true. Going to the launch was like seeing the contents of my bookshelves morph into people. Or at least, a gazillion authors I love were there - and even better, they were nice people. The advantage of getting fanlike about authors rather than rock stars is that authors get way less adoration and so they're far more chuffed when you tell them that you love their books.
That said, after reading/loving her book, it was ace to meet Louise Wener and realise how utterly lovely she is. I was blathering to her and, after an extended very random and rambling conversation, eventually asked 'so how did you get into writing?' She replied 'I used to be in a band.' in *such* an understated way that it suggested she'd been in some band that played a couple of gigs in the local school hall, rather than a top 20 indie band who played Glastonbury and all the rest of it. I felt almost embarrassed admitting that I had her CDs when I was a student, because it seemed *so* not the done thing.
Met a load of other people whose writing I love, and over the course of the evening, conversation topics included porn (big surprise), group sex (ditto), open relationships (ditto), fame/public perception versus private perception of people, misogyny in the music industry, buying erotica in shops (back to the same old themes), deadline hell and random pissed blathering. It was fun - and there was free champagne which is always a good thing.
Other than that, the week's gone by pretty quickly and I've been mostly bogged down by work. I did make the mistake of reading 'Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure' - not a mistake because it was a crap book, 'cos actually, it was ace, but a big mistake when it comes to really needing no more displacement activity whatsoever so thus getting sucked into Googlewhacking is really not helpful. I'd recommend that you read it and would tell you the ones I've found but I can't because:
a) It'd probably be dead boring
b) They'd cease to be Googlewhacks.
Anyway, writing beckons. Here's hoping this week is as much fun as last week.
Posted by emilyd at February 22, 2004 11:27 PM