A Million Reasons for Wanting to Carry on Living

Another thing published on a website. Sentences about London written over the last 18 years deposited/composited into one stream of consciousness-y piece. Not so much purple prose as heliotrope. The websites seem to prefer the meandering things rather than stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. I prefer stories with a beginning, middle and an end - in that order.

Have set up a wordpress blog to keep track of what has been published where. I know LJ was not at fault for the recent outage, but it's been highly annoying. Russians, attack facebook instead!

Oh! I have been shortlisted for a thing! I haven't won, but I have come second or third, not sure which (the disparity between the two is £100, so I'm hoping for second, obviously), but anyway even if I have come third, the winner and the other runner up are both photographers, so I am the only writing shortlistee.

I think the last time I actually made any money from writing was a £10 book voucher for a poem published in the Co-operative Society's magazine in about 1994.

The news comes after I did a shift at my old work packing fruit. Four hours on my feet shoveling plums and cherries and lifting heavy crates and I'm exhausted. "From white collar to no collar," observed a colleague. £34.84 in the bank but at the cost of me poor old back.

You can read the thing here if you want. It is faction (the McDonalds thing never happened).

Edit: 2nd prize! £150!!

I have some paid writing work thanks to my exceptional networking skills chum Tanya. £8 an hour, which is less than the people putting carrots in the bags earned at my last job, but still, I have just been given £12 for sitting on my bum for 90 minutes writing about cycling, Naomi Klein and whether the shape of a country influences its national identity and politics. It's for a linguistics textbook, so students can pull apart the various components of the sentences. When I worked in a deaf school, one of the tasks I enjoyed was helping the deaf teachers put together good sentences for school documents* (although it used to annoy me when I had to re-draft the (hearing) Deputy Head's letters), and I thought then that I'd quite like to write sentences for a living.

*profoundly deaf people whose first language is BSL often have poor English writing skills.