madelinekelly

I made jam tonight. I tried to make gooseberry jam. Before we get going you need to know that I HATE gooseberries. They are noxious and vile and the smell makes me want to vomit. Plus, the bushes attack with supremely long thorns when you try to harvest their horrible little hairy green balls. Ugh. But we do have a gooseberry bush at the allotment and, waste-not-want-not, I thought I should harvest the fruit and do something with them. Matt likes gooseberries, but has shown no interest in the little tub of goosegogs that have been sitting in the fridge for several weeks. Consequently: jam!

It went well at the beginning. Mixture was boiling. Setting samples on cold plate tasted surprisingly lovely. All I needed to do was find the packet of waxed paper discs and I'd be good to go. After thirty seconds of ferreting around in a drawer I triumphantly held aloft my little pieces of shiny paper and, behold, the jam had turned to bitter brown sludge.

I would've have been less cross if I hadn't done exactly the same thing with the ill-fated marrow-and-ginger jam, three years ago.

I also made blackberry-and-apple jam tonight. It turned out alright, but it wasn't as tasty as the gooseberry mixture. How could it compare? I am grieving for the jam that might have been.

It turns out that I don't know myself as well as I thought. The story I've been telling (to myself and others) for the past couple of years is that I hadn't attempted to write any fiction since I was 16 years old, until HP fanfiction tempted me to try again. I've also propagated the lie (it now turns out) that I'd given up on the idea of being a writer -- had in fact never properly counted it as an ambition since I was a child.

However. Last week I was trawling through a box of ancient papers and I came across a story that I wrote in 1996. A 6,000 word story, no less. A story about a little boy who gets sucked into a mysterious suet-pudding world where he has to defeat an ancient evil before the inhabitants (a mixture of sentient dried fruit) will let him return to Earth. Would you look at that? I wrote a story. When I was 22. And it was a children's story, which at least shows that I'm consistent (even if I don't realise it at the time).

I also found, on this computer, a file of 'affirmations' that I wrote in 2001 -- years before my fanfiction phase. And what I was affirming was that I was going to be a best-selling children's author.

So the lesson learned here is that I should check my paperwork and computer files before telling anyone anything about myself ever again -- clearly I don't store all my self-knowledge in my head.

Oh, and, since I'm writing about writing... I haven't done any. I've decided to junk it and start a second draft. What it needed, and lacked, was a plot. A plot shall be loosely constructed before I go any further. I comfort myself with the thought that, with all these mistakes that I keep on making, I must be learning something.