Mystery of Ochoa's destination...

So where is Guillermo Ochoa going to end up? Such a clever man - brave too. Doesn't mind taking a risk. He leaves his club, meaning he's a free agent during the transfer season, goes to the World Cup and gives a magnificent performance, comes back and takes a holiday.

Oh, transfer? Says he. I'll deal with that when I've had a couple of weeks off. Lol. Excellent. Man has balls of steel.

Rumour that Bayern are interested, but they already have two keepers and one of them's Neuer. Not much chance of starting with him around. Ochoa wants to play - he turned down a place in the Mexico squad at one point because he didn't want to sit on the bench.

Not Arsenal now, they've got Ospina. Shame. 

Malaga has been suggested and they need a new goalie. I'm not sure if this would help Ochoa, who wants to become an EU citizen, as I don't know if his time in France and any further time in Spain would be 'added together' for this purpose.

I can't blame him for wanting to live in Europe, as a footballer. Mexico have some appalling rules governing their football, they make it difficult for players to move from team to team.

Just waiting now. Don't know if I'll need to scrape up the money to pay for Sky Sports so I can watch La Liga matches... just joking. They're well worth watching anyway.

Scary stuff. No, not vampires.

Having put myself forward to read at Trans/literation, a transgender literary event, I now find myself without a great deal to say...

Or rather, I have plenty to say but putting it into a form that anybody might like to listen to is the problem.

Ah, well. Once again, doing a bunch of things at the same time. It's like being several different people. Oh, wait a minute, I am several different people. Might as well be, anyhow.

It's quite a few years since I did poetry reading and I'd forgotten how bloody terrifying it is, standing up there in front of a bunch of people you don't know. I remember now though. Oh yes.

No doubt it'll all be all right on the night. It's only five or ten minutes - they couldn't tell me which so I need to prepare two sets - anybody can read stuff out for five or ten minutes, right.

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!

Yeah, right. Got that out of my system now.

Here's one I wrote a bit ago when I still had somebody to write stuff for. Now I just write about events and stuff that annoys me and so on, because I've moved past this stage of my life, unfortunately. Or fortunately, in some ways.

You clouded down the sky, the very first

dark shades of  thunderstorm before the rain.

The whole of life took on a question's shape

The answer to the question makes no sense

The simple things I used to know become

Splitting prism, shattered facet, foot-slicing shards

Cracked in bright broken mirrors, you reflect.

You shake me like a rat, your hounded mouth

sets teeth like bars, my prison's not my own

I want to be washed up and left for dead

I want to be pulled in and left afloat;

The octopus, the Kraken in your boat.

Your voice demands, commands. Your back dismays.

You laugh and I can only stare in wonder.

I edited that so it's a lot better than it used to be.

I don't want to say anything about the person I wrote that for because it was one big mistake. But so have been all my relationships, one of the reasons, apart from body dysphoria - you know, who does what and how and to whom - why I don't contemplate ever having another relationship. Apart from with my imaginary friends :D

À propos de nothing in particular

 This isn't what I'm writing at the moment. This is what I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2012. I just rediscovered it and found I had almost 70K of novel just sitting there waiting to be tidied up and a few missing scenes put in! It's like finding money down the side of the sofa, no?

It's a fantasy as well, out and out, which I don't normally write. Although it is connected to my other books. Most of them reference each other somewhere. 

So here's a bit of it - they're trying to make some money.

“Have you finished yet?” Jin Feng glared at Orlando, who was making his pie last.

“Why does it matter?” Orlando asked. “I didn’t want a pie anyway. I wanted cake.”

“It’s apple pie, it’s just the same as cake.”

“No, it’s not. It’s made a whole different way. If you had apple cake, the apples would be part of the cake. In this, they’re separate. They’re just in –“

“Yes, yes, no thank you,” Jin Feng interrupted. “We don’t need a lecture on bakery.”

“Baking,” Orlando said. “Baking’s what you do, bakery’s what you do it in.”

“Someone’s coming,” Mallen said, forestalling what looked like a nasty explosion on Jin Feng’s part.

“What? Where?” Orlando peered around the wall. A young woman was coming out of the brothel, looking around her before setting off in their direction.

“It can’t be her,” Jin Feng said. “She’s too small.”

“Then why’s she got a big bag just like the big bag they take the money to the banker in?” Mallen asked.

“Eh?” Jin Feng looked again. “Are you sure?”

“That’s the bag,” Mallen said. “I’d recognise it anywhere. They always use the same one.”

“So – she’s got the money?” Orlando felt vaguely discomfited. He didn’t really like the idea of the three of them jumping out on one young woman who was about the size of Jin Feng and scaring the life out of her before stealing her money. “Maybe we shouldn’t –“

“Don’t be stupid,” Jin Feng said. “We got rid of the big doorman so it’d be easy to steal the money. Now it is easy to steal the money, don’t start complaining about it.”

Before Orlando could reply, Jin Feng stepped out into the road, practically into the path of the young woman, forcing her to stop or have to step off the pavement into the dirty street full of slippery cobblestones.

“Hand over the bag,” he said as she paused, looking at him.

Orlando also stepped out to back up his friend but he was starting to have doubts. Doubts about why the brothel had decided to send their day’s takings with only one small person to guard it. Unless perhaps they hoped that nobody would suspect her of having it. But then, why put it in such a recogniseable bag?

“I don’t think I want to do that,” the young woman was saying. Her voice was accented, though Orlando couldn’t place where the accent was from.

“Well, I think you’d better,” Jin Feng said.

“Well, I think I don’t better,” she said.

“Just give it here.” Jin Feng made a grab for the bag and was somewhat surprised when, instead of snatching it away from him, the young woman arced it through the air towards him, catching him across the diaphragm and knocking him to the floor.

“Whumph!” said Jin Feng.

Orlando nodded. All that money had to hurt when it hit you in the middle.

“Would you like some of this bag?” The young woman had turned to Orlando, her eyebrow raised, her posture relaxed, Relaxed like a fighter waiting for an opening. She had a bag of heavy metal her stance said, and she wasn't afraid to use it.

“I think not,” Orlando said, backing up, hands held in front of him, the universal posture of no thanks, no pain, not today.

"Look, Miss, we don't want to hurt you," Jin Feng was saying as he got up from the floor.

Orlando rolled his eyes. What was his friend thinking?

"You want another bit my bag?" the young woman asked Jin Feng, seemingly quite unperturbed that there were two of them and only one of her.

Two of them? Orlando thought. There should have been three of them. Where was - there was Mallen, sneaking round the back of her. But she'd notice him - wouldn't she?

"I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding," Orlando began. "You see we were expecting another person. A different person. A, uh, a bigger person."

"You got me," she said, shifting her weight onto her back foot as if in preparation for another swing. Orlando hoped she changed her mind as he was now in her line of sight and didn't want to be hit with a bag full of money. Or a bag full of anything, for that matter.

"I'll take that." Just as she adjusted her grip on the bag, presumably to get a better hold for Orlando-bashing, Mallen reached over her shoulder and grabbed it. And turned to run.

Unfortunately for Mallen, when he ran, the young woman didn't let go of the bag. Instead, she yanked on the strap of it. Hard.

Mallen's feet flew out from under him on the slippery cobbles as his top half was pulled rapidly backwards. He ended up on the floor at the young woman's feet, still clutching the bag like a hopeful beau presenting an oversized gift.

"You give me that back now or it's worse for you than you ever imagine," the young woman said. Orlando got the impression that she was about to lose her temper. He decided he really didn't want to be in the vicinity when that happened.

"Let's go," he suggested.

"I -" whatever Mallen had been about to say, nobody ever found out as he took yet another flying lesson from the young woman's foot. She kicked him hard in the chest, propelling him across the road and snatched back her bag.

"There's no need for that," Jin Feng said, taking a step towards her. "Why don't you just give us the bag and we'll go away and leave you alone."

"What you say?" The young woman's face fell into the expression of incredulity that so many people experienced when dealing with Jin Feng. She looked from him to Mallen on the ground and finally ended up at Orlando.

"He always like this?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid so," Orlando said. "Come on, you two, we're getting nowhere here."

"You not very good robbers," she said.

"First time," Orlando said.

"Try some other line of work," she advised, swinging the bag onto her shoulder and walking away.

"That didn't go too well," Mallen said, getting to his feet.

"I don't know," Jin Feng said. "We know now who takes the money, what time they do it -"

"Jin Feng, there's no way we're getting that bag off that woman," Orlando said. "She's obviously specially trained to defend it."

"We could drug her instead of the doorman," Mallen said. "Jin Feng, you can go seduce her this time."

"I could do that," Jin Feng said. "Did you see the way she was looking at me? She likes me, I can tell. I could seduce her in no time. I'm good with women."

Football musings

What about this World Cup, then? Better than the last one.

England - oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear. DEARIE DEARIE ME!

So now they're out, I'm supporting Mexico. Good team, smiley faces, drew Brazil due in big part to excellent keeper. People like to blame the keeper - nice to see one being praised instead.

Not sure what they'll do against Holland, though. Tough team.

Favourite commentator phrase - he knows where the goal is. Well. Duh. It's that stringy thing at one end or the other for those who don't...

Ah, well, back to work - will publish an excerpt in a minute. Working In Unison off to a publisher - yes, I know, it should be off to an agent but they were having open submissions at Jonathan Cape so I thought, may as well. Given that it still wants redrafting and I need a bit of space before I do that.

So near and yet...

Apologies to anyone that's reading this thing, I haven't posted for simply ages.

My book, Working In Unison is very nearly finished - Huzzah! And other eighteenth-century exclamations.

I had to stop about two thirds of the way through as I was stuck - I realised I commited a crime in the first few pages and, in my working synopsis completely forgot to explain who did it. Upon reflection, I realised that I had forgotten about it so thoroughly that I no longer remembered who did it...

Let us all make a note at this point to make notes about stuff all the time. Especially if it's to do with who did it.

Anyway, I started another book while I was stuck which is one I meant to write ages ago but hadn't got around to. When I got stuck with that one, I went back to this one - yes, it's a strange way of working but it works for me.

Having said I'm nearly finished here, I opened today's file I'm working on and found a note to myself that said THIS IS (yes, like that, all in capitals) ALL RUBBISH.

If that's what I think of it, goodness knows what an agent's going to make of it.

So I guess there are still some miles to go before I sleep. On the plus side, I now know who did it. And have to write it all then fit it neatly into the tightly-woven plot I already have concerning all the other things that got done.

It's going to be like shoving a pickle into a toothpaste tube. What? Never done that? You haven't lived...

Are we a different species, dear?

http://www.betsydornbusch.com/2013/04/another-sfwa-sexist-gaffe.html

So I'm like - is the guy under discussion here a human being at all? Or, given the context, a mole from Planet Uppmaiarsch, sent to sow discord?

What the fuck gives him any right to tell anybody what they should or should not be doing?

And - Barbie. Well, slap my thigh and call me Daisy. Words fail me. Yes, they do. I mean, fuck, what, Barbie? How is that a good example of - well, anything?

I find it difficult to understand how somebody can be so unreasonable. Or so scared of people of a different gender. And this is me from a gay transgendered viewpoint but still - I spend a lot of my life even now in the state of mind of - how low can we go?

My daughter had Barbies and she turned them into Borgs. Best thing to do with em.

Spousal Veto, WTF?

 http://www.c4em.org.uk/drop-the-spousal-veto/


So this is the letter I sent about that piece of shite:

Dear Lady Stowell,

I am writing to ask you to reconsider your position on the spousal veto amendment to the Gender Recognition Act.

To allow such an amendment to go through would be not just a small step backward for transgender people but a massive step backward for the whole UK - into the Victorian age.

For more than a century, people have fought and struggled for equality in marriage, to do away with the idea that one party to the union 'owned' the other. This amendment reintroduces that idea.

It is neither ethically nor morally sound to give one person control over another's physical, mental or emotional well-being, especially when the two parties are probably in the middle of an upheaval in their relationship anyway.

I am sure you know the kind of things people say and do when they're angry and confused. This amendment would just give spouses of transgender people ammunition for their anger.

I have personally seen a relationship go down the pan in part because I am transgender. (And in part because my partner was an arse...) I was told I was 'making a mistake.' I am afraid that this can be the attitude of many non-transgender people who cannot understand the despair and frustration suffered by people who find themselves stuck in the wrong body.

I hope you will consider these points when making your decision and not leave transgender people in the situation of being discriminated against as a group who need taking care of by their spouses! :D