The Owners Volume IV : A New Epoch.

I am hoping that Volume IV will be out in the summer [the real summer, not the on/off/on/off , two minutes of sporadic sunshine that we are being favoured with at the moment] but I'm afraid that the editing process is having to currently take second place to everything else that is going on at the moment.

But I promise that as soon as the editing is done, I will be onto Volume V. To be honest, it's not an actual choice. In order to stop the characters clamouring for attention in my head, I have to write down what they want to say and do...

Let's just say that whatever the outside world throws at me, it's got internal competition for attention. I'll let you guess which one usually wins!

My holiday in Brean.

Now I did tell you a few weeks ago, that I had just come back from holiday and that I would tell you all about it, so here it is.

Before I start, let me just explain one thing...I am a bit of a nervous home leaver. Not a nervous flyer, or even traveller but an actual person who is nervous of leaving home.

Not that I am agoraphobic - I have no fear of open spaces - it's more that I am terminally nervous of being away from all my belongings. So much so, that once, as a child, I packed my entire Enid Blyton book collection, plus a few other authors' works into the bottom of my poor unsuspecting dad's suitcase. You can imagine his horror upon opening it, to find that he had not in fact packed too many clothes but that the case was instead filled with my books.

Since we had walked the ten minutes journey from the train station to our rental holiday home [with of course him carrying the suitcase as this was prior to wheeled suitcases becoming the norm,] he wasn't best pleased. However, I digress slightly...

Let's suffice it to say, that I am utterly convinced, that if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I was a snail in a former life, carrying my home around with me.

I have a tendancy therefore to take everything I could possibly need [and lots of things I couldn't possibly use] with me on my travels. The checklist alone is enough to require the felling of several trees worth of paper! But on reflection, it makes for interesting reading!

So there we were, me, the kids and our two dogs, sandwiched into the car with enough clothing, food, towels and a whole host of other irrelevant stuff, to last the length of at least one world war. [Because of course there would not be a nearby supermarket which would sell any food that I found remotely recognisable, what with this being a different county to the one in which we live - except that there was].

And there would not be anywhere I could purchase a bottle of wine,[other than the on-site shop and any number of other places locally which sold alcohol.]

Nor could there possibly be anywhere that sold chocolate, thus requiring me to take not one, or even two, but three bars of chocolate...

I could go on but I think you get the picture!

Armed as I was with my mountain of food, the kids could have been forgiven for thinking that we were going on a trek to the end of the world! And what did I find when I arrived? A caravan that exactly fitted our requirements, heaters put on ready for our arrival and everything neat and tidy.

Well laid out, the caravan was fitted with everything we could have needed and was a real home from home, so much so,that I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone visiting the area.


In fact, I fully intend to return in the near future. But this time I will be packing less for the journey. Even a snail like me can learn something...

P.S. should you want to contact the owners of the caravan I stayed in, you can call them on  07944445556 and ask for Brian or Tina from Finishing Touches.

Russia, Germany, France and everywhere else!

Now I have mentioned this before but I am aware that this blog is read widely in Russia and many other foreign countries.

What I want to know from you please, is whether you are reading it in English or as translated into your own language?

I ask because if you are translating it, there may be bits which do not translate well and if that is the case, I will try to bear it in mind for future posts, so please let me know at carmen.capuano@ymail.com.

Remember too that you can log onto http://carmencapuano.getfreehosting.co.uk to view mywebsite!

Monday...

Well despite a late start, one of the dogs getting into a barking frenzy over the fact that the doorbell keeps ringing and there is no one there and several friends sending me long and laborious texts, I have managed to edit, expand and refine the first two chapters of Volume IV, so I'm feeling rather pleased with myself...let's see how long I can keep that feeling, as the week progresses!

I'll let you know how I get on.

P.S. I'm in talks at the moment with Blackheath library reading group to establish when I will be popping over to chat to them.

If you belong to another library/reading group, feel free to ask me to come pay a visit. I promise you will learn something!

25/04/13


“I know how this must feel…like we are running away. And I sure ain’t never been known for running away from trouble,” he paused a moment to look them both in the eye, needing them to understand that the words he spoke came from the heart.
“But there are some fights you just ain’t ever gonna win. And the skill is in being able to recognise them when they happen along.”

This is a little bit of the very last chapter of Volume IV. I will be sad to see it completely written as Volume V picks up not where Volume IV ended but over a decade later, when the situation is vastly altered...


12.35pm I have just written the very last words in the very last chapter and now I'm feeling both euphoric and sad at the same time. Never mind, I'll be starting the editing in the next few days, so I'll be able to get to know the characters all over again!

Too much far too soon.

I read something in the Huffington Post the other day which reflected exactly how I felt.

Apparently a father of a young daughter, who just also happened to be a Reverend, wrote an open letter to  a well-known underwear brand, asking that they reconsider their plans to produce and sell lacy, slogan emblazoned underwear to young(ish) children.

Now I use the word children here both carefully and well considered.

By the laws of this country and most other progressive ones, minors are considered to be 'children' until at least the age of sixteen if not much older. This means that certain things, acts and products are prohibited to them. And this is done with good reason.

Now I know we all love our children and want them to be happy, stylish and feel that they fit in with their peers...but let's get real here...

Do you really think that emblazoning a pair of lacy, racy thong pants with the slogan "feeling lucky?" is the way to do it? Or allowing our teens to be wearing such things?

No! The sentiments exposed there are both too jocular by nature with a semi-sophisticated self-deprication and at once too mocking to emulate the true way that teens feel about the very idea of sexual attraction.

Think back to your own early teens if you will. Were you really so sure of your own attractiveness that you could wear these pants with no self-effacement, no modesty? If you are truthful, I think you will agree with me that the answer is no.

These slogans are made up by [and any teens reading this, I want you to take note] fat, balding old men who sit behind desks dreaming lasciviously of young girls.

Be in no doubt about that.

And girls, these pants are not grown up, they are not sexy...they were designed by dirty old men who dream of you wearing them. Please, please do not buy them!

And mothers and fathers out there - please help your children to see what is happening. We still live in a world where men like Garry Glitter and Jimmy Saville are reviled - do not let that ever change. This type of underwear is designed to pander to that very element of society...to take innocence and corrupt it as early as possible!

For all our sakes, get this mini-porn lingerie back where it belongs, on the cutting room floor.

Six degrees of separation.

I am working on the theory of six degrees of separation at the moment. Perhaps you have heard of it?

It is a concept that states that there may be as little as six people or links in any chain, which binds any one person to the most unlikeliest of other persons.

For example there may be someone who knows you, who has a cousin, who's best friends' husband has an uncle who is the florist of Elton John say...but I'm sure you get the idea.

It's way too late and I'm way too tired to be writing tonight but let me just say this...If you have a neice who has a best friend who has an uncle with a brother-in-law who works for Mr Big Movie Producer, could you please pass them a copy of my book! ;) I'd be ever so grateful.

She had slipped off her shoes and socks as they had begun to unload the food. Not really sure why, she had needed to feel the naturalness and warmth of the wood grain on her bare skin, as if it could undo all the unnaturalness of the past few hours, the revelations she had been forced to bear witness to.

Taken from The Owners, Volume IV out soon!

Still a handsome woman, her face was noticeably older than it had been the year before. In living through the turmoil and challenges of the last twelve months, Sally had aged a decade.

Georgia had lived side by side with her every day for this past year but hadn’t noticed until now, so the realisation came with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Deep facial lines forced her features into sharp relief and dragged at Georgia’s heart.

Last chapter of The Owners Volume IV being written today.

The Owners Volume IV.

Somehow I can't quite believe that volume IV is almost completely written.

Don't get me wrong, I have spent countless hours slogging away at it and many more hours thinking about the route it was taking through the plot...and yet the almost completed work sits before me like a thing never seen before!

There is one more chapter to write and a lot of editing but by this stage, the promise of a finished book is so close, I can almost smell it.

Because a finished book is a strange thing indeed. I don't know about other authors but for me the book is almost a part of me whilst I am writing it; an extension of my own body if you like. But once written, it is like a child that has been firmly expelled from the birth canal - always linked to me but a seperate entity all of its own, expected to make its own way in the big wide world with only a gentle push from me to help it on its way.

If I wasn't so unsentimental I'd shed a tear ;)

Happy reading!  x

Boston attacks.

My sympathies to the victims and their families, of the Boston explosions yesterday. Nothing I or anyone else can say can alleviate your pain, or take away the horror of this indefensible act.

Such faceless violence is always sickening and incomprehensible. The world mourns your loss with you.

There is a song out at the moment which resonates very much with how I currently feel. It is the Bruno Mars track "When I Was Your Man".

If you don't know the song then allow me to tell you a little about it. It is a song of love - not unrequited love - but one that was shared and returned - until the singer took his love for granted.

It's a story as old as time and familiar to all of us I am sure. But even as I listened to the words of the song and understood that he had "never bought [her] flowers" or taken her to parties because she "loved to dance", it saddened me and got me to thinking about love.

What is love? What is that stongest of emotions, that sometimes takes us unaware and holds us in its grip, however fleetingly? What makes it happen and what sometimes prevents it from happening?

Someone spoke to me recently about an "electric" feeling they had when they met their partner and people often talk of there being a "spark" with others they meet or not. But why does one pairing engender this response and another does not?

The obvious answer is looks and levels of attractiveness but I think this is misleading. Look around you. There are numerous couples around where the level of attractiveness between the couple is not the same. Perhaps he is tall and lean with a good physique, while she is short and stumpy with an unfortunate case of acne. Or maybe she could be a supermodel contender and he looks like something hit by a bus.

You may scoff but believe me its there in plain sight. There is a young couple I see most days whilst walking my dogs. Both in thier teens, he is gangly and pimple bedecked, whilst she is slim, pretty and I should have thought, infinitely out of his league in terms of looks.

And yet she appears to hang onto his every word and gazes up at him as they sit together on the wet grass, with such doe eyes, it makes me almost embarrassed to watch them. But like a furtive peeping tom, I feel my gaze drawn to them as if by some strange osmosis, what they have can be drawn from, as easily as drawing water from a tap.

Young love I remember it well.

So a little warning to you lovely readers. Love is strange, wonderful and yes, sometimes painful. But to seek it out is, I believe, part of the human condition.

If you are lucky enought to find it, work damn hard to keep it and make sure you treat your partner well becasue if there is one thing I know, then that is that it's worth the effort. x 

What's in a name ?

Well to completely ignore what Shakespeare thought about it all, including roses and all that, it is a rather strange affair.

I'm sure we all know a variety of John Smith's or Adam Jones's and so on but up until the advent of the internet and Google, I had pretty much thought that my name pairing was unique.

You see I have both Spanish [hence the Carmen] and Italian heritage [the Capuano]. To my mind there wasn't much chance of many people being called the paired first and second names of Carmen Capuano ...but there are. In fact a few of them are on my facebook page now! They mostly live in Spain or Italy [logical I guess] but it is still strange to see some other face looking out on the world with my own name beside it.

So if you have never Googled your own name, why not try it. If nothing else, it is a good talking point [and giggling too for that matter] with friends and family. Who knows who the other 'you' might be! A famous road builder or jewelry maker or even just someone who has their own blog page.

But whatever they are and indeed whatever they are like, they are not you. And that's what makes it such a weird experience.

When I get a little time to write more, I'd like to tell you about my experiences in Brean over the past week. Until then, happy Googling! x

I am just back from holiday.

As I drove home I was singing along to Emeli Sandé's, "I'll be your clown" and "Read All About It" at full voice and full of facial expression [Lord knows what the other drivers who passed me thought of it...a strange, tired looking woman who was performing weird facial contortions.. they probably thought I was having a stroke!]

But I made a strange decision. If my books ever become films, I want Emeli Sandé to write and perform the title tracks.

Oh and I want Scarlett Johansson to be the character Sophia.

Now that wouldn't be asking too much would it? ;)

I woke up to a message on "The Owners" book page of my Facebook account this morning which said that Henry Winkler [aka The Fonz] liked my picture of us together.

I went completely glassy-eyed for at least ten minutes... until I realised that he himself had probably not clicked the box! It's a sad fact of technology that we never really know who is behind any comment or deed, conducted from the privacy of a compueter terminal.

So for that reason, I can content myself with thinking that it COULD indeed be Henry who liked the photo. Who said blissful ignorance is over-rated?

;-)

I have been having a karaoke competition with my daughter Sophia. You can see some of the results here...  http://youtu.be/B-4yjG-h2JY

There are rooms in my house that are as foreign to me as another country. I enter them occasionally and am immediately transfixed by the sheer volume of rubbish in them.

It is then that I am driven to wonder where all the contents that are strewn across the bed, the floor and even the window sills, have come from. Because as sure as night follows day, I didn’t put them there.

But before you jump to conclusions, let me explain. I have three children. Now logically you may think three children = three children’s bedrooms [messy perhaps but containable]. Believe me the reality is far, far different.

Like large messy magpies, my children seem to adore collecting the obscure and [in my opinion] needless junk that masquerades as interesting souvenirs. Bits of ripped paper, used train tickets and a fragment of a box that once contained a watch, are prime examples of this.

I know this because I have spent the last two hours wading through all this paraphernalia, trying to make sense of it all. But in the midst of all the dusting and removing of grime, a memory surfaced.

Once there was a little metal tin. Inside the little metal tin was a little metal hairslide, a little metal brooch and some other odds and ends. I know this because the little metal tin and its contents belonged to the eight year-old me.

And I treasured that tin. Not because the contents belonged to me but because they had once belonged to someone who had been very important to my father. They had belonged to his mother.

My father had a very difficult childhood, fraught with family secrets and skeletons in the cupboard but he had loved his mother, who had died relatively young. And he had kept this little box for many years, only passing it on to me, his step-daughter, when he realised that I too was the sort of person who would understand why he kept the box.

Now if you were to ask him why he had kept it, I guess he would say that it was a memento. And it was.        

But it was also so much more than that. It was a gateway into the memories of his childhood, the smell of his mother’s hair and the feel of her lips on his cheek as she kissed him goodnight. It was the sound of her voice and the taste of cool lemonade on a hot summer’s day.

It was all the things he would want to remember of his childhood and some of the things he would not but which came as a package nonetheless.

And the tin still exists. It no longer takes pride of place in my bedroom but it has not been forgotten. It has become by the importance vested in it, not only a part of my father’s life and childhood, but my own too.

In these days of throwaway items, tvs that are cheaper to re-purchase than to repair and washing machines that seem to be designed to break down as soon as the warranty expires, I wonder what we will leave as mementos for future generations.

Our houses are filled with expensive rubbish made of plastic and chipboard. We now live in a throwaway society and it is this very mindset which is becoming entrenched not only in our decorating choices but in our moral standards and values too.

So, if like me, you are spring cleaning a little over this Easter period, be careful what you throw away…because you might just throw away something worthless which is absolutely priceless…

 

 

 

 

Dangerous dogs? Dangerous owners?

{Please excuse this departure from my normal topics but this is something I feel strongly about}

In the aftermath of another child being mauled to death by dangerous dogs, I have this to say:-

I'm  very much afraid that animals [and dogs in particular] are EXACTLY like people, there are good ones and there are bad ones. No amount of nurture can make a dog that is essentialy a psychopath into a lapdog [just as no kind treatment could turn a man of the same nature, into a kind loving one] .

It's absolutley impossible! And I speak as a dog owner of two dogs [a collie and a rottweiler] and owner of a multitude of past dogs.

Raised in Glasgow, I was always a keen observer of the nature versus nurture argument and believe me, I saw some rotten apples in otherwise good families and vise versa.

I'm no scientist and I have a creative bent rather than a scientific one anyway, so I guess my penny philosophy counts for nothing in the grand scheme of things but for what it's worth...let's accept that there are some dogs who are downright mad and will chew your leg off with no provocation at all.

Let's not however, turn this into a witch hunt - I am by no means suggesting this is true of ALL dogs, merely a minority - but like the minority of yobs on our streets who turn us against the entire population of youths, there is that chance.

I don't have any answers for you. I don't know if giving wardens better powers under law will make a difference and I certainly don't want to see dogs banned from public places, or any other drastic measure being taken.

But please let us accept that just as there are dangerous human members of our society, there are dangerous dogs. I hope we can find a way to weed both of these out of our environments and create a better, safer world for all.

My thoughts are with the family and friends of Jade Anderson x

I have just finished writing Chapter 20 of Volume IV. I have had no time to write over the past couple of weeks and was desperately missing my characters. It was so lovely to catch up with them again today.

However, it is unlikely that I will get much writing done now until after the Easter holidays due to having children and dogs constantly rampaging through the house. Oh well will have to turn my scheming mind to something else I guess ...

I wonder if Henry Winkler  [aka The Fonz] has read Volume I yet?

   The trouble with being a writer is that it is by necessity a very solitary profession. Yes, ok I can talk to other people at other times of the day but the main part of my day [and the main part of my brain] is caught up in whatever plot is currently unfolding on the pristine screen of my laptop.
   But rather than making me introspective; making me focus on what is important in life and my attitude towards it, it makes me oblivious to most other things. And for that I am deeply sorry.
   Writers have long had a history of weirdness and eccentricity. Not that this excuses anything but there is certainly a correlation between creativity and eccentricity. Perhaps being caught up with one's own characters and their situations is enough to deal with, without the problems of the real world too.
    Or is it that the imagined problems, which litter the pages of any book, are more seductively appealing than real problems, their issues more easily solved, if somewhat more imaginatively? I genuinely do not know.
    And I look at the characters in my books, strong women and strong men who are faced with such challenges in their daily life and I wonder how I would cope if it were me. There is courage and there is bravery in the real world, you only have to open the pages of any newspaper to see that. People who have been so wronged by life, so unjustly treated by others, so badly served by fate and chance and yet they soldier bravely on.
     I have heard it said that very few of us know what we are truely capable of until we are put to the test. Perhaps this is true but I am honest enough to say that quite frankly I would rather not find out! And I suspect I am not alone in holding that sentiment.   
    So, wherever you are reading this, whatever else you may be doing, take a moment out. Take just one moment to stop and look around you and appreciate what you have. Take pleasure in the easy breath which you draw into your lungs, the way the light falls attractively from a lamp or lightshade, the comfort of the seat under you and the safety you feel around you.
    There is so much grace in the world around us and we seldom stop to notice. This Easter holiday I plan to notice.