I call it 'research'

Fran has been writing in Being Me about looking up how to pick a lock (for plotting purposes!).

For the book I've just written I had to research how to vandalise a building site (scary but interesting), spells for bringing back the dead (and one for making them be dead again - which fyi are much harder to find) and the de-composure rate of corpses.  I have been building myself up to approaching a local undertaker and planning officer - and I don't know which one is the scarier prospect!

And this doesn't include all the stuff that you click on by accident ("...officer"). A friend of mine was looking doing some research about land contaminated with heavy metals. She was quite surprised to be faced with Slipknot and Black Sabbath.

I suppose we must all be keeping 'the authorities' busy - they must have us under surveillance by now. *whistles innocently*.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever found yourself Googling?

Why is my biro broken?

It was a year ago today I started this blog.  But having celebrated the blogs that came since in My 100th Post  today I'm just looking back at why I started and why-oh-why I called it Broken Biro.

I struggle with names for things. It's not that I don't have enough ideas - too many more like! - but I was painfully aware that it would probably develop in ways I didn't expect, so it couldn't be anything too specific.

Originally I thought it would be more about the nuts and bolts of writing, maybe even developing into some sort of writers' resource site, but once I began - and especially when I began to read more blogs and engage with other people online - I realised I wanted to be broader in content.

It took a while to realise a blog's a great place to store things that I'm interested in, even if no-one else read it!  It's a very neat way of grouping thoughts, pictures, quotes and links on a particular subject together.  I bet I use the Google 'search this site' tool in the  top right more than anyone! I wish everyone had it - it's an easy way to find posts you vaguely recall someone writing ages ago!

But because I like writing and scribbling down ideas, I wanted a loosely writing-themed title. Something friendy, slightly comical and human too. I had a list, but I just kept coming back to Broken Biro - you could find one anywhere, use it to write anything. In a way the blog has become like those little notebooks I always carry around - crammed with thoughts, contacts, rhymes, facts, ideas written in with assorted biros.

I'm rambling, aren't I?  

Anyhoo, that's where the name came from and I think it fits (although I am described in certain quarters as: 'Not a biro, not broken'. Bloody pedants!) - even despite my recent reinvention as a library assistant. It's not the best ever title - there are many out there I love and envy - but it's me!

10 Things you can do with a broken biro

• Not write a novel
• Not be able to write in the notebook you keep with you at all times
• Not mind-map ideas for stories and ideas in idle moments
• Make a big inky mess
• Shoot peas
• Drink 'Margaritas'
• Irreversibly stain trousers
• Emergency tracheotomies
• Press a restart button
• Fiddle

So - lots of things you can do with a broken biro... and that's before we even start on the whole lampshade / cutlery/ insert your own whacky idea here

Literary tattoos

I've edited newsletters, I've edited articles and reports. I've edited stories and poems.

But last week was the first time I ever edited a human body. 

To be fair, the tattoo was yet to be applied and I was only really being consulted on font size, but I noticed a grammatic error (it was a quote which had been cut down a bit, so the ends didn't quite fit together) and some dodgy punctuation. 

 
And, yes, it was one of my colleagues in the library - what have I been saying all along about librarians and dark underbellies (or in this case, two fairly symmetrical dark sides)?  You never know what lurks beneath the practical cardigan, stretch pants and sensible shoes. None of these pictures are of the tattoo in question, by the way.

It turns out literary tattoos are quite the thing. Not content with adorning their bodies with a rose/butterfly/names of soon-to-be-ex-lover/full-colour death metal scenario, today's bibliophiles, poet-fanciers and epigrammarians are wearing their favourite phrases, passages and even book covers close to their hearts...and other organs. 

I blame Robbie Williams.

It reminds me of the lines from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: 

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

More literary tattoos here: Huffington Post and here: Contrariwise and in the Guardian Books Blog but, for scale and variety check out the whole passages, illustrations etc at Yuppie Punk.

So you know what I'm going to ask, don't you?  What lines or phrase from a book or poem do you love so much that you would write them not in stone, but in your own skin?

Are Tuesday's blue (& what does Nick smell like?)

An interesting blog by InkyFool - (read it here) last week has led me in curious directions. It was about Synaesthesia - a neurological condition where, as InkyFool says: 'colours are perceived as smells, smells as sounds, sounds as tastes etc'. Interesting stuff and I'd expand on it but he's done it so well I need say no more. 

A comment from Mrs M led me to this article in the Guardian - one chap's take on the first leadership debate was that Gordon Brown's name tastes to him of soil mixed with Marmite, Nick Clegg's reminded him of pickled onions and Spangles (whatever happened to Spangles *sigh*) and Cameron's was like ink and macaroons. Topical tie-in: tick.

Seems odd, doesn't it? But what if more people make these sort of links than we realise - possibly even you? It reminds me of a loose and unscientific piece of social research I pottered with a few years ago. (Science? BrokenBiro? Yeah - who knew?)

I forget how it started. It's not a question we ask each other, or information we volunteer. But for a while I asked everybody I met what their week looked like when they pictured it in their mind. Stop reading this for a second and close your eyes. What does next Tuesday look like? How do you picture August? What about ten years ago? 

Mine's very dull, a bit like a diary - no colours - with the past petering out of my head to the left and the future heading off to the right. I was astonished by the answers I got. So astonished that I still recall some of them (no, of course I didn't write them down, I told you it was 'loose'):

• Lots of people pictured the different days in specific colours - i think yellow was popular for Mondays and blue for Tuesdays.
• One married couple, who had never discussed this, had the same colours for the same  days
• Some people pictured a cartoon bone-shaped week, with Saturday and Sunday being the bigger ends, often in brighter colours - except amongst the unemployed
• One person's year spiralled away from them 
• An eco-minded friend pictured his week as a walk through a tunnel of trees

There were many more. But no-one had ever discussed it before, there seemed to be the assumption that of course everyone imagined time the same way. Now isn't that interesting? Maybe some of us have other ways of thinking - unique to us and weird to other people - that we don't even consider. What? Doesn't everyone think the moon smells exactly like cardamom?

I'm going to continue my experiment now and ask you all  - what does your week look / smell/ sound like? 

Oh, and here's a bit of a poem I just wrote about it:

I touch you, taste that scent of early hyacinth
like a waterfall that flashes blue and pink.
Feed me on violins, let me gaze upon
the salty sweet of your voice, call my name
and I will come to you with kiss of cinnamon,
hot as fresh-baked newspapers
whose words tickle like spider ants,
leave an after-taste of cathedral bells.