Today's Tweets

Tweet, Tweet, Here's a list of all my twitter postings in the last 24 hours.

• 23:42 On the Blog : Today's Tweets tinyurl.com/cc98qv
• 09:10 Morning world - How was your weekend?
• 09:26 See my profile pic? That's not my hand, or Jr's hand - got it off the web. But I did try and take one like it this weekend.
• 09:27 Except he wouldn't sit still long enough.
• 09:31 I'm behind on my follow backs - so apologies for that.
• 09:35 @fableton You and me both. It'll be 2010 before we know it.
• 10:19 @commonsense4 So Is Dollhouse any good? We don't have it over here yet but it sounds like a good concept to me.
• 10:42 On the Blog : Do this make me "Popular" tinyurl.com/ddnnyp
• 10:56 @victoriablisse Didn't know you were a Reds fan. Not sure i like you anymore. lol
• 10:58 @commonsense4 It might work with a proxy, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. I guess Hulu is like the BBC iPlayer then. Catch up TV
• 10:59 My Contact lenses are really causing me problems today. It's a new pair as well. Not good enough.
• 11:04 Time for a meeting. Joy.
• 11:04 @victoriablisse I suppose so. I'll let you off just this once.
• 11:31 @victoriablisse I know. What can I say, I'm a gentleman. Well, sometimes. Very occasionally. the rest of the time? My devil horns fit nicely
• 11:59 @victoriablisse Now that i can believe.
• 12:01 LUNCHTIME!!!!!!!!!
• 13:47 @Cynical_Woman Just get out in the snow and enjoy it.
• 14:06 Another blow to fatherhood: IVF mothers can name ANYONE as 'father' on birth certificate tinyurl.com/bebhxd via @ShareThis
• 16:10 Been sent an e-mail titled "Blonde's year in review". Very funny.
• 16:11 @lissamatthews Hey, Me Too! Right now I'm leading towards the latter.
• 18:44 On the Blog : Here we go again. Would you be my baby's father? Even though you're a woman. tinyurl.com/ahr2km

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Here we go again. Would you be my baby’s father? Even though you’re a woman.

Sometimes I really do wonder just what the hell is going on in Britain. The Daily Mail (that respected source of common sense and balanced reporting – not) has a headline today claiming the end of fatherhood as we know it.

It seems that a Bill is before parliament which will allow anyone who consents to be named as the “father” on a birth certificate – regardless of gender, genetic relationship to the child or romantic relationship to the mother.

Yes – regardless of gender. That means that a woman could name another woman as father. That may be her lesbian life partner or even her BBF. In fact, they may even go to the extent of replacing the word “father” with “Second Parent”.

So it’s goodbye Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and hallo to “First Parent’s Day” and “Second Parent’s Day”. What the hell kind of crazy mixed up world do we live in?

Okay, so a homosexual couple (of either gender) want to bring up a child as a family unit. That’s fine, as long as both parent’s understand that they need to put the child first. It can’t be any worse that a heterosexual couple who split up after a few years. But the fact remains that, for now, you still need an egg and a sperm to make a baby, and that means you still need a man and a woman in the birth certificate.

The part of this that gets me is that the person named on the certificate need not be genetically related to the baby. But i thought that was supposed to be the whole damn point of the things – to allow tracing of genetic lineage. Okay, so woman may have lied in the past and put their husband’s name when the genetic father was someone else, but to be so open about it as to write into law that genetics are unimportant is preposterous.

Still, the Daily Mail is hardly the most objective publication, and this may be another example of their overreaction to anything and everything that labour does. I’d like to know more about it. I’d like to know the details and get some reassurances that traditional family is not being irrecoverably undermined by this legislation. But, honestly, I don’t think I’ll get either.

Do this make me “Popular”

The answer to the above question is, of course, no. But I’ve been monitoring visitors to my website and blog since the ‘re-launch’ at the start of the year and I’ve seen a marked rise in figures.

Right now, I’, averaging around 75 visitors a week to my website. Not huge I  know, but not bad either. A third of those visitors head for my free stories page and a tenth look at my e-books page. Now, if only a couple of those e-books page visitors goes on to buy a copy of Charlotte’s Secret or Lost & Found then I’ll have to profess to be happy.

As for my blog, it’s averaging 75 visitors per post (across all places where it’s posted). Which again, in the grand scheme of things isn’t huge, but it is higher than this time last year, so I have to be happy with that. And the trend is increasing, so that’s all good too.

I wonder how much of this is down to my usage of twitter. My number of twitter followers has doubled since the start of January, and I’m getting two or three new followers a day. How many of those are genuinely interested in what I have to say – who can tell? But it can’t be bad to have my name ‘out there’ noticed by more and more people.

So, am I popular? By world-wide standards, no. By my own meagre standards, yes. Popularity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

To Diarise or not to Diarise.

I have been considering starting a new experimental blog and I honestly don’t know if I should or not. Let me explain me idea, and then any thoughts you may have will be gratefully received.

All authors will tell you that one of the key ways to improve as a writer is to write. Anything. Just write. It’s why I write on this blog. I really don’t expect anyone to read the rubbish I spew on these pages – but I don’t write on them for that reason. I do it as practice. Writing practice.

Now, some will say that it’s a waste of time. Instead of writing on this blog, I could be writing or editing actual fiction – real stories which will (I hope) be destined for publication. Personally, I don’t believe that. I believe that every word you write, no matter where you write it or what it’s about, is all good. So if I don’t feel that I can write high quality prose or string together so top notch dialogue, I write something else – anything else – and it quite often ends up here.

Of course, the other reason I write on here is that sometimes I just have stuff I need to get off my chest and these pages are a convenient place.

So, in the spirit of ‘all writing is good no matter what it is’, I’ve been thinking about a new blog. Not a blog to replace this one – I enjoy writing this one too much. But a second, supplemental blog.

It will be, essentially, a diary. A “What I did today” diary. But not my diary. It will be the diary of a fictional person. And the events in the diary will be fictional. All the other people in the diary will be fictional too. In other words, it’ll be a narrative without end. A serial if you like. What do you think? Sound like a good idea?

My plan would be to write diary entries as the mood takes me on the blog and then post several entries together as chapters in an SOL archive of the ‘story’. So it would be raw, mostly unedited, fiction, given away for free.

Okay, I admit, there is an element of marketing here too. I would naturally hope that if the diary draws people in and they like what they read, they might consider buying my books too.

This is still very much ‘an idea’ at present. I have no clue who the diarist would be, what his life would be like, or what the direction of the plot (such as there is one) would be. I’d be ‘flying by the seat of my pants’ to a large degree.

So should I go for it? You thoughts if you please.

Today's Tweets

Tweet, Tweet, Here's a list of all my twitter postings in the last 24 hours.

• 23:42 On the Blog : Today's Tweets tinyurl.com/djb6nk
• 08:52 @markinreading I missed QT last night - was too tired and had an early night. Might watch it on the iPlayer at lunchtime. I know I'm sad
• 10:54 @Kinchie It's just looking out for you and your wallet
• 11:12 Did you know you can get my books on the kindle? Not in the UK, as we don't have kindle yet. But in the US you can. is.gd/l53g
• 11:40 I'm sitting at my desk fuming because I need to talk to someone who's not at her desk (and so not answering her phone)
• 11:41 i could go and look for her, but I'm just too damn lazy to get out of my seat.
• 14:37 Cadbury's fingers or jammie Dodgers? Hmm, tough choice.
• 15:57 I've not been much a tweeter the past couple of days. Guess I must have been busy without realising it.
• 15:58 @TowcesterNews Quite - but i bet it'll be a hell of an atmosphere in Paris tonight.

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