Time to review a book I think.

Before I go any further, I must point out that this is one of the books given to me free to review by Penguin Books. The only impact this has had is that it meant I got to read some books I might not otherwise have stumbled across. Nor are the Amazon links I’m using here affiliate links. All I get out of these reviews is the joy/horror of reading new books and sharing them with you 🙂

The Book – Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

The facts:
Paperback, 400 pages, ISBN 9780141322919, pub 05 Jul 2007, £5.99, Puffin

That last – Puffin – is a bit of a flag. Puffin is the childrens/young adult imprint of Penguin so if you’re an adult-book-snob, this won’t be for you.

The blurb:
“I’m Annabel. I’m the girl who has it all. Model looks, confidence, a great social life. I’m one of the lucky ones. Aren’t I? My ‘best friend’ is spreading rumours about me. My family is slowly falling apart. It’s turning into a long, lonely summer, full of secrets and silence. But I’ve met this guy who won’t let me hide away. He’s one of those intense types, obsessed with music. He’s determined to make me listen. And he’s determined to make me smile. But can he help me forget what happened the night everything changed?”

The review
As I’ve already said, Puffin books are aimed at the younger end of the market and I’d probably pitch Just Listen to the 15+ girl market, give or take a few years depending on maturity. The writing isn’t so simplistic or childish as to put adult readers off, but it has been pitched to its intended audience and you might find it takes a little while to get used to the style.

From the blurb it’s fairly self explanatory that this book wants to give you a view from the other side, a sneak-peak into the life of the popular girl. To be totally frank, this immediately set my back up and set me out to loathe the book from the start – the ‘popular’ girls made my life unmitigated hell at school, so why would I want to read about them for fun!? Even ten years on, empathy is a bit much to ask for. The opening of the book didn’t exactly endear itself to me either. Far too much scene setting and overly conscious ambiguity. Oooh, look, little miss popular has a secret and her life isn’t so great after all!

I got all that from the blurb.

But I stuck to it because, well, I was curious as to what exactly had happened to bring about Annabel’s fall from grace, and I’m glad I did. Somewhere about chapter three or four I found I was getting caught up in the story and I didn’t put the book down till I’d finished it with a lump in my throat at three in the morning. Personally, I’d have stopped the book one chapter earlier but I can appreciate why the author felt the need to wrap all the loose ends up with a pretty bow.

I never totally warmed to Annabel and the villain(s) of the piece lack any subtlety of character, but the supporting cast are total gems. If anything, the middle sister, Whitney, made the book for me and I’d willingly read more about her. As for the plot, yes it is a little predictable in the grand sweep, but I will admit to being knocked by the main plot revelation. Either kids books have got a LOT darker lately, or my own segue to sci-fi/fantasy in my early teens spared me some fairly gruesome YA fiction!

Would I recommend Just Listen?
For the intended audience: yes, though a qualified yes. I might be being overly prudish, but I’d suggest that parents of younger teens read page 263 to 265 first, if only so they can be prepared for questions that might arise.
For older readers: maybe. It depends on your own personal taste and tolerance for highschool girls and all their neuroses. I enjoyed it but I’m not convinced I want to read it again.

Three mugs of tea.
(More about the rating system used can be found on the about page).

Those of you who have been following Bright Meadow (and me) for the last few years might remember that each year I run the Race for Life for Cancer Research UK. My reasons for doing it are personal and already documented here on the blog.

This will be the third year in a row I’ve paid for the pleasure of running/jogging/walking/staggering the 5km around the Southampton Common (and yes, it is as far as it looks) in order to raise money for cancer research. All I ask of you is that, if you are so inclined, you sponsor me to do so.

As I’ve said, I’ve already paid to do it – anything you donate will go directly to Cancer Research UK to fund research. I don’t even get so much as a free t-shirt, which is exactly as it should be.

So, what next? Easy. Click on this link – www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/BrightMeadowYearThree
You’ll be taken to my online sponsorship page, and then all you have to do is click on the bright pink “Sponsor me now” button and follow the on screen prompts. If you are UK based and pay taxes, don’t forget to click the ‘gift aid’ option as it means your donation automatically grows by 28%.

Between us we’ve already raised over £350 in the past two years, so let’s keep that total going up. The page stays open for donations till the end of July, though I race this Sunday, so if you want me to race in memory of someone, let me know before then 🙂

And that’s all I have to say, other than this will be the only event I ever ask for money for through Bright Meadow. Please give something – 10 pence or 10 pounds, whatever you feel comfortable with, it all helps. According to Feedblitz, there’s currently 106 people reading through RSS. If each of you just gave £1, that’s £100 right there.

I have been tagged by Anne Helmond with the ‘Eight things about me’ meme for no reason other than that she’s clearly got it in for me. I mean I’ve got archives here stretching back to 2003 – how the hell am I going to find one thing you don’t know about me, let alone eight?!

Ah well, here goes nothing.

The Rules:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

The Things You Don’t Know:

1. I have to put my left shoe on before I put my right shoe on. I’ve no idea why, but if I put my right shoe on by accident first, I have to take it off and start again.
2. I have the biggest crush on Eva Green. The woman is just too gorgeous for words.
3. I get a discount on Clarks Shoes because my dad is a shareholder. When I was growing up this meant I only got boring Clarks shoes and I hated it. Now I buy my own shoes I love it because it means I get discounts on lovely boots like these.
4. I tell people I couldn’t do it, but really I would love to be a writer for my living.
5. If I have cereal for breakfast I have to have it with water because that much milk in the morning makes me feel sick
6. I’m still secretly (or not so secretly by the end of this post) hung-up on two guys from my school days: Ed Wilson and Tim Decamp. No idea why but the pair of them just keep haunting me in my dreams. Damn them and all the preppy rugby playing Millfield kind!
7. I’m awful at keeping in touch with the people I love. If they don’t contact me, I’m likely to not speak to them for months on end. Before last week I hadn’t spoken to my mum in about a month. Yes, I feel bad about this – but to be fair, she has more of a social life than I do so she’s never AT home to call!
8. I have very complicated rules pertaining to toast. Most store-brought bread (i.e., Hovis etc) can’t be eaten soggy, so it needs to chill and THEN be spread with spread. However, if it is good quality bread (i.e., from the bakers) then it HAS to be had hot with the spread melting in. There are many exceptions and caveats to these rules and they are complex enough that Moose still can’t grasp them after three years.

And there’s the eight. Would you believe it took me over an hour to come up with them?! Oh, and I’m going to ignore one of the rules because I refuse to tag people. I find it cruel and unusual, so I shall leave it to y’all to tag yourselves if you are so inclined 🙂

I know I’m not the only one here who’s having a moment of social networking overload.

I got my arse on Twitter because everyone told me life was not worth living without it… I think I’ve tweeted about three times in this past week, and the most exciting thing I had to share was that I’d seen Maureen Lipman on the Northern Line and that a pigeon had shat on me. Not exactly earth shattering stuff.

Then I got me a Facebook profile because, well, all the other cool kids were doing it and it’s hard to measure the possible impact of something if you don’t experience it yourself. From the first, Facebook has baffled me, especially at the beginning when I had no friends *sob* Since then, people have found me and asked to be my friend. If I have a passing acquaintance (real world or online) with them then I’ve most likely agreed to their request.

I have enjoyed Facebook to a degree, but I’m still on the fence about it and can happily go for days forgetting to check my profile. The stalker element appeals somewhat ghoulishly to me but that works the other way too and I’ve felt more than a little stiffled over what I feel comfortable ‘posting’ there, knowing people from all walks of my life can see. It’s bad enough having the RLO from work reading, but to have old school friends privy as well?!

And then we come to the latest on the scene, Pownce (and was there ever a word more treacherous to a mildly dyslexic British girl?) The buzz about Pownce has been just silly, especially around 9rules. Even those who have no idea what it’s for are talking about it.

Here it goes again. Yet another social networking tool that I’m going to have to give a try because if I don’t, I’m not going to understand half the conversations the people around me are having.

I didn’t ask for a Pownce invite exactly, but one landed in my inbox (thank you Tammie 🙂 ) and it would have been rude not to accept it. So now I have the grand total of… three friends on Pownce. I could have more because I know the names of a good forty or so more, but – and here we get to my main problem with social networks, both on and offline – I hate to go up to people. My MO is to wait for people to come up to me. Reticent to the point of ridiculousness I will admit it, but it’s the way I’m wired.

Plus, I still don’t know what Pownce is for, any more than I can really see the place in my life for Twitter or to a certain extent Facebook. When I want to tell people about things, I post them here on Bright Meadow. I have Flickr for my pictures. I have email, IM and a mobile for the people I want to talk to. Why do I need more? Why do I have to spread myself across multiple sites?

I liked Twitter when I was in London because I could blog to a certain extent through SMS from my mobile. The problem of having a laptop where the battery is buggered and phone that lacks even a basic web interface is that when away from my computer, I’m cut off from the net… Most of the time, no big problem, but every now and then it would be nice not to have to wait to share stuff. Twitter isn’t really the solution though – a way to interface easily with my wp-admin panel for Bright Meadow on the other hand… Sweet thought.

Facebook I think I’m starting to get to grips with, or at least find ways it fits into my life.

I like how I can watch people’s statuses change – this takes care of the only interesting thing about Twitter, really.
I can link to my Flickr pictures on my profile.
I can tweet to Twitter on the rare occasions I feel like it from within Facebook, though the refresh rate is a little laggy at times.
I can import my blog posts to my profile – in theory at any rate. Facebook keeps choking on my rss feed, refusing to update.
I can connect to my friends and friends-of-friends, sending them mail easily from within the site.
It’s got a birthday notification tool – useful. That only shows the day before… not so useful.
I have a ‘wall’ people can leave embarrassing drunk messages on.

But to view any of this activity, I have to go to the site itself. I get emails saying “someone’s written on your wall”, or “someone sent you a message” and I have to go to the site to view the message. I can understand why it does this, but it does bug me some when I’m at work, receive the notification, but can’t see what it is till I get home because work have banned Facebook.

I’ve never really gotten into the groups thing on Facebook. Oh, I’ve joined a few but never actually participated. I don’t as a rule write on friend’s walls because the things I have to say are normally private. So Facebook fits into my life better than Twitter, but it’s still a slightly strained relationship.

And as for Pownce, there I really don’t know where I stand. I want to give it a try before I consign it to the long list of services signed up for and never used again, but right now I really can’t see how it fits in with things. More importantly, I just keep forgetting to sign into the website. Yes, I downloaded the desktop application which is, I admit, as pretty to look at as the rest of the site, but it’s not gelling for me. Give me an RSS feed at least.

I don’t know what I want, I think that’s the problem. I know there’s some mythic application or site out there which will have me swinging from the chandeliers in girlish glee, but I couldn’t tell you what I wanted that site to do if you promised me a date with the latest favourite RLO.

I know integration with Bright Meadow would be key, as would seamless integration with Flickr. Finding friends would be easy too, either through real name or their web-aliases. Oh, and you wouldn’t force my screenname to be more than four characters. (If I could reserve ‘Cas’ and ‘Bright Meadow’ on every webservice in existence now and in the future, I would be a happy, happy bunny). There would be easy ways to assign people levels of permissions and RSS feeds for everything imaginable. I could, if I wanted, view messages people had sent me within the site on some other medium – email, at a suggestion? Perhaps most importantly, I could upload content from a variety of means, including SMS and email. There might be a sweet desktop application that was as straightforward to use and as effective as Skitch is for Flickr.

More than that, your guess is as good as mine. I know I want to stop spreading myself across multiple sites. I only have so much attention and time to spare. There are so many things that I’m already letting pass me by because I can’t fit them into my life – Last.fm, Pandora, podcasts. All things on paper you’d think I would love. LinkedIn, Joost… You name it, the chances are I’ve looked at it and thrown up my hands in despair. Perhaps I’m not as social a person as I thought.

This is me throwing my hands up and admitting I’m defeated. I’m not sure I can do it any more. I can’t cope with more than 300 RSS feeds. I think I’m maxing out the number of Flickr contacts I’m happy with. And I don’t think there’s room in my life for yet another social networking site. If nothing else, I’m growing tired with the constant rounds of “Oooh! Look at this sexy new site that can do everything include make you a three course dinner!” followed by everyone and their dog signing up, then a few weeks of frenzied activity, before it all dies a death as everyone migrates to the next best thing since bread came sliced.

That’s not how I act – like in all parts of my life, it takes a lot to get me involved, but once I am, I’m hooked for good. I’m just not fickle that way.

The more I think about it, the more I think I’ve got my home on the web – Bright Meadow. Flickr does me for images. Facebook does me for the slightly more real-world connection to people. And 9rules does me for when I want to be more social… Why do I keep thinking I need more?

I just quickly want to say a big thumbs up to Apple and their Southampton Apple Store – thanks to them, I have a working and highly shiny iPod once more, for the same cost as a new shuffle.

How? Why?

Aw, since you asked so nicely, I’ll tell you.

My beloved iPod is an old 3rd gen model which I got way back in the mists of time (April 2003 to be precise) and it has served me wonderfully. The battery has never caused me a moments grief, managing to hold a full days charge up till the end. Yes, it got all scratched and dented to hell and back, but they were honourable scars. I loved my iPod from the moment I brought it.

Yes, I admit I grew stupidly attached to a lump of metal and plastic, but it just fitted into my life so well and kept doing what I needed it to do so flawlessly that I started to take it for granted and got seduced by a prettier model.

More fool me.

This past week the poor iPod finally admitted its age and started randomly loosing ten minutes of time a day. Not a big problem till you remember I use it as my alarm clock… Then the alarm clock randomly decided not to work and my heart sank.

One trip to the Genius Bar – free help with your Mac products, how great is that?! – and it had been muttered over by the helpful Genius. I wasn’t reassured when he told me he’d never seen this problem before… One hard restore later, I toddled back home hoping against all commonsense that that would have done the trick. Alas, it was not to be, so tonight I took myself back to the Apple Store for another meeting with a Genius.

This Genius was even more helpful and candidly admitted there was nothing he could do for my poor iPod bar administer it’s digital last rites. As my face fell and I started to do the sums in my head to see if I could afford a new video iPod, he uttered words that were music to my ears –
“Of course, for £49.99 I could just do a straight swop and give you a new iPod. It wouldn’t be a new model though…”

I could have kissed him then and there, but I restrained myself. Just.

You see, I don’t want a shiny new video iPod. Don’t get me wrong, they are sexy and shiny and lovely and great, but I don’t like the click wheel. It just feels, and I know this is silly, but it just feels too clicky. On my old iPod you just brush the buttons, no pressure required – it’s like you’re activating a computer in Star Trek or something. With the new video iPods, you have to push the button and it feels so tacky and twentieth century somehow. Plus, with a screen that big I’d be petrified of scratching it! At least with my old black/white screen all I’m going to obscure with a scratch is the track name.

Yes, a shiny new video iPod would be shiny and new but… well, everyone has one! Mine still has some retro chic going on 😉

So we did a swop. My old 15gb 3rd gen iPod got packaged up and marked for recycling and I got handed a worryingly shiny new 15gb 3rd gen iPod. All for £50 and ten minutes of my time.

Not bad going really.

Kudos to the Apple Store in Southampton. Yes, one of your operatives ran away from me last Saturday, but you’ve done good by me and my iPod. You didn’t once try to sell me something I clearly didn’t want – you listened, tried a fix, and when that didn’t work straight up offered me a replacement. For a gadget so old in tech-terms it should be getting it’s bus pass.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to scratch the back of my new/old iPod some – I’d forgotten how disconcerting the mirror brightness is!

Oh, and if you’re thinking of trading in any of your Mac products for new ones, take them into an Apple store for recycling and you get 10% off the purchase of your new toys. Again, pretty good.

Some days, becoming ‘known’ has it’s benefits. Yesterday was one of those days – coming home to find an advance copy of William Gibson’s next book on the doormat is probably one of the nicer ways man (and Penguin) have ever invented to end what was a fairly shitty day.

But the rare golden moments aside, was it better when Bright Meadow, and Cas, slipped by under the radar with just a handful of readers? Not that I exactly have oodles upon oodles now, but I have more than my fair share.

Along with my treasured readers, it turns out that I have “influence”. I’m not sure how you measure influence but, according to people who should know what they’re talking about, I have it. There’s this trust, apparently, that’s built up between blogger and reader/commenter, which means if I recommend (or conversely trash) something, it’s not totally inconceivable to think you might let my opinions sway your own.

I’d never thought of it like that before. I’m just here, shooting the moon, saying the things I want to say… Never figured I could really turn y’all into my minions just through the words I said. Or that I’d be schmooozed by people oh so nicely so I might be more inclined to say nice things about them/their products.

So where’s the down side?

Free stuff = always cool. Free stuff I enjoy = even better.

But there’s this accompanying nagging feeling that I should then blog about the free product, and I do so hate to be forced to write on certain topics. Then you have the expectations of the readers bearing down on you. This feeling in the back of your mind of “oh crap, I haven’t posted anything in near a week…” Heaven forfend I should miss two Sunday Roast’s in a row – there’d be a riot!

Or the times when I want to write about something that’s happened but I can’t, because now pretty much everyone and their pet cactus reads my blog. I can’t vent about work because people at work have the URL. I can’t blog about crushes overly much because, yup, you guessed it – invariably they’ve somehow finagled the URL out of me or have stalked me to Facebook. There are family things I can’t mention because… You get the picture. I don’t force any one of these people to read Bright Meadow and 99% of the time I love that they read it, comment and participate because for better or worse it’s a huge part of my life, but there’s that 1% of the time I just want to let of steam and I can’t.

I thought about starting an anonymous blog but I realised I like having readers too much. To be not known now after I’m starting to take baby steps toward getting there… Shudder time. I can bury some of my rants and frustrations in the fiction I occasionally spew out, but people are starting to work out THAT code too.

For sure, no one is forcing me to put these words on the Internet. I could trap them up inside a journal or in a text file on my hard-drive, but it’s true a problem shared is a problem made smaller. And not just problems. Some truly fantastic things happen in my life that make me laugh out loud for the sheer absurdity of them – yet I can’t write them and share them with you, dear blog readers, because they involve other blog readers who I would never want to hurt in any way with my words.

I could just write and post regardless, I suppose, telling myself I don’t care what you all think, that if you don’t want to read it you can leave, but that’s not me. I try never to intentionally hurt people. If there’s an argument, I tend to just step away. It’s a curse, but I’m the one with the “nice personality”. I’d far rather sit on some story than post it and cause pain. The more people I get to know though, the more stories there are that I have to sit on.

And let’s not forget the truly odd feeling you get the first time you walk into a bar full of strangers, only to be hailed by cries of “Cas!” and “we’ve all be reading your blog – it’s great!” As I said, odd, and not just because I haven’t been called Cas to my face since Ti and I last spent a summer on the beach. The mild confusion over names aside (which get more hilarious when all parties concerned are well lubricated on alcohol, trust me) it’s the sheer stalker-heaven that is blogging which has hit me in the last week or so. “I’ve been following your progress on Twitter” and “recognised you from your hairstyle on Facebook” are two comments that are brought forcibly to mind. Along with “yes, we’re all going to be reading your blog…” said to me more than once by people I’ve grown to love and respect.

All things designed to make one shy country lass want to hide under her duvet and never blog again.

Sometimes.

Maybe.

OK, I lied. I love it. I was always the quiet one at school, the one no one remembered. To know that my words in some small way stick in people’s brains? That’s just the best feeling in the world.

But sometimes I think it would be nice to go back to how it was before Bright Meadow took up so much of my life. To when I could rant about the Cute Canadian and not have to worry if he was reading. Or when I could tell verbatim what happened down the pub. When Neko turned to me the other week and said “You’re going to blog about this, aren’t you?” I realised quite how far into my life it’s all gone (and how blessed I am to have people around me who understand) and then I realised that, actually no, I couldn’t blog about it for assorted reasons. And that sucked.

For about ten seconds till she poured me another glass of wine and the vampire stories started up again.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: this blog isn’t all of me. I would that it were, but the closer it gets to a real reflection of my life, there more I’m going to not be able to say. Some things just aren’t bloggable for whatever reason. Which is sad when I’ve set out to write but life, but then that’s the way it’s supposed to be. If you knew everything about me from my blog, we’d have nothing to talk about when we met up. Just think how boring the conversation would be then.

Just forgive me if I go a bit into hermit mode on occasion, please. I’m just having a personal moment of stage fright 😉

Milestones are important. I could give lots of reasons why, but I won’t. Just accept that they are, OK?

Which is why I was firstly all excited when I noticed that I’d posted 700 posts, and then a little narked when I noticed what the 700th post was. I mean, a cryptic throw-away post about what a chicken I am is hardly worthy of a milestone post now, is it?

Ah well, it’s done now. Not a lot I can do to change history.

But I just wanted to say thank you to y’all – over three thousand comments is pretty good going, especially considering only posts since December 2005 have comments due to the move from Blogger to WordPress and my own server. For the curious, that means there have been roughly 450 fresh posts made on brightmeadow.co.uk and you’ve all been adding to them in your own inimitable style to the average tune of 6.9 comments per post.

You commenters really have made Bright Meadow so much more fun, so again, I thank you. And for you other people who I know are out there, lurking at your keyboards, reticent to join in – come and say hi. We don’t bite and I want to hear what you have to say 😀