The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Are Fictional French Detectives
... and it's not nearly as interesting as it sounds, unfortunately...
(Thanks to everyone who voted on my ‘What Should I Call My Newsletter?” poll this week: it looks like we’re going with The Awkward Girl’s Guide, so I’ll do my best to get round to updating graphics etc as soon as I can; in the meantime, though, here’s your Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Week, which is free to all subscribers, although rumour has it that paid subscribers will be rewarded in heaven with forest green coats and quite a lot of shoes1…)
I’m just going to begin by saying I’ve totally mis-sold this week’s newsletter: there are no fictional French detectives, it’s just me in a wool wrap coat and beret. But we’ll get to that later. (It’s a nice coat, it’s worth the wait2, trust me…)
For now, let the record show that I got my Covid booster this week — and if you could possibly sing that line to the tune of Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License, that would be great, because I’ve spent the entire week now walking around going, “I got my Covid booster this week / just like we always talked about…”, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should be the only one to suffer like this.
Sorry.
Anyway, I was booked in for two jabs (Covid and flu, both of which I get on account of Terry and his immune system3) on Monday afternoon, and I know the Covid jab in particular always makes me feel… well, like I have Covid, basically… so I spent most of Sunday preparing for it to take me down, like it usually does. The house was cleaned. The laundry was done. My mid-week newsletter was written in advance. I was totally ready to spend at least 24 hours lying around looking delicate and wan, like an Edwardian lady with the vapors, and, if I’m totally honest, I was kind of looking forward to it. Because, when you have kids, being ill is basically the only opportunity to get to have a bit of a rest, isn’t it?
Then, on Sunday afternoon, Max came down with some kind of lurgy.
We have no idea what kind of lurgy this was, really. If you’ve seen my Instagram Stories this week, you’ll know that, according to Max, it was the kind that makes you want to only eat cold things. What I was to discover, however, was that it was also the kind that keeps you up all night, and off school the next day, too. The poor soul had a horrible time of it, so I spent the night in his room with him, then the next day on the sofa, playing Roblox and watching really quite a lot of videos about the Titanic, before heading off my jabs… which, as predicted, totally wiped me out for the next 24 hours.
All of which is to say that this week has been a bit of a bust, really. My life really only works when it’s scheduled down to the last minute, and absolutely no one gets sick, so I’ve basically felt like I’ve spent most of the week playing catch up, and trying to re-work my complicated hair-washing schedule to fit the times I’ve had to leave the house: which have, thankfully, been few and far between.
To be fair, the biggest issue of the week wasn’t actually the lurgy: it was my random decision on November 1st to sign up to NaNoWriMo (Which some of you will know is a writing challenge in which you attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel in November) and use it to try to finish my next book by the end of the month.
I feel a little bit cheaty doing this, because I’d already started the book in question (I think I was about 15K words in, although I wasn’t paying much attention because I thought I still had months to finish it…), and also because, well this is my job, so it’s obviously not as much of a ‘challenge’ for me as it is for someone who’s having to fit it around a real job, or whatever .
The thing is, though, there are badges. On the NaNoWriMo site, I mean. Every time you hit another goal, you get a badge, and this is exactly the kind of meaningless reward I love, so I am ALL IN. It’s the first time I’ve done NaNoWriMo since about 2005 or so (When I wrote 30,000 words of a “novel” that was literally just a bunch of scenes from my life, with nothing to really thread them together) but I’m the kind of person who takes totally made-up deadlines v v seriously, so, yeah, that’s been a whole lot of extra pressure to add to my week.
(Oh, and I’m ForeverAmber on the NaNoWriMo site if anyone wants to be my friend there…)
Here’s what else I’ve been getting up to this week…
READING
Reminders of Him, Colleen Hoover
[Warning: this bit contains spoilers for the book, so scroll past if you haven’t read it and want to…]
Back when Terry was first diagnosed with kidney failure, I went through a phase where every single book I picked up seemed to have a dead or dying fiancé in it. It actually got to the stage where I’d have to read the end of everything first, just to make sure nothing bad was going to happen, and this is why, when I was going through my ectopic pregnancy a few years ago, I passed the time by re-reading the Harry Potter series, rather than risking anything new, that might have the potential to trigger me.
This is also why I’ve been avoiding reading Reminders of Him, even though it’s been on my bookshelves for months now (I actually think it was one of the books Terry bought for me as “research” when I started writing romance…). Because this book has a dead fiancé. (Well, boyfriend, but samesame.) And a mother who’s been separated from her child. Neither of these things exactly say ‘light read’ to me, and, honestly, given everything that’s happening in the world right now, I feel like light reads are all I can really handle most of the time. There’s just so much sadness already, you know?
Colleen Hoover, though, is the queen of the messy romance, so I can’t blame her for sticking with what she does best, and although I wasn’t looking forward to reading it for all the reasons above, Reminders of Him managed to hook me in, right from the first page, with one of those “everyone is in the wrong, but you feel for them all anyway” situations.
(Side note: Hoover is particularly good at creating opening hooks that make you want to read on. I suspect that’s one of the reasons she’s so popular on TikTok. We can learn much from her in this respect…)
Anyway, this book follows Kenna and Ledger, who fall in lust after one meeting: which is inconvenient, really, because Kenna’s just been released from prison for the involuntary manslaughter of Ledger’s BFF, Scotty, and is in town hoping to see the daughter she had while incarcerated, who’s being raised by Scotty’s parents, assisted by none other than Ledger himself.
So it’s messy, and complicated, and just a tiny bit unbelievable at the end, where <SPOILER ALERT> Scotty’s parents go from hating Kenna so much they took out a restraining order against her, to being all, “We’re making lasagne, why don’t you bring her over?”
Yeah.
(Also, I was screaming at the bit where Ledger and Kenna are about to have sex (or have just had sex, I can’t remember), and he tells her he’s “read a lot of books about feminism” and that’s why he’s never told her how beautiful she is. Dead.)
I added a bunch of other stuff in parentheses here, but I’ve taken them back out again because it seems I have way more to say about this than I thought I did, and now I’m wondering again if I should start doing “proper” reviews of the books I read here, or just stick to these little synopses that don’t really tell you anything?
WATCHING
Archive 81
This is a supernatural horror in which a video archivist is offered $100,000 dollars to restore and digitize a collection of home movies from the 90s, which were found in the burned-out wreck of a New York apartment building. (WHY CAN’T THIS KIND OF THING HAPPEN TO ME, JUST ONCE? Because I would LOVE to digitize your home movies from the 90s for $100,000...)
The catch, however, is that he has to do this in a creepy, isolated building buried deep in the woods (This is literally how it’s presented to him. It’s like, “We’ll pay you $100K, but you’ll have to stay in a creepy, isolated building in the woods, and there’s a strong possibility you’ll go mad. You cool with that?”), which was, of course, the kind of hook that’s irresistible to me. You’re telling me there’s a creepy old apartment building AND a creepy old “facility” in the woods? Are there basements? Please let there be basements…
We binged the entire series in a week, and although it was overly-long and complicated in places (And yes, there are basements, which, ALSO YES, people go into, having obviously learned absolutely nothing from all of the many horror movies involving basements…) fI ound myself getting really into it around half-way through, so I’d say stick with it if you’ve just started watching.
It’s naturally now been cancelled after just one season, though, so it’s possible that I’m alone in all of this…
TRYING
I went to Starbucks for a Caramel Brûlée Latte, but they didn’t have any, so they gave me something with the word “waffle” in it instead that I can’t actually find on their menu:
They didn’t give me a festive cup with it. I was disappointed because, as you can see from the caption, I was wearing a plaid shirt, and had thought that I might finally crack this “autumn” thing, and understand why other people enjoy it so much. But no, it was just me drinking a very sweet coffee in a plaid shirt.
Bummer.
TRYING
OK, this is the bit with the fictional French detective:
(It’s also the bit with a really bad photo taken from Instagram, because the light is non-existent at this time of year. Sorry about that.)
I don’t know, I just feel like I should be sitting at a pavement cafe and smoking Gauloises in movie from the 1940s or something. Love that for me.
The coat is this one (affiliate link), and I’m sad to report that it’s unlined, and therefore not particularly warm, so not really remotely appropriate for a Scottish winter. But it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to own a forest green coat, so I’m keeping it.
And now, my friends, I have to go and write my NaNoWriMo words for the day, or… well, absolutely nothing will happen, really, but I’m going to do it anyway.
Until next week,
The Awkward Girl's Guide to Reading Snark About Yourself On the Internet
I did a thing I swore I would never, ever do. I read a gossip thread about myself on the Internet.
I cannot confirm this.
It’s really not, soz.
For those of you just joining us, my husband is a kidney transplant recipient and is on immunosuppressants because of it, so I’m offered these jabs as a kind of “belt and braces” approach to protecting him from getting sick.
You look fantastic in the coat and beret!