Ideas for a Novel

I have always loved the idea of writing a novel. As a kid, over the long summer holidays, when it was rainy and cold outside, my sister and I used to write stories. The first adult story I started writing was about a group of friends who lived in a village. They knew each other from school and college and work and most had lived there, and known each other, all their life.
I started it off basing the characters on friends that I used to go to the pub with when I was about 18. The characters and the relationships were, as I said, initially based on my own group of friends. But the story progressed at a much different rate to real life and very soon, the story became entirely fictional.

I have been writing this story for the past seven years. Initially, I dreamed of it becoming published. However, even if I do ever finish this story (I'm at about 70,000 words and far from finished), I think it is far too personal to share with the world.

I have several other stories I have in my head at the moment. They all have strong characters in them, and they just tend to pop up in my head at times and I managed to write. But so far, I'm yet to finish a story. Here are my current favourite soties that I am working on:

Katherine:
Katherine works as a lawyer. She is very focused on her career, works long hours in the office and doesn't have much time to herself outside of work. But on a rare night out with her former fellow students at university, she meets a man called Darren and they have a one night stand. A few weeks later, Katherine realises she is pregnant.

Initially, Katherine decides she has no choice, and books an appointment to have an abortion. A documentary the night before though, forces Katherine to change her mind. And she decides to tell the man, whom she has not seen since that night, that she is pregnant.

Slowly, Katherine starts to fall in love with Darren and plans to return to work within a few weeks after the baby is born. But things don't go to plan for Katherine.

Ella:
Ella is a strong, confident woman at university. She is sociable and everyone loves her. She is training to be a teacher, something she has wanted to do for years.

And then, Ella meets Derek. He is charming and protective and appears madly in love with her. But things change when they get married.

Slowly, Derek turns in to a possessive, domaneering man. And then he hits her. But Ella stays, each time forgiving him. One night, though, Derek goes too far and hits their eldest child, Holly.

The next morning, with their two children, she leaves.

Ella starts to build a new life with her children and plans to go back to university to finish her teacher training. But when she files for divorce, Derek doesn't like the idea that timid little Ella is actually leaving him. And so, he goes after her.

Ellie, Ava and Jane:
Ellie is a teacher, in her late twenties. She is dating a businessman who often travels overseas for work. She loves im but knows he's not the type to settle down.

Ava is a single mum in her early thirties. She works as a nurse and enjoys her nights with the man she met on a night out. She doesn't know how long he will be around, so he hasn't her daughter and has never even been to her house. The fact he travels for business suits her.

Jane is a thirty year old office manager. She is deeply in love with her boyfriend and, unbeknown to him, stopped taking the Pill six months ago.

And so, when each of these women find out they are pregnant, they are surprised. Jane is delighted.

Lee is horrifies to discover that three of the women he is seeing are pregnant.

When these women meet in ante-natal class, they discover that the same man is the father of each of their unborn children. And so the women decide to exact their revenge on Lee.

I love these stories and can't wait to complete them.

Please let me know what you think of them. Leave any comments or suggestions below.

Getting Ready For Christmas

I'm off work next week. I can't wait. I've barely started my Christmas shopping - I have so much to do. I have a few presents for my immediate family and my best friend's son and I've made my Christmas cake. And that's it. Today, we went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of the dried ingredients for all my Christmas baking.

I made a start today. I have made some meringues (they're OK but I don't much like eggs, and I think they have absorbed the colour from the baking paper as they have a slight brown tinge), which, if I keep them in an airtight container, may keep until Christmas. I also made a batch of fudge. I have failed at this so many times before, and I just cannot do failure at cooking. And I actually think it is starting to set. I'm so proud of myself. This is only a practise batch, though.

So, for Christmas, for the children in the family and my friends' children, I have decided that I will, in addition to buying them a present, give them a bag full of home made sweets and treats. My best friend thinks it's a lovely idea. She even wants one. I have so many ideas of what to put in them. I have recipes for sugar mice and stripy biscuits and Turkish Delight and loads of other yummy sounding things. I just don't know if the bags I plan on getting will be big enough! I am excited that I'm going to be able to decorate the bags with pretty ribbons. I'm actually really excited about it!

I also need to crack on with my mince pies. I made lovely mince pies last year and I was going to make a start on them today. But I left my recipe book with the best ever mince pie recipe in at my
 house and I'm busy baking and cooking at my mums.

I Think I'm In Love - HELP!

I have met a wonderful man and think I am in love with him. I am both deliriously happy and very, very miserable.

It feels different to anything I have ever felt for a guy before. He is absolutely gorgeous. But I think he has a great personality, too (unlike the last absolutely gorgeous guy, who was a lying, cheating thing). He is friendly and funny and warm. He smiles at me when I get to work and he often comes and says hello (followed by a 'Oh god, I'm not working with you today am I?' and a smile to show he's joking).

Every time I think of him or see him, I can feel my pulse quicken and my breathing change. I have giggled over him with my friends. Despite being 25, I have never been a giggle-over-guys kind of girl - I have tended to keep my crushes to myself. Or tried to be all grown up about it.

We flirt all the time together at work (to an extent - as you may be aware I am a nurse, so in front of patients, we are of course sensible and mature) and it must be so obvious cos everybody has noticed. I felt so good after a couple of shifts with him as the flirting just didn't stop! He even started the flirting the other day.

However, I don't know if he is single. One of the girls at work says he is single, but I don't know. But I am too shy (about the only thing I am shy about!) to ask him, or to take the flirting any further, just in case he says no. And seeing him at work after that would be so embarrassing.

He's also a little bit younger than me. To me, that sounds like a problem. But then, I realised that the last guy I was with was 2 years younger than me, and the one before him was a year younger than me. So, actually, I guess that's not a problem, really.

I don't know what to do now, though.

Help!

Book Review - Midwife on Call by Agnes Light

Plot Summary

The book starts off with a young Agnes Light (pseudonym) fainting at her first birth. What is particularly mortifying for her is that she has two children of her own.

Agnes started training as a nurse some years previously, only to discover she had become pregnant. She gave up her post as a student nurse, quickly married her boyfriend and had two baby boys in quick sucession. She and her husband split up. She later remarried and had two more children.

She worked as an Auxillary Nurse (HCA) for some time when her boys were young, and then commenced her midwifery training as a direct enterant. And fainted during her first birth.

Throughout the course of her book, Agnes describes some of her more memorable episodes, working in the hospital, in clinic, in the community and as an indepenent midwife, and the difficulty she faced in the profession due to poor hearing.

Book Review

Unlike many books of this type, Agnes is still a practising midwife, approaching retirement and dreading it. Also, uinlike many midwives of her generation, Agnes did not train as a nurse first. These make this book unique in this popular and expanding genre of health care professionals memoirs.

This book is funny and sad and is definitely well worth a read.

Book Review - The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell

Plot Summary

The novel starts off when Melody Browne is 9 years old. She wakes up with her mum and dad outside her house shortly after her ninth birthday. Her house is on fire.

Melody has only a couple of memories of her childhood before the fire, and grows up, estranged, from her parents, with her son, whom she had aged fifteen. This is part of the reason they are estranged.

The book moves from nine year old Melody to 33 year old Melody, weeks before her son's 18th birthday. She is unhappy with her life. She is a single mother, living in a council flat and working as a dinner lady. And then, on the bus one night, she meets a man. He admires her shoulders. She thinks he is a freak. And yet, she agrees to a date with this man.

He takes her to a hypnotism show, and Melody is chosen to go up on stage and act out the part of a five year old. Afterwards, Melody faints and slowly, over the next few weeks, Melody's memory starts to come back. It happens slowly. Sometimes, she just recognises a house or a hairy mole on a lady's face, and knows she knows it. Other times, she actually has to be told about it.

By the end of the book, Melody actually knows what has happened to her and has met some of the people who, during the first nine years of her life, were important to her.

Book Review

The book starts off a bit slow, and to be honest, after reading the first few pages, I was almost tempted to give up. However, I persevered and it was worth it. As you learn more, along with Melody, through her fleeting flashbacks, or her feeling that she knows something, you are eager to learn how she got from there to here.

The book flips back and to, between now and 1979-1981, not always in order, so if you like a book that is chronological, it may not be for you.

I'm being deliberately vague, not wanting to give away the plot, but it is so surreal. It is a very exaggerated book, and if things like that happen in real life, then I must have lead even more of a sheltered life than I thought I had.

By the end of the book, I was in tears about Melody's life.

Except the disappointing start, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Book Review - Matron Knows Best (By Joan Woodcock)

Plot Outline

Joan started training as a nurse cadet in 1966. She tells of her early years as first a Cadet Nurse and then as a Student Nurse, and how she was expected just to do as she was told.

She then became a Staff Nurse and worked in a variety of different places, including A&E, a respite hospital where they had to refer to the patients as clients and weren't even meant to do basic things such as send off a urine sample (!) and in an isolation hospital.


Her first post as a Sister was in a GP practice when the post was new, later becoming a Marie Curie nurse, a prison nurse and working in a centre for women who had been subjected to sexual assults.

All this was interspersed with raising her son, caring for her mother in her last week or so of life and caring for a friend at the end of her life.

Review

Being a nurse myself, I absolutely love these books of previous nurse's experience. I find the change from how we practise today so very different and absolutely fascinating.

At times, I was laughing out loud at the stories in these books. I know what can go wrong in a hospital. Joan has difficulty using the sluice the first time she is expected to use it. I, too, had difficulties when using the sluice once as a student, and whilst I didn't end up soaking a Sister, I did have an HCA having to help me scoop faeces up!

I do however have one major criticsm, and it is of Mrs. Woodcock herself, and not of her book. At the end of the book, she criticises the care that nurses with a degree provide, giving two examples, one that her elderly neighbour was left in a disgusting condition (incontinent with her head in her dinner plate whilst the nurses sat at the nurses station) and the second that a degree level student nurse told some one in a hospice that she didn't do mess. All I have to say is the fact that the neighbour was left in such a terrible condition is not the fault of degree nurses. It may simply be those nurses. Secondly, the fact that just becasue the student nurse was being trained at degree level does not mean that all degree nurses are like that. I am a nurse with a degree and will help clean up all types of bodily fluid. Likewise, I have worked with nurses trained the old fashioned way who do not see it as their job to get their hands dirty.

Whilst I enjoyed the book, the last few pages, criticsing degree nurses, left me fuming.

Book Review - Yes Sister, No Sister (Jennifer Craig)

Summary

This book is based on the author's (Jennifer Craig) experience of her nurse training. It starts on her first day as a student nurse, where she meets friends, many of whom are important through the rest of her life. She also meets the House Sister, a woman who takes delight in her power over the young students.

It follows the author through her training, starting as a nurse in a preliminary training school, where just the sight of a ward terrifies her, through to her time as a junior student nurse on the ward, and slowly graduating her way up to ward sister.

Review

As a nurse myself, these sorts of books interest me. The way these nurses were trained is so different to the way I was trained. As a student, I was supernumary - our university would have gone mad if we were given the responsibilities students in the 50s were given! The ward was organised very differently to how it is today. Not only physically - we no longer have Nightingale wards, but small 4-8 bedded bays with the odd single side room. But also in the work division. Sister does not have overall responsibilty for the patients; nurses are allocated specific bays and provide care for these patients, which encompasses many of the roles Sister did in the book. The hospital is also a lot less formal these days. We have Modern Matrons and we are all on her first name terms with ours.

Jennifer Craig though still shared many of my worries as a student and a newly qualified nurse. I remember the first time I stepped on a ward - it was terrifying. I was worried that I would never get used to dealing with urine, vomit and faeces. I didn't know how I would ever be able to do things like changing dressings without being sick. I, probably along with most of my friends, went through bad placements and the feeling of wanting to quit. And those first shifts as a newly qualified nurse! They were the worst.

My only criticism of the book is that it is much, much too short. There are 340 pages, but I read them all in a day.