Thursday 22 September 2011

A Political One

I do try and keep this sort of thing to where it belongs - political pressure groups, private discussion, that sort of thing - but this morning I need an outlet and this is my blog, after all. I'm a member of Amnesty International and an opponent of the death penalty in all cases, but last night was a particularly difficult case to stomach.

Huge doubts remain about Troy Davis' guilt, and he was executed anyway. The method was particularly barbaric - not just lethal injection, with which I have plenty of problems to begin with - but the manner in which it was carried out. To have allowed the execution to progress to the last hours three times previously is bad enough, but last night he was due to be executed at 7pm (EST), and at 7.05 news came that the Supreme Court had delayed it while they considered whether to issue a stay. A little over three hours later, the stay was denied, and at 10.53 the execution went ahead. Who are these people, to toy with a man's life like this? As The Guardian's Ed Pilkington tweeted from the scene, it doesn't matter if he was guilty or not - no human being should ever have to go through that.

Seven out of the original nine eye-witnesses - a precarious basis for evidence anyway - recanted their testimony in recent years. Some of them cited police coercion. No physical evidence linked Troy Davis to the scene. A man died - a husband, a father and a son: his life was taken away from him as he attempted to help a homeless man who was being attacked, and the perpetrator should be punished. Of course he should - life without parole sounds fine with me. We don't need people like that in society. The thing is, if it turns out (as it very well might) that Troy Davis was innocent all along, then there's nothing we can do to reverse what happened last night. I make no bones about it - if anyone hurt or killed a member of my family, I would want to rip them apart with my bare hands just to watch them die. Absolutely I would. Does that mean I should be allowed to? Is it justice or vengeance we're after as a society? Because only one of those is the mark of civilization.

Tuesday 23 August 2011

Something I Probably Shouldn't Admit To On The Internet (But Oh Well)

Is it bad that I've found myself identifying with Sylar from Heroes? Okay, it's bad, but is it bad bad?

I mean, I'm not going to start murdering people any time soon. But I've recently (belatedly) started watching the first season of Heroes (okay, getting newly obsessed with Heroes. Hey, I'm unemployed and sometimes the thesis just will not be written) and I found myself really relating to that idea of living a life that's much smaller than you expected it to be and suspecting that it's not what you were supposed to be doing. I'm sure, 100% sure, that I'm supposed to be writing. It's just what I do, and when I'm not writing I'm thinking about writing, so it's not an exaggeration, really, to say that it's my life. This - the whole unemployment/no money/still in Belfast thing - this isn't what my life is supposed to be, I'm sure of it. So, maybe I'm not going to start murdering people and stealing their brains (I mean, I'm only 5'2" for a start, and not particularly threatening. Both my younger siblings can hold me off with one hand. My 5 year old niece could probably take me in a fight) but I get that sense of isolation, the sense of, isn't there more than this? Aren't I more than this?

Of course, the fact that he's played by Zachary Quinto might have something to do with it as well.


Sunday 22 May 2011

Of Pestilence and Stories That Don't Know Their Place

Bleurgh. Pity me. I went to bed on Wednesday night with the vague sense of a cold in the works, and I've been down for the count ever since. It is surely not normal to be pestilent for this long. And I also have a hyperactive puppy that I can't get out of the house to walk and who, for reasons best known to his creator, is approximately the size of a small caravan but as intelligent and empathetic as a brick. A particularly stupid brick. That has suffered a recent head trauma.

However, there's only so long a virulent snot-fest can keep a writer down, and I've been taking advantage of the fact that, while the flesh might be weak, the brain is only partially marinated in excessive bodily secretions and it's not like I have any kind of better excuse to put off washing the damn dishes. So I've been trying to work on the ultimate goal again this weekend, and I've got a couple of poems sent off for a competition and I've also identified a couple of magazines who are about to bear the full force of my enthusiastic interest. The problem is that my absolute favourite short story at the moment, and the one I really, really want to share with everyone, is well over 5,000 words long, which kind of puts it around double the maximum length of most short story competitions and well into SCARY MANIAC!!!1!1! territory for a lot of magazines as well. It's not my fault. My characters wouldn't shut up. And then the protagonist insisted on looking for information in the wrong places for a while (for reasons of pacing, if you can believe it: I swear, the pacing was necessary!) and before I knew it I was pushing six grand. I wonder if other writers have this problem, pacing-wise? I read my work back over and it often feels like I'm rushing to the good bits so I stick in more exposition in case my readers feel like I'm cheating. I'm absolutely certain that's the opposite of the way it's supposed to be - didn't Stephen King once advocate chopping a third out of your manuscript in the editing process? If anything, I tend to add another ten percent. Oops.

So, being as how it's a Sunday and all that, and the world didn't end last night (super yay! Snark) I also tried to get moving on another short story that I've been working on now for well over two years. Although admittedly there's been a gap of, well, two years where I wasn't doing any work on it at all. So... yeah. But I'm not used to short stories giving me this much grief. Usually, what happens is: I get an idea, I think about it for a little while, and then I sit down at the computer and I make that idea my bitch over the course of a few hours. Voila: the creative process at work. Except this time, I feel like the story is making me its bitch instead. But I persevere, because I do think this could be quite good. I'm already a little bit disturbed by the vaguely sinister direction it's taking (which is incredibly tricky to write, since I'm using an unreliable narrator who doesn't think the situation is sinister and... yeah. I can see why I Bravely Ran Away last time) and I happen to know that the hook scared seven kinds of shit out of me when I... All right, I dreamt it. It's based on a dream I had. But really: you should see the kind of weird-ass, messed-up shit I dream sometimes. Actually, you shouldn't. Except in this case. And maybe one or two others.

Oh, and the thesis still sucks, but my lovely friend and former thesis-advisor has given me permission to turn a cold shoulder upon it for a few days. And, in the words of the great philosopher Terry Pratchett (whose career I unashamedly want), hate is just love with its back turned. I do love ya, baby. You just need to stop bitching at me for a while and make me remember why...

Tuesday 17 May 2011

Again With The Crisis-of-Faith Thing....

I don't know. Everywhere I look at the moment, I keep being smacked in the face with reminders of how difficult it is to (a) get published and (b) make a living out of writing. It's not like I don't know this. It's not like any of us go into the business for the yachts and the four Caribbean cruises a year. The chances of being the next JK Rowling have got to be on a par with any given RADA graduate becoming the next Catherine Zeta Jones. Or, I don't know, someone who went to RADA. She might have done. I don't follow her obsessively the way I might follow, say Zachary Quinto.... guh.... mmummumummuh... huh.... hmmm....? 
........
........
........

Nothing, I don't know. What?

My point is, it's another one of those Debbie Downer days (which seem, strangely, to be linked to the phases of the moon. Being female sucks, sometimes) and I'm basically on here now for three reasons:

(a) to moan; I might as well be honest about it
(b) to make fun of myself for moaning, and
(c) to avoid finishing off the boring stupid nitpicky damn stuff in Edge (I have, for example, discovered at least one Chapter Pluh and one Chapter That Follows The Last Chapter in the current MS, which made me snicker happily but also made me fear for whatever other placeholders I might have left in).

But I digress. To to get back to the object of today's Random Synaptic Rant, I'm not sure, for example, that I overly needed to know that middle-performing novelists of many years' standing are currently being dropped by publishers and agents alike, simply for not being the Catherine Zeta Jones (Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto) of the literary world. I'm not sure I needed to hear that it's harder than ever these days to find an agent and then for that agent to persuade a publisher to publish you (really, when is it ever not hard for these things to happen?). I know it's hard, but the only reason any of us manage to keep on trying is because we know it's hard but we also know it's going to be different for us. This is very difficult to sustain when we're assaulted from every angle with a chorus of how badly everything in the universe sucks.

People, everything in the universe does not suck. I intend to demonstrate this one of these days.

Oh, and my thesis is the spawn of a syphilitic demon from the seventh pit of Hell. Today. Tomorrow we might be friends again (though don't hold your breath, because it's requiring me to read Cicero at the moment and that whiny little sod gets right on my tits), but today we are not speaking and IT KNOWS WHY SO STOP ASKING IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO ASK!!!

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Little Bit of Win, Little Bit of Fail

I've been going a little bit online-ordering-happy lately (this is what happens to me when I'm broke: for some reason, my inner consumer awakes and starts feverishly justifying all kinds of purchases. Perhaps I need an exorcist?) so the package that arrived at my door today didn't overly fill me with any kind of thrills or giddiness, besides the vague delight at the prospect of receiving Leonard Nimoy's autobiography. Yes, that's right. I love me some Nimoy. I am an unrepentant fangirl.

So, imagine the flailing that was done when I opened the package to find.... My latest printed word! It's a book review that I submitted to a (self-promotion alert) very prestigious academic journal this time last year, and it's made it into print! Nothing will ever dull this feeling, I am privately convinced. Every time I see something I wrote, out there for general consumption, it feels a little bit like flying. I am sick with excitement. I am jubilant. I am rapturous.

In other news, though, I got a rejection from the magazine to which I submitted my short story a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a blow. Never mind that I was fairly sure it wouldn't be their thing (it's science fictiony-ish, but they are out-and-out science fiction, and I didn't think it would wash. It didn't) it was still a bad moment. This comes at a point where I'm physically (and occasionally violently) forcing myself to Sit The Hell Down and Look The Hell For Some Agents, so now would really be the time to work on developing that thick skin you always hear that you need, but... yeah. It would be very easy to use this as an excuse to not try at all. Fortunately, I'm just far enough into my thirties to be horrified at my lack of progress in the novel-publishing business and have spent enough time in my head to be able to reliably call myself on my own bulls***. Plus, while I'm looking for agents, I'm not working on thesis rewrites. To be honest, I would imagine that's what really did the trick...

Monday 2 May 2011

Excitement! Thrills! Awesomeness!

So - final redrafting is finished on The Edge of Heaven! Updated sample chapters are available at www.rachaelkelly.com - and, naturally, any interested agents or publishers can have the full draft on request! Even if you don't know that you want to request it, I'm going to be trying to convince you that you do. You have been warned...


Sci-fi with a beating, emotional heart, that's how I like to think of it. Smart future-noir, character-driven but with hefty dollops of painstakingly-researched plot. And when I say "painstaking", I mean painstaking. This stuff has kept me awake at night. I'm pretty sure it's watertight now.


Here's the synopsis (imagine it with the Deep Voiced Narrator from the movies. I do...)



Limbe do Cælom is not the worst place in the world to live.  Granted, an objective observer might protest that the worse places could be counted on one’s fingers; possibly, if pushed, adding a couple of toes.  Some of those places are also in Olvido…

In the late twenty-second century, the habitable world is shrinking. The answer is Olvido, a bi-level city; a metropolitan leviathan that scrapes the clouds that hover over what used to be Provence. Olvido is the melting pot of nations, a city of a thousand languages, where the dark streets explode with colour and festas and violence. It’s the place where you go when home is just a memory.

Danae lives alone in the nineteenth district, Limbe do Cælom, nursing the kind of secret that can get a person killed. Turrow lives a little life and plans for a better future, maybe even a job where no-one punches him. Neither one hopes for the spectacular or the glorious, so when the city throws them together, neither one is prepared for the depth of their connection. But it's the kind of love that comes with a price.

Because Olvido isn’t the land of happy ever afters. Crumbling buildings and casual violence vie with endemic disease to top the mortality lists in the crowded, heaving streets. And now there’s a dark shadow from the distant past creeping up on the city, ready to strike. Danae is going to have to make a decision: what would you give up to save the one glorious thing in an inglorious life?

The Edge of Heaven is a story about holding onto the little things in life that make us human in an inhumane world; about making a life where life is cheap; about conspiracy, loss, and hope.



Yes? Yes. PEOPLE, I WILL GIVE YOU CAKE.

Sunday 1 May 2011

Serendipity

Well, I've gone a bit quiet lately, admittedly, but it's been for good, honest reasons: I finished my paper - in the predictable last-minute chaos of "Aaaarrrrggghhhh-I-have-negative-time-to-write-six-thousand-words-and-I-know-nothing-nothing-NOTHING-WHY-GOD-WHY???", but it's finished nevertheless, and, if I haven't learned how to write without ulcer-inducing panic by the age of thirty-two, then I think it's reasonable to assume that this is my standard modus operandi for the rest of my life. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but I'm pleased with it and happy to have it sent off. Let's see if it makes publication now; it's a little on the short side, but fingers crossed.

Good God, did I just write those words? "It's a little on the short side"? Coming from me? About something I wrote? Could someone just quickly check outside and see if there are any other harbingers of the Apocalypse? kthx. I'll wait.

In other news, I've been carrying on with the final final FINAL edits of The Edge of Heaven and am almost finished now, which is scary, but in a good way. The intransigent middle section has been transigented. It is now transigent. I have even re-read it a quite, quite obsessive seventeen thousand times (possible hyperbole) and it seems to confirm the transigency report on fanatical review. So then I got to the beginning of the third act and was absolutely certain that I'd taken a shot at re-writing it during the doomed 2009 blitzkrieg but couldn't find any evidence of the rewritten scene on my hard drive. This was a cause for panic, as I had been in the habit of saving everything onto a pen drive until I abruptly (and predictably) lost it last year - fortunately, after I'd been beaten around the head with the stupid stick by enough people to back most everything up onto the hard drive - but the only possible explanation was that this draft that I'd been working from was not the most recent draft. Worse: the most recent draft must have been on the pen drive when it disappeared. Luckily, some of the folks with the stupid stick had also known enough about computers to recommend that I back stuff up to a... thingie, I don't know. One of those thingies that stores stuff in cyberspace for you. A cyberspace file storage thingie. There's only so much the stupid stick can do for the technologically illiterate. And it was there that I made the dramatic discovery: the existence of a hitherto unsuspected seventh draft!!! Ach, du liebe! Sorry, I've been reading the most fabulous fic site recently and that term crops up a lot.

Now, remember I was saying that I didn't know how much damage Insane 2009 Rach had done with the Insane 2009 Purge? I'd been quite pleasantly surprised at how little of the flesh was hanging from the skeleton of my poor, eviscerated baby. Turns out, Insane 2009 Rach, in serial killer style, had been hiding the actual carcass in cyberspace this whole time. So it seems that I've been working off of the last, decent draft before the insanity began, without even knowing it. All right, Insane 2009 Rach had a moment of clarity with the cytokine storm scene (impressed? Be impressed! You have no idea how hard it is to research stuff like that when you have no background in human molecular biology!) and I'll have to do an unexpected sweep through of the cannibalised remains at some point and see if there's anything else good that might transfer over, but, all things considered, it could have been much worse. I like this novel. I would like to release it on the world at large. If anyone has any inspiration (or a publishing deal that they'd like to give away), you know where I am.

Also: remember I have cake....

Thursday 28 April 2011

Vignette

How I love days set aside for nothing but uninterrupted, focused, dedicated, thesis-writing! I get so much housework done....

Sunday 24 April 2011

Lolloping Dogs and Existential Angst


Belfast is an unlovely city, haphazardly stitched with areas of such outstanding natural beauty that, periodically, I get what Anne Shirley (that’s the one from Green Gables, for those who don’t know. And, really, people who don’t know – you should fix that) once called “the queer ache”.  I’m a reasonable woman and I’m prepared to admit that if I’d read that line for the first time at any stage post-adolescence (chronic emotional immaturity notwithstanding) I probably would have snickered too (don’t lie: you snickered). But regardless of the shifting linguistic semantics, it remains the only time I’ve ever seen that experience recognized and put into words: that pang of anomalous sadness when you see something so lovely you can hardly find the words to describe it. Like, for example, when you crest a hill in Belvoir Forest Park and the first and only thing you register for a couple of seconds is the thick blanket of bluebells that absolutely weren’t there three days ago.
And then having one’s dog lollop through them. That kind of killed the effect.
Yes, I did spend a bit of time today reflecting on the hilarious quirk of fate that accidentally obtained me a lolloping, loopy dog after I’d written a lolloping, loopy dog into one of my novels that basically sets off the entire chain of events in a Very Bad Way (gasp! What happens? How does the dog make Very Bad Things happen? Who does it happen to and why? Visit my website at www.rachaelkelly.com for the thrilling account in The Edge of Heaven! Coming soon to all good bookshops!). And to be honest, some days (most days) (okay, every day) I wouldn’t be overly surprised if Jasper did bring about the Apocalypse, with a great big doggy grin on his face and his tongue hanging out. Extensive, enthusiastic stupidity: thy name is Jasper.
Well, I had good intentions today and I still do: I’m juuuuuust updating my blog and then I’m getting stuck straight back into Edge. As a reminder to myself, I have retitled the version that I’m working on thusly: The Edge of Heaven Draft 6 24.04.11 – THIS IS THE ONE. I scared myself the last time I sat down to do rewrites because I got the idea from somewhere that the central story didn’t work. That’s kind of a big thing to be wrong with it. Especially when it’s not actually wrong with it. The central story works just fine. But, unsurprisingly, trying to hang the entire freakin’ novel on a different premise proved, well, challenging. Happily, this is the only time in the novel’s extended history that this impulse has visited me and I’ve decided that, if ever a time machine is invented, I’m going to nip back to 2009 and smack that summer’s Rach soundly over the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
No, Summer-2009-Rach. No!
But, unfortunately, the scaredy-cat-runny-away-thing that I did back then means that I need to start again from scratch; there is no point in trying to head back to the point I left off before because (a) I don’t know how much damage has been done and (b) hey, my novel is Deep. Lots of stuff goes on in it. I need to get back up to speed. But I’m snipping and trimming along the way and I’m actually (whisper it) feeling pretty happy about it.
So, more big thanks to my lovely friend for posting a link to YouTube, which I’m going to link again here. I’m going to have another little watch off it before I gird my loins and get stuck into edits.
Do Something. Do Anything. Yes. Yes, I shall, stick animation, for you are wise and full of win.
What I did was, I submitted a short story to a magazine. Haven’t done that for a while. Gonna do another one tonight, or, at a push, tomorrow at the latest. Because, really, what’s the worst that could happen? If they say no, then I move on to another magazine. If they say yes, then angels descend from heaven singing the Hallelujah chorus, peace obtains between the nations of the world, swords are turned into ploughshares, and my dog and two cats run like blue blazes for shelter as I crumble buildings and shatter glass with my squee.
Big shout-out also has to go to my long-suffering mother, who had to deal with a dose of the Troubled Artist late on Friday night (“But, Mummy, really, what if I’m no good? I’m. Just. So. SCAAAAARRRREEEDDDDD!!!!”), and who managed me with her usual aplomb (“Get off your arse and do something. Go and do it now.”). I would not like to have to deal with me when I have a case of the existential angst, but apparently all was forgiven years ago when I won the Orange Northern Woman Short Story Award for Long Anna River, and spoke the immortal words, “I just want to thank my Mum for all her support.” Publishers and agents: a mother-daughter relationship hangs in the balance. Won’t you give me the chance to top up the goodwill again with a bit of, This book is dedicated to my Mum? Go on. I’ll give you cake….

Friday 22 April 2011

On Fear


“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” – Virginia Woolf
Today has been a good day.
For a start, I managed to only lose half of it to reading fanfic, and have, as a result been feeling supremely virtuous, diligent, and self-disciplined. I have made some (minor) headway on my paper, I’ve got some kinks ironed out in the website, I’m reconnecting with my fictional characters, and my lovely friend posted a reply on my Facebook page (where I’d posted a link to the website: self-promotion FTW) telling me she thought it was wonderful and had no idea I was such a ‘prolific writer’.
‘Prolific writer’. Verbatim. I cannot tell you how much I needed to hear that.
See, here’s the thing. Since I was tiny, I’ve always written. If anyone has visited the Bio on my website (and if not, why not? Go now! Nah, I’m just kidding: stay here and listen to me witter for a bit…), then they will know that I wrote my first “novel” at the age of five. Yes, I do the air quotes when I say it out loud as well, but it meant a lot to me back then. Writing isn’t something I do, it’s something I am. I read, years ago, about finding your Flow – the thing you do just for the sheer joy of doing it, for getting lost in it. That’s writing, for me. Without it, I’m diminished, as though something very fundamental is missing from my life. And I do believe that’s part of what scares me, because this feeling is like being on fire, it’s like being in love. It’s like jumping off a cliff with no idea if the pool below is deep enough to cushion the fall, or if I’ll go careening at breakneck speed into rocks hidden beneath the waterline. There have been other things, Big Things, going on for me over the past number of years, things that have needed to be worked through, and I’m not sure I had enough room in my heart to make space for this level of, well, obsession as well. I kind of feel like I turned my back on a fundamental part of me, because I didn’t have it in me to give into it properly. And now that’s a little bit tinged with regret, because here I am, older and (hopefully) wiser, and I’ve been denying something that I need the same way I need air and sleep.
Wow. Sorry. Deep.
But my best friend and I had a long conversation last night about fear and self-confidence, and the triumph of the one over the other. My doctoral viva, almost two months ago, was not a particularly positive experience (I passed, but with substantial revisions to make) and it was only last night, talking to C, that I realised just how much of a blow it had been. The thing is, I have it on good authority that every single doctoral candidate walks into the room terrified that their work isn’t good enough, and, for the vast majority of them, that turns out to be entirely unfounded. And, technically, it was unfounded for me: the feedback I got was positive – I have a publisher for my thesis, for heaven’s sake – but the fact is, there was a lot that my examiners decided they wanted me to do differently. It’s like having all your worst fears confirmed. God, I hope this is good enough. I really don’t think it’s good enough. I’m terrified it’s not good enough…
Oh.
It’s not.
This is my thesis. My baby. Three years’ work and counting; a lifetime’s preparation and love and Fangirly adoration. To hear that it’s fallen short of the ideal has been an absolute blow to the core of me, and it’s been incredibly difficult to come back from it. I will – I do – I am. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m some kind of delicate, fading flower that can’t take criticism, because that would bode very badly for a future in (a) academia and (b) writing, both of which would bode badly for my sense of self. I will come back from this; it was simply a question of connecting with the fact that I’d been knocked away from it in the first place. It would take a lot to knock me out altogether, and I want this badly.
But not quite as much as I want to see my novels in print. And, by finding other things to do with my time; by not making space for this burning desire; by allowing the Angel to whisper in my ear; by procrastinating and prevaricating and letting years slip by without trying, what I’ve accomplished is a soft cushion of certainty that I have not failed to get them published. How can you fail to achieve something when you don’t try?
It’s scary. It’s huge and scary and it terrifies me in a way that nothing else does. But that’s not a good enough reason anymore…

Look at Me, Ma! I'm Blogging!

Well, here I am on the internet, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. If anyone's reading this, hello!!! And I mean that in the slightly maniacal way it sounds as I haven't really been on Blogger long enough to have any friends yet so I'm a little bit starved for attention.

Why am I blogging? Well, my lovely shiny, brand-spanking-new website is now up and running at www.rachaelkelly.com  and this will be where I feed news of my adventures in publishing to that site. It's time to get serious about getting my novels into print - some of them have been hanging around, completely finished, for ten years now. I write sci-fi. If I don't get my thumb out, it's not going to be sci-fi so much as social realism by the time they see the light of day.

Also, I'm finishing up my thesis at the moment and, while that technically means I have *no* time on my hands, what that translates to in real terms is that I spend most of my life online. I might as well so something productive with my feverish procrastination.

In exciting, thesis-related news, though, I have a publisher for the little darling when it comes out of the other end of this extended brain fart I'm currently experiencing. Very, very exciting. My baby's gonna be a book!!! I don't want to say anything more than that for now as no contracts have been signed and I don't want anyone to get spooked. But holy, mother-lovin' yay!

So, hi internet, this is me. I'm Rach and I will be sporadic and undisciplined at best regarding this blogging lark. I will probably segue off into all kinds of non-writing related stuff, although I will try to save excitable fangirly stuff for my other blog.  But sometimes I just want to get all enthusiastic and squee in the hope that someone is listening. My family may even pay you for this service; it's either that or choke me until I stop talking some days.

Other stuff that I will certainly wax lyrical about is thesis-y related things, probably a lot about Mark Antony and Cleopatra (they are my guys. I own them. Back off), the novel that I'm working on which isn't the novel I should be working on - or in fact, the thesis I should be working on, and the indignity of job-hunting with an almost-PhD. Hopefully one day soon that will become the indignity of job-hunting with an actual PhD, but that would involve me finishing the damn thing...

Watch me! Follow me! Be my friend! And then, three years from now, you can say, "Oh yes, of course I used to follow her blog before she was famous..." and everyone will be all like, "Wow, you are the awesome!" Also, I have cake. Virtual cake. Okay, I don't have cake, but I'd give you cake if I had some...