Category Archives: Knockout

Roll Play Exercise

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Spot the difference



There’s a song by Janis Ian which contains the line “Let’s drink a toast to those who best survived the life they led”. Well – here’s to all those who’ve survived the drink and the toast – and the butter, the foie gras and the chocolate. Life catches up with us doesn’t it. The bus driving blogger novelist carboholic lifestyle has done its worst. It is not that the situation has got out of hand. It has got out of both hands. Soon I’ll have enough spare tyres for every wheel on the bus. It had to stop. I have joined a gym. When I finish my morning shift I go straight to a modern cathedral of techno-flab where there are merciless machines that have ways of making you squawk.

 Even worse the place is half full of skinny pert anorexics who do not need to be there and spend their self righteous time watching the sagging wobblers gasping for survival. If that were not bad enough I encounter neighbours and acquaintances to whom I would never present myself in rippling Spandex. I have seen a few films of an erotic and anatomical/educational nature where the participants wear masks so as not to be recognised (I assume) by friends, work colleagues or members of the book club. A small comfort like this would double membership. Luckily a little ray of sunshine fell upon me today. I staggered back through the door after a treadmill session watching a TV show about liposuction and heart transplants. There on the mat was a lovely sample selection from “Hotel Chocolat”. Damn – I must have forgotten to cancel my subscription. And before I move on to literary matters here is a video clip I found whilst researching Vladimir rootin tootin Putin. I think it’s about dieting. Keep watching until you see the ballet dancers! Wow – Oscar likes this video, but only the classical paintings. Seriously though – this world has so many cultures! Rejoice.


Tomorrow (Saturday 3rd March) is a free KDP day for “Knockout”. The tweetbots and all the engines of cyber triberr will be whirring. I apologise for all the self promo. If you’ve not got your copy roll up roll up. Here are the links:
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Amazon France
Amazon Germany
Amazon Italy
Amazon Spain



Emma thinx: Beauty is only deep skin.

Nessun Dormitory

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Oh – too brief my little trip to France. Even the problems of the great freezage did not weaken my love for my adopted home. We lumbered our possessions back into our UK rented house grateful that there were no floods, ice or power cuts. There was no heating because the modern state of the art wi-fi thermostat system had suffered an “Electronic anomaly”. And there was me thinking it just did not work. A while later the auto fire alarm system developed a “signalling issue” and activated the “tamper threshold” on the theft alarm system. Stuff is trouble. More stuff is more trouble. My stuff and jargon decoder is at critical meltdown. 


I left the return booking a little late and there were no cabins on the 2300 service from Caen to Portsmouth. That meant a night in the “reclining chairs”. Deep joy! For a few extra pounds or euros you can buy a kit comprising of eye shades, a small blanket and an inflatable plastic pillow. Gilles and I gazed into each other’s blindfolded  eyes and puffed into our stubby inverted nipple nozzles. My Romantic novelist DNA flipped towards a public love scene where two lovers – perhaps fleeing from her crazed aristocratic family of sword wielding knights, attempt to escape on a Brittany ferry to find love in a Portsmouth concrete housing block. Realizing that members of the family had boarded, their one chance to cement their love before death was in a reclining chair, surrounded by iPod playing  bleeping electro-geeks, a snoring drunk with a body freshness issue and some leather clad English biker who wanted to talk to his mate about his chain lube. Oh yes – public sleeping is a whole new game. Luckily there was a coffee machine a and a door to the outside deck. I would have kissed my lover in the moonlight if there had been any moon and if he had woken up. And they say Romance is dead! Now – looking for a link to Pavorotti singing “Nessun Dorma” (no one shall sleep) I saw on the you-tube menu this truly inspirational moment which many of you will have seen before. Even so – please allow yourself a pure surge of surprise and joy and watch this clip. You cannot tell a book by it’s cover – except mine. 


On the doorstep at the English house there was a soggy frosted parcel containing the hard copy of “Knockout”. Wow – it looks like a book that a proper writer person could have written. Rosina  had ordered me a copy to proof read. Oh no – can I face reading it again?….




Emma thinx: Read to a child. You can cover a book by it’s telling.



Oxymorons Run Amok in Free Sales Orgy

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You know that insecure feeling when you come downstairs after the party, slithering on a wine soaked crushed samosa that obviously missed the eloquent mouth of some unknown drunk, who at the time, was the wittiest and most flattering intellectual in the world? For a moment you gaze around wondering how cobwebs could possibly suspend so many popper streamers until you remember that the spiders have had several months of freedom to weave silk ropes that could catch an anchor chain. And all because the lady is a novelist and does not do dusting. She also does not do ironing or checking of sell by dates on mundane produce. How can a pickled onion be out of date? Who did not know that 2007 was a vintage premier cru champagne year for bloody pickles? 


This is a long way to explain that I had a bit of a party and that I know my life is being sucked into a femaelstrom of microwaved Swedish meatballs. Apparently Edgar Allan Poe first introduced the masculine form of the word into literature. I must start to get a grip. I get up in the morning in my furry dressing gown and check my sales, my blog comments, my facebook likes, my triberr karma rating, my Amazon chart position, my twitter re-tweets and my Goodreads reviews. I am become  Electro-Fem, a Joan of Story Arc, a Romantic Grovelist at the keyboard shrine. Then I put on my woolly pully and go out driving my bus. Good job all the other motorists don’t know that the huge vehicle in their rear view is being driven by a neurotic self doubting ego maniac on a cobweb and pickled onion literary guilt trip. This life would not have happened to Jane Austen.


Oooh – I’m glad I got that lot off my chest. The party was on account of having some 3,000 folk reading my book Knockout! by Saturday. By the end of the weekend I had shifted 8,000 books. Of course, they were all free on Amazon’s grand KDP Select Adventure. My serious “mined from the sorrow of life” prize winning etc. short story Sub-Prime had shifted 328 copies. You know, I always bear in mind that I sell the Romance for 77 pence in the UK which is less than a candy bar. When it became free, there was an exponential increase in interest. And I bet you that someone who got it for nothing reviews it and says it is a soppy formula written load of sex, cops, robbers and slobbers. (Oooh, I love it!) I do hate it when people miss the point. As I hover on the publish button, Amazon have just started tweeting me as a “mover and shaker” and I’m still high in the rankings with sales increasing if anything. Does this make me feel secure? Of course not. See my thinx today. My future sense of security rests on the continued real sales.  I think there might be a few bad hair-trigger days.


 Somewhere in the fog of the party, an intellectual goatee beard type is reading the sell by date on my pickle jar and asking me what year it is. “Look”, I exclaim, “I’m an artist – how the hell should I know?”


Emma thinx: From the ground you see the mountain. From the peak you see the drop. 

Writing the Sex in the Text

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Shall we talk about sex? Oh OK – if you really want me to. I write Romance. Well – love and sex actually. In “Knockout” there is a story but it is a story about a sexy woman going headlong into a passionate sexathon with a beautiful guy. They do it in her bed. She does it all on her own. They do it in his bed, in Paris, several other places and they do it on a boat. They kiss and caress the burning totality of each other’s lips. They adore each other’s skin and musk. She craves the untiring hard knot of his controlling, urgent muscles. He longs for her abandon, surrender and softness They eat highly flavoured food and breathe the garlic of shared ecstasy. They drink champagne and lie naked in the warm open air almost as a sacrifice on the altar of lust. Oooh….if I don’t stop tweaking the knobs I’ll have to jump in a cold bath. And just think – it was me, a middle aged working woman who wrote it.

self portrait

 The basic reason why I write this kinda stuff is that I love it in life and I love it in fantasy. I know it may be a brazen to say that, but it’s true and if I’m honest then in my writing about sex I’m not short changing my readers. When I write a sex scene I am there and willing it on. Actually, it’s writing itself.


There are technical problems in writing about sex. The big one (Oooh steady on) is the line between artistic, pornographic, anatomical, purple and naff. Different generations and cultures have different levels of frankness and taste. In the supermarket today I noted that I could present myself for chlamydia venereal disease testing while I was waiting for a new batch of granary wholemeal bread to reach the shelves. All those intimate swabs quite put me off the idea of a nice buttered crust.  I was reading some supermarket Romance where the young lady presented her sexual arousal by way of her “dampened swath”. That brought me out in a fit of the giggles. I figured if things didn’t gel with the guy at least she could wipe down the kitchen worktops. In another similar epic, the young lady exposed her “creamy crevice” – so far this is the worst image I have ever encountered. Well, at least there is some classy alliteration. Finding the words, the euphemisms and the poetic passion of human juice is not always easy. Just this morning I encountered a curly triangle of love. Well, I suppose if your car broke down you could prop it up in the road to warn other drivers of an obstruction. It’s all about context is it not?

knobs and shafts

When it comes to the male side of the park, obviously a female can only guess and ask a lot of questions. My lover man is never shy. His only complaint is that males only get to ride one wave while  females can stay in surfing all day. – (Hmmm – depends on the quality of the water). Males provide more vocabulary problems. I have a few dislikes – such as swollen manhoods. It always makes me think of those old naval war films where they wear 10 layers of clothing under a duffle coat.. Luckily, my readers are mostly female and factors such as size of hands, width of shoulders and tone of voice can excite more response than shafts, lengths and pulsating needs. For fun I googled “knobs and shafts”. Not quite what I had in mind. With males it’s just so easy to get lost in engineering. 


But here is the core of the issue. People like sex. Even people who do not want actual full contact sex are interested in it. Sex is us. We are born what we are and half the world has the opposite set of bits. 

And then, of course there is love. Oh Love, oh love, love, love. This purest thing, rejoicing in the pollution of its own sense, losing focus so as to see nothing but the other. It is where the ego both asserts its power to give and shrivels in a humility of powerless longing. Our love finds expression and escape in physical sex. Cold sex is what my friend the poet Oscar Sparrow describes as the “gaping gash of loveless love”. Getting this blend right is the work of the humble hack Romance writer. 

“Knockout!” my romance novel on Kindle is FREE on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th January if you want to check out how I deal with these tender literary parts.

Amazon USA
Amazon UK


Emma thinx: Love me – love my love.







Cook The Books With A Gastrocrat

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Italy is to be led by a technocrat. Greece has been handed to a technopinion of technocrats. All of this misses the vital point. What is a crat? Also what is the proper collective noun for a number or gathering of crats? And another thing – how could you hire one or apply to be one?
“Excuse me Frau Merkel – we have a problem here. Could you send us a couple of crats?”
Anyway this whole issue has led to me re-branding myself as a writocrat, busocrat, laundrocrat and very much of a gastrocrat. World governments please note. If you need to pay a big wedge of cash to hire a crat, you need look no further. Once you’ve put a crat in your team you’re on the way to salvation.


Well now, I’ve been kinda loafing about and kinda busy. You poor souls had to clear your inbox every single day of my output and I figured you might need a rest. I actually needed to get down to some good solid chocolate sampling and digging up of sexy tingle dust to sprinkle on a video trailer for “Knockout”. I’m sure some of you already know that it takes about a day to do 10 seconds of visual. If you would like to see my efforts they are here.


At an educational establishment where some of my bus kids attend, they offer “life skills” training. Often this involves retail orientation and expertise development. You probably know this better as shopping. The idea is to show them how to handle money and how to evaluate the best price. During a recent tutorial held in a hypermarket, a student was grabbed by security guards for impulse buying without payment. There are several terms for this practice. The suspect explained that he had been asked to obtain goods at the best possible price. Now, that lad got the best deal in the world.  And they say educational standards are slipping!


Tonight as I drove my bus on a 4 lane highway at about 50 mph a black cat flashed into my vision as it sprinted across the 2 lanes to my right, across my path, body swerved a lorry to my left and sprang on to the foot-way. I’m guessing that’s 4 lives used up. If he makes the return he’ll only have the one in reserve. Should I buy a lottery ticket?

Emma thinx: Why do the big breaks all come in life number nine?

Homeward Bound

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It’s week 4 of the Warm Fuzzies Blogfest and it is also the last week of my daily blog before it moves to a new twice-weekly schedule.  

The quest this week is to discover what makes us scribblers do it at all? Hmmm – well, I would have to give two separate answers. I write poetry because I want to magnify that small voice that is the essence of life. Most of the time you cannot hear it above the rumblings of lusts, stomachs, diesel engines and the pick and mix dilemma of daily decision. As I have aged the sound has become ever fainter and more distant. These days it is the blurred hiss of the TV sound system between segments of the jangling multi-coloured commercial breaks.

I write Romance because I like sexual passion, travel, wine and drama amongst most other things as well. The sensation of warm sun on my skin, a glow of Bordeaux wine and a long deep kiss of lips and souls that starts to build my desire, is where I want to be mentally all the time. As it is I aim a bus through heavy traffic and shop in Walmart. I am saved by a gorgeous lover. Romance writing is a turn on and is intended to nudge the love nodes of my readers. For me this  is fantastic because it gives me too an erotic buzz and allows me to use what I learned about words and moods as a poet, but without the ruthless discipline of poetry and short stories. If I combine my two responses it would be in saying that I write because I love words and words of love are the writing of our emotional DNA. 

I have chosen a passage from my novel “Knockout!” when the lovers are spending the night in Paris. They have dined and become engaged that evening. Both Anna and Freddie know that huge forces beyond their rapture are hurtling in. At stake are their lives – or worse – their love.

That night they made love tenderly, without urgency or complication, reaching out to each other like the roots of two seeds blown by chance and interwoven as one. At around midnight they lay touching hands in the moonlight. The window was a little open and admitted sounds from the street. In the distance voices and traffic spoke the muffled language of other lives. Somewhere close by in another apartment a sad saxophone played reflective moody late night jazz. If there had ever been a moment when she would have stopped time it would have been then – in the mellow moments of their after-love and their before-life.
The great River Seine rippled and pushed on to the sea as the sun tip-toed the back stairs of the world climbing towards dawn across Paris. Maybe the morning light would never uncover two lovers hiding within the protection of each other’s arms…

I would like to add my thanks to Juliana for hosting this blogfest. It has been a marvellous opportunity for me to encounter so many other writers. I know this kinda stuff is hard and eats time and so I wish you now a little peace and poetic space.
Tonight as I drove my route, the setting sun was a cold red disc in a sky of cruel blue. The kids were singing along to Rihanna’s “We found love in a hopeless place”. A particular lad always wants to sit next to me. He pointed at the volume control to indicate he wanted to pump it up. I pumped it up as a V formation of rooks passed across the void of space and we sang, bopping about in our seats. For just a moment I really felt the lonely turn of our planet in the cold indifference of the cosmos and heard it filled with defiance and a kind of love. The lad cannot speak.


Emma thinx: A beautiful second will fill all time.

For Juliana: WFPF 4xposts plus 4xtweets = 24 ?

Where next for determinism?

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A gorgeous Autumn day. I am looking out at verdant grass, sparkling with slightly amber dew as the low sun hauls itself above the trees. Oh yes- this is England. Now no church bells mark my hours and once again I will wear a watch. The noose of time tightens. At least I know the words for everything – well almost. I’ve just been phoning around to get some pâté de foie gras. Can you believe that there is none! Whist on the line to the deli I asked a young girl if they stocked moules. She went off to ask the manager and didn’t come back.


Other than imminent economic implosion, the News is filled with uplifting English tales. Eight year old boys apparently put on a cage fight in a social club to entertain the crowd. I suppose I should be shocked – but I’m not. At least there were adults to supervise and I imagine that the parents actually knew where their children were that night. When my brood were adolescents I suggested to various toy companies that they produce inflatable street corners with spittoons so that kids could hang out safely in the warm at home. Since then inflatable friendships and hostilities have been developed by social media and most kids are too badly affected with rickets to go out.


On the subject of pugilism I hear that the boxers of Azerbaijan tried to buy gold medals at the 2012 London Olympics. If you wanna read about this kinda stuff in boxing get my novel “Knockout”. It’s all true. The book is damn near free at 99 cents or 86 pence on Amazon Kindle. There’s SEX too, but I know you wouldn’t read it just for that soppy stuff.


I’m not sure what to make of the discovery by Italian scientists of particles that travel faster than the speed of light. I’ve always known that if you are in a hurry, stockings ladder before you touch them. I’ve also found out that banks put charges on your  account before you perform any transactions. The philosophical implications for fiction writers are massive. Characters will  move ahead of the plot into a kind of uncharted mist without any causal structure. Come to think of it, I might have already written a couple of novels like this.


This afternoon I’m going to the bus depot to sort out my next career move. I’ve spotted quite a few lady bus drivers. Dear old Geoffrey will be there to ease me into the system. Once again I am to be a horny handed daughter of toil. Maybe I won’t drone on about the shortage of foie gras just yet.


Emma thinx: Causality – the next great step for man.