Once upon a time, two mums who really
should have been doing housework wrote a book together. They called it Cocktails
at Naptime and some
nice Australian publishers called Finch Publishing laughed out loud when they
read it on the train home and thought their readers would laugh out loud too on
their trains home, possibly startling some fellow passengers along the way.
Here’s their story:
Emma says:
Gillian was like Nanook from the frozen
North (Aberdeen) while I was a sunburnt British ex-pat living in East Coast
America. How, you may well wonder, did this unlikely duo meet on the
blogosphere. I am ashamed to say my chat up was that corny old line, “I really
like your blog.” Luckily she was polite enough to reply.
At first I was suspicious. What was the matter with
Gillian I wondered? She was not loud and shouty like so many people on the
blogosphere. She never posted pictures of her cats or mumsy articles about how
to create rainy day activities out of a thousand saved yoghurt pots. She was
immature in a certain way like me, a Eurovision Contest fanatic who liked to
dress in cheap spandex for non sexual purposes, yet unlike me seemed to run her
family like a well organised military machine. Whereas I was domestically
challenged, leaving the dirty washing to overflow the baskets like Mount
Vesuvius and sometimes (okay a lot) getting my two daughter’s names mixed up.
So in some ways we were chalk and cheese and
yet before we even disclosed we were both Capricorns (born a mere two years and
10 days apart) there was a certain indefinable chemistry between us. Well I’m
not sure how it happened but we realised that we were having the sort of
synchronised and brilliant ideas that could no longer be hidden under a bushel
and before long we were telling each other we had to write a book together.
Now why that worked out is a bit of a
mystery. Why we understood each other so well despite the fact we’ve never met
in person may be partly astrological but it is also deeply geographical. For
while I was born in the South and Gillian in the North we both shared the same
soggy, damp landmass for many a moon. Essentially our shared heritage involves
such cultural reference points as finding the royal family ludicrous, a genetic
disposition to enjoy things like fried sausages and eggs without worrying about
its cholesterol content, a 70′s childhood involving numerous electricity
strikes where we sat in the dark listening to ABBA on a portable radio and an
adolescence spent dating weedy pasty men with crooked teeth (tans only briefly
becoming a fashion statement in the UK in the 80’s when orangey fake tan made a
debut which looked awful unless you were a member of Wham!).
Even though we were psychic twins in many
ways including a love of cheesy pop music and the fact that we both speak
German it still didn’t take a genius to figure out that writing a book together
in cyberspace was going to be about as easy as asking Lindsay Lohan to lay off
the sauce. And yet, because we are both goats we dug our hooves in and got on
with it, with bits of text flying back and forth until we had amassed something
that looked distinctly like a book. And now that this book is done and dusted
and filled with marvellous illustrations, we’re hoping there are other mums out
there – not necessarily Capricorns – who will enjoy our peculiarly skewed but
perceptive views on what really happens after your midwife screams, “Mrs Mum!
Take a deep breath and push. You’re crowning!”
Gillian says:
It was October 2008 and I was hatching
plans for that year’s over the top Halloween costume (Marie Antoinette, as I
remember, complete with a papier mache dead Louis XVI’s severed head in a
basket) when an email popped into my inbox from someone I only knew as Emma K
in the strange world of blogging.
“Hi Gillian
I always enjoy your blog
and believe you are on the ball, so I just wanted to pick your brains. So, I
was wondering……”
And that was how Cocktails
at Naptime started. We added the Woefully Inept bit later as we
realised there was a slight theme emerging when none of us put forward any
recipes for anything anyone could feasibly feed our kids or any top household
tips on how to get any baby puke cleaned off of anything that would normally
require dry cleaning. So, effectively what I’m saying is that the email there
is the evidence I need when my own mother reads this book for the first
time and gasps at all the naughty bits so that I can point squarely in Emma’s direction
and shout “She started it!”
What strikes me now, over two years on,
is that what is even more bizarre than starting this tri-continental book in
the first place is that we actually finished it. You see, Emma and I have never
met in person. Not even as I write this little epilogue as the book’s about to
go into print. Yet, I feel I know Emma pretty damn well as for the past two
years we have been writing and sending little funny stories and daft lists
about “Ten Ways to Hide Birthweight with Nothing More than Electrical
Tape” to one another, and fretting over what’s funny and what’s not, and what’s
too rude and what’s not rude enough and somehow getting a book written between
us. Along the way we’ve talked about what’s going on in our lives, made each
other laugh frequently and possibly cry with frustration on the odd occasion.
We’ve even had the odd off-peak long
distance phone-call where we nervously tried to suss out if one of us was one
of those unhinged crazies you meet on the internet, who given half an inch,
will turn up at your bedroom window one evening wielding an axe or start
sending you carefully constructed and physically uncanny representations of
yourself as a voodoo doll through the post. Turns out we were only as unhinged
as each other and that’s why we got on so well. If Emma ever sent me a voodoo
doll I’m sure it would have been well meant. I’m certainly currently working on
a simply darling one for her.
One thing’s for sure it’s not been the
easiest way to write a book I’m guessing, but it certainly has been an
incredibly interesting one. At first I was convinced that at one point Emma and
I would have to at least meet geographically half way and actually clap eyes on
one another to get this book finished. Maybe we could rent a cheap garret in
the Faroe Islands halfway across the Atlantic and stay there for a week, with
one of us sitting at a laptop typing furiously with fingerless gloves on as the
other paced the creaky floor brandishing a half empty wine bottle, dressed in a
parka ranting about nipple shields, support pants, colic and the humour
therein. After all, isn’t that the kind of thing writers do? It never happened.
We each just sat in our respective kitchens thousands of miles from one another
and wrote and edited and emailed, and then rewrote and edited and emailed some
more without requiring any Faroese hospitality, garrets or otherwise. I still
wore fingerless gloves though for that feeling of writerly authenticity — I
can’t speak for Emma although I’m guessing, like me, she was in spandex a lot
of the time. We both also confess to occasionally brandishing half empty wine
bottles.
After all the blood, sweat and emails
there came a lovely time when a good while after we had dispatched Cocktails
out into the world of publishing and sat expectantly by our letterboxes, we
indulged in quite a lot of virtual jumping about hugging one another in
cyberspace when we were asked by some nice Australians if they could publish
our book. This was indeed an unexpected twist to the already insane geography
of this whole project. Let’s get this straight: I live in Aberdeen, Scotland-
Emma is English but lives in Baltimore in the United States- and a publisher in
Sydney, Australia wants to publish our book? And none of us have ever even been
in the same continent as one another at the same time, never mind the same
room? Somehow, even in the era of an international web community and the whole
“global village” thing, that still seems completely and utterly mental.
The big question for me is; will Emma and I ever meet
one day? I really don’t know. But I know I feel like we already have. In fact,
I feel like we’ve been sharing a flat for nearly three years. And yeah, that
horrendous mess in the living room, yeah that wasn’t me, that was Emma.
The authors are excited to announce
that Cocktails at Naptime is now available as an iBook from the
Apple iBookstore and can be downloaded to an Apple device such as iPhone or
iPad. Cocktails at Naptime is available in English on all Apple
iBookstores worldwide, that is in Australia/New Zealand, America, Canada, UK, France, Germany and other
EU countries.
It is
available for download here:
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