An Old Flame*

Are you the same person that you were ten years ago? I mean, obviously in a lot of ways you are (name, memories, NI number and so on). In some other less obvious ways you... maybe... aren't. Those pink corduroy flares that you thought were a good idea? That evaporated milk habit? That - ew, squick! - that boyfriend?**

If you're wondering why I'm asking, it's because I'm editing my first novel. I wrote it nearly ten years ago, and it's an odd experience coming back to it. I hadn't even read it for years, and so in some ways it was rather exciting. There are lots of adverbs (sadly) but also some rather fun scenes, and some plot twists I genuinely hadn't remembered. It needs work but I think it could be quite good, if I do the right things to it. And the right things aren't the opaque, totally mysterious impossibilities that they are for my most recent magnum opus, thank God, they are actual definite changes that I can do. This is all good. 

But - as I say - it's odd. It's odd because my writing voice has changed, and I'm trying to work out how much I should go with my old one and how much I've got better. It's odd because the sort of book I write now isn't the sort of book I wrote then, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write that sort of book. It's odd because I recognise myself and I recognise the differences, the way I've developed as a writer and as a person.

It's oddest of all, I think, because it's a love story.*** It was my first love story. 

People talk about how first novels are autobiographical (and then often go on to say that they're rubbish because they're autobiographical). That's not true, obviously, because loads of people write novels without ever writing anything recognisably autobiographical. But in a way it is true: your first novel is the one you've waited your whole life to write. It's the one, I think, where the purest expression of yourself comes out. You're less guarded, less ambitious, less driven by career moves or vanity. Not to mention that every time you write a book, you narrow down the possibilities for your next one - so the first, the first... It's not the best. But sometimes it's the most yours. 

And so... my love story. It's making me feel the way I did ten years ago. I was in love with my character then, and I'm still in love with him. I have to be, or I couldn't write the book. But now... I don't know. It makes me feel... off-balance. Haunted. Maybe slightly unfaithful. Like a perfect lover from the past has walked in and expects me to love him as much as ever. And I do.  

We'll see. But right now, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only four chapters in. But I can't help thinking, maybe I've cracked it. Maybe that's the trick of happy editing: leave the book for a decade.   

* I love this metaphor. Especially as the character in question is called Ash. 

** This is a joke. I didn't have a boyfriend ten years ago. And not having a boyfriend is never a bad choice.

*** Slashy?! Of course it's slashy. 

Help! This title isn't working!

OK, that is not an attention-grabbing metajoke about titles. My blog site is genuinely doing something weird. 'You request cannot be fulfilled', it says, when I try to type in the title bo-- oh. Wait. Maybe this is metaphorical, after all. Anyway, if I were sensible I'd stop right here and check whether this will post, in case I spend hours writing and then discover I've lost it all. But I'm not. I'm going to write it anyway. (Ever feel like you're really not trying to be metaphorical, but the bloody metaphors WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE?)

I can't remember what I was going to blog about now. :)

Was it the Stonewall party? Yes, maybe it was the Stonewall party. Which was fabulous. I don't have any photos of the actual place, because I didn't have any pockets and therefore no camera or mobile, but I do have this:

Hmmm, it's very small. It wasn't meant to be that small (obviously today is not a good day for me and techonology*) but you can at least see that we were really overdressed and enjoying it. But then, if we are occasionally overdressed we make up for it by always being immensely overeducated...

Also, we got congratulated by the hotel staff. That was fun. If slightly awkward, in a how-do-you-explain-that-yes-you're-in-a-wedding-dress-but-actually-you-haven't-just-got-married? kind of way. 

And since then... well. Work goes on. It went quickly for a while and now it's going slowly again. As I explained to a friend of mine, it's like watching a video on youtube - if you fast forward you have to wait for it to catch up with you before you can go on watching it. So while I'm not actually stuck, I'm wading a little bit. Although I'm generally quite excited about the book, and I'm not complaining. It's going to be long, though. I'm on 80,000 words and only two-thirds of the way through. 

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. If this posts. Here goes...

* Or typing. 

The Art of Beginning Again

That's probably a pretty appropriate title for this post, in the sense that you might have thought that I'd been kidnapped, got seriously ill, become entirely disaffected with this whole writing thing or indeed just died. (Out of interest, I just googled "is B. R. Collins dead?". Happily, I seem, on the whole, not to be.) But in fact it's apropos of something entirely different, namely my new novel.

I had a bit of an arid patch over the summer. (Metaphorically. There was room for a hell of a lot more aridity in the actual weather.) A lot was happening, and my life has undergone a lot of personal changes since then - which I won't go into, but suffice it to say that more of my 2012 New Year's Resolutions were successfully completed - and the writing kind of went on a back-burner. That was OK, until I started to think about having to earn a living, and then I tried to force myself to start something new. It was a struggle. It really was. But then I had this brilliant (no, really!) idea. One of those ideas which remind you why you want to be a writer at all. I didn't really care about selling this book, or winning prizes with it, or even getting it published. I just wanted to write it.

Hurrah.

I wrote it. Well, some of it. I sent it to my agent, who really liked the idea. I carried on writing it. She showed it to my publisher. I carried on writing it. I got to 40,000 words of it.

Whereupon my agent got back to me with the news that two books with similar "hooks" were being published next year. This book, she said, is not the one that you should be writing now.

Bugger.

Now. I realise that this is not the end of the world. The book I'll write with Hook A is not the same book you'd write with Hook A. It wouldn't be the same book if I used the same blurb as your book. My book will always be mine. (I was going to say "special"... but it might not be, actually.) There might be a good time for it eventually. If those other books are successful it might be a positive advantage that they have something in common. ("If you liked Hook A, you'll love this...") It's just that right now... well. It's not the book I should be writing.

Why don't you have a think, my agent said, and maybe send me five or six ideas, and we'll talk about which one you should work on...?

Five or six? I said. (Well, no, I didn't. I thought.) Five or six?! If I had five or six ideas I'd be rich by now.

So all was sombre in the Collins household. My beautiful little book was half-formed and not going to be born. The world was a vast wasteland, idealess and unforgiving.

And then... I had another idea.

It happens. Eventually. You batter at yourself and fume and rage and sigh and give up. And then, invariably, you have the idea. They come, not at your bidding, but in their own infuriatingly sweet time.

It took me a long time to turn round, like a battleship. But now I am on a new course, cautiously optimistic, and a Better, Stronger Person.

Well. Optimistic, anyway.

'There's nothing sadder than a neglected blog...'

So, the summer is over. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and, you know, harvests and first frosts and new stationery and Michaelmas Term is upon us... which means I need to Get Down To Work. I don't know about you, but I think of autumn as the beginning of the year (for which I blame eighteen years of formal education) and October as the beginning of autumn (for which I blame 8-week university terms). So in my book (no, not an actual book, although more of actual books later) it is perfectly fine to take two and a half months off over the summer. No, really.

Rationalisation? What do you mean, rationalisation?

No, but seriously... Then again, I realise it does get monotonous when I start every post with apologies for not blogging enough, so I will stop. Suffice it to say that someone - in a completely different context - did say, 'Ah yes, there's nothing sadder than a neglected blog, is there?' to which I could only shake my head dumbly and inwardly wince.*

The other thing is, I had so much to blog about! All of which has been either forgotten or gently overlaid with other concerns. Here, for your interest, is a quick (and non-exhaustive) list:

- Fifty Shades of Grey. Notably the underlying assumptions of same, i.e. that consensual sex-play with a riding-crop is Terrible and Shocking, whereas a controlling partner who won't let you drive your own car or meet male friends and who calls a doctor to give you a hormone injection because you've forgotten your pill is absolutely fine because he loves you. I am sure other people have pointed this out already, and more lucidly, which is partly why the blog never got written. Plus, a friend of mine insisted that the third book was really feminist (no, really!) and redeemed the gender politics of the first two, and that if I wanted to blog about it, it was only fair to read all three. Which I couldn't bring myself to, so that scuppered that.

- Rereading things from your childhood, especially things that scared the shit out of you. A few months ago I was suddenly reminded of a story I'd read when I was about eight, about which I could remember nothing except that it was bloody terrifying and about a Christmas pudding. So I googled 'children's story christmas pudding' and found it - result! - and it was quite a weird experience, because of course when I reread the story it turned out to be quite creepy, but with nowhere near the haunting, nebulously horrible quality I remembered. It's funny how revisiting somewhere in your mental landscape can be like going back to a place - it felt so much smaller this time round...**

- The brilliance of google. Same story as previous one...

- She Stoops To Conquer, which was the most recent play I did. There was no intellectual content to this post but I did have a wig and a costume with paniers, and being the sort of person who gets excited about that I was going to share it. (Ah, actors. It's basically all about dressing up. And being loved.***)

- The Giant Rat of Sumatra. Well, someone should.

- Progress on my adult book. Basically I finished the edits and my agent has started sending it out. As blogs go, this one would have been quite brief, because until you hear back from publishers there is really nothing to say. Although I can tell you that the rejections from the first round of submissions (apparently in adult publishing you can have lots of rounds because there are more publishing houses than in children's publishing, which is great because it means that, figuratively speaking, I haven't been knocked out yet. Although I might be at the bottom of my group. It all depends on Wales and Outer Mongo-- oh. No, wait. Sorry, I'm getting confused with the World Cup) were pleasantly contradictory. ("I wasn't entirely convinced by the Edwardian voice." "It's just too authentically Edwardian." Etc., etc.)

- Basic writing angst. Don't know why I'd bother, really, it's not as if you haven't heard it before. :)

- An update on my New Year's Resolutions. The fun ones are going well. The other ones are... well, still in the realms of possibility. Most of them.

Anyway. There might have been more potential posts, but they obviously got sucked under by the bog of daily life, to the extent that I have no idea what they were. I just didn't want you to feel that I wasn't thinking about blogging, because I was. Really. So there.

And in other news, I have just started a new book. (I am excited. It is going well.) When it's a bit more established, I shall tell you more about it. Promise. :)

Watch this space...



* Obviously there are in fact lots of things sadder than neglected blogs, like forgotten cups of tea and snails that get trodden on and people dismantling the NHS... But it was meant as a rhetorical flourish. Presumably.

** The story was 'A Christmas Pudding Improves With Keeping', by Philippa Pearce.

*** As is the rest of life, really.

Climbing and the power of negative thinking

I went climbing on Saturday. It wasn't the first time I've ever been climbing, as I used to go bouldering in Mile End when I lived in London, but it's the first time I've done proper roped, outdoor climbing on Actual Rocks (at least since I was a kid, which was only once and too long ago to count). So it was quite exciting and actually quite scary, as obviously when you're roped you go higher and do harder pitches than when you're not. And I'm a little bit afraid of heights.

It's always good to do things you're scared of, though. You discover things about yourself. Like your maximum heart-rate. And your default swearwords.

But the best thing I discovered was the liberating power of low expectations.

Now I realise this goes against a lot of what we get told. The general philosophy seems to be that in order to achieve something you have to tell yourself incessantly that you can do it. Be determined. Tell yourself you won't be beaten. Insist on the possibility of your chosen task. Insist on your own brilliance. Sooner or later all that positive thinking will convince everyone who needs to be convinced, and all will be well. And often it works, and you can see why. No one ever got anywhere by deciding it was useless to try.

But on Saturday... It was funny. I struggled not to give up because I didn't want everyone to think I was pathetic. I was determined. I was positive. And I clung helplessly to various rockfaces, occasionally bobbing up and down on my toes and reaching limply for bits of rock that were just too far away to touch, telling myself I was Not Going To Be Beaten. Until finally I thought, bugger this for a game of soldiers, waved down at my climbing partner and said, 'I'm stuck.'

Whereupon I could move. And did. Upwards. In a beautiful fluid leap, right to the top.*

As soon as it was OK to fail, it was easy to climb.

I suppose the logical extension of this is to accompany every demanding task with a little pep-talk about how no one could reasonably expect me to attempt this, let alone achieve it, and failure is absolutely fine and indeed to be expected, and - well, getting stuck and having to be lowered down is TOTALLY OK.

The implications for writing are too obvious to be pointed out. (And they don't come as a surprise. Although it was a salutary reminder for me, right now.)

I will simply say that, as with writing, you know you've made a decent stab at it when you end up with bruises.

Bruises... everywhere.


* Yeah, so this is a bit of an exaggeration. (*Cough*hugeexaggeration*cough*.)

Stories, truth and ourselves.

I've been thinking a lot recently about truth, and honesty, and reality, and the relationships between them. I like to think of it as a Truth Detox. Not that I want to be honest all the time, you understand (I'm not quite ready for that yet, and I'm not sure if I ever will be) - it's more about being aware of the ways I lie and elude and fudge things to myself. One of the things that has dawned on me over the last few months is that lying to other people is morally grey, in the sense that you can judge each lie on a case-by-case basis, dependent on context: but lying to yourself is always, always wrong, because it means you automatically pass that on to other people. Once you stop being honest with yourself, there's no choice involved.

That is one of those things that when you write it down looks about a hundred times less profound than when you thought of it. Phooey.

But aaaaanyway. Thinking about truth is particularly interesting if the way you earn your living is all about fiction. Because, at its best, fiction is truthful. It's the big Defense of Poesie, isn't it, that by creating something that isn't real you can find a space to say something that is enlightening and recognisable and, well, you know... spot on. We've all had those moments, when you read a novel and think: yes. Yes, absolutely yes. The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours. Yes, the past does come back and haunt us exactly the way it does in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Yes, misery does make me lean against walls for no apparent reason, like in I Capture The Castle; yes, memory does run the risk of driving us mad, like in Funes, His Memory. And yes, the important thing in this life is not aunts but the courage with which you face them.*

But it's not that simple. The big problem a lot of people have with trashy writing (mentioning no naTwilightmes, of course) is that it just doesn't ring true. Or worse, it provides people with a narrative that is simultaneously dishonest and seductive - which means that not only is it not edifying (and I use that in the deepest, most liberal sense, which is nothing to do with "improving" literature) it is actually really problematic. Like it or not, books rehearse the world for us: they teach us how to think about ourselves, our relationships, our bodies. They work in the same way that advertising does. We need to think carefully about the narratives we give people, because narratives are powerful.

Which is not to say that there isn't a place for trashy books, in the same way that there is sometimes a place for conscious lying - or self-indulgent dreaming, or any kind of activity which takes us out of ourselves. Actually - yes, that's a good phrase. Things that take us out of ourselves are fine - good, in fact - as long as we can put ourselves back afterwards. Lying - or buying into someone else's lie - is defensible as long as you know it's a lie.

What makes this more interesting is that it's not only bad writing that helps us lie to ourselves. I originally started thinking about this post because of something I remembered from a long time ago, when I was in a messy love-triangle-relationship-thingy, and happened to go and see the film of The End of the Affair. I still remember, very clearly, walking out of the cinema, feeling suddenly very passionate about my lover. Not because of anything about him, you understand, but because the story had resonated with me, because the tragedy and romance of it made me think of my own situation - in the same way that seeing an advert for a perfume you already wear can, briefly, make you feel more glamorous than just wearing the perfume does. This, I said to myself, is my story. Like those characters, I am having an affair. Therefore, like those characters, I am tragic and lovable and romantic... It's dangerous. And yet, the ability of narratives to validate our own experience is part of its wonder. It just has to be confronted honestly.

Not sure what point, if any, I am trying to make here. Maybe that, when it comes down to it, real people are more important than fictional characters. Life is more important than art. Lying can be good as long as it's done knowingly, in the context of the truth.

Not, perhaps, terribly profound. (OK, that "perhaps" is there to salve my pride. But I'm going to leave it there anyway.) But - I like to think - for a writer, it's a good thing to get clear in my head.


* Jokes, of course, have to pinpoint something that's simultaneously an exaggeration and absolutely true, otherwise they're not funny.

Done. Almost.

I thought about just leaving this blog post as the title on its own, because it just about sums up everything I have to say. But that seemed a bit... stingy. Oh, by the way, I haven't had much sleep. So don't expect the right words in the right places or anything. (Or rather, as I typed that originally, "don't expect the right words inntb eh righy placex". Which, coincidentally, is one of my favourite Basque proverbs.)

I don't know if you've seen the film 28 Days Later. It's not one of my top ten... but there's a moment when the hero's making his way through the apocalypse-torn, disease-ridden world and he goes into a church and up some stairs, and the camera focuses on some graffiti: NIGH, it says, in huge spray-painted letters. And then the shot pans up, and it says above that, FUCKING. And then EXTREMELY. It takes longer than you think to get to THE END IS...

So my edits were - OK, are, so much for having finished, I've got to start again at the beginning now - a bit like that. Last week I worked really bloody hard (up at six, worked till four, started again after dinner, till midnight) thinking that that day I would get there. It wasn't till yesterday this morning, at ten past three, that I finally wrote the last sentence. I was too tired even to feel particularly triumphant. But now I have a new draft. Not the final draft. Probably not even close. But those problems, which seemed like a brick wall, did have handholds, after all. I'm not sure that, having climbed up, I won't have to inch my way painstakingly back down again and find another route - but right now I can take a breather, hoping I'm on the right track.

Sleep. Read. Do some laundry.

I did tell my agent that she'd have the MS by the end of the week, though. So tomorrow I will be back to work. No doubt, this time tomorrow, I will be staring helplessly at my computer screen and wondering if I could just cut straight to the middle of the book. Actually - there's a thought...

That last sentence probably won't be the real, final, actual last sentence. But the end is extremely fucking nigh.

Editing. Still.

I refuse to get into the habit of starting every blog post with an apology for not blogging more, because that way madness lies... but, er, well. Sorry. I should blog more. I suck.

Basically, this is because I'm still editing. And the editing is weighing so heavily on me that if I do anything else I feel guilty. Including blogging. Right now, though, I'm on my lunch hour (ha! who'm I trying to kid? my lunch hours) and facebook was looking boring and googling myself wasn't fruitful and the BBC iPlayer wasn't showing anyth-- wait, I'm giving away far too much, here. I am a hard-working writer, honest.

Anyway, here we go. Hello. Long time no see... :)

I was hoping to get a new draft of Edward Leigh to my agent last week, for the 1st of February. I did actually think I could do that, right up until the 30th or so of January, when it dawned on me that I'd only got halfway through and most of the work is in the second half. I've never missed a writing deadline before, and it came as a bit of a shock. The thing is, I thought I had it sorted. In January I'd sat down and more or less told myself what I needed to do, scenes I needed to add or delete and so on. Then all I had to do was just implement my notes and All Would Be Well.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? Yes, it was the "more or less".

So there are a few problems with that rosy idea of editing. Firstly, edits, like a novel, are only meaningful once you've written them. They will always work in theory. It's only when you're writing them that you realise that there's a glitch or a bug or whatever. (In my case, MAJOR PLOT POINTS which have been ENTIRELY FORGOTTEN. Oops.) And secondly, "just adding or deleting scenes" is like saying "just writing a novel". Today I've written more than a thousand words from scratch, which in a first draft situation would be a good day's work. But according to my (and I do not want to admit that it's even slightly optimistic) schedule, I have another fifty pages to get through this afternoon. And another hundred tomorrow. Wish me luck.

It's like toothpaste. You look at the nearly empty tube and think, oh, not much there, better buy some more. But then, as you squeeze, the toothpaste builds up until by the time you've rolled the tube up halfway you realise there's a bloody sight more toothpaste than you'd bargained for. (OK, so that metaphor would work better if toothpaste was more of a burdensome, negative thing. Probably not many people find out they've got more toothpaste than they realised and feel utterly daunted and overwhelmed. Although if you do, let me say that I know exactly how you feel, because toothpaste - well, it can be so like editing...)  

Or rather it's like a machine. You think it's just a question of changing a few cogs and then you realise that a) now the whole balance of the thing has gone and there's a lot more recalibration to do and b) it's still not going to work after that and you don't know why.

Sigh.

Actually, I think it is advancing. I might get it done by next week. I really hope so, because I'm dying to do some reading and writing and fiddling and thinking and you know, writerly stuff*, without feeling guilty. Then again - anyone else find themselves editing and gradually starting to think, hang on, I think I'm making this worse? Those moments when there wasn't enough of a particular character, so you take them out entirely, or you suddenly realise you've cut the very part your agent liked so much, or... wait, this is getting too depressing. Enough - if you know what I mean you know what I mean.

On the plus side, it will be finished one day. I hope. And then we will look back and laugh. Ho ho.

And The Broken Road came out this week - hurrah! - and has already had a lovely review on bookbag.

And the salt and pepper pots are safely back at King's College.** (I assume. I didn't phone to ask.)

You lose some, you win some.


* AKA sleeping.
** Although sorry, Elin, those Maltesers may never return to their rightful home...

Of deadlines, editing, wading through treacle, and the relative easiness of the latter.

So. It's just as well "write more blog posts" wasn't one of my New Year's resolutions. It's better not to fail spectacularly at too many things at once...*

At the moment I am editing.

More precisely, I am trying to edit. This week I have actually done some work, i.e. cutting and rewriting, which is an improvement on last week, but that putative deadline of 1st of February - oh, I was so pleased to have an actual deadline like a real writer! - is looking less and less achievable. Especially since the Australian Open is NOT BEING SHOWN ON THE BBC, which means I have no reason to stay at my computer, idly editing in the changes of ends... (If you think that's a joke, by the way, sorry, it isn't. I was genuinely relying on the motivational power of watching BBC Sport, with Word open in a different window. Please don't laugh.)

I don't know why it's so hard, but it really is. Maybe because I've just got another idea for a novel, or rather an idea for another novel, and all I want is to start writing that... or because I'm trying to do something new every week, which is quite exciting but rather distracting, or because I'm feeling strangely domesticated and would happily spend a lot of time cooking. As I say, I don't know. It's not even that I think the book is bad. I think it's fine. Maybe it's just that it's not the sort of book I feel like reading right now.

It doesn't matter. The crucial thing is that it's difficult, but it's advancing. I think I have tentatively decided how to solve my problems - ha! note the "tentative" - and now all I have to do is Just Do It. (To coin a phrase. Thank you, Nike.) As someone rather vulgarly and brilliantly says in this relevant blog post, "That story isn't going to unfuck itself." Well, quite.

So I suppose I should be optimistic. I might hit the deadline. You never know.

Then again, I should be working on it now. Right now.


* If you're interested: out of my 12 New Year's resolutions, I have so far kept 6 (more or less); 3 of them are unkept as yet, but since I regard myself as having until the end of next December to keep them I'm not being too hard on myself; and I have failed miserably so far at the remaining 3 of them. I'm not going to specify which are which. :)

New Year's Resolutions

1. Send back the silver salt-cellar and pepper-pot to King's College. I am not going to give indiscreet details about how they came into my possession; suffice it to say that they shouldn't have. And I have held on to them for long enough (i.e. more years than I care to remember).

They will be going in an anonymous, unlabelled parcel, of course. My instinct for righting wrongs is not infinite.

2. Get my M.A. As this consists entirely of writing a letter asking aforesaid King's College to graduate me in absentia, it's rather embarrassing that I haven't done it yet. But sometime in 2012 I will be B. R. Collins, M.A. (Cantab). Promise.

3. Do something at least once a week that I haven't done before.

4. Fall in love with someone single, available, fairly well-adjusted, fairly solvent and living within ten miles of Tunbridge Wells. (Which is where I live, rather than just some arbitrarily picked area.) How hard can it be?

Oh, and resist the temptation to blog about my love-life...

5. Edit Edward Leigh. Finish The School of Glass. Think up an idea for my next book for Bloomsbury and write that too.*

6. Keep writing. Stop giving myself a hard time about getting a proper job. If I decide I really need a proper job, just get one.

7. Have more sex. As before: how hard can it be?**

(Note to self: lower standards if necessary. Possibly also applicable to Resolution 4.***)

8. Answer all queries about laundry, washing up, tidying up, emptying the dishwasher, cooking etc. with, 'Sorry, I made a New Year's Resolution not to do that any more.'

9. Live adventurously.

10. Stop getting really, really angry about politics. Do whatever I can, and then swallow unnecessary fury and try to achieve serenity. (Ha!)

Also, hold people in the light more. Try to see the good in everyone, even wankers, arses, idiots and total shits... (Yes, well. Possibly this one might need some work.)

11. Stop overusing brackets, italics, smiley faces, asterisks and... ellipses.

12. Stop buying lottery tickets. Except metaphorical ones. Buy more metaphorical lottery tickets.


* If I put these all in one terse, unchatty resolution I'm hoping they'll seem like less work.

** Oo-er.

*** This is a joke. Probably. :)