This Much I Know Is True - An Interview with Stupidgirl

@AliaMck speaking Right, here we are in my considerably less lovely sewing room, Stupidgirl is sitting against the radiator and I am sitting her at the desk, trying to surreptitiously drink three inches of wine. She has passed your questinos onto me. NB The first 8 questions have come from stupidgirl45's twitter followers.

21stscribe: when will we see the finished novel?
SG45: How long is a piece of string? When I stop tweeting and blogging long enough to finish the damn thing. Hopefully I’ll be ready to submit be the end of the year. That’s a little ambitious though......er, Your husband is hiding in the kitchen. You need to put that in the interview. He’s not offered us any tea. Is he okay?

Ren Cummins: Where was the strangest time or place that inspiration ever hit you?
SG45: Well I normally get random ideas all over the place, the shower, the tube. But normally I get them when my mind goes blank. So when I’m belaying my husband when he’s rock climbing. Um. That’s not menial….. I’m just doing one thing with my hands and another with my brain…. Uh. Yeah. So inspiration can strike at any time. I get a lot of inspiration when I’m climbing.

GGnewED: which bits of Becky 2011 would you hope to have kept with you as Becky in 2025?
SG45: I’m guesing that’s from the blog post I did for this weeks WoTW. I guess I’d hope that I still have the same relationships, friends, husband. Obviously I hope I get some new ones along the way (well not a new husband obviously). I hope I’m still optimistic about the future and I still care about people. Still wearing my heart on my sleeve. Those are things that are really key about me and I wouldn’t want to lose them.

I also hope I still like fart and poo jokes just as much. I wouldn’t like to lose my scatological sense of humour.

LuckyVoice: What was the first single you bought? (Well, it had to be musical!)
SG45: I thought about this quite carefully cause I got given a lot of CDs when I was younger, the first CD I was given was (quiet voice) Bryan Adams So Far So Good. But the first single I was given was Meatloaf’s I’d do anything for love (but I won’t do that) the extended version. The first actual…jesus, was it Take That? God, I was buying books back then. I think it was Queer, by Garbage and also it had a really good B side that I’ve never found anywhere else.

Demonwrangler: What is your biggest regret?
SG45: I don’t have any regrets. No I genuinely do not have any regrets. I’ve made my choices and made the best of them - I believe you this is what you have to do in life generally. But I do wish I’d worked harder at Uni and gotten a 2.1 to prove to myself that I could have done it. I was so close anyway. Je ne regrette rien.

Wilkravitz: What is your ideal spot for a 2nd home + why?
SG45: I kind of want to say a big city but I have to pick somewhere we can go climbing so I’ll say Innsbruck. It’s a lovely city – is it a town? It’s a city. We went there on honey moon and it’s really lovely and I have lots of happy memories.

Ijclark: how about if you could eradicate one human emotion, what would it be and why?
SG45 : What would you pick?
AMcK: Selfishness, mostly because I deal with it on a day to day basis
SG45: (laughs) If I was going to be really cynical and not me, I’d say Love because it causes so many problems. Love triangles, unrequited love, but realistically I’d never choose to live without that so I’ll choose jealousy because I dislike it about myself. I’m a really jealous person. It’s irrational and it can cause problems in relationships where there were no problems to start with.

UnicornRW: Why 'stupid girl'? And what's your forté - your blog is on so many topics/themes. What's your favourite?
SG45: SG is from a song by garbage called Stupid girl. I really like the song and have had it as a username for about the last 15 years. With the topics on my blog, that’s really hard because I like them all in different ways, they’re like my babies. Some are funny, some are introspective, some are pretty and some you learn from. It’s hard to pick a favourite. I hope that people come away from the blog feeling like they have learned something new that day. And I really like to entertain people.

AMcK:What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
SG45: I was thinking about this the other day actually because I couldn't think of one. I guess I actually have 2 pieces, which I wouldn’t normally allow, but its my blog. The first if from an old boss, and to paraphrase, its thinking about what you want to say and how it’s going to come across before you say it. In politics you’d call it spin, but I guess it’s just really thinking about other people and about how something is going to affect them and then you can think about how what you say is going to affect them. I don’t mean that to sound cold and calculating. It’s not.

And the other bit is the final 2 lines of The Desiderata , which is "For all its sham + drudgery/it is still a beautiful world". When things are really getting me down I just think about that poem and think about how many beautiful things there are in the world and it helps me pick myself up even when things seem impossible. I have the whole poem printed and stuck up by my desk to help. 

AMcK:What do you know to be true about life?
SG45: I guess I think that like I said before you have to remember that you’re in control of things and if you don’t like a situation, you have to decide if you’re going to put up and shut up or not. Only you can decide what you can put up with. We’re stronger than we think and we can find our own way out. We spend too long fighting against stuff, sometimes its easier to go with the flow and you’ll find a resolution. It sounds kind of ‘Hippie’, but it works for me and its made am a lot happier for it.

AMcK:What is your favourite book? 

SG45: I have 2: The Handmaids Tale and The Secret History. If you don’t know who these are by, google is your friend.

AMcK: What is your favourite song? 

SG45: Where The Streets Have No Name - U2. I want this played at my funeral.

AMcK: Describe yourself in a dating ad: 

SG45: Regular girl seeks irregular guy. Must like…………….must like don’t know how can I describe stupidboy? Must be kind, funny, don’t know, must be stupidboy. (Shrugs.)

AMcK: What really annoys you? 

SG45: Ignorance and rudeness.

AMcK:Tell us a secret about yourself.

SG45: Well I've already done a 25 Things About Me post but ummm.....yes, my great grandmother’s maiden name was Frankenstein. Not really a secret, but not a lot of people know (Frank was the Dr, not the monster people, I do not have bolts in my neck.)

So thats it folks - hope it was interesting for you - normal interview service will resume next week! Tomorrow I'll be back with a picture essay of ITALY!! And sunday will probably be my top 10 recipes :)

Thank you and good night

Stupidgirl (and AliaMcK) have left the building