Lockdown Read #1

One of the most consistent pieces of writing advice that published authors give is to read A LOT! To read widely and read often. I tend to get a bit narrow in my reading preferences – cough, crime fiction, cough! So, I’ve been trying to read outside of my ‘crimefert’ zone. Yeah, I’m not sorry! My first lockdown read, Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, is not a book I would ordinarily seek out. But I saw Graeme and Anne in conversation with Cass Moriarty at Avid Reader the evening before our latest lockdown began. It was a lovely event that cut through the pre-lockdown tension that had plagued me during the day. It also didn’t hurt that I came home with an armful of excellent books to see me through lockdown.

Two Steps Forward is almost the perfect lockdown read. It is gentle and beautiful and undemanding, and yet, I cannot put it down. The book follows the two protagonists, Zoe and Martin, who are walking the Camino de Santiago for entirely different reasons. The book follows their journeys and their blossoming romance. The Camino de Santiago is a series of pilgrims’ ways winding through France into Spain and ending at the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Tradition has it that the saint’s remains are buried there, and tradition also holds that everyone who walks the Camino is changed by the experience. Thus, Two Steps Forward is not simply a romantic travel story, it is also a thoughtful philosophical tale. I am not generally a fan of romance novels, nor of novels narrated in alternating points of view, but I am loving Two Steps Forward. It is that cleverest of all novels, the one in which not a great deal happens externally but which is entirely gripping, nonetheless. I would highly recommend it to all my fellow Australians constrained by the vagaries of Covid, and in need of something uplifting to pass the time.

Comfort reads I have known…’Beauty’ by Robin McKinley

I am an avid re-reader and always have been. Being stuck in Covid isolation during the first wave, I had time to revisit some of my favourite comfort reads. So I thought that I would share some of the books that I return to at loose reading ends or in tough times in my life.

One of my earliest comfort reads was Robin McKinley’s Beauty; a lovely retelling of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. Most years as a child I stayed with my grandparents for a week in the June holidays and my mother always sent me with a pile of library books. I still remember picking up Beauty from this pile that first time and being entranced by the cover which showed intricately carved gates opening onto formal gardens and, in the distance, the Beast’s castle.

The first edition I read.

McKinley’s take on the tale switches things around so that Beauty is the ugly duckling, youngest sister in a close-knit family fallen on hard times. Awkward and clumsy and, in her own mind, deeply unattractive, she is obsessed with books and horses. McKinley dispenses with the Lear narrative of the jealous older sisters and tediously virtuous youngest sister. Beauty’s older sisters, Grace and Hope are beautiful and kind and baffled by Beauty’s desire for a university education. The change to a happy, cohesive family provides a strong emotional thread throughout the novel as Beauty suffers deeply, and much more understandably, from home sickness at the Beast’s castle. She is also a much more attractive and interesting character as a result. The original Beauty, who appears to have no idea that her sisters hate her guts, is either spectacularly dim or an incredibly poor judge of character. Perhaps both.

Beauty invited me into a world with a library whose books hadn’t been written yet, an invisible staff of temperamental and fashion-conscious maids, and delicious food. I’m not a fan of heavily descriptive novels, but Robin McKinley evoked a place and atmosphere that made me wish that this world was real and that I could be transported into it, in the same way that I often checked the back of my wardrobe, just in case a door to Narnia had opened inside. The descriptions of the food and clothes, remain some of the most evocative for me, from Beauty’s favourite spice cake and tea ‘sweetened with orange peel, spiced with ginger’ to the changing colours of the Beast’s suits, ‘dark-red velvet, the colour of sunset and roses, and cream coloured lace.’ When the Disney movie came out a year or so later, I was unimpressed. Where were all the quirky, nerdy details? And the Beast! McKinley’s Beast was intelligent, witty, kind and deeply unhappy, there was no way that Disney’s Beast could live up to him.

It’ll be no surprise to you, dear readers, when you learn that 8-year-old me identified strongly with Beauty, the misfit who loved her books. No one at school wanted to read books or play make believe at recess, they just played handball. I wasn’t good at handball, I was good at reading and I quickly learnt that great Australian school yard lesson, if you aren’t good at sport you aren’t good at life. That lesson obviously doesn’t still sting all these years later! And so I never took a book to school because I knew that reading a book at lunchtime would be social death. I feel a little sad, looking back, for that misfit book nerd who stood in line to play handball badly, hating every minute of it. But when I got home there were all those magical rooms, in the Beast’s castle to explore, and gorgeous dresses to pine for. After a hard day’s handball, Beauty promised me that good things came to those bookish misfits and I was comforted. I never did stop being bored by the handball.

Rose photo by Ricardo Resende on Unsplash

Who needs a drink?

She showed up one evening in the middle of a particularly difficult week. Work was hard at this time of term and each night when I sat down to write my whole body, including my brain was so tired that the words either wouldn’t come or they sounded like they’d been written by or for a five year old. Before I’d decided to combine teaching with small children of my own, I hadn’t known that my brain could feel tired.

I was sitting at the kitchen table wrestling with a tough scene of my old nemesis, dialogue. It was a key scene, it revealed so many important details, but the words kept congealing between my brain and the pen. I’d started writing on the laptop but given it up quickly and gone long hand. It still wasn’t helping. I’d been plugging away at it for three days and all I’d achieved was something with the fluency of a First-Grade reader:

‘You killed the man. The man is dead.’

‘I did. I killed him.’

See the dead man, he is dead. Peter killed him. See, Jane, see.

When the sharp rap sounded on the window, I jumped. I was irritated and a bit nervous, to tell the truth. Who would be out on my back deck at this time of night? The woman staring at me through the window gestured with the cigarette in her hand and, when I went to unlock the back door, she pushed past me into the house. In the brighter light of the back room I saw that she had short, dark hair parted on one side and shingled like a 1920s flapper. I though, great 2020 has come to get me, but I said,

‘Can I help you?’

She lowered herself languidly onto one of the kitchen chairs with a grace I would never be able to achieve if I lived to 1000.

‘No. I’m here to help you, of course,’ and she blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.

‘We don’t smoke in the house,’ I said stiffly.

‘That must make things very uncomfortable for the smokers,’ she said, examining the glowing tip of her cigarette.

I stood staring at her and she stared back at me raising one sardonic eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I call the police? What would I say? Some woman from a Nancy Mitford novel is smoking in my house? Hmmm, perhaps not.

‘I’m really quite busy, I’m in the middle of something,’ I gestured at my writing station.

She rolled her eyes and raised a thin, sardonic eyebrow, ‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Writers, honestly! Have you got any gin, I could murder a g and t? What use are you? Well, go on,’ she said, as I stood staring at her. ‘Are you waiting for another invitation? Sit down, write!’

Bewildered, I edged back into my seat and picked up my pen. And it was easier to start again than I’d expected, even with her sitting there, squinting at the ceiling through her cigarette smoke. The dialogue started to take shape, then it flowed and in minutes I was scribbling hard to keep up with the words as they poured out of my brain.

‘Get rid of ‘actually’ from that sentence. ‘Actually’ is one of your junk words.’

She was still staring at the ceiling and she couldn’t possibly have seen my sentence, how did she know I’d written ‘actually’? Anyway, ‘actually’ wasn’t one of my junk words. Surreptitiously I opened the document I’d been working on, keeping half an eye on the woman. I did a quick search through it for ‘actually’. 15! I could not possibly have used ‘actually’ 15 times in that chapter.

‘See, 15 ‘actuallys’ is more actually than anyone actually needs,’ my visitor said, still watching her smoke curl towards my ceiling.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered.

‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? God! I need a drink. Be a muse they said, you get to smoke, drink gin, inspire people to write witty things. Nobody told me it would be so goddamn boring! Honestly, are you going to write or not, because there are plenty of other would-be writers I could be visiting!’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said.

I picked up my pen and started to write again, my mind buzzing. I’d read Stephen King describe his muse as a basement guy, in On Writing, smoking cigars and grunting occasionally, apparently mine was a Mitford sister. I hoped it was Nancy and not the one who’d been a fan of Hitler.

‘No, I’m not that one,’ she said.

And the words flowed, swift and smooth onto the page.

Image by Nickolay Dimitrov on Unsplash

An Ode to the Mundane

The incomparable Agatha C is supposed to have said, ‘The best time for planning a book is while you are doing the dishes.’ While this quote is apocryphal, I’ve always liked the banality of this idea, that those convoluted plots came about during something as mundane as the washing up. I’m a bit of a champion of the mundane, probably a defense mechanism because so much of my life is taken up with it. We’ve evolved as a society to dread the ordinary and the dull. We fill our waiting by distracting ourselves with our devices and we always seem to be seeking out bigger and better experiences. Don’t worry this is not my great sermon warning against the evils of technology and the apocalypse which must be nigh, something, something, alfoil hats. But it is a celebration of those small, dull and ordinary moments.

I grew up immersed in what we now call mindfulness. At school and at home the emphasis was on being where I was, not wishing to be somewhere else, doing something else. Of course I blithely ignored a lot of this and lived very much in my head as many only children do, but I absorbed a lot of those lessons about being present and I find a great deal of comfort in the dull tasks that inevitably become part of our lives.

I think it is interesting that YA fiction is currently full of ordinary people who turn out to be the ‘Chosen One’, complete with a special something that enables them to save the day and catch the babe. I think this says so many things about our horror of ordinariness. So many of us long to be that special one, which probably also explains our cult of celebrity. None of my students think that they will end up in administration or sales, they are all convinced that they will be doctors, lawyers, engineers, marine biologists, YouTubers or Instagrammers. This is not helped by the many well-meaning motivational slogans that urge us to live their best lives or tell us that we can be anything we want. No wonder so many of us want to be somewhere else doing something else.

I get it, the daily routine is a grind, the endless making of food and the endless cleaning up after the making and eating of food feels interminable sometimes, oppressive at others. Our jobs can be tedious. In mine there’s the marking. Don’t get me started on the marking, no seriously, I’ll bore you til you’re dead. There’s the playground duty, which is either peak monotony or a series of unpleasant confrontations. And there’s the brain-numbing, eye-stabbing boredom of calculating and entering reporting data. But sometimes, when I get into a marking rhythm and see my pile dwindling, when I get to smell the jasmine that flowers near my staffroom or when I have a friendly interaction with a student on the Demon Playground Duty; I experience a small sense of satisfaction. Nothing makes entering reporting data better.

There is a special beauty, a magic even, in the most prosaic moments of my day; the smoothness of the paper in my writing journal, the promise of the empty page, the neat shapes and colours as I chop vegetables for dinner, the sheen of the table after I wipe it down, the achievement of a pile of neatly folded clothes, the sunlight on my washing as it skips in the wind, there are so many of those moments.

I know this is all very philosophical and utopian, and I forget to notice these things more often than not, but in this time of pandemic and uncertainty, the small experiences, those present moments are precious and lead to a deeper and more lasting sense of satisfaction than all the big, glamourous experiences, the legions of Instagram followers and the successes that a broken society teaches us are important.

It is telling that the only sort of fame to interest me is as an author, just about the most anonymous fame there is. With the exception of the Stephens and the JKs, most authors can walk down the street entirely unrecognised. I wouldn’t know what to do with a red carpet and small talk at social events is my nemesis. I love instead the quiet 6 am space at my new old writing desk, with my journal, a biro and a mug of tea. I’ve started getting up earlier on work days to fit this in and my head space during the day is clearer and quieter – mind you, this may just be light-headedness from the early rising.

And I can live without the big historical events, the adventures and the great excitements, a pandemic where I had to stay at home and not see other people was my kind of apocalypse. Poor old Bilbo put it best, ‘We don’t want any adventures around here thank you…nasty disturbing uncomfortable things.’ He pined for his cups of tea through that whole journey, there…and back again!!

I know that if the zombie apocalypse comes or Sunnybank is inexplicably menaced by a masked  serial killer, both of which seem increasingly likely as this weird year goes on,  I won’t have the distinction of being the first to die, I’ll be third or fourth and I’m fine with that. I have even less desire to be the last girl, hiding in a cupboard, wearing inadequate nightwear trying to outwit the crazy guy, who is wearing a mask made of people and wielding a chainsaw. I’d rather be hanging out the washing.

Image by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

The Marvellous Middle Ground

We seem to be living in an age of black and white. You can be a leftie liberal or a right wing conservative, feminist or misogynist, ally or enemy. And I find these certainties, these definitively drawn battle lines, troubling. In all these black and white certitudes there is no comforting, softer shade of grey. But why is she getting all political on me? What does all this have to do with writing and books, I hear you ask? I can tie this in, I promise.

I’ve never been a big fan of aligning myself dogmatically with a particular tribe. Although I seem to get more leftie and social justice warrior with each passing year, I see some merits in true conservatism. I wasn’t an attachment parenting mamma, nor a cry-it-out proponent, not a rabid breastfeeding Nazi nor a strident ‘fed is best’ advocate. I could see useful elements in all these areas. For me, the flexibility is all. You do what works, the dogma be damned. As in life, so in writing.

The writing world, too, has its certainties, like the tribes who advocate for worthy literature over trashy genre fiction or the self-publishers versus the traditionally published. But at the heart of writing practice is the sacred dichotomy of pantser versus plotter. A pantser is a writer who doesn’t follow any plan in their writing, but flies by the seat of their ‘pants’, following their creativity. A plotter is the opposite, a writer who carefully plans every aspect of their project from plot to character traits, often scene by scene.

I used to think that I was a pantser and I suspect, by natural inclination I am. If you’ve had any dealings with my organisational abilities or seen the horror show that is my desk at work you’d probably agree. Apologies here to my long-suffering staffroom buddy, Robyn. For a long time, I was sincerely baffled by my inability to finish anything longer than a short story – not even those sometimes. Why, I wondered, was it so very hard to complete my creative writing projects? So I gave it up. It was just too difficult, maybe I wasn’t cut out for this whole writing malarkey. Then I embarked on a course called ‘The Year of the Novel’ with Kim Wilkins, who I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The course is designed to help you get the first draft of a novel written in a year. Dr Kim had a very specific and detailed method for doing this. I know you’ll be shocked to discover that the core of her method was meticulous planning. And after my first novel, begun in a pantsing burst of inspiration, turned out to be an ungodly mess, I was inclined to think she might have a point. So, when it came to my current project, I followed Dr Kim’s advice and plotted. And…ta da! I finished a first draft, and it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, then a second and I’m now elbow deep in my third draft – a structural edit. I’ve even written a couple of short stories this year.

I’ve come to the conclusion, that I have to supress the most overblown of my pantsing tendencies if I want to get a thing finished, but I don’t plan scene-by-scene as Dr Kim advocated, because that bleeds my creativity dry. While I was thinking out this post, I was listening to an episode of the podcast, So you want to be a writer, created by the Australian Writers’ Centre where they interviewed Graeme Simsion author of The Rosie Project. He talked about this very idea. ‘I see constantly, people who managed to write about half a novel and give up. I know exactly what’s happening, they can write the first act, the first quarter, because it’s the premise. And then they get to the middle part and what they lack is escalation, they can’t write the thing…it just falls away, and it’s because they don’t have a plan.’

This tallies with my experience, the plan is there to help me get past the hard bits that would otherwise mire me in a writer’s version of the Slough of Despond – the Bog of Block perhaps? I do still let my pantsing out within the confines of the plan. It will sometimes take me in interesting new directions that are very well worth exploring. So I’m in some strange kind of middle ground, with my lovely greys, maybe this silvery area should be called being a plotster or a pantter. On second thoughts, scrap that one – it sounds…dubious, like it’s something best done behind closed doors.* One of my favourite Tolkien quotes deals with plotstering. Tolkien, Mr I’ve-created-an-entire-intricately-detailed-world -with-its-own-fully-functional-language, the uber-plotter himself, wrote to his son Christopher in 1944, ‘A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him…but there he came, walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir.’ That quote has stayed in my head for years because I love the idea that Faramir just walked into the story. That seems to sum up this strange old, magical process that we call creativity. And I think it sits at the junction of that plotter and pantser dichotomy, in fact, in my beloved, grey-shaded middle ground. We ignore it in our creative pursuits at our peril.

The middle ground lets us have the best of both worlds, it gives us the nuance of all two hundred and fifty six shades of grey (not 50, she even got that wrong) and it avoids the rigid certainties and extremes that come with black and white. We miss out on all that lovely, useful nuance when we can only see one side of a situation whether that be in writing practice or in the bigger pictures of politics and ideology. We might all be a bit better off with more grey in our lives.

*I have since discovered that the official name for this middle ground is called being a plantser – I still like plotster and we still aren’t going to talk about the ‘other’ one.

Image by Natalie Grainger on Unsplash

In which I read ‘that’ series

I’ve got something to admit. Try not to let it irrevocably damage your view of me. Ok, here goes, (deep breath, Rahnia)…I’ve read Twilight. The whole original series, more than once, actually…multiple times – but not Midnight Sun, because that just seems a bit pointless. If you are still reading at this point, I’d like to add that I am a reformed Twihard. I promise! Although I was comforted recently by how many savvy, intelligent, middle-aged women on Twitter turned out to be mad keen Twilight fans.

Joking aside, I did wrestle with writing this post. I didn’t mind admitting that I’d read the books, I just didn’t want to admit that I’d thoroughly enjoyed them, even less, that I’d been inspired by the series to start writing again. So, I didn’t want to write this, but it’s a topic that has been prodding at the back of my brain for ages. And in the spirit of refusing to be embarrassed by my reading preferences, here I go!

At the age of 28, what I found in Twilight was a book that summed up my experience of adolescence perfectly. No, not the dating sparkly vampires bit. The other bits. Like the sense of not quite fitting in anywhere that I had for so much of my teens. The knowledge that I was not good at the things that counted where social capital was concerned. The dread of the horror show that PE could be for the terminally uncoordinated and the liking of things that were really uncool like cross stitch and Jane Austen and tea (I just realised that I’m a refugee from a Regency novel!). Recently, I read someone reviewing Midnight Sun, cruelly, but accurately, sum up Bella’s musical and pop culture tastes as perfectly reflecting the interests of a middle-aged Mormon woman. That was me, middle-aged at 14. But while I loathed Judy Blume as a teen because her unflinchingly realistic portrayal of awkward adolescence made my teeth ache, Stephanie Meyers mixed in enough wish fulfillment that Twilight was delightfully escapist instead. I know, I know, Bella’s a Mary-Sue and that’s why I identify with her*, but when I read the Twilight series I was always left with a longing to revisit a teenage-hood that had never really existed, except in my head.

That time spent in my head, dreaming of the boy I half adored and half resented, is one of the stand out memories of my teenage years. Of course, the boy in question changed frequently, whether it was Keanu Reeves or a friend’s kind and good -looking older brother or the golden-boy school captain from our brother school, all three equally unattainable as it turned out. But there was always a boy in my head and the boys in real life never quite matched up to him.

Disappointingly, no brooding, tortured vampire or werewolf types improbably fell for me and when I did get myself a string of brooding, tortured boyfriends in my late teens, I discovered that the brooding and tortured tended to hide substance abuse and unpleasant personality flaws. In real life you want a Mike not a Jacob or an Edward. Go Team Mike!

But beyond all this, it was the sense of infinite promise and infinite possibility, of a bright future that was mine for the taking; that I loved about the books. The whole world is in front of you at sixteen. It was this feeling and a nostalgia for a time and place I’d never been, that made me start writing again. I wanted to write a book that made other people feel that same way, that spoke to people in the way that Twilight spoke to me. And no, I didn’t rush off and write a book about a delightfully klutzy girl with hidden attractions pursued by two exceptionally hot boys, one a demon and one an angel. I didn’t even write a terrible Twilight fanfic complete with BDSM – yes, I’m looking at you E.L.! Because let’s face it, there are plenty of problems with Twilight too, not least of which is the fact that it is frothy, escapist reading  with about as much substance as fairy floss and about as much nutritional value, long term. Brain candy, if you will.

So eventually I outgrew Twilight and went searching for other more substantial YA fare (may I commend to you, the truly awesome We Were Liars by E. Lockhart) and when I returned to it recently, with the publication of Midnight Sun, I was unable to recapture more than a faint echo of that original feeling. I could see the flaws and I couldn’t lose myself in the world anymore, because if Edward smirked one more time, so help me…! I will, however, always be grateful to Stephanie Meyer and Twilight because, what I have left is an enduring love of YA fiction and a rekindled passion for writing. So this is a love letter of sorts to the series. I am determined that if one day, one reader senses that infinite promise and infinite possibility in my books, a nostalgia for a place and time that I’ve created, then I will know I have been successful and I will blow Twilight a heart-felt kiss and thank it for setting me on the right path.

*A Mary Sue is a character in a book who is unrealistically perfect or gifted and are often an author’s idealised self-insertion.

Image by Loverna Journey on https://unsplash.com/

In which I am an impostor

I only came across the term Impostor Syndrome a couple of years ago, but I’ve been experiencing it, at a conservative estimate, for the past twenty years. If you’re new to the concept, Impostor Syndrome is a term that describes the psychological experience of feeling like you don’t deserve your success, whether that be in a career, a hobby, or just adulting. I often feel that any minute now someone will pop out from under my desk in the staffroom and yell, ‘We knew it! She’s a fraud, she can’t really teach English!’

The things to feel fraudulent about are infinite, but for me, teaching, parenting and writing are my Big 3. Mind you, why restrict it to the big things when I can feel like an Impostor about so many small things. Can I really invite anyone out for coffee, when I don’t actually drink coffee, only tea? Isn’t every other adult in the room wiser and more experienced than I am? And, is it bad that I feel like I’m making up the whole parenting business as I go along, and mostly getting it wrong?

Which often makes me wonder if there are people out there who are completely free from this? What would it be like to live a life full of such confidence in your abilities that you never second guess yourself? I mean clearly if such people exist they must be sociopaths. Mind you, I don’t spend my entire life crippled by self-doubt, just 95% of it. I do feel that deep satisfaction when the lesson I’ve taught goes brilliantly. I do feel it when my kids are kind without being prompted. And I do feel it when I’m writing and there’s that sensation, almost like a click in my brain that tells me it’s all working beautifully.

And yet, much of the time I do feel like a fraud, especially around my writing. I’ve been writing off and on my whole life, but I began writing with the intention to be published around ten years ago. I’ve not made a secret of writing novels, exactly, but I haven’t called myself a writer until recently. If I’m honest, I am still not really calling myself a writer. I think the big difference now is that I’ve started seriously thinking of myself as a writer and mapping out a plan to achieve that in real life. And, while writing this blog is a first step to that, the biggest step I’ve taken in considering myself a real-live writer, is looking Impostor Syndrome dead in the eye and calling myself a writer, right to its smug face!

Part of what made me resolve to do this is realising that other people, far further down the writing career path suffer from Impostor Syndrome too. Neil Gaiman tells a rather lovely story about this. Bear with me if you’ve heard it before.

‘Some years ago, I was lucky enough [to be] invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things.  And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.’ (https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-footnote.html)

I love the idea that none of us are grown-ups, and many of us feel we’re winging it, even the first man on the moon. So I’ll leave this here and get back to writing my novel, because I am a writer, even if it’s only in my own head so far!

Photo by Thomas Park on unsplash.com

 

In which I dream of a writing room of my own

We went shopping for antiques on the weekend. I loved it! It turns out that I am one of those people for whom ‘antique’ is a verb. It also confirmed something for me about beautiful objects and picturesque settings, something that has been in my mind for a little while now. I recently saw a post on Twitter by Australian author Kate Forsyth. In it she talked about creating a sacred space for writing, filled with beautiful things that inspire her because this helps to get her into the flow of the writing. It was something that I have always felt, and I experienced that sense of comfort that comes from seeing your own feelings exactly expressed by someone else. This and the antiquing are all tangled up for me in the slightly vexed question of my writing space. Or lack of it.

Where do you write? It is a question many of us talk about in writer land. It can be fraught with controversy as are so many writerly things: plotter vs pantser, write everyday vs write when inspired, traditional vs self-publishing. I even heard about an anti-Microsoft Word faction the other day, go figure! Anyway, some writers are very clear that we should always go back to the same space. That way the muse knows where to find us, is the theory. Others say, shake it up, learn to write anywhere, then you never get stuck. This approach does have some backing from neuroscience but is far less interesting than imagining what my muse looks like.

About a million years ago I did a writing course with the fabulous Dr Kim Wilkins aka Kimberley Freeman. Dr Kim was a proponent of the latter approach and, as she was my first writing teacher, I have tended to follow her advice. Followers of this blog know that I’ve written in the car, at the park, in waiting rooms, at swimming lessons, in sneaky lunchtime spaces at work, or in boring staff meetings (if my boss is reading this, let me stress this was a long time ago under a different admin team – honest!).At other times, probably more often than I’d like to admit, I write in bed with a cat curled up close by. And while I do all this to carve out my writing time, I also do it, in part, because I don’t have my own writing space.

              Mostly I write at the kitchen table. Sometimes there are maple syrup or Bolognese stains on the covers of my journal, often there is a clutter of toys or homework paraphernalia at the other end of the table, but my brain is used to sitting here now and when I sit down to write, mostly the muse shows up. She sighs, rolls her eyes at me, and makes a caustic remark at my expense. More about her another time. So, this is my regular writing space when the day job and the three children don’t intervene.

              But like Martin Luther King Jr, I have a dream. Mine has nothing to do with the greater good of humanity, mine is selfish. I dream of a writing space of my own, a tiny shed in the back corner of our garden. I’ve been Googling these lately and I have a couple of favourites already!  I dream of an old wooden desk with a beautiful finish and a comfy office chair and an armchair for reading and contemplating. A little bookshelf wouldn’t go astray either or some nice pictures on the walls. When I get my first book published (hopefully this is sooner rather than later) I have promised myself this writing shack, but until then I’m starting small. Which brings me back to the antiquing, that was what we were looking for, an antique writing desk that can go in the back room. This will be my sacred writing space, for the time being, to fill with beautiful things. It will be a space that I don’t have to clear when it’s dinner time and a space free of Bolognese and maple syrup. For now, I mark out my little piece of real estate at the kitchen table, but I dream of my beautiful writing space.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

In which I only include cool books on Goodreads

Ah book shame, ‘tis a wonderful thing. If you aren’t familiar with this particular phenomenon, it is the feeling of guilt associated with enjoying books that you suspect to be deeply uncool. It’s what leads us to read Crime and Punishment on the work commute instead of Twilight which we are enjoying in the privacy of our own home.

I distinctly recall my first ever moment of book shame. I was fourteen and obsessed with Mary Stewart’s books – not the Arthurian ones, which might have given me some cred – but the mystery romances like Madam, will you Talk? I was reading one of these when a friend of my parents came round. He was an earnest twenty-something who’d recently qualified as a doctor. In the absence of attractive boys my age, I had a bit of a crush on him. He said, ‘What are you reading?’ When I told him he said, ‘Oh yeah, my mum reads her books.’ I still vividly remember the hot prickling of shame that rushed over me. I read like an old lady! To this day I have never admitted to reading Mary Stewart in public again although her books remain some of my favourite comfort reads. Notice how honest I am being here, exposing my dirty, little reading secrets. I feel an echo of that long ago embarrassment even as I write this.

It was a similar story with my other great love, British crime novels. When I was nineteen I had a boyfriend who was, in hindsight, pretentious and clichéd in the way that only intellectual young men in their early twenties can be. I was terribly impressed by him. He wore Che Guevara t-shirts and lived in a share house straight out of a John Birmingham novel (no one died with a falafel in their hand but I’m pretty sure one of the guys passed out holding a kebab). My boyfriend (we’ll call him Che) read edgy books about people with drug habits living in inner city slums or biographies of socialist freedom fighters. I read Cosies and police procedurals. Che bought his books at the Folio bookshop in the city. I bought mine at secondhand bookshops. He loved Irvine Welsh and Hunter S. Thompson. I loved Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I was ashamed! I hid my scruffy paperbacks and read all the Irvine Welsh I could get my hands on starting at Trainspotting. The novels grew progressively darker and more experimental until Filth became one of the first novels I failed to finish. That nasty, misogynist policeman and that stupid intestinal worm – aaarrrggghhhhh!!!! Filth was the worst but I can’t say I enjoyed any of them (although, I guess you aren’t really meant to enjoy them). The stupidest thing was that by the time I sat down to read Filth I wasn’t going out with Che anymore anyway.

It took me almost ten years to purge my feelings of book shame and embrace my love of all things Golden Age of British crime. Or so I thought…Then about a month ago I started my first Goodreads challenge. And my old feelings of book shame are alive and well. I am quite happy to add Neil Gaiman and Donna Tartt and China Mieville to my TBR but when I came back from the Library with a couple of the Wycliffe novels the other day I was actually trying to work out how I could include them on my list without admitting what I was reading. That got me thinking about the notion of ‘cool’ books and how odd that is. Why would I make myself read books I don’t enjoy just to impress other people? This is totally removed from embarking on a challenging book to stretch my reading muscles. This is about pretending to be a different person than I really am who has different tastes than I really have, for the benefit of a bunch of strangers, that I’ll probably never meet. Hmmmm, doesn’t sound awfully healthy does it?

So I hereby declare that I like the Wycliffe novels and if you look at my Goodreads list you will see them there. Feel free to judge me and know that I don’t care – very much,…I think. Here’s to reading what we like, when we like, without worrying about it. Who’s with me?

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

In which I purge my guilt

Contradictory opinions have been flying around Internet-land lately about finishing books. Finish, don’t finish, read what you like without shame, won’t somebody please think of the Literature! I read Juliet Lapidos’s piece for The Atlantic last week, in which she was very firm (and maybe a bit judgey) in her opinion that readers should finish any book they start. And I have to tell you that she made me feel very frivolous. You see, once upon a time, in my youth, I would never have abandoned a novel that I had begun. Now I will dump a novel without compunction. I don’t remember when I first gave myself permission to give up. I suspect it was after I started teaching. From that point I became very intolerant of clumsy writing style. For me, poor writing is a deal breaker; like the novel I half-read that contained no contractions, not one. But sometimes it is simply that a book is dull. I am currently stuck in the middle of The Goldfinch. I got halfway through and there I bogged. It is sitting up on the bookshelf with the bookmark still in it. And so I join the 55% of readers (of the e version – I don’t like e-books, which is another story for another day) who started, but did not finish it. But Lapidos says that isn’t good enough. Consider my wrist effectively slapped!

I much preferred Peter Damien’s Reading is not a chore in Bookriot. It made me feel so much better about myself as a reader. His message was read what you want and if you don’t like it, stop. He cites his experience of reading Lolita and hating it. I recently read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, or rather, I started reading it and stopped about halfway in a sort of stupor. Nothing was happening and although it’s a clever premise, for me, a clever premise without an interesting plot doesn’t work. I bought it at the same time as I bought The Goldfinch and I was so ashamed of myself for not reading either and so cross about the money I’d wasted on them that I forced myself to finish The Night Circus. Juliet Lapidos was wrong, there was no payoff for plowing my way through to the end. It got slightly more interesting and that’s about the best that I can say about it. Peter Damien, on the other hand, was on the money because it is unlikely that I will read anything of Erin Morgenstern’s in the future.

So you’d think that I’d be championing Peter Damien’s point of view, throwing out The Goldfinch and picking up the new Richard Jury book Vertigo 42 instead. And…you’d be wrong. Here’s what Lapidos said that got me thinking about seeing the book through to its end: ‘As any agent will tell you, it is one thing to start writing a novel and another thing entirely to finish one. Many would-be authors simply cannot bring a work of fiction to completion, which is part of why publishing houses, as a rule, won’t enter into contract until they see an ending.’ So finishing the novel is partly about respecting the writer’s hard work and it is hard work. I’m working hard on my first novel so that resonated with me. It also reminded me of a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn that I heard in a Philosophy class once:

‘Now listen to the rule of the last inch…The job is almost finished, the goal almost attained, everything possible seems to have been achieved, every difficulty overcome — and yet the quality is just not there. The work needs more finish, perhaps further research. In that moment of weariness and self-satisfaction, the temptation is greatest to give up, … That’s the realm of the last inch —… The rule of the last inch is simply this — not to leave it undone. And not to put it off — because otherwise your mind loses touch with that realm.’

This is very true, I’ve often found myself pushing through a project until the bulk of the difficulty is done but the project is not completely finished. Then I think, I’ll just have a break, and that’s it, I never go back or I have to and it’s excruciating getting myself back into the head space and finding the willpower to actually finish. Case in point is my novel. I’m nearly finished the first draft, there are only about two chapters to go and for the longest time it has stagnated. I’m finally back into it, but it has been a slog. So where does that leave me and reading a novel to the very end? I figure it’s practice. The more often I make myself see the book through to the end the better I will get at it, building up my reading muscles if you will. I also see this as practice for writing. This may be only my first novel, but it will not be the last and with each try, actually finishing will be easier. So I’ll see you on the other side of The Goldfinch.

Photo by Taylor on Unsplash

J.K., kindness and clay feet

Have you ever been disappointed by one of your heroes? Perhaps you discovered that your favourite Mitford sister was the one who thought Hitler was a good guy, maybe Woody Allen’s penchant for his daughters disillusioned you, or you remember the day that Kanye declared he was a Trump supporter (honestly though, if you are a Kanye fan, you and I can no longer be friends). But never fear, I too, have tasted that disappointment, I’m still not over learning that my beloved Fass* is supposed to have hit a former girlfriend. Oh Michael, you were my favourite Mr Rochester, too!

On social media the other day, someone posed the question, does the behaviour of an author affect your decision to read their books? I don’t know if it was specifically referring to J.K., but she was the first person I thought of and I realised that it is a question that I cannot answer comfortably. On the one hand, I would say, absolutely, it does affect me – it changes the way I see that author, it taints my enjoyment of books I previously enjoyed and there is no recapturing that magic once it’s gone. The Usual Suspects continues to be my favourite film of all time but my enjoyment of it is tempered by the knowledge that Kevin Spacey, and possibly Bryan Singer, did awful things.

I know I’m not alone in this, the disappointment in discovering that our heroes have feet of clay has been very evident recently, in the vicious Twitter threads about J.K. Rowling, in the bookshop refusing to stock her new books and the former fan who filmed himself burning his Harry Potter novels. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that strongly about the transgressions of my heroes, but it does hurt when they seem to have let us down.

But this is where the other hand comes in and I become uncomfortable. I am concerned about the absolute nature of all this. You are in, or you have been removed from everything, never to be seen again, world without end, full stop. (I know, poor J.K. with her millions, in her Scottish castle – I’m weeping, too). But seriously, what happens if J.K. starts to read the room more accurately and softens her stance on trans women? Can she come back in or is that it for her? Can our trespasses ever be forgiven? J.K. seems to be a bit of a cautionary tale about being careful, but above all, kind in what we say online. It might even be that kindness is more important online that it is in real life. It’s certainly easier to forget the real person online, harder when you see your words hit home in person.

So, what’s all this got to do with me? I’ve vastly enjoyed my first forays into the writing community on Twitter, having heard all the horror stories and consequently avoided Twitter for years. Imagine my relief when I discovered that the writers of Twitter are wryly funny and passionate and welcoming. I’ve felt the effects of their kindness and it has encouraged me to seek out books I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise because I’ve enjoyed my interactions with their authors online. It reminds me to be careful what I do in these, my early days online. Because I am a nobody online right now, just plugging away at my novel and blogging for a few friends, it doesn’t seem like it matters what I do and say, but I work to be a good citizen online. I aim to be passionate and kind and welcoming, but also to make sure my clay feet are there on display from the start. I have no desire to spark furiously vicious Twitter threads and I don’t want any theoretical future fans to be disillusioned by my unexpected feet of clay. That way no future fan ever has to make a bonfire out of my books, on his lawn.

*Michael Fassbender

Image by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

I have an unwelcome visitor

I’ve had a visitor, an unwelcome visitor. You might have met her. She might even have stayed with you before. I’ve got Procrastination staying. She’s been hogging the best spot on the sofa, eating all the good snacks and watching Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, which means that I have to watch it too because it’s only polite. This would be fine except that she is needy! So I can’t get to my writing because I have to hang out with Procrastination. And I swear she can read my mind because every time I even think about going to write in my rare and valuable spare time, she entices me into some time-sucking activity. She’ll hand me my phone and somehow half an hour has gone by, Miss 3 is awake and all I’ve done is fall down the Twitter rabbit-hole.

Or she pats the sofa next to her and I find myself watching something fun in the precious after-children’s-bed-time peace. It would be rude to refuse, after all she is our guest and the ancient laws of hospitality require that I give her what she wants. But how I wish she’d go away!

Of course all of this raises the question, how have I managed to write this blog post at all? I got sneaky. I put my writing journal in my handbag when I was procrasti-tidying and Procrastination doesn’t like going to the OT. Yah boo sucks to you, Procrastination! I felt like I was winning. And then…she infiltrated my bedroom. I woke up to my alarm ready to get up and write before the children were awake and there, in the early morning gloom of my bedroom, was Procrastination watching me sleep.

              ‘You don’t want to get out of bed, do you? It’s cold and your bed is so warm and comfortable,’ she cooed, in her warmest, fuzziest voice. My husband rolled over and stared up at her groggily, ‘This is getting creepy!’ he muttered and pulled the blankets up over his head. I stared back at her and for a few, long, long seconds it was dueling gazes. Then, without breaking eye contact, I sat up and reached for my fuzzy purple dressing gown. I shuffled out to the back room and sat at the space I’d prepared the night before. I got half an hour in before the children woke up.

She didn’t want me to finish this post – apparently if I abandon it here she and I can still be friends and hang out. But I know it means she’ll have won another small victory in the war on writing. She knows this is a critical time and she’s there waiting when I’m tired, which is all the time. She whispers that all those things which stop me writing are so real and completely justified and totally understandable (‘After all, sweetie, you have three small children, and of course it’s hard to find time for writing’). But I’m not listening to her siren song of ‘Do Less’ and although these are small steps I’m taking, they are concrete and constructive. And you know what? I’ve got the interest back, that tingle in my fingers that means I’m just itching to write the first chance I get. Consequently, those chances present themselves more often.

And you know what else? Procrastination looks a bit less comfy on the sofa these days. She has trouble meeting my eyes and she’s making noises about needing fresh horizons, greener pastures. Naturally she talks in clichés. If I persist, one of these days I’ll come home from work and she’ll have taken off. That doesn’t mean she’ll stay away, she’s like a vampire, once you invite her in she can come in any time she likes and will. But now I have some defenses against her, and next time it will be easier to send her packing quickly. In the meantime, the writing is starting to flow more easily and I’m enjoying it all again. Hooray!