brick paths and symphonies

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Expected bad weather still holding off, but my hands got very cold heaving bricks and moving turfs. I am taking up a grass path, but keeping the turfs to build a bank in the poor dry soil next to the drive.

No writing today either. Reading the 1853 A Year In Music in bed this morning, I was comforted once more by how little time the great composers of that period actually spent composing. They made a lot of music and they talked to each other about music and they travelled, but composing time was rare. I imagine that it didn’t earn them a living, any more than writing does today. Composing must be the most frustrating of the arts. It is all imagination – unless, say, you are a pianist composing for the piano. For orchestral work, or worse still opera, without the instrumentalists and the singers and the venue and the rehearsing time, you will never hear your own work, you cannot even show it to others except as a score.

It occurs to me that this is no longer true. Presumably there is now software that will allow you to compose and hear some version of your work… Hmm, I’ve always wanted to have a go. Now I recall the girls had a very simple music program on the old Atari. However in 1853 you had a page of music and, if you were lucky , a piano.

miscellaneous day

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Yesterday was a weird day. We were expecting bad weather yet the sun was shining bright, so I scrambled into gardening clothes and went mad in the garden, mending the hose that takes water from one rain butt to another, clearing paths and finding the edges of them. EG had set a fine example a week ago clearing all the moss from the side path. I kept expecting the sun to disappear, but it was so warm I went coatless.

In the afternoon we went to the funeral of our 92 year-old neighbour. She was a feisty and determined lady. She lived alone in the house her father built, and insisted on maintaining standards as she thought fit. When we came to live next door – more than thirty years ago – I lived in dread of her. She went in for unparalleled frankness and had many things to say about our house and garden, but over the years we became friends and she was always kind and generous to the children. Latterly she became a great supporter of my writing and would lend her copies of my books to all her friends – insisting that they read them.  She was lucky in having devoted friends, on whom she made great demands, who made it possible for her to stay in her own home to the end of her life.

After the funeral, as the bad weather still held off, I rushed into the garden and started work on the brick paths and beds in the area near the new drive-to-be. I had forgotten how much I enjoy the exhaustion of labour. I positively relish moving earth around and realising designs that had started out as pencil on paper. I think the two maples will look great in their re-made beds.

Later in the day, a lovely email from the researcher of the magazine on Far Eastern Prisoners of War to say that my article was OK. Much relieved. Apart from corrections, I did no writing yesterday.

To finish off the day I took myself off to a Lindy Hop session. This was mad. It takes place in the basement of a pub with limited floor room. Tonight there were suddenly about 15 newcomers. A crazy, lively and very noisy session, but not much room to dance.

coincidence

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On the TV last evening a program about a right-wing group at the beginning of the WWII. The consequences of their treasonable behaviour are linked to the rounding up of all ‘enemy’ aliens and their internment. At the same time I am reading the sad story of the Arandora Star (Maria Serena Balestracci), torpedoed on its way to Canada while carrying 2000 or so German and Italian internees, many of whom lost their lives. These internees were for the most part harmless individuals well-integrated into British life. They had been given very little time to leave home, with minimal goodbyes and often even the arresting officer thought they would be back the next day. Such unnecessary suffering, lives torn apart pointlessly, it is maddening how often humans create misery for each other.

Tearing a manuscript in half

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Torn between a new project – redesigning parts of the garden near new drive to be – and further work on Border Line. Had enough discipline to spend a couple of hours, working on dialogue of one character and checking the re-written story of another, then allowed myself to play with the garden. Much measuring in freezing wet conditions, but I now have a passable plan to scale, so ought to feel cheery. I feel pleased with the plan, but slightly unfocussed.

Actually I am frustrated that the weather is too foul to get to work, and I am dissatisfied by my writing today. I also had feedback about Writing to a Ghost from a dear friend. Love the feedback, but the dilemmas remain. Do I try to publish as is, or do I tear it to pieces and create three different kinds of books. I could fulfil the Pen & Sword requirement for a 50 – 70,000 word social history, by using only the relatives letters, and write the story of Phyllis and the dossier and the wives and mothers. Hmm, I can feel the juices flowing a bit as I wonder how to set about this.

happy family

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Big excitement, daughter is in the Chicago Tribune. Dedication to her craft precedes this production of the TomKat Project.

“Just how far can a clever director go working with little more than a trenchant script and a nimble ensemble? Look no further than the Playground Theater, where Elly Green has put together a clean, sharp work that reveals a deeply entertaining heart beating somewhere beyond its tawdry, gossipy origins. In the realm of fringe theater, this show is a near-perfect achievement.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ott-0315-on-the-fringe-20130314,0,3392866.story

writing worries

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One of the concerns I have with this blog is that it will eat writing time, rather than contribute to my writing life. I made an effort today to work on differentiating characters in the much revised draft of my third novel. It has improved immeasurably over the last couple of years – but how long should I engage in this ‘finishing’ process. I was aware of over-familiarity as I worked today and begin to wonder if I shouldn’t just self-publish. This novel, along with the WWII letters & memoir project, has been in the finishing stages for over a year now. When they were both out of my hands on a recce recently I got so excited and involved with my new project, I realised how much I was missing that buzz of pulling in new ideas and images. For a month or so, I was alive with input, sensing music differently processing words differently, now I am back in that other – but equally necessary – ‘finishing’ phase.

Writing, like my earlier careers in sculpture and scientific research, is project work. I like that. I like moving through the phases: creative; engineering; labour; finishing and peer review. Each is good to start and great to finish; none of them are so pleasurable when the record gets stuck in the same groove.

On the other hand, the only qualification that seems essential to getting published is a certain level of bloody-mindedness that refuses to accept defeat. I’m not suggesting that you don’t have to learn to write as well as possible first, but it is clear that being able to write is not, by itself, going to get you to publication. I have an instinct not to start a new project until the previous one is wrapped up, so I have at the very least to get the fiction  – Border Line – launched before I can enjoy the playtime of my next project.

Hmm, this morning I was reading this book about a year in music (1853), Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner etc all composers still famous today, battling away with daily life, but alongside them many others equally, or more, famous in their day and known only to specialists now. There are others too, some perhaps with as much potential, getting nowhere. They are all earning a living conducting, playing, writing or something else – but not composing. No one has it easy and luck and bloody-mindedness strike me as on at least an equal footing with talent.

This is a dull post, but I planned to think aloud – so there we go. And thinking aloud, I am sad about the choice of new pope. Not that I have any feeling about the church as such, and he seems a generally pleasant guy, but he is clearly not going to release the stranglehold the Catholic church holds over women and men’s health. I had a passing hope that an enlightened pope would allow contraception to his followers. I suppose it was naive to expect that they would think about the fate of the world and the living.

chilly start

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Out in the garden at 7 ish in dressing gown and boots. Ice crystals on every bud and branch. It looked stunning, but the birds had no water and some frost covers had blown off in the hailstorms yesterday. I know you shouldn’t plant tender plants where they are vulnerable, but the camellia given to us in memory of EGs dad is covered in fat buds.

We’ve had plenty of sun today plus some flakes of snow. The buds and leaves on the blue clematis on the fence are blackened and limp, but the one on the house as survived.

Goldfinches visiting and below that the newcomer – a siskin.

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We now have another estimate for the drive, not as expensive but lower spec than the first and either way to do the whole job will cost more than we are willing to pay. A compromise on doing half the drive (where the old lifting concrete slabs lie) looks like being the answer. We are lucky to be able to do it at all.

steep learning curve

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Much achieved today. Thanks to EG and friends Alan and Mike, I finally sorted a name for this blog. Thanks to help from specialist Chris a few days ago, I can more or less find my way around it. Still SO much to learn!

Yesterday had a one-to-one lesson from Apple and managed to retain enough to sort out my emails and add a web address that I have only been able to access through the web until now.

Alternating hailstorms with mass attacks on the bird feeders by great variety of birds. All the usual for us – sparrows, chaffinches, robins, dunnocks, pigeons, goldfinches blue-tits, coal-tits and great-tits – our new comer is a bright yellow siskin feeding on the Nyger seeds.

The first estimate for repaving the drive now in. This is the Rolls-Royce version for removing enormous ancient concrete slabs and more recent buckled block paving, adding new drainage channels and giving many layers of membrane and double underlays etc. It all come to a whopping £8,300 when you add in the VAT though we could have half of it done  for around £5000. This firm would do a brilliant job, but the cost is gulp-making and we are very much hoping that the more local man will come in with a more reachable sum. I am tempted to plan some DIY options, though I could no longer lift the old slabs myself.

Bought a replacement copy of White Teeth the other day, hoping to learn a little from the language. In my draft novel I have a Londoner and I am struggling to get his speech out of the middle-class white idiom without heavy stereotyped overtones.

As I feared this blog has a sort of delta style flow. I hope the categories would help me streamline but not so far. No doubt I will learn

FEPOW article

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Yesterday I sent the first draft of an article to the Researching FEPOW History group for their magazine. I found it very difficult to stick within the 2000 word limit. I realised this was because I was trying to tell the whole story of the book. I rewrote it telling only the story of finding the materials with samples of the letters. I hope this is what they had in mind. There is so much material. I did not give the book a title in the Article in case when/if it gets to publication they change it. At the moment it is Writing to a Ghost: Letters to the River Kwai 1941-45