Tag Archives: writing

Drive excitement

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You wouldn’t think that the excitement of a new drive was worth waking up at 5.30 am for. Yet, for the last three mornings I have been waking at this hour and been out in the garden working on my bit of path or levelling bricks in the old bit of the drive before the men come to fill in the sand again. I think it is the sense of coming near completion of a project. This is (nearly) the end stage of a very long sequence, of dreams, ideas, design, assessing finance, finding builders, working as they worked (they were very helpful). I don’t think it is that different from writing a book – though rather quicker and a little more under one’s own control in the final stages. When I was working 9 to 5, I used to wake early and write before setting off for work.

They have finished – we have a new drive – but the surrounding chaos is daunting. We will have to barrow large quantities of earth and probably buy some as well. I still have much path work to do, and this includes the path to the front door. We forgot to ask them to move back the wooden half-barrel they had shifted and whose bottom will certainly fall out if we touch it. Still the fun bit is to come, making the surrounding garden beautiful again.

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We’re a little concerned about the birds. The noise and movement right near their feeding areas must have been very disruptive. The mad blackbird is unfazed, but I think is short of some (bird) marbles and doesn’t know it is supposed to be wild.

Double trouble

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If you are submitting two different manuscripts, of course you get two sets of rejections. Todays’ was for the POW non-fiction book. A very kind email from an agent whose submissions were closed anyway and who still read the first 50 pages. A little troubling though that there was praise for the idea of varying my ‘novel’ by using letters. This is a history book that I am editing, full of original correspondence from 1941-1945.

The remaining Far Eastern POWs are in their 90s and it is now, as these men reach the end of their lives, that their children and grandchildren want to understand what they lived through. These documents need to be made available, so I think self-publishing has to be the route. The materials – letters from many sources, memoirs, linking passages and illustrations would have been better presented and pruned with professional advice, but I can’t spend the next ten years tinkering and waiting for rejections.

I have self-published once before, but the world has changed (e-books etc). So I have downloaded a free up-to-date guide. Just have to pick up the bag and get marching.

Mad blackbird

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This morning we saw a blackbird with a leaf as large as itself (ivy?) disappear into the holly tree outside our front door. This tree is only about twelve-foot high and brutally pruned each year to a ball shape to stop it taking the light out of the front windows. It’s pretty dense, but I have just looked and there is a nest there on eye level for the post man, or anyone else approaching the front door. This is no doubt the same blackbird (female) that does not bother to move if I cross her path while gardening.

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The heap of earth and turfs growing on the front lawn (ready to fill in the new bank after the drive is remade next week) is probably regarded by the blackbird as a permanent meal table. The state of my back may mean she is right as it will be a while before I can move, shovel and barrow it all into place.

I should be writing while the back recovers. I am – sort of, but without any sense of making progress. With two books in full draft all I can do is tinker, make submissions and try to decide when to make the break and self-publish – and check the clock to see if it is time to put on the kettle.

age and procrastination

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I have noticed an interesting effect of age. I no longer put off doing a major job properly. So in the garden, finding the protective mortar flaking off the lowest level of bricks in one area – which was in the same state four years ago when I was laying paving slabs there – I know that I must deal with it. I have this feeling with all heavy work in the garden; best to do it now, I may not feel like it in a year or so’s time, and best make a good lasting job of it.

This feeling spreads to other areas not necessarily involving physical strength. There is no longer anything to be gained by waiting for a better/quieter/more mature period in my life. While the tendency to cook up long term schemes and projects has not left me, perhaps I am finally learning to live in the moment.

I read that you should only touch a piece of paper once – meaning that when you open a letter you should answer and file it in one go. Looking at the pile of paper in the box that masquerades as my in-tray, I still have a way to go on that front.

Of course it may not be age at all. I have just finished reading an unpublished memoir of a WWII Far Eastern Prisoner of War (Dishonourable Guest, by W G Riley). Riley is a young Signalman who starts POW life in Changi, works on the Thailand-Burma Railroad, gets transported on the doomed Hokofu Maru troopship, and is one of the 23 Britons rescued in the dramatic Cabanatuan Raid at Luzon. I have read many POW memoirs in the course of the last three year’s research. Elements are the same, but each man’s story is unique. You would have to be very obtuse to reach the end of even one of these memoirs and not learn to appreciate the moment.

Riley made, in his son’s words, ‘anguished attempts to get the work published’. His whole life was affected, not only by his experience as a prisoner, but also by his need to get his  story written and known. It was never published as a book, but his son, Steve, had the second version of the text (the first was lost) typeset and printed 1988. This certainly puts the odd rejection by agents or publishers into perspective.

displacement activities and rejection

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Over Easter I decided to rearrange my writing room. I have that dream – a room of my own in which to write. It is almost perfect, but, as always, there are compromises. I need to fit into it my desk, which is a large old Victorian pine table, with flaps and a pitted, stained surface, and my mother’s piano – a hundred year old upright, on which I dream of achieving something better than my current Grade II skills – and the double piano stool my father made. There is also a large modern filing cabinet that I share with my husband, a wide bookcase full of poetry, a floor-to-almost-ceiling set of deep shelves (Sally Army) full of files, dictionaries etc. a cabinet, a working chair, a reading chair and an assortment of box files, document wallets etc without a home and a large wastepaper basket. Plus the photos and paintings (all by, or of, friends and family) on the walls.

There is no way all this will fit elegantly into a room 13 x 10 foot square. I don’t attempt elegance, but I am fanatic about practicality. I need to reach or see everything important. I am also keen on a sense of space. I might not have done anything about the urge to move the furniture, if I had not had another rejection for Border Line from an agent. It was very warm and friendly – though clearly a standard email – and they no longer surprise of hurt, but a little displacement activity often ensues.

So now I am sitting sideways on to the wide, low window, looking out onto the new paths and bed I have been working on and yesterday I cleared my desk and continued working on one of Border Line’s less satisfactory characters.

Since drafting this I have moved the piano. This required a certain amount of weightlifting attack, guile and a lot of leverage with undignified positions sitting with my back to most solid object, the filing cabinet. It was only when the piano was finally in position that I realised that I had switched off the socket (now behind the piano) for the much needed lamp. After some pointless fishing with torch and bamboo, waited for EG to come home and help.

All working now and miraculously my back is still OK. Not much work on Border Line, but an important correction in Writing to a Ghost achieved. Unless the weather makes path work possible tomorrow, I will surely WRITE.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – part 2

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We had a group discussion of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist last night and I left feeling faintly troubled. Most people wanted to talk about the subject matter – leading off into all sorts of world views and favourite gripes. I had been knocked out by the use of language and the writer’s skills. One of the consequences of writing, which has both an upside and a downside, is that your perspective changes. You can’t help, even in the most absorbing of stories, becoming aware of the writer’s craft skills. I used to regret that total loss of self as I read, now I relish it.

That wasn’t the only disquiet I felt. I thought Hamid had taken us, very skilfully, by the hand and led us from a world perspective we shared into one that we mostly fail to understand and yet are worried by/curious about. The curiosity and worry were certainly shared by my fellow readers, but I am not sure they had all come on the same journey. Part of this is the assumption that the writer is the protagonist – an almost unshakeable belief held by so many readers – and this led them to mull over who Hamid is, and where his allegiances lie.

Having said that, the story is so concentrated – while appearing to be deceptively straightforward – that each person had noticed (or read about) aspects of the story that the rest of us had missed. I will certainly need to read it again. Perhaps I should lay aside my concern as there was a general vote to read another book by him.

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.