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August Moon: day 14

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How will you start the journey?

I’ve just got home from my grand tour of England. I went almost as far west as you can go without hitting Wales, I went south and stood in the English Channel, I went far into East Anglia. I caught up with school friends, work friends and family. I went back to 1996, 2013, 1994. I talked to my future self, and I saw my nine year old self on video. I spent all of one day, and most of two others, ill in bed.

And now I’m home, and I’m exhausted. I want to start everything, and I don’t know where to start. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I feel that I ought to be starting everything – and ‘ought to’ is the oldest and most dangerous of all the monster phrases. It’s not what I want at all. And there’s no particular reason why starting should happen right now. So I shall give myself permission to begin exactly when I need to, and not before.

I want everything to happen, and I want everyone to leave me alone. I’m panicking a little bit, because I was too ill last week to do certain things I’d meant to (organise my thirtieth birthday party, for example) and it’s nearly September.

I’m reminding myself that no reasonable person would expect me to come home from what has actually been quite a stressful, people-full, week and start working on the next thing. I’m reminding myself that I have left tomorrow (a bank holiday here in England) clear for a reason.

How will I start the journey? I don’t know, yet. I’ll go to bed tonight and sleep, trusting and believing that tomorrow morning the fog will have lifted and the path will be clear. Maybe I’ll want to start everything tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have the courage to phone my new doctor and get the sickness certificate I would need to reclaim the days of leave I lost to illness. Maybe some completely new and surprising solution will have emerged.

I’ll start the journey rested, happy and confident. I’ll start the journey when I’m ready, and I will trust that this will coincide with the journey being ready to start itself.

August Moon: day 13

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What are the stories that limit you?

Stories? I could fill a book with them:

– Doing What You Love is all very well, but one can’t expect to make a living that way.
– Doing anything other than What You Love is a betrayal of your artistic integrity
– expecting to make a living from any form of art is irresponsible and your family will starve
– of course it’s impossible to write without drinking/smoking/coffee
– we are the weird ones and nobody understands us
– it doesn’t matter how brilliant I am, nobody actually likes me
– if it doesn’t get eaten, it’s wasted
– it’s my responsibility to compensate for other people’s shortcomings and omissions

Some of these aren’t even mine. I’ve never smoked, for example. In fact, most of these are now neutralised. Naming them allows me to analyse them, take them to pieces, see how far they are true and where they are not. I’ve got into the habit now of picking up any such sweeping statements I hear myself making, stopping myself, and thinking: what? why?

So much for the verbalised stories. What stories are lurking in my head that I don’t even know are stories, that’s another question. What convictions do I have that I haven’t even thought to question? What could I do without those stories I don’t even know about? Now, that could be fun.

August Moon: day 12

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What do people thank you for? How do you surprise and delight other people? (Because you know the truth is that you do.)

Thank-yous. The expected sort (“I did this thing you asked me to!/Happy birthday!” “Thank you!”) and the surprising sort.

There is the sort of thanks that is surprising because the thing I am being thanked for is so ordinary, hasn’t required any sort of special effort. “Thank you for sending that email.” I once worked with someone who had the habit of thanking and congratulating people effusively for doing the most trivial tasks, which, I found, rather lowered my respect for them – and myself. You are impressed that I sent a very simple and obvious email? You are clearly very easily impressed – or your expectations of me are insultingly low. Thanking me for doing the minimum I would expect of myself anyway. I fear I’m rather ungracious at accepting that sort of thanks, at least when it jars with my own estimation of the worth of or effort put into a particular task.

Then there’s the sort of thanks that’s acknowledging something that I didn’t even know I’d done. While I’ve a pretty good idea of the worth of my own work, I’m constantly underestimating my own self: I’m always surprised to find that people like me, miss me, enjoy my company. For example, I don’t think of myself as someone who smiles much, but a week after I’d left my old job I got an email from someone there with the subject ‘Missing your smiling face!’ That one made me smile – consciously – all day. My oldest friend – the friend I’ve known the longest, I mean – got married last week, and was tremendously grateful to me for coming. And, even though it felt absolutely right to have borrowed the in-laws’ car and driven half-way across the country for this, and I’d have got my own driving license and driven further if it had come to it (and it was in a tipi, and was huge fun!), I did appreciate her gratitude.

I think there’s something there about the difference between being grateful for who I am, and being grateful for what I do, and the different levels within ‘what I do’.

I very much like it when I do something that I think is good, and so do other people. There’s a story of mine out there on the internet (not under this name, so I’m not linking) which someone has tagged with the comment ‘Empowering as fuck’. That pleases me, a lot. And, on the occasions where I have put a lot of work and somebody notices, I’m really happy. That doesn’t have to be serious, either. Still on the topic of emails (I do do other things at work, I swear), I remember with great fondness a comment something like “I like your emails, Kathleen, they make me laugh”. I appreciated that; I can’t remember what the original was about, but I think I had gone to some effort to make it amusing as well as informative. The sort of thing that I was secretly hoping for a thank-you for, but I wouldn’t have admitted that to anybody, particularly myself. The secret little glow that comes along with, I was hoping that this person would like this thing, and they do. Much like the birthday present that is absolutely perfect for that particular person, and that they like just as much as you hoped they were going to.

And then the things that fall outside my job description (any of my job descriptions), that are none the less appreciated. I used to be – and am beginning to be again, now my new colleagues have caught on – the woman that people would look to if they had something that needed a thorough going over for spelling mistakes. Also, they liked it when I brought in home-made fudge. Fudge and proofreading. Sweetness and accuracy. Yes. That’s what I want people to look to me for.

August Moon: day 11

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What is the perfect space for you? How can you start creating a place like this in the spaces you already have at your disposal?

Where am I now? I am sitting with my legs stretched along the length of a sofa, my netbook balanced on my knees and bouncing as I type. I’ve retreated from the dining room (which is being tidied, loudly) and kitchen to the conservatory, which is below the reach of the wi-fi.

I have a pretty good view. Beyond some household debris (a broken office chair, a mountain bike, a Lloyd Loom armchair) is an open French window; beyond that, a trapezium of decking and a buddleia bush, and beyond that, the sea. I can hear grasshoppers, the waves swishing gently on the rocks, a seagull or two, someone shouting down in the carpark.

I’m reading Fame is the Spur at the moment, and the central character is being provided with a study – a rare luxury in the working class nineteenth century world he inhabits. His parents find him a desk, give him a chair with a cushion and let him light a fire in the grate; his friend puts in some bookshelves, and they make regular expeditions to a second-hand bookshop to fill them. There are red curtains and an armchair. Even in 2014 it sounds pretty good.

A space that is mine and mine alone is non-negotiable; it has been ever since I moved in with my partner. The current study is the best yet. I have a bookcase, and my desk and computer, and my pictures on the walls. There is a sofa bed to sit (or lie) on when I want to read, or think, or write long-hand.

What can I do in the short term to improve this space? I can buy a lampshade. I don’t usually look at the lamp, and the light is gentle enough that I don’t notice the absence of a shade, but it would be nice to have one. I can empty the three boxes that are blocking the space between the bookcase and the wardrobe. I can rearrange the books, so that the poetry goes into the study. I can put a tiny little plate next my keyboard, to hold the daily chocolate ration. I can remember to shut the door to minimise the likelihood of my being disturbed.

Improvements that require quite a lot of money, and possibly a whole new house: I’d make it a little bit cooler in the summer. (I’ve not been there in the winter, yet.) I’d swap my desk (which is really a dressing table) for one that’s less likely to do injury to my shoulder and upper back. I’d arrange for more horizontal space, so that I have a surface on which to write as well as to type and I’d have a pinboard. A chaise longue, or a day-bed – either way, big enough to curl up in or to sleep on. And yes, I’d have an open fire, or perhaps a wood-burning stove. A gas ring and a coffee pot. Heavy, red, curtains and a thick, comforting carpet. A window – a big one – that opens to the outside.

In the dream house my study won’t even be given over to guests. We could have people to stay every night of the year and I’d be able to carry on as if they weren’t there. I’d have magic mind-reading wi-fi that would only give me access to the sites I needed for research. There would be far more bookshelves.

I’d have a separate room for the more practical things, very light, with big windows and white-painted walls. A big press to keep fabric in, and one of those merchant’s chests for beads, every drawer labelled. A huge table that I don’t have to clear mid-piece. An Anglepoise lamp (I’ve always wanted one, anyway).

I’d keep this view, though. Who wouldn’t?

August Moon: check-in

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It’s a beautiful moon. We are staying with my mother at the moment, and she has put us in the bedroom with a balcony looking south out over the English Channel. There’s very little sky-glow and the moon is a sharp silver sickle. Vega is very bright and the Milky Way stretches east-west. We’re very lucky.

I have come down with some vile bug and have spent most of today either in bed or sitting up in a chair feeling sorry for myself. I suspect it’s a case of not having had enough holidays, and having been doing too much gallivanting on the ones I have had.

This weekend – a long drive and a wedding and a family get-together – has been the hinge between a week of work and a week of (it seems) enforced idleness. (Although I am still holding on to the hope that I’ll be well enough tomorrow or Thursday to go to Amazon World and look at the poison arrow frogs.) In some ways it’s easier to get August Moon posts done during a work day; I have the prompts buzzing in the back of my mind all day and the words pour out pretty quickly. On holiday – particularly one like this, where there are friends and family all over the place, and the laptop’s at the bottom of the suitcase, and my brain’s running on only two cylinders – it’s more difficult. But I’m managing to carve out half-hours here and there to get on with it.

I’ve just finished reading White Feathers, Susan Lanigan’s first novel, and am feeling mighty privileged because I don’t think it’s officially released yet, and also I saw the thing come together before my eyes. (In the acknowledgements, Susan credits the Pico group. I don’t wish to blow our cover, but I’m part of it too and it’s a fantastic, supportive, encouraging group, the best incentive to write that I’ve ever come across.) I will content myself for the moment by saying, see? It can be done and I can do it too

August Moon: day 10

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How will you make time work for you?

I think I accidentally answered this one yesterday – which is helpful, because I’m not sure I’m up to a very detailed post today. How to reconcile making a decent fist of the day job and doing all the other things I want to do. How to not end up, the first day of holiday when I don’t actually have to do anything, spending most of the day in bed with an epic sore throat and no energy.

I talked about the nine-day fortnight yesterday: one day off every two weeks, with the house to myself. The downside to that arrangement is of course that each work day is forty-five minutes longer.

I’ve also mentioned the advantages of a long commute: reading time and writing time. I do at least reclaim a little bit of my day that way.

I would like my day to start a tiny bit later. Say half an hour. Say I were to aim for the 0745 rather than the 0715. That would mean getting up at 0615, which would probably leave me feeling a little bit more human. Start work at 0855. Half an hour for lunch (except on Pilates days, when it’s an hour) would mean finishing at 1625 and the 1645 train home. If I were to add forty-five minutes onto the end of the day I’d finish at 1710 and get the 1745 train home. That would get me home at about seven o’clock. That’s later than I want to be. Hmm. Need to think about that. There isn’t enough work at the moment anyway.

Oh yes, and the other thing I was going to do when Pilates stopped being on a Wednesday was to go to the lunchtime communion service at the church over the road. That’s going to kick in mid-September. It will help with the thing where I reclaim lunchtimes for myself, too. I wouldn’t mind cutting lunchtimes the rest of the week down to ‘twenty minutes with a book and a sandwich’.

I wonder if what I really want to do is go part-time. It would be a heck of a financial hit, particularly in terms of travel cost, since I’d still need an annual season ticket, and I feel that it’s probably not an option at the moment. Would I want to, if it were and I could afford it? Probably. Well, that’s a thing to think about.

August Moon: day 9

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What about your multiple selves?

Multiple selves: that would be nice. If there were three of me, there’d be seventy-two hours in each day, probably. Eight hours of it would go on earning a living, twenty-four hours of it would go on sleep, and the rest would go on making things and reading.

The question was about earning a living. I think Kat’s point is spot on, so I quote it:

Regardless of whether we’re talking about an overtly “creative” pursuit, it seems to me that putting pressure on your dream life to earn you money can somehow rob it of all its joy. This can become crippling and get in the way of the actual doing i.e. the refining of your craft, the prioritising of your actual goal.

I am incredibly lucky to be in the job I’m in at the moment, working for a not-for-profit organisation whose aims and ideals are broadly in line with my own – and, moreover, comparatively well-paid when you look at the job description. (Which, we note, is not the norm in the not-for-profit sector.) I have a lot of freedom to direct my own work and I have a good sense of its being generally worthwhile.

And yet sometimes I find myself resenting my day job for the proportion of my mind it occupies, for the way it takes up the morning, when my brain is at its best. I miss being a mile away from my office, rather than fifty-five. And knowing I need it in order to be able to pay my half of the rent, the sense of dependency, is frustrating.

I remind myself that this would happen wherever I worked, whatever I did. Even if I worked for myself. Particularly if I worked for myself.

I don’t want to make my bead stuff into a job. The pressure of knowing I have to make so many by this particular time… No, thank you. I don’t really want to make it into a business. Too much hassle. I do want it to pay for itself. Annoyingly, this will mean going through the motions of some form of business, but I’m not quite at the stage of thinking this through yet.

I am getting used to the idea that people might pay me for writing. Art is worth paying for, mine included. Yes. But I really don’t want to become dependent on any money I might make from it. I don’t want to be forced into writing to order.

So. I like my job. And it brings in enough to live on, and it doesn’t drain my brain completely. What I would like to do, when the workload picks up again after the summer, is to look into working a compressed arrangement, where I do ten days’ worth of hours in nine, and have a day off every two weeks. And by ‘day off’ I mean ‘a day to do everything else’.

Does this give me time to be everyone I want to be? Probably not. But I don’t want to be all of them at once. The day’s too short, and life is long enough.

August Moon: day 8

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Put out the call!

Dear friend,

You know your job title. But who are you?

You are a worthy addition to my circle of godparents, odd-parents and not-parents. You are absolutely convinced that I can do anything I want to. Even when I’m not. Even when I’m trying very hard to persuade you otherwise.

You encourage me. When I’ve been told ‘no’ – when I’ve told myself ‘no’ – too many times, you’re the person who says ‘yes’. You’re the one who gets me to sit down and try again, because I never know. You do. You know, and you’re just waiting for me at the other end, for me to make my way through the uncertainty and the self-doubt. You fight my corner.

You’re a good fifteen years older than me, maybe twenty. You’re confident about your place in this world, and mine. I don’t think you have children. Either way, I’m one of your honorary children. And you understand my ambivalence about having children myself; you know that, whatever else I might do with my life, getting this damn thing out into the world is incredibly important.

You know what you’re talking about. You’ve been in this game for a long time, and the reason for your having been there this long is that you love it. I can ask you any stupid question I need to and you won’t laugh at me.

I am looking forward to meeting you.

Much love,

Kathleen

August moon: day 7

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What tends to trip you up?

My stumbling blocks tend to come in two sorts:

Overcommitment

I always have at least three projects (I dislike the word, but it is widely understood, so let us go with it) on the go. One to work with my hands, one to work with my brain, one because it caught my eye, and so on. I said at the beginning of this week that I wanted to go forward, in all directions. The danger is (indeed, I’ve been having trouble with it this week) that I will try to throw myself whole-heartedly into everything at once and burn out within a couple of days. I want to make three necklaces and write a short story, maybe two, and oh yes, a couple of poems, and get the website online, and I want to do it all tonight. I manage perhaps half of one of those tasks, and then I’m knackered.

Then, of course, I get fed up with everything I’m trying to do and abandon it. Then I feel guilty about abandoning it and avoid thinking about it, sometimes for years at a time.

I’m trying to use this as a prompt to think more about providing myself with rest and sustenance. Not trying to fill the unforgiving minute – or, rather, learning to think of rest and relaxation as equally valid forms of distance to run. I’m setting myself realistic goals at the beginning of each day – for example, ‘on the train I will polish up that poem about the table for one, and when I get home I’ll get supper going, and in the forty minutes that it’s in the oven I’ll make a pair of earrings, and then after supper I’ll stop trying to do things, and will watch an episode of The West Wing and then go to bed’. Written down like that, it sounds exhausting, but it’s a lot better than kidding myself I’ll do EVERYTHING and failing miserably.

Monsters

Monsters are the things inside your head that tell you things about yourself that are not true. Eve Jacques has a comprehensive and joyfully wacky take on them; so does Havi Brooks.

Mine are usually trying to tell me all the awful things that other people might conceivably say, in order to stop me bringing the glorious project of the day to joyful fruition. If other people don’t know about the thing I’m doing, they can’t say horrible things about it. This seems to happen to lots of people.

With specific reference to the mermaid project, known in real life as Operation finish and publish Speak Its Name, damn it, here is a selection of monster stories, some current, some defunct, some mutually contradictory:

– there’s no point, because nobody is interested in what is essentially a sweary Victorian social problem novel about the crossover between faith and sexuality
– there’s no point, because Vicky Beeching has come out and it isn’t needed any more
– [Evangelical Christian friend] will be upset
– the remainder of the friend group will conclude that anyone who upsets [Evangelical Christian friend] must be a truly awful person, and I will lose them all
– somebody will try to sue me and we’ll be bankrupted and end up living in a cardboard box
– it’s actually terrible and I haven’t noticed
– I have made some awful embarrassing mistake and everyone will laugh at me
– and so on

And the solution is, when I’ve finished howling into a cushion, to have a calm and rational conversation about it. For example:

Yes, Vicky Beeching has come out and this is wonderful news. What this means is that there are thousands of young people in the world who have just heard that there is a way to be LGBT and Christian. And yes, this is partly what I was trying to do with Speak Its Name. And yes, hers is perhaps a more interesting story.

But it wasn’t the only thing I was trying to do. In the beginning, it wasn’t even the main thing I was trying to do. In the beginning I was trying to explain the early 21st century academic equivalent of the Schleswig-Holstein question (and I, like Lord Palmerston, have now forgotten all about it). It’s gone a very long way from what really happened since then. What if there’s something else in my book, something that I’ve forgotten about, or don’t even realise is there, that is what it’s really about?

And if you think about the billions of people in the world, the millions of Christians, the thousands of LGBT Christians, is it beyond the bounds of possibility that there’s one person who hasn’t heard about Vicky Beeching, who, two or three years from now, when it’s old news and the conservative evangelical churches don’t play her music any more, will pick up a copy of my book in a school library or a charity shop and discover that it is OK to be who they are? Isn’t it worth going on with just for that one? I’ve written the book I wanted to exist. Is it too much to believe that someone else wants it, too?

And no, there still aren’t enough books about being LGBT and Christian.

(At this point the ‘that’s because nobody wants to publish stuff about being LGBT and Christian’ monster wakes up. Rinse and repeat. Eventually the whole crew will shut up and let you get on with it.)

August Moon: day 6

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What are the signs that you’re on fire? (not literally!)

(I think this one needs a tiny little bit more context! “What I mean to say is: I mean to say, how does it feel in your body when something really gets you going?”)

Time disappears. I can turn an intense beam of attention onto the task in hand and make huge progress without (I would claim at the time) having to think about it. (And then it’s two hours later and I’ve got fifteen hundred words down and suddenly I’m really quite tired.) I don’t get distracted by Facebook or ice cream or yet another cup of coffee.

I’m more alert. Colours are brighter. Everything is sharper, the edges more defined, the way they are when you’ve just got new glasses and not yet adjusted to the new prescription. The beauty of quite ordinary things, like sweet wrappers or dandelions, makes me cry. I look and look. I am open to everything.

I’m confident. Insecurities about what other people think about me evaporate. I know them and I trust them. There’s a joyful sense of sharing, of rejoicing in other people’s work and successes, and the way they respond to mine. It’s at times like these that I tell people what they mean to me. I glow. I trust myself: my sense of direction, my judgement, my conscience. I don’t get lost. I see things all at once with an intense sense of rightness.

Words aggregate inside my head, sitting there patiently like pearls until I’m ready to write them. I go for a walk and collect more. There’s a sense of abundance, of being on the crest of a wave that’s carrying me gleefully forwards. I could sing. Sometimes I do. I breathe more deeply There’s an impulse to physical activity. I want to run, to swim. However far or fast I go, I’m aware of there being more that I can throw into it.

Kat asks two further questions: What is the catalyst for this feeling?

Noticing. Sometimes I can induce it by deliberate noticing, conscious wonder. Sometimes it happens day after day, and each morning I wake up and see how full of wonders the things are around me. Sometimes it’s gone for weeks, months, at a time, and then suddenly it’s back again, and something catches me, and I stop, and see. Oh.

What is it that you love about feeling this way?

This: that I feel absolutely, totally, miraculously alive.