Category: writing

April Moon: day 13: false dichotomies

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Sometimes I wonder if I will ever… shh. Don’t wonder too hard. You’ll wake it, and it needs a rest. So do I. It’s asleep, curled up in a cave somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Don’t worry. It’ll come back when it’s ready.

We’re not talking about this today. We can talk in generalities.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever make my living by writing – and then I realise very swiftly that I don’t want to.

Oh, I dream. I wander along the banks of the Cam and wonder which house would be the best to live and write in. I think of having a studio with a balcony and looking out at the swans and ducks and rowers. I imagine how my books will change people’s lives. I daydream about being interviewed in my beautiful home, and all that guff.

In the mean time, I write on the train to work.

Here’s a confession. Even in that dream life, I still go to work.

I was talking about other people’s expectations early in this round. I think there are just as many levied on artists, of whatever ilk, as there are on everyone else. Just as everybody assumes that the temp can’t be happy until they’ve found a real job, everybody assumes that the artist must really want to chuck in the real world and devote themself to art.

It’s the dream, isn’t it? Chucking in the [soulless bullshit job] and giving the whole to [one’s vocation]. But is it really the dream?

I have a friend who, in his forties, left the air conditioning trade and went to university (which is where I met him) to study French, with the ultimate aim of becoming a teacher. He tried teaching, hated it, and is now back in air conditioning, although with a life much improved (or so I believe) in other ways. Meanwhile, my uncle has left teaching to become a lorry driver. (He’s also an extremely accomplished musician and photographer.) Life is, as ever, more complicated than that. And people vary.

Personally (and I know I was ranting about the conflation of these concepts earlier in the round, as well) I would no more like to be a full time artist than I would a full time mother. I like my day job. I like getting out of the house and going to the big city. I like interacting with amusing, knowledgeable people. I like my forty-five minutes of writing time on the train. (Hush. Hush. It’s all right. Not you. I didn’t mean you. Nobody’s writing anything more on you at the moment.)

Even if there were a way to earn a living by writing without the nicotine and/or alcohol dependence and chronic financial insecurity that characterised the only household I knew where anyone tried it, would I want to? I don’t think so. I am learning to take better care of myself than that.

April Moon: day 3: “I feel I brought those children into the world”

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My great-grandmother, having introduced her former beau to a suitable young lady, was wont to say of the resulting offspring, ‘I feel I brought those children into the world’.

History does not record what the suitable young lady said about that.

Which is to say that birth as a metaphor for anything that is not birth has never worked very well for me. It somehow manages to diminish both birth and work, and I am really uncomfortable with using it of my own projects.

I am not entirely sure why that might be. It’s not as if I am particularly squicked by the concept of birth – I spent my teenage years as unofficial chief proofreader for Midwifery Matters, and as a result I probably know as much as anyone who hasn’t actually been there and done it about the physiological, practical and political aspects of birth. I can tell you what ‘O. P.’ stands for both in the Latin and the vulgar. I can explain why a common party balloon makes a reasonable model for the uterus. I can talk about the importance of continuous one-to-one midwifery care. What I absolutely cannot do is apply this to my own work.

Possibly I’m too much of a literalist. Take my long-going novel, for example. I resist applying the birth metaphor to that, because I am irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that the pregnancy has lasted seven years but nobody actually knows whether the conception was successful. I end up wandering through the animal kingdom (‘Well, horses and deer and things are born and then stand up within a few hours, while human infants need intensive nurturing for years before one can safely leave them to their own devices. Birds lay eggs – which is the nearest thing to birth – but then have to incubate them for weeks…’) and end up concluding that the current project is actually a marsupial.

And, jumping back behind the metaphor to what I think is the intention behind the prompt, my most recent project, into which I put a huge amount of work and of which I am extremely proud, has the unedifying title ‘Private Contractors Database’. One can’t talk about ‘birthing’ a ‘private contractors database’ without falling about laughing. At least, I can’t. The metaphors that do spring to mind are building (largely, of recent weeks, in the context of Rudyard Kipling’s If: ‘If you can see the things you gave your life to, broken/And stoop and build them up with Sharepoint 2013…’) and transformation.

The Private Contractors Database wasn’t my idea. It already existed, in an embryo (ha!) form. My role in bringing it to where it is now was more like this:

My manager: Well, we have six white mice and a pumpkin. We need a coach. I want you to look into coach-building possibilities.
Me: No problem; let me think about it.

Six months later, after a lot of hard work (important point! ‘hard work’ is often a translation of ‘magic’) we have a coach.

This is all very interesting, because I had thought that the part of me that was a fairy godmother had packed up and flown off when I stopped temping. I’d been looking after other people too much; it was time for me to look after myself. (I have a feeling I’ll be writing more about this soon…) But I look at the projects that I’m working on at the moment, and I see: one is a quilt for a baby. One is a necklace to surprise a friend.

Even the novel is a coming-of-age present for some imaginary godchild, to tell them that, whoever they are, they are turning out exactly as they should be.

August Moon: day 1

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Set an intention

Starting at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end. Spiralling around and around, soothing the hurts and remembering the dreams of the me-that-was, looking ahead, asking advice of the me-who-will-be, who already knows how to do everything I want to. And, more than anything, being here, now.

As luck would have it, I’ve just got to the end of The Artist’s Way and (is this a normal reaction?) been sorely tempted to go straight back to the beginning and work through all the exercises I missed the first time round. I’m going to lay off that for the duration of this fortnight, though, and concentrate on August Moon.

I walked out just now to look at the moon rising over across the river, huge and low and buttery-yellow. I had thought I might not be able to; we have had so much rain today, and great dark clouds to race against. But the rain had stopped and the clouds cleared, and, although the river was high, it was no longer lapping at the grass, and the wind had fallen to a breeze. And the moon was worth looking at.

Here are the four and a half things I am working on at the moment:

– my novel (!) Speak Its Name is, after seven years, as finished as I can get it, and currently out knocking at agents’ doors. Admitting to its existence in so many words, in public, is a new adventure as of this very minute. This is the project I’ve been referring to for ages by oblique references to mermaids. I will probably continue to do this. My intention is to keep faith in this thing, in my work and in the world’s need for it; to refine and direct it so that it breaks the surface and gets out there. Relatedly, poetry. To keep writing and posting it.

– something rather unexpected that’s developed over the past couple of months is a renewed interest in beading and general jewellery making. I’ve signed up for a silversmithing course, beginning in late September, and am considering how I can get this hobby to become self-sustaining. I don’t want this to become a career or an obligation, but I am making more things than I can wear, and spending more money than I can afford (so say the monsters), and I am fairly sure there are people out there who would wear beads depicting clusters of galaxies in polymer clay. This is Operation Silver Ship Strelsau, and my intention is to come up with an actual plan for launching it, however many sails it turns out to have.

– piano lessons! I’ve been promising myself piano lessons since before we moved house. The piano has now been tuned, and I have the contact details for a piano teacher. I need to send an email. My intention here is to remember that I don’t have to be good at everything immediately – which I fear I’ll need to.

– Operation Parisienne en ligne. Long story. My father has a bus – well, three buses. The buses need a website. I have no mechanical skill, but I can write, and my partner is happy to help me get this online. Intention: get this put together and public.

– Operation Another New Opportunity – which is a half-thing, really, as I’ve no control over whether the opportunity opens or not, only whether I jump into it if it does. This is my day job, and the feeling that I have now done absolutely everything that is open to me at my current grade. My intention is to jump, if it opens.

My intention with regard to all of these is perhaps best summed up in the phrase ‘forward! in all directions!’ I do not expect to get everything done in two weeks, particularly since I’ll be on holiday for one of them. However, I do wish to get my head into the space where they seem like things that I will do. Wish me luck!

Describe your daily, common soundscape, from rouse to turning in.

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Waking. Fighting the dry, tickling cough until the inevitable defeat. Up. Kettle burbles and clicks; computer sings. Now for a proper cough. Feeling more human: patter between bedroom and study to deal with emails (ping!), alarms (bringle, bringle, up and down the scale). Gather together the necessaries for work (‘I shall be late!’ and cursing freely), pack the bag and unlock the trike (‘what’s the time? I shall be late!’), and – now it starts:

– the click-click-click of the freewheel, the clunk of the gear change, the whir of the tyres. A sulky purr from the car behind me (‘yes, well, you can wait, can’t you?’), a honk if I’m unlucky, the roar as it passes. If it’s a motorbike, roar-whoosh. If a bike (they’re all faster than me, and can pass more easily) a slight disturbance in the air, and perhaps a ‘good morning’.

Birds. I never used to hear birds on my way to work; the fresh air never moved fast enough past me. My own gasping breathing (‘come-on-you-bastard, come-on-you-bastard, come-on-you-bastard’) – and down the other side of the hill, and I’m not sure whether I hear the air or feel it.

Back towards the main road, now. A siren. A hundred engines ticking over. The shrill peeping of the pedestrian crossing. The clatter of a train. Sometimes this seems like the longest road in the world. I am so nearly there.

Into work. ‘Kayjay!’ I am not fit for human interaction until I have had a shower. And yes, I am allowed to take the lift to it. I’ve just cycled seven miles you know. GROUND. FLOOR. Lift going up. SECOND. FLOOR. The extractor fan in the shower sounds more like a jet engine.

Phones. ‘Good morning, how can I help?… I see – when is your meeting?… have you spoken to your branch?… I’ll get the duty officer to give you a ring back…’ Will this bloody computer never load up? ‘Where are we with this committee?’ ‘What’s the craic?’ Always questions. The sickening crunch that means the photocopier has broken again.

The hum and the bleeping of the microwave. The inane witterings of whoever’s presenting this property show. A colleague’s get-rich-quick scheme (why does he never try them, if they’re so good?)

More phones. The tinny Westminster chimes of the doorbell. It is the photocopier man, who is not best pleased at being out here again. Or a courier with a trolley. ‘You coming out for a fag?’ Of course one of the smokers’ phones goes immediately afterwards. ‘No, I’m afraid he’s away from his desk at the moment. No, he’ll only be ten minutes or so. Can I get him to give you a ring back?’

‘Bye everybody!’ And then the long ride home. Whir, gasp, click, whoosh.

I am a tenor when I shower at home. ‘Yes! let me like a soldier fall!‘ The camper the better. ‘this breast expanding for the ball to blot out every stain. Brave manly hearts confer my-hy doom, which gentler wu-huh-huh-uns may tell… and the planet of love is on high, beginning to faint in the light she loves, on a bed of daffodil sky‘. Marie Lloyd used that to prove that smut was in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think she would have had to try very hard, but I suppose they hadn’t invented Eng. Lit. back then, at least, not the sort that deals with Subtext. ‘Beginning to faint in the light she lo-oves, to fa-int in the li-ight and – to die! Come! Come! Co-ome, my own, my sweet! Co-ome, my own, my sweet! Maud! Maud! Come! Come! I am here at the gate – alone! pom pom pom pom’.

The sizzle of hot fat. ‘I know I say this every time, but I don’t half make a damn good omelette.’ Somebody hits ‘shuffle’ on iTunes. Something loud and French. Or something sugary and soppy by the Kings Singers. Bairstow. Jackson. Or Youtube. Horrible Histories (‘My name is – my name is – my name is – Charles the Second’) or QI (‘Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening good evening’).

And so to bed. ‘Night night.’ ‘Sleep tight.’ ‘Do not let the bedbugs bite.’ ‘Wake up in the morning light.’

A single car passes. And the call of a night train – wah-waaah.