Stories that make sense
One of these days I will get around to buying a hardback copy of Veronica at the Wells and ditching that horrible paperback anthology. The irony is that Veronica is probably my favourite of the whole series – either that or No Castanets – but every time I think about it I end up buying one of the later ones, which I haven’t read, instead. But they’re not nearly so good.
I’ve spent quite of lot of 2017 being ill. The boomerang virus has hit me three times since New Year’s Eve. At the moment it’s manifesting in a hacking cough, set off by a) singing anything longer than a bar and a half in one breath; b) laughing; c) breathing in cold air. Previously it’s made itself known in extreme lethargy, fever, sniffles tending to nosebleeds, headaches, lack of sleep, a sore throat, and a cough. Not, fortunately, all at once. Or, at least, not for long.
Consequently, I’ve spent quite a lot of 2017 wrapped up in a blanket and occupying myself with things that haven’t needed much energy. In what is perhaps not a coincidence, I have fallen hard for Yuri!!! on Ice, which is a very sweet and optimistic anime about figure skating. This despite my having had no prior interest in either anime or figure skating. It just seems to appeal to the same part of my brain that likes epaulettes and grand opera and dark chocolate. And Ruritania.
It’s probably also significant that Yuri!!! on Ice takes place in a universe where there’s no homophobia and where the sport system can be trusted. By contrast, I have spent the last year writing in a universe where sport chews you up and spits you out, and several years before that writing in a universe where homophobia is depressingly and devastatingly real. So perhaps I just needed a break.
There are parts of my brain that think it is absolutely appalling of me to be watching anything at all light and fluffy (not to mention admitting to it in public) when As We All Know The World Is Going To Hell. (There are other parts of my brain that don’t like my admitting to liking anything at all, including epaulettes, grand opera, and dark chocolate, because that’s really embarrassing, apparently. And another one that’s pointing out that I promised myself several years ago that I’d never apologise for my reading or watching material, because if an English Lit degree doesn’t give you the right to read what you like without feeling guilty about it, what does? Brains, eh?)
The thing is, it’s not as simple as that. In the same way that one can’t (at least, I can’t) read The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau without reflecting that Rudolf V is actually a pathetic excuse for a king who deserves everything he gets, and wondering whether there’s a Ruritanian Communist Party, it’s difficult to watch Yuri!!! on Ice without acknowledging that, sadly, Russia doesn’t work like that, and China doesn’t work like that, and probably skating doesn’t work like that either. Which makes for some genuinely interesting fanfic; but I’ve been reading a lot of fluff, too.
It’s a constant push and pull: between escapism and realism (but how real is the realism?), between optimism and pessimism; the tension between the world as one would like it to be and the world as one fears it is; the question of what truth looks like in fiction. I feel the urge to complicate the simple stuff; and to give the miserable stuff a happy ending; to question whether an ending that an author clearly intended as happy is as happy as all that; and to equip other people’s characters with the tools to get out of the mess they were left in. It’s a question with which a consumer engages as much as a creator. Actually, I find that the lines are blurred, and that I’m arguing with something with everything I write: some other book, something someone else said, adding another layer to the debate.
On which subject: I’ve got back into the editing process for A Spoke In The Wheel this week, after spending all of January too knackered and too scared to look at it. It turns out that it’s neither as bad nor as miserable as my mind had made it out to be. (Again, I say, brains, eh?) And I find myself wondering, now, where it falls on that continuum between realism and escapism. I’ve tried to set it in the real world, where zero hours contracts and sexism and burnout exist. I’ve got a friend checking it at the moment for errors in my portrayal of the notoriously dreadful UK disability benefits process. It’s fairly cynical about sport, or, at least, the narrator is.
But I find, re-reading it, that on the whole it’s hopeful. And I’m glad about that. Apart from anything else, it occurs to me that if we can’t let ourselves imagine a better world, we’re unlikely ever to get one.
The unrivalled travel companion for voyagers in unknown (but strangely familiar!) far away (not far enough!) lands. Diana Wynne Jones was brilliant.
Thursday was Candlemas, which means several things:
I’m pleased with what it’s done during that year. It’s sold. It’s sold to people I don’t know. It’s had excellent reviews, from people I don’t know and from people whose judgement I trust.
I, meanwhile, have become much more confident. These days I admit to writing! These days I think nothing of contacting random bloggers and offering review copies or guest posts.
And I’ve got the first draft of the next book down. That’s not bad going for a year’s work.
In the interests of honesty I have to admit that I’m just coming out of a gigantic wibble about the next book.
It was a twofold wibble:
Maybe I’ll get over my gigantic wibbles with experience, or maybe the occasional gigantic wibble is just part and parcel of writing.
Or maybe it was just the end of the flu.
Lisa at the Student Christian Movement was kind enough to send me a copy of this term’s Movement magazine, which includes a 10/10 review for Speak Its Name. The reviewer says:
Kathleen Jowitt conveys the issues of being a Christian student involved in Christian Societies well, and as I was reading it I felt that so many of the issues raised were issues that many Christian students who are active in various Christian Societies would face during their time at University.
And, over at The Good, The Bad and the Unread, Speak Its Name gets a Grade A. Stevie says:
This really was a fabulous book… Highly recommended for anyone who has ever been involved in student or local politics, has sat on a committee or has even the vaguest passing interest in how other faiths and denominations work in the 21st Century.
I’ve also had some pleasing news on a related front, but I’m going to keep quiet about that until confirmation appears online…
When we moved into this flat, I spent rather more money than I could properly afford on getting some pictures framed. They were an eclectic collection: a screen-printed poster from one of the artists in the Brighton arcades; a photograph of my godmother; a honeymoon Montmartre drawing and a watercolour landscape; three photographs that I’d taken myself. That morning at the picture framer’s, searching through all the frames and mounts to find the ones that made the pictures sing – a ridged wood frame to echo the back platform of the bus, a gold edge to bring out the warmth of the red crayon, three different mounts for my three different photographs, with identical silver frames to tie them together – was enjoyable and enlightening. I’d never realised how much there was to it.
It took me a while to get around to getting some picture hooks. The first chapter of Fair Play stuck in my mind:
Jonna had a happy habit of waking each morning as if to a new life, which stretched before her straight through to evening, clean, untouched, rarely shadowed by yesterday’s worries and mistakes.
Another habit – or rather a gift, equally surprising – was her flood of unexpected and spontaneous ideas. Each lived and blossomed powerfully for a time until suddenly swept away by a new impulse demanding its own undeniable space. Like now this business about the frames. Several months earlier, Jonna had decided she wanted to frame some of the pictures by fellow artists that Mari had on her walls. She made some very pretty frames, but when they were ready to hang, Jonna was seized by new ideas and the pictures were left standing around on the floor.
“For the time being,” Jonna said. “And for that matter, your whole collection needs rehanging, top to bottom. It’s hopelessly conventional.” Mari waited and said nothing. In fact, it felt good having things unfinished, a little as if she had just moved in and didn’t have to take the thing so seriously.
This is perhaps my favourite library discard of all time. In my teens I didn’t quite read it cover to cover (the last section is a catalogue of pretty much every opera ever written, and even I wasn’t quite that obsessed) but I spent many hours with it. It’s irreverent, gossipy, informative, and very funny.
Without a good supply of breath there can, of course, be no singing at all. As an example of the sort of supply that can be developed, there is the famous story by an eyewitness of the bass Lablache (1794-1858). At dinner one day he “sang a long note from piano to forte and back to piano; then drank a glass of wine without having breathed; then sang a chromatic scale up the octave in trills, still in the same breath; and finally blew out a candle with his mouth open.” Needless to say, few singers today can emulate the feat.
I don’t have nearly as many orange Penguin paperbacks as I’d imagined I did. The ones in my head come from my childhood; I’ve had to buy my own copies in newer editions. I did end up with most of the Agatha Christies, but those are green, of course. I’ve already used most of the orange Penguins I do have. So here’s the next best thing. And an orange.
For me, the new year came in with a whimper, not with a bang. I was in bed long before the bangs started, knocked flat by this virus that everyone’s been getting. And it’s taken me a while to get up and running. There’s a lot to catch up with, or, at least, there could be, if I were thinking in terms of needing to catch up with things.
The crib should have gone away. It didn’t. It’s going to have to stay up until Candlemas now, and for once the Magi get to stay by the manger for more than a day. (The parrots were a present from a friend, who’d seen this crib and got ideas about how to improve mine.)
The printer is out of toner. Which means that I haven’t printed off the current draft of A Spoke in the Wheel. Which means that I haven’t read the current draft of A Spoke in the Wheel. And I’m aware that there’s more to it than the simple fact that the printer’s out of toner.
The snag is the usual one. I am scared of reading it because I am worried that I will come across a problem that is unfixable. Perhaps I have failed to do some essential bit of research and have made a mistake that’s going to kill the whole plot. Perhaps I have managed to be unintentionally yet monumentally offensive. It’s always a variation on one of those two. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
There are two potential ways to deal with this. The first is to wait it out. I’ve lived with myself long enough to know that I do get things finished, eventually, and that if the book and I want to spend two months hiding for each other then perhaps that’s just what we need to do, and we’ll find each other in good time. The second is to get somebody else to read it for me. Sooner or later I would anyway, but this is a much earlier stage in the process, and I find myself reluctant to pass it out before it’s as good as I can get it unaided.
At the moment, while I’m still getting over this illness and blessed with a contented lack of urgency, I’m going with the first option. I spent far too much of last year worrying that I hadn’t done enough, that I wasn’t writing fast enough, and, now that feeling’s a long way off, I’m going to enjoy its absence. The book can wait.
Kathleen Jowitt 