Tag: Issues in Human Sexuality

Glorious returns

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The head of a flower from which many yellow tubular petals have fallen away, leaving behind star-shaped holes

The thing about writing contemporaries – the thing that I found, anyway – is that the main characters stick around in one’s head and continue to have opinions about what’s going on in the world. Particularly General Synod (Stancester) and professional cycling (A Spoke in the Wheel). Every election result, doping scandal, every disappointing decision, every too-good-to-be-true stage win, I’d know what they thought of it. More generally, I tended to have a good idea of what they were up to now, where life had taken them. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it (probably; you never know) but if I asked myself what so-and-so was doing I’d just know.

And then the next project happened to be a historical novel, and the one after that was far future sci-fi*, and nobody in either of those would understand what’s going on in the world today, beyond the very generic ‘ugh, human nature’. And then I stopped writing altogether, more or less, and didn’t have time to follow cycling any more, and Twitter became unreadable, and everybody went away. It wasn’t quite as definite as that. They just weren’t there any more. Last year Issues in Human Sexuality was binned (not before time), and neither Lydia nor Colette had a thing to say about it, never mind the fact that they both had very strong opinions on it in The Real World and I, personally, cried.

The other week, though, just after I’d got going again, I was at a parent-and-toddler group, and there was Lydia – at least, not there, but very definitely knee deep in small children, in some other church hall. She isn’t even in this new book, I don’t think. Not outside the chapter headings. Probably. Anyway, it was very nice to see her. I’d missed her.

*Does this mean that I have three novels on the go at the moment? Yes, I’m afraid it does. Is that slowing up progress on all of them? I’m honestly not sure. What seems to be happening in practice is that the Shiny New Novel is getting most of the attention, but the others are getting a sentence a day**, and you know, that’s more than anything was getting before, so we’ll go with that.

**Assuming I get any writing time at the computer. If not, Shiny New Novel might get something in a notebook if it’s lucky, and the rest of them take their chances.

Good enough is not bad at all, or, Book Bus Stories: this year it’s a zine

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A stack of photocopied A3 paper covered in dense handwritten text. Some sheets have been folded down into A6 booklets.

Last year, Book Bus Stories was an exhibition. Next year, it might finally be a book. But this year, it’s a zine.

I haven’t been writing much in recent months; you may have seen how quiet I’ve been over here and guessed that it reflects a prolonged period of literary inactivity offline. I haven’t had much time, I haven’t had much energy, and, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I’ve been lacking the inclination too. It’s a side-effect of motherhood that I didn’t expect at all: for well over a decade I’d had a story more or less constantly writing itself in my head – until I had a baby, and it all just – went. It was if my brain had been replaced with someone else’s, someone who didn’t write, and had no interest in writing. Which was just as well, really, because she didn’t have the time and the energy.

Every now and again an idea rushed back in, and I’d get very excited. And either I’d lie awake with a sleeping child in the crook of my elbow and know that if I moved I’d wake her, or by some miracle I’d find an hour and get it written down, and then it would stick there because by the next time I got a free hour there’d be something else that needed doing, or that seemed more fun.

Meanwhile, Smashwords (which I use to distribute the ebook versions of my Stancester books) kept sending me emails about migrating my account to Draft2Digital, which kept reminding me that I’d never sorted out my tax code on there and therefore had (a frankly pitiful amount of) money sitting on my account, and every time I felt irritated and slightly despairing of ever selling any more of my existing books, let alone ever finishing a new one. 2020 – the last time I published a book – was getting longer and longer ago, and I was feeling less and less like the person who’d done it.

Then one lunchtime I went to the Wellcome Collection. They had an exhibition of zines, mostly by disabled people. They talked about how zines are amateur, scruffy, don’t have to be perfect. In the corner was a table with paper and pens and a sign encouraging you to have a go at making your own zine, about saying the things you had to say.

I had things to say, things about grief and loss and memory.

I thought, I could do a zine.

A book still seemed a very long way out of reach, but I could do a zine. Or I could at least try one. I went back to my desk and folded a sheet of A4 paper into eighths. I drew a bus across two of them. A little doggerel quatrain emerged from my mind with barely any trouble at all.

Back at home, I unearthed an A3 pad and started on the real thing. There was a poem I’d written years ago, intended for the eventual Book Bus Stories book, which went straight in. In a charity shop I found a book of photographs of Paris, all chic and moody and monochrome, which, combined with the experience of speedrunning a dozen years of (moody, monochrome) family photographs while preparing for my mother’s funeral, made me think everything looks better in black and white, and then, everything looks sadder in black and white. That became a piece.

I photocopied several pages of my father’s Paris Is Well Worth A Bus and, after several false starts, got a reasonable blackout poem down.

I stuck down a Kimberley Ales beermat and an Artichaut de Bretagne sticker to make wheels. I got out the Dymo machine.

The cat trod on the paper while I was working on it and I remembered my father yelling “Trolloper!” at her; I drew a cloud around the pawprint and wrote about how it helps and hurts to remember things like that.

I filled in the body of the bus, the platform, the window frames. I thought I was done. Then I went to Gay’s The Word (on a bit of a weepy high because the General Synod of the Church of England had finally done away with Issues in Human Sexuality as a requirement for ordinands), picked up Joe Brainard’s I Remember, read about twenty pages, and knew that I needed to fill in all the white space with the things I don’t remember.

On Friday I took the whole thing to the library and did a photocopy by way of a test. It looked great. (Everything does, in fact, look better in black and white.) I took it to the print shop and got a proper print run (fifty, in fact) done. Then I took the whole lot home and, over the weekend and today, cut and folded the lot into booklets. Now they’re packed in a box, ready to go down to Ventnor Fringe and the Book Bus with me tomorrow. It’s a good feeling.

I made a zine. It’s not perfect. And it’s not a book. But it’s good enough, and it turns out that good enough is actually great.