Firstly, the winner of the giveaway is madhat2014! Congratulations! I will email you for your address.
Secondly, there’s a piece by me on Diva Online today about being bi, visible, Christian and married to a man.
Tag: personal
Books! A giveaway! My youth!
A novel about being queer and Christian at university – about faith, love, doubt and integrity. Read more here, or scroll to the bottom of the post for the giveaway.
Self-publishing in the nineties was grim. I know because both my parents did it. ‘Nobody’ wants to read about queer Christians now, and ‘nobody’ wanted to read about the physiological aspect of childbirth, or look at pictures of buses with passers-by getting in the way of the fleet number then. Doing It Yourself runs in the family. The kitchen table was perpetually shrouded in pencilled layouts for the next coffee table bus book, or hand-drawn diagrams of the hormone process in childbirth.
There was a corridor you couldn’t get through because of the huge bale of bubble wrap. There was a stack of corrugated cardboard that was taller than I was.
And there were books. There were books in the shed; there were books under the stairs. I’m pretty sure there were books in my brother’s bedroom.
There are still books. My parents have moved house four times between them since the last self-published book came out, and I have tripped over cardboard boxes of The Girl In The Street or shrink-wrapped bales of Childbirth Unmasked in every one of those houses.
The lovely thing about Lulu is not having to bother with all that. So far as I’m concerned, everything involved in the publishing process has happened within a square metre footprint. There’s me, and there’s my computer. If someone wants a book, they order it from Lulu (or, as of this lunchtime, Amazon) and someone who isn’t me gets it printed and posts it. It doesn’t go anywhere near me, and I have no boxes to deal with.
(The writing is a different matter, happening as it quite often does at seventy miles an hour, or in a park, or, for one blissful week, in a huge dormitory that I had all to myself. But the exercise books and the archaic Asus Eee on which I actually do the writing take up a lot less space.)
Having said all that, I discovered today that possessing a modest stack of books with my name on is a very good feeling. A lot of the books in the picture have been posted to the people named on the acknowledgements page, and the British Library, and other worthies. But not all of them. For a start, one of them is destined for one of you blog readers.
Leave a comment on this post to enter the giveaway. On 19 February I will use a random number generator to select one of the comments, and I will send a paperback copy of Speak Its Name to the person who left it. No matter where they are in the world.
And the winner is… madhat2014! Congratulations!
F5
Things I’m refreshing a lot:
- Lulu’s ‘My Revenue’ page, to see if people are buying the book (they are – thank you, people, whoever you are, and I hope you enjoy it)
- Lulu’s ‘My Orders’ page, to see if the copies I promised to my long-suffering editors are ever going to turn up (they might, and if they don’t soon I shall be grumpy)
- a Google search on the ISBN of the paperback, to see if it’s found its way to Amazon yet (it hasn’t, and probably won’t for a few weeks yet)
- a Google search on the ISBN of the ebook, to see if it’s found its way to Kobo, Kindle, iBookstore et al (it hasn’t, but might within the next week or so)
I’ve also been reading Jem Bloomfield‘s fabulous review of Speak Its Name and grinning pretty much constantly.
Living the life (and living with Lulu)
Today, I shall be making use of the Christmas present from my sister-in-law and her family. Thank you, Kat and all! I used to hate colouring – the legacy of a secondary school religious education teacher who used to set it as homework – but since it dawned on me that I didn’t have to finish anything ever if I didn’t feel like it, and nobody was going to mark me for ‘not putting enough effort in’ it’s become a joyful form of pointless quietening. Wine, chocolate and candle are of course guaranteed to improve a day.
I think taking today as annual leave was an excellent plan. If I’d been at work I would have spent the whole day drinking far too much coffee and refreshing Twitter every thirty seconds. This is exactly what I’m doing at the moment, but at least I’m doing it on my own time. And I like my day job. I wouldn’t want to give it up even if I could afford to (if you’re interested, Lulu tells me that I have made £28.61 so far; there’s a long way to go before I make back the cost of the ISBNs); the worst part is the fifty-eight-miles-each-way commute, and I can call that writing time. At least, when I’m awake enough to write I can call that writing time. Reading this article on the life of touring musicians reminded me how fortunate I am, that I can do what I enjoy and make a living, and enjoy what I do making a living, and make, if not a living, some money doing what I enjoy.
Returning to the subject of my in-laws, one of them asked me about my experience with Lulu. My first reaction was to point them at Ankaret’s blog (apart from anything else, she’s got a very nice post about Speak Its Name up there at the moment) because pretty much everything I know about Lulu I learned from Ankaret’s early posts. Things have moved on in Lululand since 2010, particularly in regard to their provision of ebooks, but there’s a lot that remains the same.
Apart from that…
Lulu is very intuitive and easy to use…
… right up to the point where it isn’t and you spend hours swearing at it and crying (not that this was me on Monday or anything)
Specifically, I have learned that if you have a paperback book on Lulu under ‘private access’, and you want it to be available to everyone, all you have to do is click on the title in the ‘My Projects’ thing and change it to ‘general access’. It sounds so obvious, but you’d expect that to be under the ‘Manage Distribution’ button, which is right next to it, and only deals with making it available on things other than Amazon.
You get out what you put in.
One of the things about self-publishing that I found daunting was the fact that I’d have to do everything myself, or find someone else to do it. Cover, type-setting, publicity, editing, proofreading – everything that would be somebody else’s job if I’d gone down the route of traditional publishing, I had to do, or organise its getting done, and the one that was freaking me out the most was the ‘making the book look good’.
Lulu doesn’t help you with that. It’ll chuck the book back at you if you’ve got the margins wrong, or forgotten to put the ISBN on the back cover, but that’s about as far as it goes. You have to make it look as good as you possibly can yourself.
I’m reasonably pleased with how Speak Its Name has turned out – I’m fretting a bit about the definition of the flower on the cover of the paperback, and I don’t much like Times New Roman as an ebook font (but it’s better than all the alternatives) – but it took a lot of work to get it to ‘reasonably pleasing’.
It really helps to know about…
… using styles in Word (or Word-alike – I use LibreOffice Writer) programs. The ebook converter insists on formatting being done this way. You can’t just hit the return key until the text goes where you want it to, because the converter strips that out.
However, if you are using a first line indent style and you want to signify a change of scene with a paragraph break, it will recognise one double return. And I only wish I’d known that before I’d gone through the whole document putting in line breaks with the ‘Insert… line break’ tool, because the converter strips those out, too.
It can be really, really sloooooooooowwww
This is partly the way that Lulu works and partly the way that everything else works. I submitted the ebook for checking prior to distribution to retailers other than Lulu nearly a week ago, and it’s still ‘pending’. And of course even once it has been approved there’ll be a delay before those retailers pick it up. Similarly with the print version – it will filter through to Amazon eventually, but by all accounts this will take the best part of a month, or possibly even longer.
I think that making all versions available on all platforms at the same moment is an impossible dream.
When you really, really want something, it takes longer to arrive
Which I suppose is just life, really. Lulu’s stated printing times for paperbacks are 3-5 business days, and of course with the first proof copy, which I really desperately wanted, it was the full five days.
This all sounds a bit negative
These are the whinges, but overall I’m pretty pleased with Lulu. I’ll post another time about the hell that was self-publishing in the nineties (I know because both my parents did it) but for the moment I’ll just say that Lulu cuts out ninety-five per cent of the hassle that I remember. I gave them a file and they gave me a book. What more can you ask for, really?
Free stuff that isn’t Lulu but that is useful
- Paint.net, for the cover. Apart from the way it refuses to let you change text once you’ve added it, which is infuriating, it’s brilliant. Not entirely intuitive, but once you’ve worked out how to do something then it will do it.
- LibreOffice, if you don’t want to pay for Microsoft Office. LibreOffice Writer does most of the stuff that MS Word does, albeit in a slightly different way.
- the thing within your word processor program that converts to PDF. Essential, so far as I’m concerned, for peace of mind. I didn’t trust Lulu to convert my .odt document into a book. I didn’t really trust it to convert the PDF into a book, but it did do that properly, and the inside of the paperbook looks as I expected it to.
- Calibre, for checking the ebook version. For doing just about anything with ebooks, actually. But I found myself downloading the ebook version over and over again, and Calibre lets me look at it on screen, add it to my Kobo, and convert it to different formats.
This is all that occurs to me at the moment, after a couple of months as a member of Lulu and forty-eight hours as a live author. No doubt I’ll discover more of its little quirks along the way. I’ll keep you posted – if, that is, its little quirks are at all interesting.
Reverb day 18: trajectory
Haven’t you ever been caught in a moment, a magnetic swirl of a moment, when you knew – just knew – that something magical was taking place?
You might feel as if a portal into Something has opened at your heart to release a sort of energy into your own private universe, telling you, “Remember your magic…”
Think of three important portal points – one in the past, the present, and one you hope to have in the future – and join them together into one powerful and personal gateway into 2016.
Where will walking through this gateway lead you in this upcoming new year?
I remember the day of my interview for my current job. It was a brilliant day, it felt, if I may be allowed a Harry Potter reference, as if I’d taken Felix Felicis: everything seemed to go right. Oh, apart from the bit where the administrator forgot to reset the MS Word test and I had to undo all the previous candidate’s work before I could do my own; I nearly walked out at that point. But I kept my head and worked out how to untangle it, and everything else was great.
It was a Tuesday. I like Tuesdays. I had a fortuitous day of time off in lieu, so I took the Monday off. For some reason I can’t now remember, we were staying with the in-laws, who live on the easier side of London for the office. On the train, I passed the pub that says TAKE COURAGE in huge letters on the side. While I was drinking a cup of tea in a café, waiting for it to be an appropriate time to go in, a family friend emailed some pictures of my beloved, much-missed godmother, whose birthday it would have been. My visitor’s pass was number 26: my birthday, and part of the fleet numbers of two of my favourite buses. After I’d dragged myself through the Word test, the interview went enjoyably smoothly. Two university friends whom I hadn’t seen for ages happened to be in London, so we met up for lunch before I headed south to go back to work. All the way through, it felt as if the universe was on my side.
Where am I now? Still in that same job, but living sixty miles to the north-east of London rather than twenty-five miles to the south (weirdly, the commute is actually easier, not that it feels like that in the dead of winter). It feels as if I’m in something of a lull. There isn’t much going on at the moment; it’s that still point when the year is at the turn. There’s space here, and I need it.
There are at least four huge, important developments that are about to happen or will happen within the next year or two years, or could very well happen, and I want all of them to happen. For the sake of symmetry, I’m not going to specify what any of them is, though one at least is no secret.
I’m reluctant to pick just one of them for my future point. I am laying them out in a line: first this, then this, then this, and that can be slotted in at any point, but I’d rather it were sooner than later.
Here’s a trajectory with five points on it, then. What will I find if I follow it?
Safety. Adventure. Roots. Puzzles. Love. Claiming my ground. Growth. Learning. Trust.
Reverb day 16: including white space
Ancient alchemical texts are things of beauty – filled with allegory and symbolic language; things hidden in plain sight; and plain things promising transformation.
If we were to peek into the book of your year, what might we find?
What magic do you carry that people need to look a bit deeply to see?
This year was meant to be something of an interlude, a space where nothing major was going on, a chapter of pure indulgence where one could revel in the lush surroundings and not worry about the plot.
It didn’t quite work, of course; there was always a part of me that was desperate to know what happens next, and to read ahead and make it happen. Never mind. This was the Year of Fun, and I had fun.
This year I tried to include more white space. I blocked out a week at a time in which to do nothing, to recover, to replenish my resources. The interesting thing is how much more white space I need than that, or perhaps how I need to distribute it differently. I’ll keep experimenting.
As for allegories, well, the mermaids are still around, finding out how to get from the sea to the dry land in safety. I am becoming an ostrich, or maybe a dragon: something that eats iron, anyway. I’d like to be a tortoise, but can’t quite work out how.
Magic? I have been a fairy godmother since I was nineteen, but of late I have discovered that all the fairy godmothering that I need to do is sit and listen while my charges work out for themselves what they need to do.
Reverb day 14: growing up
You wake up and the light through the window seems different, the air carries a chill or maybe a hint of warmer days.
What has changed? You? The world?
It can be a change that happened this past year or one you’re looking toward in the time ahead. It can be a broad sweep obvious to all or a more subtle shift that only you know about.
This year my birthday present to myself was two handbags. Now I’m thirty, you see, I thought I ought to have a grown-up handbag, and carrying a black handbag while wearing brown shoes, or vice versa, is a thing that I don’t do without very good cause.
Grown up. That’s what I’ve done this year.
I’m not sure that you could tell by looking at me. My physical appearance hasn’t changed much this year; I’m still wearing my short skirts and long earrings; my hair has a few more white strands, perhaps, but it’s still short and sharp.
Could you tell by talking to me? Perhaps. Perhaps I seem more confident, or more opinionated. Perhaps I seem quieter. Perhaps you would notice that I wasn’t talking to you so much as I used to. I’ve become better at respecting my own need for solitude. I’m learning the rituals of small talk, but at the same time I’m learning how to escape it.
And perhaps I haven’t really changed at all; I’ve just become more myself. I find myself having a much clearer idea of what I want from life these days; I find myself beginning to make choices based on my own inclinations rather than by picking some externally decided virtue (‘the cheapest’… ‘the most ethical’… ‘the one I haven’t tried, because I am Meant to be trying new things’… of course, sometimes I remember that I am Meant to be Doing What I Feel Like and then come unstuck, but it’s all practice). I’ve been enjoying myself. I designated this year a year of fun, and I have had fun. I find myself making my own plans and acting on them. I find myself recognising my low days as atypical and remembering that my depression does not define me.
I feel less awkward. I feel less apologetic. I feel braver.
I’ve grown up. I like it.
Reverb day 12: desired and feared
Can you think of an instance in the past year where you have been successful at making fear useful?
What fears do you hold about the year ahead? And how could you use the energy of those fears in a different way?
This year has been remarkably free of fear. This has been the first full year where my partner and I have both lived under the same roof and had full-time, permanent jobs. I’ve been coming to understand that life doesn’t necessarily have to be lived in a state of fearful uncertainty.
Which is not to say that it has been entirely free of fear. Most of my fears have been niggly and silly. “Yes, but did I lock the front door? Did I turn the gas off? What will I come home to tomorrow?” I suppose that, the more this happens, the more likely I will be to pay attention when I’m turning off the cooker and locking the front door, and not need to turn back half way down the road.
Next year? I can think of at least three big, potentially terrifying things that might happen, ranging from ‘hmm, maybe’ to ‘almost certain’. These are three things that I want to happen, things that I am putting deliberate effort into effecting. None the less, they are scary: they’re big life changes; they’ll have significant effects on the way I think of myself; they could all go horribly wrong.
How to use the fear that comes with them? I think that in each of these cases the fear is a sort of background acknowledgement of how big they really are. The fear is a signifier of their importance. I think that if I acknowledge how huge they are, and acknowledge the fact that actually I really am quite scared of [X], [Y] and [Z], even though I want them to happen to much, because I want them to happen so much, I won’t need to do anything to the fear; it will transform itself into something delicious and exciting.
Reverb day 11: salvaging treasure
Muriel Rukeyser once wrote: The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms. And I could not agree more. Our stories are our own but, in sharing them, they become universal. And timeless.
What stories touched you this year? Which stories of your own are you glad you shared?
A couple of nights ago I watched the raising of the Mary Rose. Not the actual event – that happened three years before I was born – but the television footage of the salvage operation. It was one of those programmes that the BBC does so very well, digging up archive footage and showing what had gone before and what came after.
It’s a hell of a story. The Mary Rose went down with everything she had on board, and almost all hands. The mud at the bottom of the Solent preserved the wreck remarkably well. The archaeologists brought up everything that they could find. Then they brought up the hull, and they took her back into harbour in Portsmouth. I had a tear in my eye, I will admit. Mostly because of that lovely proud ship coming home (I’m horribly sentimental about ships, and not just ships – buses, cars, bicycles, too), but also for of the archaeologists who had spent their whole careers on this one magnificent project, who appeared in the early clips as tousle-haired students in the seventies, and in the later one as respectable talking heads, who had never run out of things to find out.
I told stories. I told the story of how my parents separated when I was in my mid-teens, and how it was horrible at the time but how much better it is now. I told the story of how, when I was twenty, I was genuinely shocked to see my future parents-in-law holding hands in public, because I didn’t know that other people’s parents liked each other enough to do that. I think it helped. I hope so.
I kept on telling the story that I’ve been telling for years. The end is in sight for this instalment. Speak Its Name is nearly done. I’m waiting on some feedback before I can tidy up the last little bits and send it out. Then it will be done, and off my conscience. Still, I can’t quite shake the conviction that it’s really a story about truth, and honesty, and integrity; and goodness knows there’ll always be more of that story to tell.
Reverb day 10: litany
When we heal our spirits the ripples are felt from the highest branches to the deepest roots of our family trees.
What radical act of love or non-conformity did you embrace this year?
I wonder how many thousands of people can recite Philip Larkin’s This be the verse from memory, people who wouldn’t necessarily describe their childhoods as awful, who are fully aware that their parents were doing the best they could under difficult circumstances, but who recognise the unforgiving truth.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,/ They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had,/ And add some extra, just for you.
I don’t agree with his conclusion, but I can’t fault his observation. This seems to be the way things happen. We are the sum of our ancestors’ assumptions, convictions, hang-ups and foibles. And then we add some more of our own. It deepens like a coastal shelf.
I’m less pessimistic. I think it’s possible to interrupt the patterns, to throw away the scripts, and watch the coastal shelf dissolve, one layer at a time. Maybe we don’t get very far through it in this generation. Oh, but it’s worth trying. I think it’s possible to make things incrementally better, starting where I am, with the material I have.
I almost answered this question a couple of days ago, and so I’m just going to expand on that, and copy in a couple of pages from my diary, from May this year.
I have told myself that it doesn’t matter that I am bisexual when actually it is very important.
I have thought in terms of ‘either’/’or’ and suppressed ‘both’/’and’.
I have had the opportunity to come out as bisexual and not taken it, many times.
I have preached the glory of God’s infinite, unconditional, love, to all LGBT people except myself.
I have told myself that I am only OK so long as I act straight.
I have hidden behind a heterosexual relationship and have been ashamed of my true self.
I have behaved as if only part of myself were acceptable.
I refused to act on hints from myself. I ignored clues. I was afraid to entertain the possibility.
I thought it must be all about the sex and ignored everything that wasn’t.
I have shut myself in a container in which there isn’t room for all of myself.
I have made myself feel grateful for being het-married and have let myself feel guilty about not having to deal with the crap LG people have to deal with.
I have wished to be monosexual and have let myself think that at least that would have been easier.
I have worried and worried that I’m making it all up and have minimised every manifestation out of fear and false modesty.
I have confined myself to the Rules.
I have allowed myself to be limited to other people’s expectations.
I have made unconditional acceptance conditional.
I have denied my true nature.
I did not come out to myself until there was no way to decently act upon it.
I have told myself that celibacy or heterosexual marriage are the only valid expressions of a bisexual identity.
I have stunted my own growth and development by refusing to allow for the possibility that I might be bisexual.
I have wondered in my turn whether my bisexual brothers and sisters might be making it up.
I have limited myself to the theoretical.
I am ashamed. I would not have treated another person the way that I have treated myself. I bristle at the slightest implication that I might.
I ask for forgiveness.
I ask for forgiveness of myself, for God’s forgiveness is granted already.
I ask forgiveness from my sad, suppressed, denied, self; from the self that was never allowed an opportunity to think that it might be both until the choice was made and irrevocable.
I ask for forgiveness from the one who might have made a different choice, had she been allowed to know of that choice’s existence.
I ask for forgiveness from the one who made the choice, and always knew that there was more to it than that.
I ask to see my whole self.
I ask to be reintegrated.
I ask to receive everyone I am and have been and might have been and could yet be.
I ask to be myself.
Kathleen Jowitt 