Tag: writing process

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.

August Moon: day 2

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What is it that you do now?

What do I do now?

I have always felt the French expression metro-boulot-dodo sums up a lot, but not all, of my weekday life.

‘Metro’ in my case means a twenty-minute cycle and a fifty-minute train ride each way. Cycling is brilliant. It has to be a very horrible day indeed, knee-deep puddles and obnoxious drivers, for cycling not to cheer me up. I also enjoy the train: it’s very fast and, so long as I get a seat, it’s time to get on with stuff with very few distractions. Metaphorically speaking, I breathe in on the way out and breathe out on the way back. That is, I spend the journey to work reading, or listening to music, and the journey back writing.

My ‘boulot’ is administration for a major trade union. Nine months ago I moved from a regional office to the national office. These days I get to eat in the staff canteen. I also get time to think – largely about how much I like being busy at work. This morning I looked up some email addresses and continued rearranging the electronic filing system: more of a challenge than it sounds, particularly given that I will need to explain what I’ve done and why. I do wonder what on earth I’m going to do with myself when I’ve finished; hence the wish for Another New Opportunity to manifest itself.

I work from 8.20am to 4pm, meaning that I miss most of the crowding on the roads and the trains, and that I get home at about half past five, and so get a decent chunk of evening. If it’s my day to cook, I pick up sundries at the Tesco on the way home. How enthusiastically I go about cooking depends on my mood, my energy, and how much stuff we have to use up. It might take me two hours to make a stir fry. Or I might rustle up two courses and lunch for the next three days. Either way, the mental effort involved has to be deducted from a limited sum available.

Apart from that, my evenings tend to be occupied in writing up whatever I wrote on the train, writing a bit more, making beautiful things (usually with beads, but sometimes sewing) – those still count as boulot – and messing around on the internet (definitely dodo). About twenty minutes of internet time is catching up with friends and reading stuff I genuinely find interesting; the rest is distraction and procrastination.

I would like to reduce my internet time, and exclude mindless meandering around long-dead comments pages that I’m not actually interested in. I’d like to notice when the switch flicks from ‘awake and productive’ to ‘sleepy and unable to disconnect’. And I would like to replace that with actual rest. Lying on the sofa listening to music. Getting an early night. Reading.

Dodo – and so to bed. I feel that any more time I could devote to bed would not be wasted.

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!

Reverb, Day 13

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#reverb13Day 13: Alchemy

The phrase “It takes a village” is often bandied about, in reference to child-rearing, running a business, just about everything. But if you’re anything like me, you may not be a natural born collaborator.

In 2014, how could you explore what community means to you?

It might be a question of sharing the load, asking for help or signing on someone with a complementary skill set. Or it could be about a creative collaboration that pushes you to explore new ideas and media.

Where might the alchemy be?

‘Not a natural born collaborator’. Indeed. One of my aunts, having her hair done for a children’s party in 1961 or thereabouts, said, ‘I’ll do it myself, and go with it wrong’; which is fairly well representative of the whole family’s attitude to life. We are a large family, but we are a bunch of loners. We do things ourselves and, often, by ourselves. I can’t speak for any of the rest of them, but for my own part it’s down to a combination of fear of other people laughing at my thing, and the conviction that nobody else could possibly know how to do it anyway.

At the moment, community means a hangover: the inevitable result of going straight from my new team’s Christmas party to my old team’s Christmas party. I very much enjoy the social side of work – by which I don’t just mean the post-rally pub sessions. Even in the alternate universe where I am a best-selling author or have won the lottery I can’t see myself not having an office job of some sort, so that I can go to and talk about Star Wars or Kerbal Space Program or the zombie apocalypse. I like other people more than I think I do, and being unemployed would drive me bonkers in a very short space of time.

But. I still like being the only one who does X, because everybody else will Do X Wrong. My new manager is aiding and abetting me in this approach. The responsibilities of the two administrators on the team, previously one glorious stew, have been divided neatly into two parts, to be crossed over only when one of us is away. My own feeling is that this is going to work nicely, and everybody will know what everybody else is meant to be doing, and that’s how I like it. Time will tell.

Having said that, there is one part of my life where I have always been a willing collaborator, and that is in music. My estimation of my own abilities is skewed the other way when it comes to music – cello, particularly, which I never practised enough to be really good at, but I’ve also always had singers in my life who are ‘better’ than me – my mother, my husband, my best friend. This has never mattered, because for me music has always been about being a very small part of a very large whole.

I realised a while ago that I never enjoyed playing cello solo anyway. It bores me. I’d much rather be part of an orchestra. Similarly with singing: while I’m now a considerably better singer than I ever was a cellist, while I do have the odd solo at church, while I’m happy to lead raucous parties in Goodnight Irene, Clementine, The Last Thing On My Mind and similar, while I’m confident enough now to know when I’m right and the person next to me is wrong (even when it’s Tony), and to ignore them, I still prefer being in a choir to singing on my own.

And music is instant social life. Even for shy retiring types such as myself, music gets you talking to people, and learning who’s who, and discussing over coffee or wine how horrible that entry before letter C is, and why don’t the basses ever watch. I shall miss my current choir horribly, because they are so very good and so much fun, and also I wanted to sing at Norwich Cathedral and now I won’t get to. There will be choirs in Cambridge (ha, that’s an understatement!) and I will find one to join. Maybe there will be some kind of amateur orchestra that plays stuff just for the hell of it. (Here is the advantage of playing cello: you can be completely rubbish, and people will still take you, because there are never enough cellos.)

So that’s one alchemical set-up, and there’s nothing really surprising there; this is really reprising tactics from all my other progressions. My other major creative activity is writing, and this is where community and collaboration are harder to find, and, indeed, possibly counter-productive. After all, every evening I’m discussing the brilliance of Firefly in a pub somewhere is an evening I’m not writing. I’m not Jane Austen, writing in the morning room between callers. I write by turning on the computer and shutting the door. And God forbid anybody ever sees what I’ve written.

Except that’s not true at all. The quantity and quality of my work has increased dramatically since I started taking part in Picowrimo, where one not only talks about writing but shares snippets of one’s writing. Three months of Pico and I have the best part of a novel, as opposed to six years simmering resentment and the constituent parts of a novel sprayed haphazardly across at least twenty different ODT documents.

Two scenes to write, about fifteen to finish, at least three very thorough reads-through which will undoubtedly see much changed, and then comes the terrifying part, where other people read it. At least, I suppose they have to. Not much sense in its sitting on my Dropbox forever.

It will be the better for it. I know that. It takes more eyes than mine to pull out the faults, the glitches, the inconsistencies; but this scares me. I have no idea of any strategy, only, finish the damn thing, finish it properly I mean, and then start prodding things, and trust that the right people will appear.

Reverb, Day 10

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#reverb13Day 10: Auto-pilot

Living life on auto-pilot can feel disorienting and dull. How did you cultivate a life worth loving during 2013?

How can you turn off your auto-pilot button in 2014?

I’m not sure I had much choice in the matter, actually. This was the year that everything changed whether I liked it or not. I had to move on. Staying on auto-pilot would have meant crashing into the cliff face.

Our landlady wanted us out of the flat we’d been in for four years. My husband got a job a hundred miles away. Everything was changing and even then I was scrabbling for ways to keep everything the same, even though it couldn’t possibly be the same. Even though I’d already got fed up with the way things were.

The universe very graciously gave me two shots at everything, and this turned out to be invaluable. Two holidays: one to cry and fight and sing, and one to sing and laugh and write. Two moves: one to grieve the loss of the home, and one to be thankful to have somewhere to live. Two job interviews: one to panic about how I couldn’t possibly cope at HQ, and one to get the job and realise I was going to love it. This autumn has almost been a repeat from 2008 – living in a room in Guildford and waiting for something to happen – except it has been so much better than 2008.

Which is all very interesting, but not answering the question at all, because the question is about what I did, not what anyone else did for me. There were four things:

a) insisting that holidays – namely, a weekend at the seaside, and choir tour – were going to happen, no matter how broke we were;
b) identifying four states of being in which I wished to continue for the next year and beyond (alive – sane – married – employed);
c) beginning to make a real practice of looking at myself and the inside of my head and finding out what I was feeling and why I was feeling it;
d) writing.

I promised you a story yesterday. I realise now that it doesn’t really answer the question, either, because again we are talking about external events; and even going by my new liturgical year, it happened before the start of this one. But I promised, and it’s not a story of what happened, it’s a story of what I did with what happened.

The women bishops thing. It hurt. It hurt a lot, and I don’t want to tell the story again. I was hurt and I was angry. I was furious. And I knew it was too good to waste. And it was nearing the end of Picowrimo and I had finished everything I had meant to write, and so I wrote about Synod. First, a scene in an oft-abandoned novel that wasn’t about Synod at all, really, except now it is. Then, a post explaining why I wasn’t going anywhere (still one of my best, I think).

The novel went on. All this year I kept bashing away at it. Three months of Pico and some solo work in between. The plot shrank and fell into place. The characters developed character. I had to rewrite the whole first section and it worked a million times better than I’d ever thought it could. It comes from Synod. It comes from my anger with Synod. It comes from my deciding to use my anger with Synod.

I was angry, and I did something with that. I directed all that righteous fury into something creative, something that might turn out to be good. I am very proud of that.

That, then, is how I turn off the auto-pilot. I must use what I am given, and feel what I am feeling.

Reverb 21 and 22: dreaming, giving, receiving

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Day 21: what’s on the dream list?

What items did you tick off your dream list in 2012? What other, unexpected, dreams came to fruition?

What are the top three items on your dream list for 2013?

I was assigned to work with the LGBT group, which is a post I’d hankered after ever since I joined my employer – and discovered that, like any other group, it is full of people, some of whom are easier to work with than others. As a direct consequence I went to some Prides on purpose.

I walked all the way around the Isle of Wight, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long while. This was unexpected in a way, because I’d originally planned to do Offa’s Dyke, but decided against it for financial and fitness reasons – then realised that I could walk the coastal path, the way I’d always wanted to.

I bought myself a dinner jacket, and have worn it twice this year. With the monocle.

My top three items for 2013? Actually, that’s quite a difficult one, because I am waiting for certain things to shake down. 2013 is the year that everything changes, and it’s hard to see how to be ready when you’re not quite sure how it’s going to change. But here’s how I’d like things to work out:

1. Tony finishes his PhD in style, floppy hat, etc., and finds that there are jobs on the other side.
2. Anne gets well enough to be able to come and live with us.
3. I get myself into a position where I have a choice to stop working where I work now, if I feel like that. I don’t have any plans to do that at the moment, but I feel as if I would like to have the option.

Day 22: your most important gift?

What was the greatest gift you received in 2012? What was the greatest gift you gave?

What do you intend to give yourself in 2013?

In terms of the difference it’s made to my self-perception, the greatest gift I received was, I think, the support and encouragement of the Pico community. The discipline of posting snippets of writing, the enjoyment of reading other people’s, the excitement when somebody says something nice about my own, all keeps me interested in my own writing. We had three months of Pico this year, and it was all extremely useful. It’s a gift that makes more of my gift, such as it is.

As for the greatest gift I gave – well, I’m still trying to take my youngest birthday to the theatre, but he is on stage so much himself that it’s been difficult to find a weekend. Use of our spare bed, for various friends and family members, also springs to mind, though it’s damned uncomfortable. Honourable mention goes to yesterday, when I was entrusted with the proceeds of two whip-rounds, and came back with a) a sponge bag filled with smellies, and an extremely enviable travel journal, for the person who is leaving our office to go travelling; b) a set of baby-gros and a box of Roses, for the person who is currently on maternity leave. I ended up with 30p left over, which I thought was pretty good going; I am usually rubbish at that sort of girling.

In 2013 I want a new camera. Mine broke and I borrowed Tony’s, but, even though it is the identical model, it is NOT THE SAME and I want my very own. My photography was improving no end before that happened, and that’s something that I would love to keep up.

Reverb 6 and 14: learning and rewriting

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Day 6: What did you learn?

Compare the “you” from the beginning of 2012 to the “you” that you are now. What new skills or talents have you learned or discovered this year?

The one thing I started doing this year that I’d never done before was letterboxing, and as a result of this I have become reasonably good at using lino cutters to carve rubber stamps out of common-or-garden erasers, which is something I’d never attempted before. I have found some letterboxes made by other people whose skill has left me in awe (The Hero of Sherwood is spectacularly good; unfortunately I can’t show you a picture) but I’ve managed to make a few stamps that have a recognisable picture.

I’ve become competent at cycling on the road. This is mostly confidence and etiquette, but it bears mentioning.

I’m beginning to learn how to get proper plots into my stories. Mostly it happens without my conscious decision; part of me watches with bewildered gratitude as I exclaim ‘but of course A would do X if it turned out that B had done Y!’ – but it’s very exciting, because that never used to happen before. So I must have learned somehow…

There were various nifty little tricks I learned on various Microsoft programs, but that’s boring.

Day 14: the path that brought you here

Sometimes I spend too long at the end of the year planning for the new year ahead, so something like #reverb12 is so good for me.

This year was so full of change for me and mine that it feels like it wasn’t a “good one”. While I welcome the fresh breeze that change can bring, too much change just leaves me itchy and skittish, the ground loose beneath my feet. Then, when things settle again and the road ahead looks smooth and delightful, I think – what’s next?

But I need to remember to look back at the winding path before I start walking.

My question is: what was the most important thing you learned in 2012?

I think the most important thing I learned this year was that ‘I ought to’ is a very bad reason to do anything. I had run myself into a wall with ‘I ought to’ and had lost sight of what was actually important for me.

When I had learned to reformulate every ‘I ought to’ into either ‘I want to’ or ‘X needs doing’, I was able to see much more clearly where I was, what needed doing, and whether it needed me to do it. Then I was able to do it, but in a way that did not stress me out, or not do it, and not feel guilty about not doing it.

It has allowed me to do things – some of them very big, scary, things – on my own terms. The whole thing broke a very damaging pattern and I very much want to remember it, and take it forward into next year with me.

Starting – late

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I forgot all about reverb12 until yesterday, and then couldn’t find it. I should have begun on the 1st; it’s now the 9th. I will attempt to catch up by posting two a day until I’m back on schedule. We shall see how this works.

Day 1: How are you starting?

How are you starting this last month of 2012?

Take a moment, close your eyes, take a deep breath and ask yourself the question: how do you feel…

… in your body? in your mind? in your day job? in your creative life? in your heart?

This is rather retrospective, of course, but I’ve felt rather stuck in the first week of December, and only really woken up today, so let’s go with it.

When I went into December I was fed up with 2012 – so much so that I was talking, only half-jokingly, about switching to the liturgical calendar and calling it new year already. My depression was atrocious, made worse by the dark mornings (because they are getting dark, now). This led to my not wanting to get out of bed in time to cycle to work, which led to me feeling worse.

Work has been one long slog since July, dealing with staff absence all over the place, feeling that I was enjoying what I was doing, but there wasn’t enough of it, and I wasn’t actually supposed to be doing that, and anyway, what was the point? I’d not picked myself up properly from a mental crash in October, having finally got fed up with being dragged into other people’s causes, and feeling like a fraud for being paid to care about other people’s causes.

My creative life, on the other hand, had suddenly picked up, thanks in large part and the House of Laity. I got some blinding white-hot fury down in pixels, and this kick-started a project that had been stalled (even, I thought, abandoned) since – well, the last time I decided it wasn’t worth writing. This time it’s looking a lot sharper; it has much more shape to it. That’s a positive, then.

Day 9: Your favourite book?

What was the best book you read in 2012, and why? (And by “Why?” I mean: Why did you read it? And why was it your favourite? Although these answers could be one and the same…!)

To Kill A Mockingbird, without question. Why did I read it? Because it was the May choice for our works book club. Why was it my favourite? Because it was so utterly convincing. Because I was kicking myself for never having read it before. Because it made me so sad, and so angry. Because everything else I’ve read this year has disappointed me in one way or another, and To Kill A Mockingbird didn’t.