Failing Better?

I just inserted the date at the top of my Word document – as I aways do – and noticed that today is my Mum’s birthday – she would have been 108 now, but she died before the old century did, at the age of 86. I might call my sister later.

I can’t seem to get started today. Realised yesterday that it’s only a couple of weeks till NaNoWriMo. I did the 50k words challenge in 2018, and last November I tried reading it through just in case there was anything in it. Basically, it’s just as if I’d been writing three of these blog posts a day for a month, not even a sniff of a novel, just same old same old. So this year I’m not going to bother. Am I going to set myself any kind of writing challenge at all? After all I managed the poems for NaPoWriMo. Some days I think I should – maybe read through what I’ve got of ‘The Long Way Back’, I don’t know.

There are a few issues over ‘The Long Way Back’ (the follow-up to ‘Single to Sirkeci’). Partly it’s because I stopped in the middle of the journey, and didn’t include the return, in order to make it a more manageable size – but that part of the book is already written, so I could just combine that with the first part and maybe release the whole thing just to Kindle. Because the second part on its own would make quite a short book (about 40k words), I had the idea of writing about what happened after I came back and tagging that on the end – but when I started editing the blogs from that time it all seemed too downbeat, then there was the Prague bit, and I wondered if it would make two additional books, then there’s the question of: where do I stop, because life is still going on (even if it isn’t quite so interesting these days). But the longer I put off starting on it the more pointless it all seems, especially given that the original book hasn’t exactly sold very well.

It all becomes a long circular argument about – what and whom am I writing for? what other things could I be doing with my time? will I ever get back to my 30 year old lapsed novel, will I ever get an idea for another novel? will I ever have any ideas for short stories to contribute to the anthologies of my writers’ group? (who have stopped meeting again since the weather has turned and the Covid restrictions have tightened up).

Maybe these 500 word missives are as much as I can cope with these days. I said yesterday (I think it was) that I keep trying, keep trying to ‘fail better’. But how can I tell whether the voice in my head that stops me from setting off down that particular road is aiming to sabotage me or to save me from myself?

Any Other Day

Trying to write a poem – the first line came up as: ‘Any other day…’ but nothing after that.

Maybe writing a poem about trying to write a poem? That sounds about as mad as the idea I had of trying to write a novel about trying to write a novel… another non-starter.

Any other day… and it wouldn’t matter so much. Why not? Come on, it’s just a day – a Tuesday, in fact – tai chi day, in normal times. Except it wouldn’t have been ‘normal times’ anyway, because I wouldn’t have been here, but on a narrow boat called ‘Teasel’, pootling about the inland waterways around the Hampshire/Surrey border with my son, his wife and their dogs.

I keep telling everyone -especially myself – that I’m fine with this lockdown thingy. Missing a holiday and spending a birthday alone are nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing compared with what others have to deal with.

So here I am, putting all that to one side and getting on with it. Trying to write a poem – or failing that, just 500 words of any old nonsense, nothing too whiney, nothing too self-pitying. Do some gardening – I’ve been putting that off, till I realised that weeding could be quite appealing, it’s destructive after all. But I might miss the postman, there might be a delivery, so I can’t go in the garden until after then.

Waiting. Waiting for an indeterminate period, for an indeterminate outcome. Waiting for Godot. Beckett on failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’. Story of my life.

Late this morning – in fact, it’s just turning into afternoon as I type. Awake half the night, early enough to fall asleep again and sleep in till 8.30, then do my morning stuff and it gets later and later, and my sister rang to say happy birthday, and I tried to call my brother (his birthday too) but couldn’t get through.

So, having made my mind up to do some weeding, I thought about the possible delivery and decided to wait in the front room, and in the mean time to do the writing that I didn’t do before breakfast. Waiting.

It’s not so much the activities that I do to break up my weeks that I miss so much as the café-sitting. It’s a habit I picked up in my flat-dwelling years – in Bedford, Ramsey, Prague and here in Southsea – and the months when I was travelling, when I would inhabit the public spaces – cafes, parks, seafronts and riversides – rather than sitting in hotel rooms. Now I have a garden, and the weather (at the moment) is good enough to be out there. But hunkering down in your own space – however appealing – can become a trap.

Just been interrupted by a phone call from my brother. It was nice to hear his voice, but has broken my chain of thought. We don’t always get on very well, but good to know he’s there.

Connections and Constrictions (but no poem)

Why do I always come up to my study to write my blog on the PC? I don’t know – there’s no reason why I shouldn’t sit downstairs and write on the laptop. I’ve been working on here for the last couple of weeks, finishing off the book design job because I have software on here which isn’t on the laptop. So it’s habit, I suppose, sitting here feels like I’m doing something serious (as if).

The two poem lines I started with yesterday, I was questioning them before I even sat down to write about them, then I got carried away down tunnels of memory and snatches of songs which made me think of other things. But the distinction I initially made in my head – of a net that links versus a web that binds –  was always a bit of a false dichotomy, because a net, just as much as a web, is designed to trap whatever blunders into it. I was thinking more of a net as a network, a positive kind of connectivity, which links us with the necessities of life. As a corny example (no pun intended), the connections between people through the supply chain for food – farmers, processers, distributors, retailers, cooks – ‘field to fork’ – even that’s a gross simplification, which can be extended indefinitely in either direction, with microlinks in between. (Note to self: ‘Chain’ is another monosyllabic word, but when you think about it, that too can imply constriction as well as connection.)

There’s a lovely quote, (I think it’s from Martin Luther King), about how by the time your food reaches your table, it’s already travelled half way round the world. Though that’s not such a good thing is it? There was a time about twenty years ago when I used to get incensed about air miles – even had a letter published in The Times about it – but as always, nobody listened.

Which reminds me – yesterday I invited people to like the FaceBook page which is linked to this blog, but quite honestly, if I keep drivelling on like this, won’t I scare them all away? As I’ve tried to explain to a friend who was encouraging me to share my writing more widely, I can’t always guarantee to write ‘the good stuff’, and I don’t see the point of just trying to pick out the odd sentences that ‘work’ and sharing them out of context.

But on I go, and here I am again, pumping up the word count. Guess I should try and write another poem today, only four days in, ye gods, how am I going to do this for a whole month?

Connections and constrictions – that’s the point really I was trying to make. And perhaps the two are inseparable? Anything which supports us breeds reliance, holds us into a familiar position, if only by imposing a sense of reciprocal obligation.  You scratch my back…? ‘We’re all in this together… ‘ at a minimum distance of two metres, naturally.

A Poem That I Meant to Write

‘The net that links us

Is not the web that binds us’

Linda Rushby (unfinished)

I thought that was going to be the start of a poem, but after an hour of rattling around, nothing else has appeared. So now I’m sitting at the keyboard, and – I don’t think this has struck me before – although I usually write as I go directly on the computer (which is why my posts ramble quite as much as they do), it doesn’t work that way with  poems. Mostly they come into my head fully formed, and then I have to write them down before I forget them – like a line from a Paul Simon song of 50-odd years ago :

‘I was twenty one years when I wrote this song.

I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long…’

Paul Simon, ‘The Leaves That Are Green’

You said it, Paul. And the first time I heard it I was even younger – sixteen, I believe – though the song had already been around for a few years. I think it was the first time I grasped – or at least caught a glimpse of – an adult understanding of the passing of time. That and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ from about the same: ‘I’m twenty four and there’s so much more’. (To me at that time, even twenty seemed impossibly mature).

How did I get here from there? Oh yes, ‘The Leaves That are Green’:

‘Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown.’

That one: ‘Like a poem I meant to write.’ Exactly. If you don’t grab them while they’re there, they get away from you – Poems, I mean, not girls (or boys). I wrote once about ‘catching the words in flight’. It may be in ‘Single to Sirkeci’ or it may just have been a blog post. It might be the one I wrote in Tulcea, on the Danube Delta – which would have gone into ‘The Long Way Back’ – if I’d ever got round to finishing it. Or maybe it was just a random, throw away blog post that at most a handful of people might have read.

Do poems matter more than people? That’s a bit contentious – though once out they’re out there, they can live forever – I’m not claiming this for mine, I hasten to add, but I was thinking of the likes of Wordsworth (whose birthday is next Tuesday – I have a reason for knowing that which some of you might work out), Ovid (who was exiled to and died on the Black Sea Coast at Constanta, from where I went to Tulcea) or even poor Sylvia Plath (enough said).  Even mine will still hang around for a while after I’ve gone, out on the internet and in unsold copies of ‘Beachcombing’. Some have already lasted far longer than the relationships that provoked them – but that’s another matter.

Of course – a haiku!

‘When we are ourselves.’

Linda Rushby

Gremlins

Here I am again. Today I feel overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all. I suppose a week isn’t that long. I said last Friday that I would keep doing it ‘for as long as it takes. As long as what takes? I guess if I don’t identify a ‘goal’, how will I know if I’ve achieved it? And a week is nothing. In the grand scheme of things.

There are things I have to do today – nothing that awful, just stuff beyond sitting in the sunshine, listening to the radio or crafting. Or writing blogs. So the gremlin on my shoulder says: ‘why bother? Who’s keeping tabs on you? Nobody but you. Tell that bitch to go and…’

‘Okay, okay’ I say. ‘I get the point. No need to share that sort of language on my blog.’

I’d forgotten about the gremlin. I was flicking through ‘Single to Sirkeci’ the other day – can’t remember why, it was something to do with checking the layout related to another book I’m designing for a third party. And the gremlin caught my eye. I seem to remember it came in quite early on but I dropped it and don’t refer to it much later in the book. Shame, because it’s quite a good idea. Every time I want to write about what I really feel, my deep, dark, nasty feelings, I should just say: ‘the gremlin says…’ or turn it into a bit of dialogue.

But reading back what I’ve just written, I realise the gremlin has two aspects. The one I mentioned above is the one that says: ‘f*ck it, f*ck them all’ (but without the asterisks). The cynical, vicious, nihilistic one. Then there’s its alter ego, the judgemental one: ‘just get on with it, set those goals, do those chores, you worthless piece of crap. Enough with the whining self-pity, you know why nobody loves you? It’s because you don’t deserve it, you have to earn love, you don’t do that by moaning about how miserable you are.’ Ooooh, I think I prefer the first one.

‘Celebrate your achievements’ says some non-gremlin – or maybe just a more subtle, and hence more powerful, gremlin. ‘You’ve blogged every day for a week, and you’ve nearly done it again, so you have 4000 words – at that rate, you’ll have a novel by the end of May!’ Or maybe not.

‘You’re “pantsing” again’ says Gremlin 2. ‘It’s a week since you did that online meeting, and you downloaded the handouts and have you filled in the table yet? Of course not, you’re an incurable “pantser”, and that’s why everything you write is – well – pants! You go through the motions, you go to the workshops, and still you don’t get your finger out and do anything worthwhile. Do you seriously think that writing this bullshit every day is achieving anything? You’re just deluding yourself…’

‘… except you’re not really, are you?’ pipes up Gremlin 1. ‘You know perfectly well you might as well give up.’

Emails

I am going back to my ‘secret’ blog, had enough of telling people how I feel. This will have to do.

I didn’t write yesterday. Instead I spent an hour and a half deleting and/or opening over 3,500 emails which hadn’t been opened on my yahoo account. The oldest were from September 2017, which I guess was the last time I had a purge. Which I suppose means that I average about 400 a month that I don’t bother to open – 100 a week, or 14 a day, which sounds about right because I counted how many I got yesterday and it was 15.

I keep unsubscribing from lists, but there are always some where you want to keep getting them because every so often there’s a good offer or something. Like Travelzoo. I bought a special spa deal which I have to take before the end of July but haven’t fixed it up yet.

Mornings are always hard. It’s the time when the self-hate and desperation are really at their peak. I don’t know why that is. I was told by Michael from the School of Philosophy group in Peterborough that whatever you’re thinking/feeling when you fall asleep at night is what you wake up thinking/feeling, so be careful what you think about before you go to sleep. What a load of bollox! If you were trying to control what you were thinking about before you went to sleep, how would you ever get to sleep? And then if/when you wake up in the middle of the night, presumably you again have to control your thoughts before the precise moment you fall back to sleep – whenever that may be! Maybe it works for him, but it certainly doesn’t for me.

I read or heard something recently saying that it helps depressed people if they make a to do list for the next day before they go to sleep – or maybe that’s insomniacs? Whatever, both those apply to me anyway.

My to-do for today: wait in for delivery of yarn that is finally coming (yay!) two weeks after the order – it came yesterday when I was out at lino printing but I didn’t know because the email saying it would arrive between 10 and 12 came at 10.17 and then it was delivered (or not) at 10.39, and I didn’t read either of them till after lino finished at 12.00. It said redelivery would be tried today, but I don’t know if I’ll get an email today and if so how helpful it will be.

Now I’ve got the yahoo sorted out I will have a go at the gmail, which is not so bad, only a couple of hundred. Then I should go into Thunderbird and sort out the damson-tree ones, which are mostly forwarded to gmail. But there is always tons and tons of spam on those. I can’t have them on Outlook because it doesn’t like the servers. But forwarding them to gmail means they’re always duplicated.

Bugger. Word’s wordcount includes numbers, but the one on WordPress doesn’t.