Category: books

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Dream Thingy

Where did that dream come from, of travelling alone across Europe and writing as I went? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, pulling together many threads from different parts of my life, even back as far as my Dad’s wild ‘holiday’ ideas of semi-spontaneously piling us all into the car and driving off to some remote (for us) region, finding a bed-and-breakfast when we got there. And of course there’s that recurring leitmotif, of Running Away in search of an ill-defined ‘different life’.

After I left my husband in 2009, I had equally ill-defined hopes and expectations of finding a new job/career and becoming financially self-sufficient; starting a new relationship (either with a ‘soul-mate’, or perhaps a series of lovers who would all remain good friends until the inevitable time when the ‘soul-mate’ would enter my life); and, naturally, writing novels. Travelling was bound up in that, because it was only when I was travelling on my own (which I was doing increasingly from the mid to late 1990s onwards) that any of those things began to feel remotely possible. The irony that none of them have happened, despite my efforts to create the conditions in which they might, has dominated the decade just past.

In 2010-11, in between job-hunting, temping, and part-time admin jobs, I tried to start a business selling my graphic and web design skills to other small business owners. I soon found out I was just as incapable of attracting potential clients as potential employers or lovers, but I got involved in a small business networking circuit, through which I made some contacts and met some nice people (as well as picking up a habit of getting up early and going out for delicious but dangerously unhealthy breakfasts).

One of these nice people was a lady who described herself as a life coach, who asked me what my ‘dreams’ were, to which I answered that I didn’t have ‘dreams’ any more, because experience had taught me that dreams never turn out the way you think they will. This was slightly disingenuous, because despite everything, I still had those underlying dreams of getting a decent job, finding a lover, writing a novel etc but I sensed this wasn’t the kind of dreams she could help me with. So when she’d explained to me that I needed a dream, or dreams, that that was what my life was lacking and why I felt so aimless and lost, I blurted out that I wanted to travel across Europe and live by the sea – and maybe I mentioned writing, too.

The next stage was to construct one of those dream thingies, where you cut out images from magazines and what-not and stick them onto a big sheet of paper – except that this was 2011 and I did it virtually by finding images online and downloading them into a folder. I think I’ve probably still got that folder somewhere, might even be able to find it (or not).

PS I didn’t find it, but did find a random poem from around that time (or a bit later), which is equally appropriate today, although, bizarrely, it must have been written in Bedford (I seem to remember I was walking home from the swimming baths when it came to me):

A new day, and seagulls calling,
grey-white and lost against the clouds.
Water in air, mingling elements,
and I, pedestrian, earthbound.

Linda Rushby 9 November 2011
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Trains of Thought

This morning I have quite a vivid memory of dreaming, which is awkward because I already had an idea of what I wanted to write about, which I’ll have to try and retain for another time.

I was at Bedford station, waiting for a train to London, only it wasn’t exactly the Bedford station I know, because it was much bigger, and a lot of renovation and construction was going on, in particular there was a large restaurant/lounge, as opposed to the ATM kiosk where I used to grab a Café Maya or chai latte in passing, or the Starbucks which is now in the place of the old newsagent. I had a special ticket which entitled me to a free drink and cake in the restaurant, but I realised I hadn’t got my rail card, and wondered if I should go ‘home’ (my old flat was only 15 minutes walk away) to get it. I got talking to an old friend, then I realised it was getting late, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in London, or whether I’d have time to do whatever it was, and if there was even any point in going anyway.

Running out of time requires no deep explanation, and train journeys are also very familiar. I always associate them with running away, and when the Eurostar terminal moved to St Pancras, I was very excited about the fact that I could go from Bedford to Brussels or Paris with only one change of train – and from there, of course, all the way to Istanbul or anywhere in Europe or Asia. At the station in Sofia, waiting on a very wet day (kind of like today) I saw on the timetable, and heard on the announcements, that there was a direct train to St Petersburg, and checking the ferry timetables in Istanbul, I discovered I could get one to Odessa (but not to Constanta in Romania, which is what I was hoping for).

But the thoughts I had yesterday, after I’d finished writing, were about fate, and destiny, and Taoism, and can I remember what that was, am I fated never to get to the end of that thought, or even to the point? I believed in fate when I was young, I remember a conversation in which I said this, and someone said: ‘I don’t because I could never have predicted that I’d end up doing this’. But that was the exact point that made me believe, because of the small chances that can have such a strong impact on life. However, I didn’t know how to explain myself, and since then I have come to believe the opposite, that fate and destiny are illusions, things aren’t set in stone, because we can never know what the alternative choices would have led to. Even if we can untangle all the chances, choices, causes and effects that led to a specific event, we still can’t say ‘this had to happen’.

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Tuesday plans

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.

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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?

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Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?

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#amwriting, #notwriting – What is the point?

I was quite surprised earlier this week to discover that I was attempting to write 500 words daily as far back as April 2005 – six months before I even started blogging – and possibly even earlier than that (I haven’t gone digging any further back).

Having said that, I just checked the oldest of the clutch of backup CDs that I dug out the other day – dated 2 November 2004 – on which I found a folder called ‘Journal’, containing another folder called ‘October’. I opened the file from 1 October and the first para was as follows:

“Friday, 01 October 2004 There was an interview on Radio 4 last night with Grahame Greene’s biographer, apparently GG used to set himself targets of writing 500 words at a session, don’t suppose what he wrote was drivel, though.”

Somehow the use of the word ‘drivel’ suggests to me that I’d already been writing that journal for some time – I’m not sure any of it’s been preserved for posterity – though there are earlier paper journals lying around. I remember buying A4 lined Pukka Pads from a cheap stationers in Bedford which has long since gone out of business. But I definitely started writing daily at the beginning of 2000.

Well, all that was what I wrote on Saturday, until I got a phone call from a friend asking for help with uploading the current Southsea Storytellers group anthology (‘Flights and Fancies’) to Kindle. As usual, there were a few annoyances where what appeared ok in MS Word didn’t look so good when uploaded, but I went to see him and we managed to sort them out between us (apart from the placing of images on the page, which never works, even in professionally published books). Always another learning opportunity.

When I got back at lunchtime, I didn’t feel like resuming this post, and yesterday I decided to go out for breakfast before going to writing group (which used to be my habit on Sunday mornings). The place where we now meet, by the beach, is different from where we used to, and a cafe en route, which just happens to be one of my favourites, only reopened last week – seemed like a good excuse to skip blogging.

This morning I didn’t want to write about anything at all, but as I’d already got a couple of hundred words from Saturday, I thought I could add to that, and now I’ve done another two hundred justifying why I’ve missed the last two days, I’m on the home straight.

Does this idea of setting a quota every day help at all? I really don’t know. I can feel myself moving towards not writing anything again. Some mornings it just feels so stressful, but it’s not usually so bad once I get started – like everything in life. But once again it raises the perennial question of whether there is any point or value in writing like this, and I honestly just don’t know the answer to that.  

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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.

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More Stuff About Writing

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I wrote a very short piece about my first love, inspired by hearing Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’ on Amazon music the previous evening, and I posted it, with a link to the song, on the blog for my regular writers’ group, with an automatic link to their Facebook page, which I then shared on my timeline and another FB writers’ group. It seemed appropriate because it was sort of a short story, or at least fast fiction (though it wasn’t fiction – is there such a thing as ‘fast memoir’? There is now.)

I can’t seem to get my head round how to link the WordPress blogs together, though they’re both set up to share on FB and Twitter. I think it might be something to do with this blog, like my other two (yes, there are three altogether, though I don’t write to the other two any more) being self-hosted. I also have a WordPress.com blog, from about ten years ago, that has hardly anything on it, because I realised I could (in theory) get a better Google ranking by having it on my domain name. But my WordPress.com identity is still out there, though under my married name.

Three members of the writers’ group are registered on the group blog, but only two of us ever post to it, though when I set it up I sent an email invitation to all the members. I guess they don’t know what to do with it – probably not helped by the fact that I set it up immediately before the lockdown, so we didn’t have a meeting at which I could give a demo. We don’t use the Facebook page very much either, although we have two collections of stories and poems under our collective belt (‘Southsea Soup’ and ‘Of Life and Love’), and a third, ‘Flights and Fancies’, coming out imminently. (I’m currently proof reading, but have already managed to knock a cup of coffee over my copy).

Sometimes I think it might be fun to get a bit more pro-active with all of this, but then…

IF I do start writing properly (and I’m not saying I will, that depends on what sort of inspiration comes to me, if any), it will probably be more memoir to start with – specifically, ‘The Long Way Back’, the first half of which is largely done, and the first draft of the rest, except – guess what? – I don’t know how to end it.

A friend commented (on Facebook) about my previous post that she has two novels that will never be finished, but she doesn’t ‘beat herself up’ about it. So why do I? Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many idealised dreams about how my life ‘should be’ (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?

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No End

Two compliments about my writing yesterday – one from an old friend on Facebook, one (actually, several) from a new one over socially-distanced coffee on the beach. As usual, I was overwhelmingly stressed and apprehensive about meeting the second, but found myself pouring out my life story and then apologising – even when I waved my arms around and knocked over my coffee, she cleaned it up before I could even think what to do next, and offered to buy me another one (I refused, naturally – it was my fault that it happened.)

I sometimes wonder why people are ever this nice to me. They learn, of course, when they get to know me better.

We first met on a writing course immediately prior to lockdown – I might have mentioned that before? I’ve got a feeling I have. I’d said something about my thirty-year-work-in-progress fantasy novel, and she said: ‘I’ll look it if you like, bring it next week and I’ll let you have feedback the week after’. I felt really embarrassed, but I printed out the beginning, past the ‘inciting incident’ (hero’s journey creative writing course BS jargon) and handed it to her at the next session. I’m not really sure why I, but I suppose I just thought: ‘oh screw it’.

At the next session – which was the last of the course – she was very complimentary and full of questions. All I could say was – well, I haven’t done anything on it for fifteen years because I don’t know how to end it, or even to get closer to the end. We all went to lunch together as a group, and I’d taken my books with me to show the tutor (it was a general invitation to anyone who’d got a book to show). She picked up ‘S2S’, started looking at it, then said: ‘Can I borrow this?’ so of course I said yes. We exchanged emails and made a semi-arrangement to meet up for coffee in a couple of weeks, but of course that didn’t happen. Since then we have exchanged irregular emails and last week finally fixed up this meeting.

I was relieved to find out that she hasn’t been doing any writing either, apart from a journal. We grinned wryly at one another about good intentions and motivation.

She writes short stories –and has sent one in to a competition since we last met. I said that I don’t do short stories because I can’t think of endings. I guess I’m basically a poet, since that’s all the muses – or the Universe, or whatever’s responsible for this stuff – ever seems to send me. And I realised – though I might have had this thought before and forgotten it – that the advantage of poems is that they don’t really need tied up endings or conclusions – they are just there, and open to whatever. Well, the ones I write are.

But the weird thing is that I’ve completed stories in the past. I guess it’s all about luck.

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Thinking, Writing, Writing, Thinking

What I write here is whatever pops into my head, and that’s all I can write.

How many times have I said that? Yeah, I know, a lot, I keep droning on about it. What am I doing wrong? I used to think that as long as I kept writing every day, something miraculous would happen , and I’d find a way of being able to write ‘properly’, to think up stories, to go back to my novel and finish it. But it doesn’t work, so why am I still doing this?

‘Oh, you have to write through all that shit’ people tell me. That’s easy for them – maybe they only have a small amount of shit to get through. For me, it seems there is no getting to the other side.

‘Write another story like that one’ someone said to me yesterday, referring to ‘Eagle Flight’, which has just gone into ‘Flights and Fancies’, the upcoming Southsea Storytellers anthology. And yes, it’s a good story, I agree, one that I wrote about twelve years ago. But how did I write it? Where did it come from?

The answer to that is that it was inspired by an object (a soapstone eagle) which was used for an exercise in a creative writing class, and worked up into a story for an end of term assessment. If I dig around I might be able to find the tutor’s comments, but obviously in those days they were all handwritten on the hard copy.

Just before the lockdown started, I went to another creative writing course, with similar exercises to stimulate writing. I went to the four sessions and brought the material home and haven’t looked at it since. A friend invited me to join a writing group on Facebook which has regular prompts, and I’ve done nothing for that either, bar sharing a couple of poems.

I don’t engage with any of this any more, and I haven’t for years. Why do I still hang on to this tiny, frayed thread of an idea that I might ever be ‘A Writer’? Why do I even want to? I am very late writing this morning, and I almost didn’t bother at all. It’s stressful. I’m stressed enough, worrying about parcel deliveries and my sick cat, how can I get medicine down her to help her appetite when she won’t eat anyway? Worrying about so many things, most of them not so important in the scheme of things but they still need to be dealt with, they require action, and action requires thought and decisions and plans and comparisons of the best way to do them and then energy to get on and do whatever it is.

And I want to run away, not necessarily to another geographical place, but into an emotional place where I can be and let other things be and not have to think about making up stories or whether I can write or not or if it’s worth trying.