Melting snow and melting down

Wow, who was I trying to kid that I'd have time to work on my cover letter this month?? We've been trying to move from our old house into our new (temporary) place, navigating through snow and ice and sorting our accumulated belongings into various piles, all the while attempting to keep tears / arguments / confusion / meltdowns and hair-tearing episodes to a minimum...sometimes winning, but quite often not. We had one of those nights last night when all the children were in hysterics about something different, none of them wanted to go to bed, and clearly they were sensing my need to get them there and open a bottle of wine as their resistance to the land of nod was at an all time high!

It's an unsettling time for the children, and I know I need to be sensitive to this. No amount of promises of seeing baby elephants and keeping chickens in Kenya (yes really, this would be my eldest's dream come true) will detract from the fact that the landscape of the world as they know it is in the process of dramatically changing. Children are incredible the way they live in the present moment and yet, the walls of security and comfort that they pencil around themselves are held up by their parents and if they see their parents in a flap - which I have been recently, more than I would have liked - then these walls wobble a little, and these insecurities are played out in feuding and words rashly spoken. Honestly, I'm not saying my kids don't ever fight, but this past week has been ridiculous.

So, back to my cover letter. Hmmm. At least I could reap the benefit of a past creative endeavour this week by a very short piece of work going up on a the flash fiction website, London Lit Project. The idea is that you write a vignette in exactly 60 words, focussing on a particular place in London at an exact time. I love the micro-detail of this, and since I'm starting to think about the next novel (which I'll write in Kenya, yes indeed, if it's the last thing I do!), the piece I wrote was inspired by an element of the novel. I also took the picture (same picture as above) and was pleased with how it turned out. It was one of those bitterly cold days, so freezing that I could hardly bear to take my hands from my gloves for fear of frostbite, but I did finally coax them out and took the picture of the bridge leading over to the Eel Pie Island, an infamous Twickenham landmark. Click here to have a read of my words.

My January goal

17 days in to January and a belated happy new year! So much change afoot it makes my head spin slightly, but in short, here's what's going on in my world:

My wonderful creative thursdays that I've treasured for the past few years since living round the corner from my mother are coming to an end because tomorrow she flies to Australia for a fun romp around the country in a camper van....

...BUT...they would be coming to an end anyway come april because...

WE ARE MOVING TO NAIROBI!!!

Yes, Nairobi! I went to Kenya once on safari when I was about nine and here's a little tapestry of memories:

keeping my malaria pills stashed in a corner of my mouth and spitting them out when my mum wasn't looking....seeing people with leprosy for the first time...a leopard climbing up a tree...drinking beer on safari because we ran out of water...warmth...a drunk old man asking if I could be his wife and me crying hysterically because I thought I was about to be sold off!!

Anyway, I will at some stage be starting a blog for my middle child as that's what I did for my eldest during our year in India (you can see the original one here), but in the meantime, how to not lose my head and keep the creativity flowing during these weeks of packing, freecycling, ebaying, to-ing, fro-ing and frenzying???

As far as the novel goes, there's nothing like the start of a new year to help one take stock and set a few new goals. I've had a crazy number of rejections now (my skin has grown as tough a rhino's!) and what I am wondering is: Am I falling at the first hurdle? Is my cover letter making agents yawn rather than sit up and dive straight for the manuscript? With this in mind, I met up with a writer friend earlier this week who has a published novel to her name and she gave me some brilliant advice, namely that she felt my cover letter has too much of a sense of me and not enough sense of why this book is the most amazing thing the agent is likely to read this year. It is a sales pitch, pure and simple. I think she's got a really good point. After all, the person writing a novel may well be the most fascinating person imaginable but they could still have written a terrible book. I need an agent to read my letter and literally be chomping at the bit to reach for the manuscript. A challenge? Yes. Insurmountable? No.

So this is what my January is about. If I don't do another single useful thing this month, I am determined to write the mother of all cover letters!