In the shade of the orange tree

Granada

Well, something has happened which, for me and my writing world, is a big old deal. I wrote a couple of blogs back that I had sent my manuscript of the novel I wrote years ago (set in Granada during the Spanish civil war) off to an Authors' Advisory Service. I was bracing myself to be told I really ought to put it behind me and move on. But this isn't what happened. I received a very thorough ten-page report which was very encouraging and told me that this manuscript definitely warrants a re-write. It needs lots of work (which I knew already) but they've highlighted for me which steps to take to get it to the stage where it can once again be sent out into the world.

Now I know this is just one opinion. But I can't help but feel excited and encouraged by this. I've never been able to forget about this story or these characters and they've told me that all the material I need is here, it's just what I do with it now. I also know that even if I do re-write the entire novel this is of course no guarantee that this will result in publication. BUT. Do I owe it to myself to try? Yes. Am I up for the challenge? Yes. Am I in a rush? With three small children and barely a moment in the day to myself, I couldn't be in a rush even if I wanted to be. But I'm going to do this at some stage, I really am. I'm going to return to the world of the Ramirez-Torres family and see how they'd like me to alter their stories and the events that happened to them.

Events

Leading on from my previous blog about finding my way slowly back out into the world of socialising and activity once again (after my lengthy hibernation!), I'm going to write a short list of writing / literary / poetry events I'd like to go to at some point this year; something I can refer to when I'm feeling inspired to have an evening out.

In no particular order, here they are:

Oh joy, I have discovered there is a Creative Writing school at the South Bank Centre. There's a dialogue writing event coming up on 8th March.

Bookslam looks like a fun night out with some really good writers talking about their work.

Woolfson and Tay is an independent bookshop in central London which has regular author events, talks and performances.

Calder Bookshop is another independent bookshop, Waterloo based, which again holds regular events and talks. Long live the independent bookshop!

The Book Club Boutique sounds kind of wacky, but lots of fun. It is, apparently, a place for books, booze and boogie woogie.


So, here's my next challenge....having listed these events, I now need to get to them!

Confessions

Ok, so I have a confession to make. This is how I imagined, once upon a time, how it would be to have children:

That I would go out almost as much as I did before, except this time with children in tow. I would strap one kid to my front, another to by back, perhaps another in a buggy or walking alongside me and off we'd go in search of adventures. They would even come out in the evenings with me and sleep in slings or curled up on chairs whilst I would attend literature festivals, short-story readings and poetry slams.

Now, here's the reality:

Some days, by the time I have got myself and three children dressed and organised, I am so exhausted / overwhelmed / stressed (delete as appropriate) that I lose the will to leave the house altogether. I know I musn't beat myself up about this, and we definitely do still have our adventurous moments, but the simple fact is that things take TIME with small children. Time AND energy and that idealistic picture I'd painted for myself pre-children was fairly laughable. Don't get me wrong, I'd have children all over again even knowing that I was away with the fairies, but what I know now that I didn't know then is that each and every time we all (or even some of us) make it out somewhere, it is an achievement.

I am coming to realise more and more that over the past six years my world has spun neatly on its axis. Let's call it pre (pre-children) and post-Becks. Pre-Becks spent next-to-no time at home. Home was just somewhere to sleep and grab some food. Conversely, post-Becks spends next-to-no time away from home. I have all these ideas and intentions, even just about all of us going to another nearby town to have a change of scenery. But by the time i've changed a nappy...or found a missing glove...or located my wallet...or placated a howling child...or got myself showered....well, by then it's time for my baby's nap and I know he always sleeps longer and better in the cot and I'm just so darned exhausted by then that I hold my hands up and say 'Ok, let's forget about it, another day perhaps'. Sigh.

Having said all this, I feel it's time for a pledge or two. I pledge not to beat myself up about this, this is just LIFE. I pledge to try small steps at a time - no point organising a trip to the other side of London and ending up feeling disappointed when it doesn't happen. There's plenty going on in just my area. And I pledge to give myself a big old pat on the back when things do work out, like yesterday, when I made it all the way to the South Bank centre and back again with two out of three children. Hurrah.

I found my way back home again after I started a family, and now what I want to do - slowly, slowly - is start finding my way back out again to the big, wide, colourful world.

The novel deal

As lots of people know, several years ago inspiration gripped me tightly by the throat and held me in her thrall for around a year, during which time I wrote a novel, In the shade of the orange tree, set in the Spanish Civil War. It's a very long story to explain how I came to be in a position to be able to devote a year of my life to writing a novel, but suffice it to say this was going to be the only time in my whole life that I could turn such an unfortunate situation (wheelchair-bound following nasty skiing accident) into a year of fertile creativty.

Now, in  brief, here's what happened to my novel:
It was rejected by several literary agents whilst a few asked for the entire manuscript. Eventually, I was told no. After a pause, I re-sent it and was told by a few it had potential blah blah and that I was talented blah blah but that as it stood it was not marketable. One agent even said (sorry, this sounds ever so vain to quote this but it does give me that-oh-so-dangerous-word-HOPE so I do have a tendency to keep reminding myself of it) that 'I was instantly impressed by your writing. You definitely have a real, and distinctive, voice, which immediately puts your writing into the top 0.1% of what I read professionally. I am sure editors would feel the same.'

Hopeful, right? But he then went on to say

However, I didn't feel the story you were telling seemed as distinctive, or as appealing, as the writing, and I didn't feel the novel's stylistic qualities. charming though they often were, could quite make up for this unfortunately.

Anyway, the point of all of this is (and the reason that I'm blogging about it), is that I have decided, after several years have lapsed, that I owe it to myself and the characters in my book (who lived and breathed alongside me for over a year) to give this manuscript one final shot. So what I've done is send the whole lot off to a well-respected authors' advisory service to tell me if it has potential or not. Because I'm prepared to re-write the whole darn thing now, which I definitely wasn't back then. I'll let you know what happens. In a way, even if she says no, I can breathe a sigh of relief and put the whole Ramirez Torres family firmly to bed and once and for all, get on with something else. Let's see.

One Sentence

Saturday morning's have become sacred to me. If we are not rushing off to do something on a saturday, what is now happening more often than not is that my husband is taking my three children off somewhere for a couple of hours so that I can write - what BLISS! Thankfully I have an enlightened husband who is aware of the equation that happy mama = happy children = less grief all round.

This morning I have been reading the latest offerings on my Women's Writing Wheel website and submitting a couple of short stories to literary magazines. I also discovered this great little site: One Sentence. It asks that you tell a story in just one sentence. Pretty difficult in some ways, but the great thing is that it won't take much time and is a good exercise in brevity and making each and every word count. Some of the stories I've read there are shocking, some morbid, some laugh-out-loud funny and some downright silly but I like this mix of the mad and mundane and it's a good way to get some creative juices flowing.

For the love of libraries

My love affair with libraries goes back a long way. I vividly remember as a small girl wobbling down two streets on my bicycle to the mobile library on wednesday afternoons. I remember the green plastic cards I had to hand over to borrow books and the small pink zip-up bag attached to the back of my bike in which I stored them. I'd then wobble back home again and devour several books a week before doing the whole thing again the following wednesday.

I remember the library at primary school, a small, safe room lined with worlds filled with mysteries, histories and adventures. And then at secondary school, that stone-floored room I revered in which I discovered all kinds of new writers. At University, let's face it, the library was the place to flirt as well as study and all kinds of friendships were made and broken in and outside of that great ship of learning.

When my first child was born, the local library became a refuge for me: heavy-lidded and bemused by this new mothering experience, I spent more and more time within its forgiving walls, laying my daughter on the mat as she burbled whilst I sat beside her in silent zombied stupefaction. Then as she grew, she started to interact more with her surroundings, first staring at the books, then reaching out for them, then crawling towards them and pulling them from their shelves, and finally choosing them herself, a process which was repeated with my second child, and now my third.

If I have ever found myself in a new place and have time to kill, I have often found myself at the local library. There's always something infinitely friendly about them - it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't even matter if you want to just sit there quietly and read the paper - libraries are warm, open places and it still blows me away that the services they provide are largely free.

It's been a while now since library services have started to be axed as a result of budget cuts and branches closed down. And whilst I wholeheartedly agree that this is bad news, I think a point is being missed somewhere along the line. According to a report commissioned by the government's Departure for Culture, Media and Sports, the number of people visiting libraries in England has fallen steadily over the past five years, from 16.4% visiting monthly in 2005, to 12.8% in 2010.Services obviously need to be used in order for them to be viable and for the government to invest in them. So where should we start? From the bottom up: with children.

Why not make visits to libraries part of the school curriculum? Not only would this help engender a love of books and reading from a young age, but it could help to break the chain in future years of library apathy. After all, book-loving children often turn into book-loving teenagers who turn into book-loving adults. And which book-loving adult can resist an entire library filled with free-to-read books?

Alan Gibbons' blog highlights the plight of nationwide libraries.

In their words

Have you ever wandered what one of your favourite British author's really looks like or how they speak? The BBC has compiled an archive of interviews called In their words: British Novelists, and range from Hilary Mantel to Salman Rushdie to Virginia Woolf. I found it particularly interesting to see some of the old footage from the 1950's and 60's.

Click here to have a look.

Writing in motion

I read recently something about the importance of finding a space of ones own in which we can write. Oh, how I dream of the day I can remove myself to a little cabin in the garden in which I can dream and write! The reality at the moment, however, is that it is impossible for me to claim such a 'space'. Every corner of my house is already spoken for, as are many of my waking hours. I know this is a common problem for many people who want to write, and it's just something that we have to get round in whichever way we are able to.

The novelist Maggie Gee apparently worked for years in the British Library and JK Rowling used her local cafe to pen her famous books. Andrew Motion writes during long distance train journeys (I rather like this, given his name) and for me, this resonates the most. I don't know why, but I often feel most inspired when I am on the move, whether this is on a bus or a train or simply walking. The poem I wrote for Women's Writing Wheel exercise number two was scribbled entirely in my mind whilst I was waling back and forth from my daughter's school. I had to keep going over the lines again and again so that I wouldn't forget them before I could get to pen and paper! (I should have learnt by now to always carry a pen!)

I'd love to hear from others about when or where they feel inspired to write.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Click here to listen to an interesting TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love (has anyone read this by the way? I haven't done, and don't know too much about it, but must admit I'm more inclined to after listening to her talk.) She speaks about nurturing creativity, delving back through layers of history to make some interesting discoveries about the source and form of creative inspiration.

National Short Story Day

I've just realised how long it's been since I last wrote. But this may have something to do with 3 children having had chicken pox....or my husband being away regularly with work and me feeling like I have alot to deal with...or something like that!

Anyway, I'm really, really excited that I seem to be one step closer to setting up my website, Women's Writing Wheel. I have 12 writing guinea pigs (myself included) and, if I manage to sort out the remaining glitches, should be ready to roll at the start of January.

On another note, I see that it is National Short Story Day on December 21st. To be honest, I never even knew this existed, but I'm very pleased that it does. Click here to visit the website. It provides information on nationwide events taking place, aswell as an opportunity to read or listen to some of the best short stories, old and new.

Speaking of short stories, I've been enjoying listening (belatedly) to the five shortlisted entries for Radio 4's National Short Story Award. If you get that golden half hour after dinner when you can sit with your feet up, a cuppa and some chocolate (yeah, right!), have a click here to listen. Although I'm far more accustomed to reading short stories than listening to them, this makes an interesting change and really brings the whole 'storytelling' element alive.