The Girl and the Rickshaw

Hooray, a short story published in Magic Cat Press called 'The Girl and the Rickshaw'. Click here to have a read. The story is inspired by my year spent in India and the many rickshaw journeys I took around Bangalore, though the girl is definitely not me! This is a funny old story, the few people that have read it have generally said that they felt let down by the ending. I guess Magic Cat Press didn't feel that way as otherwise they wouldn't have accepted it, but if anybody out there does read it, I'd be hugely grateful for some feedback!

Happy new year!

New year's Resolutions....Hmmm.....Stop yelling at my kids so much in the morning?? Deep breaths before I think I'm going to blow a fuse? Poor kids, it's not their fault they have to go to school and we have to be out the house by silly-o'clock. More patience please, new-year's-resolution fairy!

But as for writing resolutions, well I have a very simple one really, and that is to be far more disciplined on my thursday writing day. Email OFF, phone OFF, twitter OFF and more focus. It worked really well this past thursday, so I just need to keep it up. I have also started a little 'magpie' book, collecting little snippets of interesting facts / conversation / images /  ideas etc from my day which may someday be able to work their way into a story. Yesterday for example I had my hair cut by a lady with black hair with white stripes in it, so that went down in my book: 'zebra hair'. Also, she had a very prominent tattoo on her forearm so I decided to ask her about it rather than just look at it. She told me that she had it done just after her daughter was born and the tattoo spelt out her name. Brilliant - a zebra-haired hairdresser with Ivanka tattooed on her arm. Love it.

Kindle or kindle wood?

Ok, this is a little bit scary to be admitting this, particularly committing these words to paper (or the screen, I should say), but I am considering getting a kindle at some point in the not too murky future. Eek, I've said it. I say 'considering', because I really don't know if I've even come to terms with this 'consideration', let alone going out and buying one. But have a look at this graph above and you might see why I am in the process of considering the consideration of a kindle!! The yellow line represents physical books sold since 1996 and the red line shows the sales of Kindle books sold since 2008. This is utterly unprecedented. Kindle's have revolutionized the way we read and whilst I love, now forever and always the look, smell and feel of books, I have also got to acknowledge that people are reading very differently to how they were just ten years ago.

What does this mean for me and my novel? Actually, this could be exciting for me, because if nothing happens   when I go down the traditional publishing route, the good news is that I can publish an Amazon e-book for people to download on to their Kindle's. Anyone can do that, so the key to this is good marketing (aside from a darn good read). So I figured, the best way to get a feel for this market is to embrace it and that means getting a kindle. I chatted to a lady on the train not so long ago who was reading from a kindle and she told me she was the biggest die-hard book lover on the planet but is now a convert to the kindle. I have to say, I don't really want to be a 'convert', I just love physical books far too much. But what I do want to do is try to be a little more open-minded and embrace the digital revolution. It may well prove the only way for me to get my book out there.

Writing about sex!

Blimey. That was hard. I spent FAR more time than I'd intended this morning writing a sex scene in my novel. I had been an utter wimp when I originally wrote it, more a case of moving-swiftly-on and then suddenly it was the next morning - hmm, not very convincing. Thankfully, help was at hand exactly when I needed it in the form of an article in Mslexia by Monique Roffey (her sexually explit novel, above, came out earlier this year to great critical acclaim and a good dose of controversy) on how to write good sex scenes and one of the main things that I got out of it was that I have to kill the critic sitting on my shoulder. Don't think about what your mum might think or how I couldn't possibly write that or what on earth would so-and-so think if they knew I was writing this???!! But kill then, kill them all, brush them all off your shoulder and write that sex scene. Who put what where, who did what, and how. Yes, seriously!

Soooo....how did I fare? God, I had no idea what a prude I was, I guess I'm just not used to 'letting go' like this in my writing. I'm definitely not as liberated as Monique Roffey, but at least I've made a start. And I suppose that writing about sex, just like having it, takes practice. Tee hee.

Nan Green

Nan Green 

1904-1984

On my research travels for my novel, I've unearthed some really fascinating characters. I've just finished reading a book called 'Doves of War' by Paul Preston which is the biography of four women (two British and two Spanish) whose lives were all profoundly affected by the events of the Spanish Civil War. One of these British women was Nan Green, a young, working class married woman with two children. She loved walking and music and was utterly devoted to her family. But in 1937, Nan agonised for weeks before taking the decision to leave her children in a boarding school in England so that she could join her husband in war-torn Spain.

As a mother, I can understand the anguish she must have felt to be separated from her young children, but what it is harder for me to understand (for I, thankfully, live in a time of relative peace) is what drove her far from home to fight in a war that was not her own. The ideals of the droves of International Brigades and nurses who flocked into Spain between 1936 and 1939 were so strong - these were not adventure-seekers, they were men and women who truly believed that if they could fight and defeat fascism on Spanish soil, a larger war could be averted. And although they did not succeed in Spain, their ideal lives on.

Nan Green helped countless people in Spain, nursing hundreds of injured people and helping take refugees to Mexico at the end of the war. She returned to England with her husband 'missing.' After tortuous weeks of waiting, she had to break the news to her children and his parents that he wasn't coming back...

...one of the many inspiring, forgotten voices who wove her passion for liberty and human dignity into her work.

Tree

My eldest daughter in the magnolia tree outside our house this spring

A fantastic source of motivation for my writing has, for years, been through Mslexia - a magazine for women who write. It comes out 4 times a year and with each new publication there is a call for short stories or poems on a given theme and I try as often as I can to submit. For the current edition, they're asking for stories on the theme '2211', ie looking forward two hundred years and being inspired from that point. Initially I thought ugh, science fiction, not my forte at all. But I quickly realised that was very defeatist of me, and more to the point, I should know by now that the chosen entries are always very wide-ranging and the theme can be interpreted very broadly; it just needs to serve as inspirational springboard.

Anyway, I spent a while pondering the theme and came up with an idea with a tree a part of the principle narrative (not going to go into it here, just in case somebody nicks my idea, tee hee!). But after deciding that, we were sitting at lunch one day and I was telling my family about the theme and asked everybody 'What do you think the world will be like in 200 years time?' My eldest daughter (age 5), without even stopping to think about it, looked at me and in a very serious little voice, replied 'There won't be any trees.' I was stunned - firstly that the idea of trees had come to her immediately since that's what I was going to use anyway, but also that she had quite such an apocalyptic, or should I say bleak vision for the future. Where did this come from? I think I must talk about our need to protect our planet more than I realise. And whilst I am really, really pleased that she is taking this on board, I also don't want to overburden the little love and want her to believe that things are heading in the right direction! Quite sobering.

In the meantime, I'm going to start penning my tale about my tree, and whilst I'm doing this, I want my children to be able to climb from branch to branch to their hearts' content. And I truly hope that in two hundred years time, our future generations will be able to do the same.

Wise words

'I cannot help thinking that to entertain is sufficient ambition for the novelist, and it is certainly one which is hard to achieve; if he can tell a good story and create characters that are fresh and living he has done enough to make the reader grateful. You will not have failed to notice that many novels are written which have every possible excellence and yet are quite unreadable. I hope you will not think it a willful eccentricity when I tell you that I look upon readableness as the highest merit that a novel can have.'


W Somerset Maugham

Filling the blank page

'You have got to believe in the project, the book itself. You have to find the WILL, and then the energy will follow.'


Lorrie Moore


Working on my novel last week, I came a bit unstuck. I'd been on quite a roll up to that point, sitting for hours at a time and loving the process of re-drafting and reading bits out loud, trying to hear what worked best. I think it's because the original draft of the novel did actually start off pretty well, and that's what encouraged some agents the first time round to ask for the full manuscript. But then, a few chapters in, it flounders....and so did I. Now I know this is good news in one way, because it's clear to me now in a way it never was before that some of my writing is forced, unauthentic and frankly, pretty crap. But it seems that my roll has creaked to a slow-down, and here's where the hard graft begins and I have to painstakingly delete pages and pages of this nonsense I once believed was so well written. And from the blank page, I need to begin all over again.

However, I take heart from the quote of Lorrie Moore's I read recently. Because I DO believe in this project, I truly do, and I honestly believe this is a story that needs to be told. A couple of weeks ago a friend lent me a DVD called 'La lengua de las mariposas' (The butterfly's tongue), a moving story set in a Spanish civil war in a Galician village. It is about the relationship between an inspiring teacher and a young boy and how the boy has to betray his teacher when war breaks out. Although my Spanish is pretty rusty, the film had me weeping my heart out by the end. I kept thinking how could this have happened? Civil war must be the ugliest of conflicts as its pits people against one another who were once as close as family, even family members themselves. Anyway, my point is that the will to write this book is 110% within me, now I need the energy to make this will a reality to help me fill that blank page.

As I type this, my little boy aged fifteen months is sitting opposite me in his high chair guzzling chopped up banana and squishing it between his fingers before chucking it around the room. Even if I never get this book published, one day I want him to read this book his mama wrote and sense that this was a story I believed in.

Nervous energy, breathing and hula hooping

Maya having a go at hula-hooping at Shambala Festival, 2011

I have a bit of a problem. I think I've mentioned this before, but when I sit down to write I have a huge amount of nervous energy in me. Partly it's because I am like a child before their birthday party: hugely over excited. And partly it's because I don't know quite how to get going again after a week away from my characters and the story they want to tell. I know that on occasion this nervous energy simply hasn't dissipated and it's been horribly counter-productive with me doing a bit of writing, then quickly checking my email, then doing a few more lines, then getting up to make a coffee, then playing a few notes on the piano, then sitting down again and doing some writing whilst fiddling with my hair - aaaaaaaaaggghhh! This is NOT good.

So today I tried a different tack. I could feel this energy fizzing all around me as I sat down to write and I thought NO - this is my day, my precious day to write and I really cannot spend half of it making coffee and bashing out a few unsatisfactory chords on the piano. So I tried an exercise that comes from my book 'Writing begins with the breath' which suggests that you spend a few minutes on the floor on your back, palms up and eyes closed, breathing deeply. According to the author of this book (Larraine Herring), this posture helps stimulate the imagination and 'because you're on your back, your heart is open, allowing you to experience both vulnerability and surrender. Your body is experiencing a place of safe openness - a place of trust from which you can dare to risk.'


Well, I definitely liked the sound of that so I gave it a go and then managed to get up and have a good hour of utterly uninterrupted and very satisfying writing (I know, this doesn't sound like much but for me it is!).Inspiration comes from different places for all of us, but for me, it definitely comes from that still, small space of calm, so perhaps I ought to be doing this more often.

After an hour I got very cold (this is another problem I have, because when I'm really into my writing I honestly don't think, fingers aside, that I move a muscle) so to get my circulation going I put on some loud music and did five minutes of hula hooping! I know this sounds a bit nuts but it is my latest craze and I love it. So let's see if this is something I can do every thursday - calm breathing at the start of my writing day and then hourly hula-hooping breaks!

September Beginnings

There's something about the month of September - the leaves changing colour and starting to fall, being able to see my breath first thing in the cool mornings, the start up of the school run - that always makes me feel like I'm  going back to school. It doesn't matter what age we are, I think we never quite lose that back to school feeling and sense of new beginnings that comes each September.  So here I am, on my sacred quiet thursday (kids with my ma), and my new challenge is stretching out ahead of me and I'm very, very excited about it.

I've talked before about my novel set in Granada during the Spanish Civil War - well, I've started the process of going back and editing the story I wrote pre-children. I've got a great big door stopper of a book about the civil war out from the library (a little light night reading?!) and am starting to listen to radio programmes and watch relevant films about that period. This is going to be a huge undertaking as I know now that this novel virtually needs re-writing from start to finish. When I wrote it originally, I was living in rural Suffolk and was utterly absorbed by it - I remember having conversations in my head with my characters whilst I was raking up the leaves in the garden - seriously! I can't quite imagine how it's going to work out this time around as I need to put my family first. However, I know I'm definitely not the first woman to write a novel with a swarm of little people around her legs and I am hoping to rise to the challenge. Can't wait!