Dreaming in Lisbon

Lisboa

I spent last weekend in the tumbledown rainy sunny city of Lisboa, visiting some old friends. I love this place. The dire economic straits the country is in is palpable but despite this, Lisboans have not lost their sense of alegria. (This is a Spanish & Portuguese word which broadly translates to lightness of spirit). 

The whole time I was away, I was feeling pretty excited because last week, for the first time in a VERY, VERY long time, an agent asked to see my full manuscript. I really needed this as a boost to my confidence and to help me believe that my writing is of some merit because, believe me, there are times when I wonder. So while I was away, I was in that wonderful in-between stage of golden hope, knowing that they liked what they'd read so far, and that this could actually be something. Now I'm back in England and the rest of the manuscript has been sent off to them. I sat for a long time at the lap-top, not quite bringing myself to be able to push the 'send' button because that in-between dreaming stage will be lost to me forever. It's a bizarre feeling but once I pressed it, it's out of my hands again and now all I can do is sit tight and wait.

Kenya

I spent last week in Kenya and it was...well...heavenly.

Here's me in our lodge near to Lake Navaisha. I managed to read 2 books during the week (when did I last do that?), write some haiku, organise cover letters for the different agents I'm going to send my manuscript out to, eat far too much, sleep more than I've slept in months, do some yoga overlooking the lake and also spend proper time with my hubby (the longest alone since our honeymoon!). I also found out whilst I was away that a short story of mine is going to be published soon in What the Dickens magazine :)

Without even going on safari, we saw some incredible wildlife and I'm so excited to share this with the children when we move out in 6 weeks (yikes, 6 weeks, is that all?!!). It feels like a bit of a tick-tock countdown now I'm back in the UK, so much to do, so many people to see. I don't think we're going to be back here for at least a year and admittedly, everyone is so busy these days with work and family lives that quite often a year goes by anyway without seeing people. But even so, our move to Africa is feeling nearer and more real and I'm feeling a mixture of dizzy excitement on how our lives in Kenya will unfold and sadness at this chapter ending here in Twickenham.

I spent the morning in a frenzy of printing and by the end of this week I'm going to send out my manuscript to ten more agents. Then next week (or the week after), the final ten. A friend on saturday made the point to me that it takes a mere half hour to upload one's ebook on to amazon (really?) and yes, that may be what I'm looking at in a few months time and if that's the case, I shall endeavour (!) to embrace it. But until then, I'm fighting till the death for the analogue / acoustic version of my book ;)

Here's me getting to know a wild fig tree!

This is it!

Someone else seeking inspiration from glorious Granada

So, this is it. I have about 20 final agents to send my manuscript to.  I have a killer cover letter which cannot possibly get any better, I have an enticing (I think!) synopsis and at the moment, I'm going through the first few chapters with a fine tooth comb, making little tweaks here and there, tightening it all up. Then before I leave for Nairobi, I want to send it out again and if this bears no fruit, I need to bow out gracefully (as opposed to wailing and tearing at my hair!) and explore digital publishing avenues. As I keep telling myself (I'm trying to convince myself here), digital publishing is still publishing and the possibilities are very exciting. Plus it's potentially more lucrative these days if you tap into the right market.

I have spent far too long on this book to just shove it in a (metaphorical) drawer and put it down to experience. And more than that, I do still believe in it, I really, really do! I want this book to be read. I want my family to read it, I want my friends to read it, after all, what are words if not to be read? So whether on screen or paper, by the time this year is out, I am more determined than ever that In the shade of the orange tree will stop being just 'my' book and people can understand more what I've had my nose buried in for the past several years!

Snakes and little green pigs

The other day, my son came back from nursery with a snake he had made to celebrate Chinese new year. When my eldest daughter asked me what animals we all were and I wasn't sure, she was horrified! So I've hastily rectified this situation and it turns out that this year is my year, the year of the snake. With this in mind, we joined the throngs yesterday in China Town in the bitterly cold rain to celebrate, ate some noodles, bought some firecrackers and paper dragons and finally warmed up in a cafe with hot chocolate.

Since this is 'my' year (and I didn't make any new years resolutions the first time round!), my Chinese new year resolution is to try to be more pro-active with my writing and writing-related activities. To kickstart this, on saturday I went to Brighton to help out with a creative writing workshop for teenagers. A friend of a friend has created Little Green Pig, an organisation that celebrates the power and joy of the written word with both primary and secondary age children - fantastic, so inspiring. In four years, she's built this up out of nothing and it really got me thinking, I could do something similar in Kenya. It's not enough to just have ideas, we have to get off our butts and follow them through. Let's hope this year of the snake momentum is behind me.

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!

Creativity and Time

The other night, I watched a half hour talk about optimising creativity by John Cleese, well loved British comedian and actor. Here it is, in case anybody is interested in watching it:

Anyway, one of the things he talked about was giving yourself the time to be creative. In itself, this is an obvious statement, but what he actually meant was not giving yourself ample time, but rather a shorter slice of time with a pre-determined start and finish. This will limit procrastination and time wasting (I can relate to this - often on my thursday writing day, because I have "all day" I know very well that feeling of getting other things done because I can write 'later') and, Cleese states, increase productivity.

It can be a bit of a scary notion sometimes, setting myself smaller concrete writing tasks to complete in an hour or two. But it's good to sit with this fear and then write anyway. It doesn't even matter if I'm just writing for the sake of writing; the point is that I'm writing openly and intuitively and some of the material I produce may well prove fertile composting ground for future stories. With this in mind, I had a go at a couple of writing exercises from the writing workout website whereby you are timed for 300 seconds to produce some writing following a given prompt. This made me feel distinctly uncomfortable at first, but once I had told myself that it didn't matter, that there is no right or wrong, I think writing with time constraints can be really valuable and help with focus. This website is an extreme example of working within a given time, but since watching John Cleese's talk, I do feel motivated to embrace the short time I have to write (how often do I grumble as busy mother of three that I never have enough time to devote to writing?) and squeeze every ounce of creativity possible from it.

Doing something amazing with our days

Refugee children arriving in Harwich, 1938

I wish I could remember the name of this person, but I can't. A few weeks ago though, I heard a lady in her mid-seventies talking on the radio about her life and her aspirations for each day. She was an amazing woman - as a Jewish child living in Europe during the second world war, she was on board the kindertransport that brought her to Britain, never to see her parents again. As a result of that ordeal, she says that each day she treats as a gift and never, ever takes her existence for granted, striving to do something amazing with every day that dawns. It's funny, but ever since I heard her words, I've thought about them regularly. How inspiring that she has turned such traumatic events from her past around, reaching out to the world and those around her.

I don't think it matters if our 'amazing act' is something tiny; even if it's a bright smile to somebody who looks miserable - we're all inter-connected one way or another and the ripple effect of that smile could permeate in deeper ways than we'll ever know. Anyway, I know I'm waxing rather lyrical here, but this lady on the radio and her words really got me thinking (oh, I wish I knew who it was so I could quote her at least!). I have led the most comfortable, privileged existence imaginable; I've never had to endure real hardship, hunger, loneliness or deprivation like so many people in this world. And yet sometimes, still, I get trapped in this safe little bubble I live in, in this cosy corner of London and find myself complaining about these 'problems' of everyday life. Really, I have nothing to complain about and everything to be thankful for. At the very least, I can strive to do something amazing with this gift of today.

Productivity and web of opportunities

My sister, the talented violinist

It's thursday afternoon, the sharp winter sunlight is streaming through the windows and I'm thinking about how much I'm going to miss my writing days when my mother leaves for her extended trip in Australia and New Zealand in January. She's been absolutely amazing these past couple of years looking after my children every thursday. If it weren't for her, I don't know how I would have got my novel written (Of course I would have found a way, but it would've been much harder) or just had days like today when I've been really productive. I've written a whole new story for Liar's League - a great monthly live fiction night whereby actors read out writers' stories. Last time I sent them anything my story made it to the short list, so let's see what they make of this new one. Fingers and toes crossed.

I'm slightly terrified at the prospect of performing in public so this would suit me brilliantly, despite all the drama and plays I used to do at school. I am just very, very out of practice. Speaking of which, I went to see my sister and her husband, the Steinberg Duo (violin and piano) perform a lunchtime recital in Central London yesterday. As always, I was completely in awe and inspired by their performance, not to mention the hours of hard work that precedes it. They are planning to make their first commercial CD in the new year and have used a creative crowd funding website to raise the money which just makes me think afresh about how powerful a tool the web can be in all kinds of creative endeavours, if used the right way. An example of an equivalent to this in the world of books is Unbound - here, the public can pledge to support books. And so, motivated by my sister and her husband's performance yesterday and her success with her crowd funding project, and also feeling more productive than normal somehow (possibly a decent night's sleep?!), I also wrote and sent a proposal off to Unbound this morning. So, once again, fingers and toes and pigtails crossed.

Navigating a path onwards through rejection

The young Beatrix Potter

If you read my last blog post, you'll know that I was feeling less than positive about my novel and, in fact, my writing in general. It was extraordinary, but it had become a physical thing - whenever anyone asked me about my novel, I could feel this tightening across my chest and was keen to leave the subject as quickly as possible. But I'm glad I wrote that posting, because I received lots of encouraging emails as a result of it which made me feel much better. And then last night, a writer friend came round; she's also writing a novel and we've been helping each other out with feedback. For the first time, I counted up how many agents I've sent my novel to (27 - OMG!), but my friend insisted I keep going, keep sending it out, not to give up.

And so, with these encouraging emails and my friend's advice, I have a renewed determination this morning. I have done so much work on this book. I had fallen out of love with it, but it's amazing how this can change so quickly. It's not my novel but my attitude to it that shifts the delicate balance of tension I've been feeling.

And just to make myself feel better, here are a few well known writers who took a while to reach their dream:

Stephen King received dozens of rejections for his first novel. One publisher replied with the words 'We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.' Ha!

CS Lewis of Narnia fame received over 800 rejections before he had a single thing published.

Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone with the wind was rejected 38 times before finding a publisher.

John Grisham was rejected 28 times before his first novel was published.

Beatrix Potter  never managed to find a publisher and eventually self-published.


This list could go on and on...but suffice it to say, I WILL GET THERE!