That whole social network thing again - Pheed, Facebook, Goodreads and Twitter-ache

At the end of November I ended my phone contract and switched, with my old phone, to a new provider that provides a flexible, choose-a-bundle-each-month-and-just-pay-for-that type of arrangement (I'll tell you who it is after a couple of months when I've made up my mind about the service). For this first month I chose not to pay the extra £3 for the blackberry services, like internet and push email, and haven't bothered to do the free get-around programming, for which there are plenty of YouTube tutorials. I'm not bothered about the internet and email, but it also means I can't use Twitter on my phone and - huge surprise - I really miss it! I hadn't realised how many ten-minute chunks of time I'd passed on the way to work in scrolling down the news and in noting competitions and interviews. It's just not the same on a laptop screen. 

I recently joined two networks. One is Pheed, and to be honest, I don't really know why I did except in order to have a look around. People seem to share stuff - pictures, videos - the way they do on Facebook, so I imagine that for focussed people who spend a lot of time online anyway, with something specific to promote, it could be useful. There is an option to 'monetize your content': I haven't looked any further into that because, although I know that it only means 'sell your work', the phrase just sounds so dreary. Why not term it, well, 'Sell Your Work'? Okay, I'll stop griping. The point is, it's a fairly new network, it's another way to connect and publicise your work, and could make you a bit of money. 

By the way, I am pretty much dormant on Facebook now; my friends are mostly people with whom I'm in regular contact anyway by email, text and phone, and hula hoopers I've met over the years, whose profiles I'll drop by to say hello to every couple of months. From what Rebecca Woodhead says in her column in January's Writing Magazine, the days of promoting yourself and your books on Facebook are pretty much over, so I can happily ignore the nagging voice in the back of my head that's been saying 'What about that Facebook author page then?'. (Wait till I'm a proper author, I've been telling it.) 

The other network I joined was Goodreads, which I think everyone should be on. It's a great way to get recommendations for authors you'd never heard of, so you can toddle off list in hand to the library (you do use your local library, don't you?). It's also brilliant fun simply loading it with all the the books you have read, finding ones you'd forgotten about and ranking them.  You have various shelves, you see, and you can create ones with your own labels. As well as the 'Read it' and 'To read' that come with the new account, I've added 'Must re-read' and 'Couldn't finish it'. You can connect with friends and follow people  - there's a distinction there which is unclear to me as yet as I haven't done either, but I will! Give it a go.

Right, must rush - I'm going to Manchester to meet my sisters and then we're all off down to London by an early train tomorrow to meet our lovely cousin for her birthday treat. There will be cake, and tea, and a musical, and possibly wine!

 

Nature writing

Well, the elements have certainly been showing us who’s in charge! Hopefully, you’ll have experienced no more than mild inconvenience and a few thrills of excitement over the last few days, rather than dangerous and scary disruption. I haven’t been able to work today, as my current job involves planting young trees along the upper reaches of rivers in a selection of lovely, lonely valleys in southern Snowdonia. After last Thursday’s experiences we’ve decided to listen to what the weather is telling us, and are staying in painting the kitchen until the waters subside. Well, Himself is painting. 

Excellent nature writing reads easily. It’s certainly not easy to write, and is as susceptible as travel writing to purple prose. I struggle to capture the simplicity and complexity and sheer heart-stopping beauty of nature. The squawks of a reluctant fledgeling housemartin struggling as a parent, patience lost, hauls it out of the nest for a flying lesson. Raven pairs renewing their pair bond in flight-dance, with side-flips and tandem turns and those achingly lovely deep-noted plunky calls, like a metal pail of water tapped with a stone. The colours. The bud of a hawthorn in May, a ivory ball of promise. If you enjoy trying to capture nature on the page, there are a couple of competitions to look out for. 

Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is launching a new international nature writing competition. The closing date is January 6^th 2013. First prize is a five-day residential Arvon foundation writing course PLUS £500. Entry fee £7.50. Trigger words/phrases for the 2013 competition are: ‘Roots,’ ‘Spaces’ and ‘A Whisper’; more details here.

The page links to an excellent article on how to be a nature writer. 

BBC Wildlife has run a nature writing competition for the last five years, with a closing date of April 30^th. There’s no news on the website yet of a 2013 competition but I’d be mightily surprised if there wasn’t one. Keep an eye on the website. You can read last year’s winners and commended stories here. 

A few of my favourite books of nature writing

Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey. No scary species identification guide, this; it’s a glorious compendium, divertingly readable. All the native British flowering plants are there, including trees (which are technically flowering plants). Beautifully photographed, the entries include alternative names and their origins, folk stories and myths and legends, former and current uses from the medicinal to the culinary, appearances and references in older literature, their habitats and distribution, traditions and festivals surviving to this day.  

Collected Poetry and Prose, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A devout Christian and a priest in later life, Hopkins saw God’s glory in every natural thing. Not that this makes his writing inaccessible to those of other (or no) religious persuasion; his joy in the natural world, from meadows pinned with buttercups to songbirds in flight, is palpable and infectious. And what writing it is - sometimes almost chokingly dense, so squeezed and pulled are the words and phrases so that it says exactly what he wants it to say. Take the first four lines of Pied Beauty: 

‘Glory be to God for dappled things - 

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;’

And you’ve just got to read Hopkins out loud. Say the second line out loud now. Go on, now. Doesn’t it just feel joyous? Your mouth has to move; the sounds paint the colours. And how much more lovely does ‘couple-colour’ sound than ‘two-toned’?

All that, with an anatomist’s accuracy of observation. That is the best description of rainbow trout I’ve ever read; unmistakable.  And how many of us would think of a finch’s pied wing rather than the more obvious magpie? I’d better stop now, I have a habit of raving about Hopkins once I start. 

Please, do, do read him. 

The Oxford Book of Nature Writing, edited by Richard Mabey (he is rather a giant of nature writing). Mine is the 1995 edition; there may well be another by now. From Aristotle to Primo Levi,  eighteenth century amateur naturalists to the suppositions of Dark Age thinkers and monks, this is one of those books you keep on the landing and dip into while waiting for the bathroom and have to be roused from half an hour later, still standing. Two favourites: Welshman Gruffydd ab Addaf ap Dafydd’s letter to a tree in the 1300s, ‘To a Birch-Tree Cut Down, and Set Up in Llanidloes as a Maypole; and an extract from the Journals of Richard Jefferies in 1884, ending thus:

                        ‘Never go for a walk in the fields without seeing one thing at least however small to give me hope, the frond of a fern among dead leaves.’

Taking time

On Monday we planted a hedge of trees in slanted wind and rain, watched with interest by three small donkeys, a small herd of pygmy goats and four llamas. Yesterday’s office was a polytunnel full of cherry tomato plants; we harvested the fruits and weighed them for the friend whose charges they are, the guinea pigs for his PhD. (Our freezer is now brimful of pulped tomatoes.) Today we planted trees along the banks of a turgid stream flowing from the head of a beautiful, remote valley in southern Snowdonia.

I love my varied life. It’s not easy to forget how lucky I am; if ever I’m complacent, or feel even slightly inclined to grumble about the weather, I just remind myself that I could be wrangling with the grants department of a quango or filling in performance indicators for a nature reserve (yes, that really happens). Total job satisfaction is instantly restored.

However, patience is not one of my virtues. ‘Why’s it taking so long?’ I am frequently heard to cry when terrain or weather makes jobs a bit more difficult. (Also shouted when occupied in any kind of housework.) On Monday, for example, my partner and I planted a hedge of 300 trees in under five hours. That included hauling trays of little trees to where they needed to be, plus the canes and guards that support and protect them, laying everything out – a seedling, a cane and a guard in each spot – and finally working along the hedge-line setting them into the soil. Today it took us six hours to plant 400, only 100 of which required canes and guards (sheep were excluded, and, being on the river bank, and subject to occasional inundation, the guards would probably be swept away in the next flood, possibly injuring or killing the young tree as well; better to plant the trees securely and let them take their chances).  My impatience was running high. ‘It’s so SLOW,’ I complained.

My partner is my polar opposite. ‘Things take time,’ he says to me, often. ‘Doing things well takes time.’ Today, he pointed out to me the things I should have noticed before I began to whinge: that we had to carry materials a lot further; that the river bank inside the fences was an organic, curving, changing creature, with heights and sinks and  narrows and broads, and that we had to spend more thought on placing the trees – willow near the edge, hawthorn and hazel on higher ground, birch and alder in amongst the rushes– rather than just laying them out in regular lines; that the trees’ job would be to stabilise the banks, so thought had to be given to where they were most needed. 

It’s probably obvious that I’m going to draw a parallel between this and writing. I’m terribly impatient with this as well. One sentence in and my mind is yelling at my fingers. ‘Rubbish! Scratch it out! Delete it! Do it right first time, why can’t you?’ Which is when it’s good to remember the trees, and to hear his voice in my head. ‘Things take time. Doing things well takes time.’

If you have your own mantras - yours or a supportive dear one's - I'd love to hear them. 

Ash to ashes

These are my closest ash trees, the ones I see when I look out of my bedroom window. One mature ash stands between and behind the pair of sweet chestnuts, and together with the ash saplings and seedlings they make a small copse that the tawny owl sometimes nests in, and always brings the fledgelings to for flying practice. In the light rain afternoon I went out and took some photographs of them. 

It’s windy today. Standing underneath looking up, the still-green leaves on the sapling danced beneath the limbs and ochre saw-toothed leaves of the sheltering sweet chestnut. On the parent ash, the leaves have long gone; they were one of the first to turn and fall, a brilliant, lime-tinted yellow while other species were still green. There are about half a dozen young ash in the undergrowth here. The one in the photo is about two years old; the tallest sapling is perhaps seven years old.

Some of reasons why I love ash:

• It was the first tree I learnt to identifying in winter; it’s the only common tree with black buds.
• If you clip a bud and carefully open and unpick it with a needle, you’ll find the leaflets already fully formed, on the tiniest scale. It’s all there, ready.
• It casts the most beautiful dappled shade. Herb flora has a chance under ash and speckled wood butterflies seem to love it for the same reason, fiercely defending the dancing beams of sunlight that it allows through.
• You can burn it fairly green, but if you have a chance to let it season it is the best firewood. Whatever the number of hours of work you’ve had to barter with the land-owner in order to get it, and the hours it’s taken to carry, saw, chop and stack it, a wood-store of ash is worth double.
• It’s graceful. Look at the three trees together: where the sweet chestnut arms stretch outwards, bending and twisting, the ash reaches skywards.

Tomorrow we start planting work. The seedling trees have arrived, four thousand plugs in bundles of twenty, carefully laid in a large crate and sent to us from a nursery in western Scotland, where the locally sourced seed has a similar genetic make-up to that in western Wales. No ash this year.

When I hear a government minister advising the public to wash their boots and their dogs’ paws after walking in woods, I want to weep. This is an island, we live on an island. There are twenty-one miles of seawater between mainland France and Dover, the best possible defence against an invading pathogen. This shouldn’t have happened. 

Sending it out into the big wide world

Don’t you just love cold, wet weather? All you have to do is spend a couple of hours out in it  - working in the garden, or the graveyard in our case, or on your bike battling against crosswinds and hail for thirty miles - and then you can spend the rest of the day in toasty warm indoor pursuits, feeling virtuous. That was yesterday - today it is just cold, cold, cold, and I’ve got a dodgy tum so I’m inside by the fire while Himself is off cycling in the mountains. 

I’ve been taking some Looks At What I Do, specifically comparing what I’ve achieved in October against what I achieved in September. I’m not talking about word counts, which I think can be misleading unless qualified. (I tend to write two or three drafts of a short story by hand before it gets typed onto my laptop, for example, and never count the words; life’s too short.) No, my yardstick for progress is how many pieces, stories or ideas I have submitted. In other words, how often I’ve stuck my head up from behind the big, safe wall and said, ‘Hello, this is me! I’m trying to be a writer! Umm, what do you think of this?’ 

During October, into the world I sent:

Three short travel articles, unsolicited

One pitch for another travel article

Two short stories to women’s magazines - result unknown as yet

Five short stories to competitions - one unsuccessful, results of others yet to be announced

That’s eleven. Eleven.

Paltry as this may seem to some of you, this is a huge improvement on September (three submissions in total: one article accepted, one competition not won and one unsuccessful womag submission), which was in itself the first month in my entire life that I’d submitted or pitched more than one idea or story. 

This doesn’t include all the stories that I aimed to finish for competitions but didn’t finish in time; some of these are on my To Be Worked At list because I think they’ve got legs. It doesn’t include my drafts of other travel articles, ready to be worked up if any of my pitches (sent out in the last couple of days) get any bites. It doesn’t include my long-term projects, the novel I’m currently plugging away at daily and the cycling memoir that I work at a couple of days a week. 

Eleven submissions. Eleven. 

It’s been nice and safe behind the wall. If you don’t send work out, no-one can reject it, can they? 

One of my hobbies is hula-hooping. Now, I am not a performer. Being the centre of attention has always been a nightmare for me, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice, and having more than three people look at me at once does horrible things to my knees. However, you can’t practice hooping in the garden (indoor practice has been forbidden since the smashed-lightbulb count hit double figures) without attracting some attention. I’ve become used to people stopping for a stare; I’ve even busked a little, and performed with my fire-hoop at some chilled parties. The performance-fear is still there, jellifying my knees and my digestive tract, but I do it. It’s a simple equation. The sheer loveliness of hooping is now greater than the fear. Just a smidgeon greater, but that’s enough to make it better to perform than to sit down wishing I had the guts to perform. 

At last, I’m getting to a similar place with my writing. Far, far better to keep sticking the head up and sending work out into the world than endlessly working on it in the safety behind the wall. My stomach muscles clench every time I click Send, or when my fingers release the envelope into the postbox, but then it’s done. On to the next piece of writing. 

By the way, if you are curious about hula-hooping, type Safire’s Hoop Manifesto into YouTube. It’s all about persistence and practice - transferable to any art or discipline - and there are some clips of beautiful hooping. Have a look.  

Rambling thoughts on cultural identity. Oh, and Pinterest

National identity is a funny thing. My parents came over here in the sixties and I was born in Birmingham, along with my sister a couple of years later. Like many, my parents went back home a few years later and that's where I grew up until I came over to Wales in 1998. I love living over here and have no intention of going back to live until the onset of my dotage, but I am, most definitely, Irish. A couple of months ago the fact that I was born in Birmingham came up in conversation with friends.
'I never knew that,' said one. 'So you're not actually Irish at all?'
Wrong thing to say.
Short version: 'You're not truly Irish unless you've been an immigrant at least once, and I've been one twice, so FECK OFF.'
Longer version: 'I was born in an Irish community in England, I was hauled back and reared in rural County Cork in the 1980s (the most benighted time and place for formative years, and SO BORING I made up stories using the little black flowerheads of plantain), I spent university summers in London in traditional Irish student fashion, I got married in a church and I emigrated again in traditional fashion. I've got the ancestry, the accent and the Catholic guilt complex; all the hangups and the history except for having been born in the place. I say again: FECK OFF.'
It might be the 'feck off' that clinches it.

Let me recommend a couple of Irish authors. I'm in the middle of Dara O Briain's Tickling The English, an attempt to pin down the English character - if there is such a thing - in his stand-up tour around the country in 2009.  It's great to read someone else observing the English; I find myself nudging my English partner and reading bits to him. I've also resolved to catch Dara next time he's on tour.
I've also just finished Marian Keyes' new novel, The Mystery of Mercy Close. She's done it again, this time dealing with depression. I can't recommend it highly enough. While you're at it, read her last novel This Charming Man (domestic violence and alcoholism). And Rachel's Holiday (drug addiction).

On the Kicking and Screaming front, I recently joined Pinterest. It's easy to join, and then it's simply a case of uploading pictures or of installing the 'Pin It' button into your bookmarks (easy to do) so that you can pin pictures of pages on the web onto your Pinterest page. I rather like it. The major thing to watch out for is copyright; the pinning button (as I understand it) automatically links back to the source page of your pins, but apparently it is possible not to include this, which means of course that the source is not credited. It is easy to be responsible, but presumably not all users are, so on the flipside it makes sense to be sure that you're happy for any personal photos you upload to be repinned all over the place. I've read that the security isn't up to Facebook standards, so it's recommended that you login every few days to make sure your account hasn't been hijacked. That being said, I opened the account and then forgot about it for a couple of weeks, with no dire consequences. I've added the link to my account here.

I'm still delighted with Twitter. I probably check it only three or four times a week, but it's always worth it, just to hear the chatter and chaos, but also to pick up writing news, tips and occasional competitions that I wouldn't have known of otherwise. I'd like to give back a bit more, but I'm still in the shy and retiring phase, just occasionally retweeting interesting stuff.

Finally: I am still blogging! Occasionally late, but it is, at last, becoming something I just do. The world doesn't need another writing blog, but I'm going to stick with this.

Writing what you know and omnipresent choughs

I’ve been sorting through the zillions of unfinished stories in my files, and found half a dozen that I’m going to concentrate on for the next few weeks. They’re ones I feel have legs, stories that I want to communicate. They range from 100 words to 3,000 words but they all have one thing in common: they’re reflecting a facet of myself. Heavily disguised, but I’m in there. That’s okay: ‘writing what you know’ is oft-repeated advice, for excellent reasons. 

However, what if writing what you know intrudes a little too much into the setting and colour of your story? I work in the countryside, in nature conservation. Not all my stories are set in this world, but landscape and wildlife and the outdoor world feature strongly in my writing. If there isn’t a character who’s just been chopping wood, there’ll be someone off to survey a quadrat in a chalk meadow when the Inciting Incident happens. If wellies don’t make an appearance, a landrover will, probably with a terrier in the passenger seat.  And at some stage, someone will observe a pair of choughs. The character might see the pair and remark on it out loud; they might hear their call and search the sky; they might see the birds while sitting alone on a rock mulling over a key plot point. But you can depend on it, there will be choughs. They are in Every Single One of the six stories I picked to work on. 

(Here’s a link to the RSPB’s chough page. Irish and British choughs have lovely blood-red bills to match their legs, but the only royalty-free images I could find were of alpine choughs, whose bills are yellow. I’ve never managed to catch one on camera myself; too busy looking up with a grin and saying ‘Look, choughs!’ to my companion or random strangers.)

I’m not going to write them out of the stories I’m working on. They’re beautiful birds. So are the others that sneak in (if it’s a Scottish story, it’s almost a cert that someone will rhapsodize over black guillemots). But I am taking it as an opportunity to set myself a challenge. As I finish each piece and start working on another, I shall use other experiences from my life for background colour, or draw on the worlds that my friends and family inhabit - the more uncomfortable and distant from my current life, the better. I spent four years in my twenties working in a hospital as an audiologist, in a soundproof room with no windows. Horrid, horrid, horrid. It’s unbelievable to me now, and I shudder to think of it; it was a horrible time. Yet there’s a huge bank of story material there just waiting to be plundered. Likewise my sisters’ experiences: between us we’ve got everything from bending the croissants in a French bakery to working in a sexual health clinic.

There's an enormous number of worlds out there, and that's before going into fantasy or science fiction. It’s time to explore a bit more. 

Good news and good news

I've had a brilliant day. First of all, Himself and I spent the day cycling from our home on Anglesey all the way around Snowdon and home again, a loop of over sixty miles taking in Beddgelert and Llanberis. We're immensely proud of ourselves and have been competing all evening with tales of the mightiness of our quads and how it didn't really take much out of us at all (belied by creaking and wincing getting into and out of the post-ride bath). Here's Bike having a rest halfway up from the Nantgwynant valley bottom.

Second, while we were tucking into Pete's Eats' peerless carrot cake in Llanberis, I picked up an email from Gail at 5minutefiction to say that my flash story Alley Cat had been published on the website today and sending me the Amazon gift certificate of £10 in payment. And third, I got home to find a story I'd submitted to the People's Friend sitting on the mat, rejected. Hang on, I hear you cry. A rejection? I thought this was a good day. Well, it is. That was the first story I have ever submitted to a woman's magazine, ever. It's not the end of the world that it wasn't accepted.  I submit things and get rejected like a proper writer; I've grown up at last.

Right, I'm off to spend that certificate on the new Marian Keyes novel!

Two female authors to try

This week I read two books by entirely different women writers, back to back. If you haven't read either of these authors before, I urge you to try them. These books are great introductions to them.

First, Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl. You probably know that Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, who had published several stand-alone novels before adopting the pseudonym for her very different Shopaholic series of novels. Since I finally read the first novel of that series earlier this year she has become one of my favourite authors. Twenties Girl  is one of her more recent novels, which she chose to write under the pseudonym, presumably because in style it is more similar to the Shopaholic novels. And perhaps also because Sophie Kinsella is such a well-known name now.
Don't be deceived by the lightness of touch of her writing. The novels may be humorous in tone - and they are often very, very funny indeed - but they always turn out to be about something other than what you expect. With her first person viewpoint and present tense narrative, you are inside the heroine's head, slammed up against the present, experiencing it all as it happens. Twenties Girl is a very funny and original ghost story, but it's also about mortality and the alienation and helplessness of old age, with two good-old-fashioned love stories wound through it for good measure.

The second one was Anne Enright's The Gathering. This novel won the Booker Prize in 2007 and I'm embarrassed that it's taken me until now to read any of her novels. I was prompted to by a recent edition of Book Club on Radio 4 when it was the featured book.  The story is tragic, centred on the gathering at home in Dublin of a large, scattered family for the funeral of the narrator's brother, Liam, which provokes her to try to pin down and record long-ago, half-remembered events in her childhood which might have started him on the path to his death. The writing is hard and clear; very very funny at times, shockingly matter-of-fact in others. There's no way I can do justice to the book: just go and pick it up. I'm reading her more recent The Forgotten Waltz now.

By the way, I picked both of these up from my local library. If you don't use yours, please try to do so. We must support our libraries!

Why I'm not bothered about my Oomph

When I started this blog I joined Socialoomph, thinking that it might be useful to me at some point in the future. Having had a look its services and an honest look at my writing life, I don’t think I’ll be using it yet. I registered with the free version; the home page lists the features available for free and those that come with the professional version. The free version features are mainly to do with Twitter.  

As I’m still much more of a listener than a talker on Twitter, I don’t feel any need to use this. As far as I can see, some of the people I follow use this, or a service like it, to schedule their tweets so that they are dripfed to followers. Obviously, this is extremely handy to keep your content moving through the twittersphere, or at least it is if you have plenty of stuff to tweet. I’ve been a bit slow and choosy, so most of those I’m following are interesting to me, but I’ve noticed that some people seem to do not much more than tweet lots and lots of quotes. Quote after quote after quote. Interesting enough, some of them, but a bit irritating if the tweeter’s name isn’t @dailyquotes and it’s not what followers are expecting, particularly if some of the quotes start to recycle after a couple of weeks. I do follow one writing quote person, but that was okay as the clue was in his Twitter name. 

Please, if you’re thinking about joining Twitter, think well in advance about what you want to do there and how much you are going to be tweeting. Actually, no, that would be a bit prescriptive, and it’s not what I did at all. But if you’ve had an account for a while and find yourself wanting to dramatically change the style and frequency of your tweets - especially if you suddenly want to bombard them with quotes - then be clear about it for the sake of your followers. Set up a separate Twitter account. Tweet your followers about it and invite them to follow the new account as well, something clear like ‘For hourly inspirational writing quotes come follow me on @mynamewisdom’. Then your followers won’t be surprised or irritated. 

Socialoomph offers other services in the professional version, clearly useful if you generate lots and lots of content and want to keep your profile high across a variety of social platforms, but it’s not for me at the moment. I did flirt with the notion of creating a bicycle quotes persona on Twitter, but to be honest I’d rather be writing or cycling or walking in the free time I have. 

Incidentally, if you do like bikes and quotes, here’s a couple of sites: http://www.quotegarden.com/bicycling.html and http://www.theargonauts.com/coolquotes.shtml 

And my favourite at the moment, which might apply to writing as well:

‘It never gets easier, you just go faster.’ Greg LeMond

Story success and time to write

First, good news: Gail at www.5minutefiction.co.uk emailed me to say she’ll be publishing a flash fiction piece I submitted! It’ll be on the site in mid-October. I am thrilled! My submission record is shocking - I still get crippling crises of confidence, and I’ve only actually ever finished and submitted five pieces of fiction, so I’m delighted with this. ‘Someone looked at it and didn’t think it was rubbish!’ I keep thinking. Ditto with the story that reached shortlist stage in a recent Writing Magazine competition. These are the things that keep me going.

I’ve been thinking about time to write this week, because I’ve had loads of it. Nothing but time. ‘If I had time I’d…’ How often have you heard that? Or perhaps said it? If you’ve been getting serious about your writing - or anything you love doing and want to better yourself at - you’ll know that you don’t wait for time. You make it.

Of course, sometimes, rarely, the world makes something easy for you. For a week, I’ve had the house to myself. Himself went off on a camping trip in Yorkshire, and for a couple of reasons I didn’t accompany him. One, my wallet’s feeling a bit tender, and two, I’m really really enjoying being at home at the moment. We spent nine weeks cycle-touring in France earlier this year and although it was amazing and wonderful and I’d have been happy to keep going, since we came back I have fallen in love with my home and this beautiful corner of the world all over again. 

Because Himself is also my sole source of employment at the moment, this meant that I didn’t have any work. A whole week at home, alone, on enforced leave! Though I didn’t set any special writing targets for the week, I was curious about how much I’d achieve with other obligations and distractions removed. 

The answer is: nothing extra. Not a bit. No extra wordage, no more than the average number of ideas and scribbling. This sounds pathetic on the face of it, given all that free time. Perhaps I should have set specific targets, but you know what? I don’t care. The great carpet of time in front of me last Monday morning felt daunting rather than liberating. Perhaps this raises questions about my staying power, and about how I’d cope if I one day write myself into being a full-time writer, but I’ll say it again: I don’t care. A week like this won’t come around again for years, if ever, and I’ve had a great time: loads of cycling in wind and sun; walking around the paths on the headland that I’ve neglected of late in favour of the bike; working in the graveyard; even a little gardening; the usual amount of writing; sorting out un-needed stuff for a future car-boot sale; washing every textile in the house; tea with a scone and jam and cream in the old drawing room of our nearby hotel; and reading reading reading. I’ve hardly stopped. Novels and notebooks are all over the bed, not just on my side of it. It’s been just lovely.

I love writing. But I love doing other things too. I’m happy that for a week, I’ve had the chance to enjoy being at home, doing exactly what I want, when and where the fancy takes me.

Plodding on

Some weeks it’s just hard. Balsam-control season has just ended - hurray! - and we’re into the post-breeding season work. Brushcutting and raking off rank vegetation on heathlands is hard but satisfying work. Over the last few years the heather and western gorse have been slowly spreading; it's really satisfying to see the tiny feathery heather plants popping up away from the main patches.

I don’t know if the physical tiredness is to blame, but my imagination has just curled up in dark corner and gone to sleep, presenting a moody posterior to me all week. I’ve plodded on with my wake-up scribblings at breakfast and a couple of leaden paragraphs of stories in the evenings, but it’s been difficult. Nothing flows. Every sentence is earthbound, turgid and lumpen. It’s been the sort of week where I’m terrified I’ll die in the night and my sisters will find this twaddle on my desktop and be mortified on my behalf. I can trust them to do the right thing and burn the lot, but the thought of anyone reading what I’ve written this week makes me prickle with embarrassment. 

There’s an exercise I came across in a creative writing book a few months ago. Take a favourite book, open it at random, and copy out about half a page. That’s it. Pencil, pen or keyboard, it doesn’t matter. The exercise is about the physical effort of writing and the time it takes. 

It's one I’ve come back to a couple of times, because it reminds me, in a visceral way, that every author of every book ever written wrote it by doing just that: sitting down and getting the words on the page. On weeks like this, when I’m staring at what I’ve written and the internal editor is saying ‘That is RUBBISH, who are you trying to kid?’, it really helps to picture the authors of the books on my shelves beavering away in their rooms, at their desks, in libraries, at the corner of the kitchen table or wherever they managed to make time and space for their writing.   

They all wrote their books the same way, the same way I'm writing this post. One word at a time. 

Outside the comfort genre

Last night Himself and I watched a film. At least, he watched it; I left about a third of the way through for the bright lights and comfort of the kitchen downstairs. I've never had much stomach for the supernatural in films; tremulous cellos and slowly moving camera shots are enough for me to reach for a large cushion to hide behind. Last night, after the first distinctly weird death (heard, not watched, from behind the cushion) I'd had enough. In our bright, safe kitchen, I put on an 80s radio station and worried contentedly at plot threads in the thoroughly non-paranormal novel I'm writing, while the tastes, smells and sounds of tea, chocolate and ancient pop grounded me in normality.

But the writer had done his or her job.  This morning, I woke up still disturbed. The film's story had one central question: were two people inhabiting one body? Or was it one charlatan, aided in a complex deception by charlatan doctors?  How would the struggle between good and evil, foreshadowed in that first half-hour, play out in the end? Would the heroine's  loving family members - a daughter, a brother, the father who introduced her to the antagonist - be sacrificed during the struggle? The antagonist's story was by no means clear by the time I left: were the powers he seemed to have under his control? The prickly, aggressive host and the benign young man in the wheelchair he apparently becomes - which one will turn out to be the agent of good, or evil?

Though I couldn't face watching it, and it's not a genre I enjoy, my thoughts about the film were the first thing I scribbled on waking this morning, and I'm still thinking about it. This is my aim, and the aim of every writer: to hook readers and viewers even against their will.

It's a bright Saturday and I've got things to write, stuff to do. But I'm going to watch the end of that story. In daylight, with tea, chocolate and cushions at the ready.

The mobile bedside table

Travel broadens the mind, inspires. New sights, sounds, smells, languages, new and unfamiliar trials and tribulations are all grist to the writer's mill. But what about the practicalities of travelling and writing? And if you're expecting inspiration on tap, does it always work out that way?

This is what my bedside table looks like normally. A collection of the current library books, resident novel and short story collection, Kindle, current novel notebook, general notebook for morning pages and late-night or early morning exercises, and my journal. Actually, there's a bit more on the floor as well.

When I went camping around France on my bike for two months earlier this summer, I had to rationalise. I always keep my travelling journals separate from my bedside journal, so I brought two fat little notebooks, a bit smaller and squarer than A6 (I had to buy a third towards the end), a floppy leather covered A5-ish sized notebook for notes on possible articles, ideas for stories, notes on stern emails I intended to write to the authors of the guidebooks we were using. Of which there were three. Apart from the travel guides we carried guides to wild flowers, birds and butterflies, and our bible to eating on the move, Moveable Feasts. And my Kindle, loaded with fiction and French for Dummies and an assortment of kick-up-the-bum writing exercises from a variety of sources, all pdf'd and ready to use in free moments.

This all added up to nearly two kilos of weight, which I can tell you is significant when you are pedalling up one of those endless gradual slopes that French road engineers are so fond of and the sun is burning down, splitting you into a mind overloaded at the beauty of the scenery and a body that is near-liquid between the heat of the sun and the baking tarmac.

I wouldn't have changed a second of that journey or shortened it by a single day, but it's true that by the time we arrived home I was ready and eager to transfer my journal onto my laptop, follow up some of the ideas I'd had for articles, and - strange to say - start writing fiction again. For not once in the course of nine weeks did I write any fiction at all. Nothing. Not even the shortest of exercises. My journals took all my writing time. The day-to-day routine of moving on almost every day under our own steam - finding campsites, bakeries (pause while my mouth waters), food shops and markets, tourist offices, stuff to see, deciding where to go to the following day, making food and getting enough sleep to do it all again the next day - occupied almost all of our time. Back home typing up my journal, it's funny to see how much of it was scrawled outside shops while Himself purchased the necessaries and I was minding the bikes outside, or when it was his turn to go into the tourist office, or after our picnic lunch by the side of the road, or snatched in the quarter of an hour between my vegetable-chopping duties and the dinner being ready, or in my sleeping bag by the light of my headtorch.

Perhaps the dearth of creative writing was because I wasn't reading much fiction. I'm more inclined to think that it was because I was living utterly in the moment. I had expected that I'd write at least a couple of stories with ideas for loads more while I was on the road, but my attention was wholly in the present. Now that I'm home ideas for stories are flying around in my head, informed and inspired by my experiences whilst away, and what's more, some of them are actually being written! I'm enjoying a particularly creative time and have turned into a total home-body, loving being in my home, at my desk and chasing some of those ideas onto the page, just as much as I enjoyed living under canvas and carrying my worldly goods around on my lovely uncomplaining bike.

The muse doesn't always behave. She went on holiday when I did, and left me alone to come back with journals loaded with experience and memories. Now she's back, sitting knees-crossed on the back of the sofa and smoking an elegant cigarette while I scribble and type and grin. I knew you'd be okay, she says. Just as long as you were writing something.

Notebooks, blogging and Twitter witter

It’s a Saturday morning in the middle of the month and it’s raining here, which means it’s the perfect time to get to grips with my notebook situation. I’m using twelve at the moment. This does not include the others, stuffed with ideas and scraps of my life, or the new, irresistible ones yet to be assigned a purpose. 

1. Oxford A4 office book: mainly for drafting blog post and stories. 
2. Tesco recycled paper A5 notebook: ideas for articles and random thoughts during work lunchtimes in the Landrover
3. Oxford A5 office book: writing exercises, kick-starting inspiration
4. Blue-plastic spiral bound A5 with index cards: the great novel!
5. Pink-plastic spiral bound A5: morning pages, scribbles as I slide out of unconsciousness
6. Fountain A5 cloth-clovered notebook: my bedside journal, with my end of day notes. I love this one, the feel of the cloth, the design of the cover and the watermarked detail of the paper.
7. Slimline journal from the Oxford Botanics, detail inspired by illustrations of flowering plants: this comes with me whenever I have a handbag day, as opposed to my more normal pannier or rucksack day. Anything goes in here: scraps of conversation, shopping lists, to-do lists, journal fragments. 
8. Unlined A6-ish bendy cloth-covered notebook: the last five days of my French tour journal, together with notes on anything France-related recalled since.
9. Two recycled-leather covered chunky little notebooks: covering a month each of my French cycling tour
10. Red Silvine Memo book: this is for writing to-do lists. 
11. Tiny blue RNLI notebook with pencil. This will fit in the pocket of my jeans; if there’s no room for anything else, this will come with me. 

Is this too many? They each have a purpose, but with the exception of the bedside journal, the travel journals and the novel, they can each be used for any purpose. This, really is the purpose of the end of the month tidy: to take pages from one and insert them (with a satisfying snap of elastic) into the correct one. 

Can you really have too many notebooks? How many do you have? Have you got a system? Let me know!

The Kicking and Screaming bit

This increasingly seems to be a misnomer, as I’m loving my paddle in the shallows of connectivity. I am a total Twitter convert. Yesterday I caught Joanne Harris’s storytime, stories she writes on the spot in a series of tweets. I’ve found out the origin of the irritating use of ‘gift’ as a verb and been notified of some competitions I wouldn’t have found out any other way. I’ve said hello to some people and they’ve very nicely said hello back. I’ve started to tweet occasionally. There’s a world out there, and it’s wonderful. By keeping Wednesdays and Sundays phone free - and by dint of the fact that I have to work for a living (Himalayan balsam still) - I’m managing not to become addicted. 

For the moment, this is enough. I’ve taken the huge step (for me) of adding a ‘Follow me on Twitter’ button to this blog. This makes me feel a little naked. Obviously, I want this to be read. I’d like to think that in time, someone will benefit from reading about my tentative online experiences. But I’m wary about shouting about this blog until I have a solid base of articles built up, and proved to the world that I can hang in there for at least a couple of months of regular posting. So the Twitter button winking in the corner there isn’t going to be seen for a while. If you are here, and you do see it, it’s probably because I’ve started to mention my blog on Twitter. Now I’m getting into a slight mental tangle about where I am and where you are in space and time, so I’m going to return to the present, to my desk on the 18^th of August. 

Incidentally, this is not the post I prepared. One of the first things I did when I conceived the notion of this blog was to draft eight weeks’ worth of posts. The other five are still sitting there. Six, in fact, because I looked at what I had drafted for today and decided that I didn't want to write about that topic. But I’m sure that if I hadn’t prepared the posts I’d be staring at a blank screen, and this would never have made it into the world. So if I have a piece of advice for complete beginners, it’s this: don’t, don’t, don’t get carried away by the blurb on your chosen blogger platform, the one that says ‘Set up your account with us and you’ll be blogging in minutes!’ You won’t. Take your time. Draft a solid base of posts, there to be called on when you come to sit down at your alloted blogging time, and used or not as the fancy takes you. They’ll always be in reserve. Keep adding to the reserve. If this blog is still going in three months, you’ll know that it worked for me. 

Getting into Twitter

I’m typing this at seven in the morning on a campsite in Suffolk. I’ve already been for a walk and seen a hare, a shrew and three muntjac deer!  Yesterday we went for a cycle to nearby Southwold on the coast, a beautiful town with a lovely pier and the most unusual arcade I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never been, go to the ‘Under the Pier Show’ at Southwold.

Fail confession time: It might be Saturday morning, but I’m not going to be able to upload this until Tuesday. I had hoped to be uploading this post via my mobile, but that is a little beyond me at the moment. I’ll practise when I’m at home and I have some leisure, not when I’ve run out of time and am up against my self-imposed writing deadline. That’s one of the problems I have with the whole online world in a nutshell: in order to be efficient you have to put in the time, as with any other new skill, and I find nothing more frustrating than putting in time attempting something new and not quite managing it. It feels as if I’ve just dribbled away more precious minutes on the internet, minutes when I could have been writing or feeding the cat or washing-up or something, anything else, and it drives me MAD.

But enough moaning. It’s been a good week. During the half-hour drive into the mountains every day this week (still weeding Himalayan balsam – picture coming soon!) I’ve been listening on Twitter. And I’ve become far more relaxed about it. It seems to me like a vast room full of people talking, calling across each other to throw a comment into a conversation heard at the next table, a few tables away, or on the other side of the room. Some Twitter users, or Tweeps (get me!) are also putting up noticeboards while they converse, like the ‘read all about it’ boards outside newsagents. Some do nothing else; their feeds are like great scrolling billboards around the walls of the room, on the supporting pillars, across the great arch of the ceiling. It’s a place where someone like me can wander, virtual mug of tea in hand, reading the scrolling news and the endless quotes, eavesdropping on the ordinary conversations, stopping to listen to the more local news and to read the littler noticeboards. I’m getting the hand of how hashtags work. (Muntjac brings up three random entries.)

I’ve tweeted a couple of times, just ‘Hello! I’m here!’ and that sort of thing. It does feel a bit odd, throwing utterances out into the world with no expectation of their being noticed as yet, let a lone getting a response. But is that so very different from how we all start off as writers anyway, casting our thoughts, the products of our imagination, onto the page, with the hope of them being noticed a secondary and more distant goal?

I haven’t said hello to anyone yet – that’s for next week. But already the Twittersphere is beguiling me, and seems a far friendlier place than I had imagined. My statement in the About This Blog page, where I said I didn’t particularly want to be best friends with every reader of my books, now looks like old-fashioned  humbug. I do want to be friends with them all! I can see how time could dribble away there, but so far restricting myself to Twitter in the car has worked.

On the writing side I've been enjoying Notecard Plotting this week, an exercise in Holly Lisle’s Mugging the Muse. Plot is something I struggle with: the two novels I’ve started have foundered because of characters wandering around not really getting anywhere. This exercise has thrown up some themes that were lurking at the bottom of my mind and has been a real help with maintaining my interest and momentum. You can read more about Holly Lisle’s books here.

I’m off to the Gig In The Park in Halesworth now. The big draw today is the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, but there are loads of local musicians playing as well. And the sun is shining AGAIN! In August! Who’d have guessed it?

The new beginning

It's five days since I had this notion of experimenting in some kind of organised fashion with Facebook, Twitter and the like. I had a brief tussle with myself before sitting down to write this post - it's sunny outside, I haven't done any 'real' writing yet today, all the usual reasons that my inner voice comes up with when I need to write a blog post - but I've got my fingers in my ears and I'm singing.  I've promised myself fifteen minutes of purple, cliché-laden, adverbial scribbling once I press the publish button, and no pudding if I don't!

I've been working with Himself pulling Himalayan balsam this week, where it's been going rampant in spots along rivers in Snowdonia and Anglesey. It's rather monotonous, but very satisfying, and it allows the mind free to mull over story ideas and plan the Kicking And Screaming experiment.

The first active steps I took were getting this domain name, a fresh Twitter account and a Google+. I'm leaving the Google+ to stew for a bit and concentrating on this blog and Twitter. Why did I choose Blogger? Mainly upon some advice in Rebecca Woodhead's column in September's Writing Magazine. Apparently it looks much better than Wordpress on mobile devices, which is as good a reason as any.

With Twitter, I set up the account, went through a list of the blogs I follow or check up on regularly, found which ones tweeted and followed them. I had a total panic when the first one I followed came back and followed me. Eeek! Even though I know (now) it was cleverly automated, suddenly there was Pressure! I was interested when she sent me a Direct Message; I'd had no idea such things were possible on Twitter (what sort of dinosaur does that make me sound like?). I also got followed by someone utterly random, who seems to have disappeared now - possibly he thought I was someone else?

On Thursday, still pulling balsam, I got myself into a mental state about what to tweet about. My tiny voice, out there in the Twittersphere? PANIC! I know, I know, idiotic! As well as the firm talking-to, I gave myself a treat - a late night sessions scouring Amazon for as many books as possible for less than £6 in total. I found Nicola Morgan's Tweet Right: the Sensible Person's Guide to Twitter and fell asleep reading it. Yesterday, I went to my new Twitter account and made a bunch of changes. I really recommend the book: her writing style is lovely, very clear and practical, and the book is exactly what it says on the tin. I haven't tweeted yet: I'm about to read about how to get started now.

So, what about my other Twitter accounts? I've deleted one, which was to do with an old job. The other is still there. I didn't tweet there, not once, but used it more as an information-gathering tool, following things like Radio4 and Radcliffe & Maconi's twitterstream. I say following; as I managed to remove the icon from the homescreen of my Blackberry I rarely followed anything. I can't see myself devoting time to two accounts, even if one is just reading rather than interacting, so I'll probably close the first account soon.

And real writing? Actually, it was quite a good week! Spotting that I'd been shortlisted in the Writing Magazine competition gave me a real boost.

I've got to go now: Himself has been cooking and pizza is nearly ready - totally home-made from the dough upwards. He does this every Saturday.

Plan for the next week: get tweeting and add a link to my Twitter self on this blog.

Has anyone else had TwitterFear? I'd love to know!