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!