The Last. For Now.

Well, after managing to keep to four posts a month, in December I had a spectacular fail! In my defence I was extremely busy.  First my sisters and I went to London to meet our closest cousin Catherine  (our mothers are identical twins) for her birthday, and had a brilliant time at the tribute-show-musical Let It Be. 

Then my partner had an operation on his knee, which meant a few weeks of crutches and limited movement for him, which in turn meant a lot more movement for me! Then there was the brief social whirl (well, two nights out in one week) in the last week before Christmas before my entire family went to my parents on the west coast of County Clare for Christmas week. Back home, we had a day’s breathing space before my partner’s side of the family arrived for the New Year, along with a dodgy cold-and-wobbles virus that’s only just left us.

This is the first day of real life, so I’m having a look back over the last few months. I’m pleased that I managed to post almost every week without running away screaming but it was still a struggle. So what about the main purpose of this blog? What have I learnt about social networks, blogs and online personas? 

Facebook: I can’t really say because I’m dormant there now. Only when I have a book to promote will I consider using it. Emphasis on ‘consider’.

Pheed: as far as I can make out, this is for the committed online marketer, not for the aspiring writer who needs to get on with the writing.

Goodreads: I love it! Tremendous fun, but like all these, a potential time-waster. Make sure you’ve earned the time you spend on it.

Twitter: I’m really delighted by Twitter. I was surprised how much I missed it in December. My list of tweets is tiny, but I plan to remedy that. I’ve benefitted a lot from others sharing; time to give a little back.

Blogs generally: along with Twitter, other blogs are my favourite way of passing online time. I follow a few, but have many more bookmarked on my browser instead, preferring to drop in rather than have my inbox clogged with notifications. I've resolved to be a bit more active in commenting on those I enjoy, and acknowledge how much I’ve benefitted from them and give a little feedback. Like Twitter, it's been a bit one way so far. 

Blogger: I’m going to revert to my old Wordpress blog; I just prefer the way it works and the way it looks. I’ll keep this blog visible, and any posts on future forays into the world of social networks - for example Google+, which I didn't get around to exploring - will appear here.

So that's it! I'll be back from time to time, with a bit less of the kicking and screaming.

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.