Twenty thousand, five hundred words and counting

The book is flowing well and the odd character of Emma is being stretched like an elastic band. I have to go back and read chapters one and two, because Lily and Emma have developed and I need to make sure they are still consistent. But this is only first draft so it's still all about the pacing and the story.

I can't draft something from a plan, the characters kind of write the story and then I loop back to the beginning and rewrite from the end, as if I were looking back, to make sure I set up the later chapters with the right foundations. Poetry wise, I have started looking at a series of autobiographical poems about the impact of losing a child for TMA 04. Hopefully the feedback from TMA03 will help, but I'm not expecting high marks. Just thinking about Leonie is hard, it's easier to write poetry about her than prose. She died so long ago, but it stays with you, like a scar. It's that scar I want to write about, how your life grows around this grief until you make it into something else. The novel is about losing a child, too, and about coming back from that long winter, and I think that's probably therapeutic anyway. It's sparking ideas for the life writing, anyway.

Leonie and poetry

It's that time again, the leaves are turning and the 23rd of October is creeping up on me. My daughter Leonie died eighteen years ago - in August - but I grieve for her on the 23rd of October because her father died a year before, on that date. So I lost the two of them ten months apart, leaving me, Scary Spaniel and Smudge to somehow carve out a new, and completely different life for each other. So, every October I dream about her, get miserable and don't talk about it. This time, I'm going to write about her, talk about her, get it out there. Leonie was born in 1984 when I was in my early twenties, just a kid really, though I thought otherwise at the time. My first baby had been stillborn and I had been seriously ill, so ill that I was told I would never be able to have a child. Steve and I were very very young and optimistic, so we went again anyway, and Leonie was on her way. This time I got past the point where Robin had died, only to find the baby had spina bifida. We were told she would probably be stillborn, would have an enormous head and would die soon after birth if she was alive. Anyway, three hours after I was induced a month early, Leonie was born, alert and well, with a big bump on her back.

Steve and I decided to give her the best possible chance (though against medical advice - in fact, if another surgeon hadn't told our consultant that Leonie couldn't be saved, he wouldn't have tried). Anyway, she did very well for 3 years, paraplegic but unstoppable, bright as a button and dangerously extrovert. Then she started to get ill, and a benign tumour was eventually found over her brainstem. They tried to operate when she was four, but left her comatose for months and brain damaged for life. As the pressure grew in her head life became difficult, and she could no longer understand what was going on. Until she got to 8, and her father died suddenly, when she decided it was time to let go, and with great dignity and love, she kissed us all, told us all she loved us, and slowly died.

And my whole life has changed. But few people in my life remember her, or Steve for that matter. So now I wonder whether to take a little of my own medicine and use narrative therapy to find those memories and work on the feelings and maybe grieve better. They say you never get over losing a chid, you just grow around it. But it leaves a scar, and sometimes when you try and do somthing, the scar gets in the way. So, I'm going to have a go at writing some poems about her, even if they are so self indulgent and sentimental I keep them very private.

But if you're out there, little lion, and reading blogs, I still love you and miss you.