On a completely personal note

Today is the anniversary that we don't talk about publicly. Eight years ago a decent and loving man, who had very recently lost his wife in a horrific accident, took a huge leap of faith and started a relationship with me. To the almost universal censure of the community (there were some notable exceptions), we broke an unspoken rule about how long you have to grieve. Well, every December he grieves for Maya, just as I remember Steve in the summer. So today is my day for feeling grateful. He has become my best friend, the love of my life, and a great Dad to my children. I really don't do the mushy stuff (he does) and I rarely say it out loud. But eight years ago was one of those magical days...well, nights...when the prince finally turned up and it turned into a happy ever after. So, thank you, Bear. Happy Anniversary even if we are 166 miles apart.   

Chapter 7 and the invisible reader

It's been a productive day, though I was distracted when I ran out of teabags. I managed to knit chapters five and six onto the earlier bits and now have started chapter 7. I feel the need for less sitting around drinking tea and chatting and more action, so I might scrap today's words and rewrite as something bigger. The bad character is closing in, but I want to work on it. I wish I could just plan!

Thanks to recommendations I received from another blogger I picked up a copy of Between the Lines by Jessica Page Morrell, and the first thing I noticed is that it's a book that speaks to the female fiction writer, which really suits me. A lot of the time, books brimming with ideas are actually aimed at producing a male style of fiction that I neither write nor, very often read. So I recommend it if you are trying to write subtle, rich prose rather than a bodice ripper or a crime thriller. She also recommends Brian Kitely, and I look forward to exploring his writing exercises after my assignment bottleneck has passed.

One things I'm benefiting from at the moment is the input of fellow students who are willing to exchange work for editing/critiquing. I'm finding this incredibly helpful, and even if I (and they) don't agree with every suggestion (which is all they are) we are getting rare insights into how the reader receives the work. It's no good me thinking I'm come up with something really clever if the reader doesn't get it! I've always though that art, any art, is empty without the viewer. A picture on a wall is nothing, but when someone looks at it, it becomes something to that viewer. I think writing is like that, my ideas, my story acting itself out in my head, gets approximately and thinly translated into black and white marks on the screen or page, then someone else with a rich and varied imagination uses those words as a starting point to create their own story. If their story relates to mine, great. More importantly, does their story progress, is it satisfying for them? Ultimately, I write stories because I want to know what happens to the characters. Editing and rewriting gives me a chance to share that story with someone else, bringing it to life as a piece of fiction rather than an elaborate daydream. So, thank you ladies, I appreciate your help enormously.

Six chapters done!

Having put chapters together for my fiction class, and reviewed and rewritten them, I feel confident that the first six chapters are in a good second draft state and I'm back on course. So have updated my wordmeter to 16k. Chapter six still needs a bit of tying in but otherwise it flows, which was the problem before, when each seemed like a rather naff short story. So lots of progress made today and I can wander into town for lunch!

Having fun with front sheets

I have two assignments to do which have the simplest of briefs: hand in 4000 pieces of work inspired by the modules. I've decided that this gives me latitude to play with the front sheet a bit, instead of being strictly factual and sensible, I'm doing a graphic for each. One is the raven poem (see December 27 2010) and the other is a poem made up from the history of all the fabrics in a patchwork quilt and how a family's quilt might hold a lot of stories. I wrote it in little blocks and offset them so some are at right angles so they look like a quilt. I'm baffled as to how I can put that up here so it's legible, but I'm really pleased with how it looks!

And if you click on it, you can (sort of) read it. Our tutor also wants a bibliography and some sample drafts - which is a creative project in itself really. I'm enjoying playing with words again and more plot is downloading into my brain (mostly when I want to go to sleep, admittedly) so today, I'm working on the novel to the sound of the tumble drier. The boys are on 'outdoors courses' which means they have far more laundry than any normal human being! And for light relief, I can edit the poem, which is full of odd words and repetitions, I just wanted to get the word length right to start with.

Back to work.

After a really lovely solstice/Christmas/New year celebration I am finally installed, ahead of time, in Winchester. It's been a terrible wrench leaving home and I found myself wandering around, the day I packed, touching things I think of as completely home - the blue and white china I started collecting two decades ago, much of which is from charity shops, the bookshelves my husband built, the wooden box I bought when I moved to the Island in 1994. I have deliberately not brought favourite things from home, because home is Devon. This is my work place, so I'm supposed to be working. My commitment is to write 1000 words a day, because that's when I feel best about my writing, even if I'm also writing something else like an assignment. This counts, and so does my diary. So I very quickly rack up words anyway. With 4,000 words ready to go off for my fiction assignment (thanks to the very welcome help of a fellow student!) I am ready to start seriously editing the next thing, a collection of poems. The problem is, they all sound a bit similar in style, because I've been reading a lot of Erica Jong and Sharon Olds. I also want to write a sestina, but I've never tried. They seem so contrived when you look at them on the paper yet they sound so gorgeous. Since we're doing sestinas, villanelles and sonnets in A363 shortly, I thought I would work my way through that chapter and see if one of my long poems (which needs serious cutting) will work in a new format.

Otherwise, I'm quietly looking at the novel, not setting myself a huge workload, but pottering with new scenes rather than whole chapters. I need a new way of novelling, just taking a run up at it means the beginnings are full of ideas but I'm running out by the end. So my novels accelerate at the end and fall off into anticlimax. Although I had no fun at all writing the radio play for A363, I have found some of the screenplay writing stuff useful for writing cinematically, like a film. So I'm playing with that.

The assignment I have been most confident of, partly because I've got my head in the sand about it, is the 'creative toolkit' one. For this, I've put together a sequence of poems and a short story, but I've left these until last to work on. I'm going to print them off and stick them on the shelves so I can see them when I'm slacking relaxing after a hard days work. Meanwhile I'm putting a photo up of the silliest cat ever. She was sitting on the desk looking out at the birds and obviously got tired - and curled up like a snail.  Silly Saffy. Or as she is known in the family - (big breath) Teeny Tanley Fat Fluffly Saffy Doolins Bave. And when middle daughter was working at the vet's, she did try and get all that on the computer...I shall miss the cats too.

Referencing

Well, this is a blast from the past. Eldest child is working through her psychology essay's references, which I know how to do. I, on the other hand, have written a sequence of poems and prose about Greenham Common and have no idea whatsoever what to include or leave out of a bibliography. I've never even written a bibliography. So I'm trying to reference songs, newspaper archives, youtube, articles, books, poems, poets... I'm at a loss. Somehow I have to relate the work back to the theory it was sparked off by, a reading we were given about Helene Cixous, but we're not writing a commentary or rationale so how do we demonstrate the inky footprints back to the original theory? Worse, I've never written a prose-and-poem sequence of life writing before and I've got the Kafka piece to do as well. Lament over.


I'm about to head back to Winchester to start new modules on the MA. I have to fit in a critique of another student's writing in A363 which I have decided to do with my eyes shut, since it's 10% of the marks and my last assignment didn't score highly. I think my big end-of-module assignment will do well, and I have a short story to write for TMA05 so will enjoy getting on with that while I wait for university to start up again. I have also signed up for a poetry class, and that will be for fun, I can do all the reading and exercises (if I want) but can skip them if I'm busy which will leave me more time for the other stuff. I've also got all the children's books ready for Fantastic Fiction and am reading through bits of them, in preparation. I want to keep up with work so I can keep the assignment momentum up.

Reading through my psychology books, I have an interesting case study by 'The Troops of Truddi Chase', a strange phenomenon of a woman who dissociated into different persoanlities that excluded the original Truddi. While I'm not going to get into a debate about MPD (Multiple Personality disorder ICD10)  or DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder DSM-IV) I have long been fascinated by When Rabbit Howls, a rare book where the patient gets to explain their own experience. I would love to write a MPD character for a short story. She wrote very movingly about the agony of rediscovering the abuse that led to her dissociation (or delusion if you're sceptical) but either way, this was a disturbed and hurt character who found a way through trauma. So I'm taking it back to University for a bit of light reading when all the children's books get too spooky. I've just read Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan, which frankly, is a horror story. Written by Shan as if he were a child it follows the story of Darren Shan (confusing I know, try to keep up) as he is transformed into a vampire and has to leave his family to travel with a band of monsters. It's creepy and disturbing and one of my sons loved it, collected all 12 books. It's an astonishing work, and shows how diverse and creative children's writing has become. The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks) seems more likable and comfortable now. Varjak Paw (S. F. Said) was the same, gorgeous story but with a hard edge, not easy to make it realistic or believable when the narrator is a cat. Back to referencing... 

Assignments and publishing

Well, I'm pleased to say two of my assignments are sorted and the big ones are still not (why didn't I just write two short stories and be done with it! Some more sensible students ran them through the fiction workshop radar and can just tidy them up and hand them in. Meanwhile, I get bitten by the poetry bug...). Kafka's weird world view is becoming more clear to me and I feel I can do something on him now. I can't imagine doing an essay on any of the theory stuff, though. I do have another idea for a Freudian piece, stealing the therapy idea and taking it further as two poems.

Meanwhile, I've been through chapters one and two of 'Borrowed Time', my supernatural thriller, and am ready to reinvent chapters 3 and 4, which I edited a bit quickly for my fiction workshop and actually need to extend to make sense of subsequent chapters. I'm reading Kelley Armstrong again, which is helpful, as it has a supernatural world which is approached differently from each character's POV. I love 'Haunted', a book about a character who was a selfish, fairly ruthless and amoral person and has been dead three years. The story starts there, as her 'evil' qualities give her the edge in dealing with a supernatural baddie who even the angels haven't been able to rein in. She's bad, but likeable, and the dilemma is she may be able to protect her daughter but will have to give up her lover to do it. I've sketched out books 2 and 3 in the Borrowed Time series, I'll have time to get on with them after the MA. Apparently, publishers like to see authors working on more books, on the off chance their first book is moderately successful they will have a saleable product.

One thing I've found dispiriting about some of the other students on the MA, is that they aren't interested (so far) in the relationship between publishing and writing, as if their work will magically be discovered and be published. Writing for publication is all about producing a product and matching it to the people who want to sell it. Writing for oneself isn't so much of a problem. John Gardner said, write everything as if it is going to be published. Some are so perfectionist they can't let go of anything, it's never finished. Two students stand out though, they are already writing for the commercial market and they are both already publishing, one in a blog and one in short story websites. I'm looking forward to the publishing project module, hopefully this will awaken a few more students to the publishing world. Meanwhile, I have a few pieces to go off...and a few poems to try out.