Horrible day (warning - whinge)

I think the fact that the day started at 3am is partly to blame. I couldn't get to sleep until about 1am, then woke up two hours later completely miserable - and wide awake. I did manage to finish Liz Fenwick's The Cornish House, which was lovely and did cheer me up. It's a debut novel, a romance, with a bit of mystery about the two leads' parents. Lovely, well written, fun. And it did drive away the blues. I'm a huge fan of her blog, too. 

Then I took the kids out to the garden to show them how to feed and care for our new chickens, Charley, Maisie, Florence and Charlotte. Maisie had prolapsed all her egg making equipment with her first egg, not something the vet could fix, so she went on a one way trip to the vet. Where she behaved impeccably, letting them stroke her and fuss her while they slipped the needle in. Even the vet cried, that was one tame chicken.

Maisie is on the left, next to Florence, the white one. 

So, of to a very sad start, especially as Maisie was the chicken that would sit on my lap, make absurd leaps at raspberries, just tame as anything. 

Anyway, then the joy that is mammography. They have a mobile X-ray unit at Tesco's car park in Ilfracombe, and apart from the inevitable embarrassment of being half naked, and the incredible 'discomfort' of having your boobs pressed between two plates until they are about 3mm thick, then you have to hang about for a letter with the results. 

I also hate packing. Hate it. When Leonie was little, we were in and out of hospital, sometimes with a toddler and a newborn, often at very short notice, like after a hospital appointment or in the middle of the night. So I packed all the time. Empty my 'ready' bag, pack a new one, as soon as we got home. We had to go back within the same day, several times, often blue-lighted in by ambulance. So packing is a dismal task and I always forget something. Being sleep deprived doesn't help. Being on tablets which are stated to have a high risk of depression as a side effect just makes it worse. I am not a happy camper. Spare a kind thought for the poor bugger who has to drive me for eight hours tomorrow.  

Well overdue for a holiday

I don't know whether to be uplifted or depressed by Rosie Garland's amazing success, generously shared on the Mslexia blog. Here am I, same competition (but not the winner, of course) and same situation. The book is out to editors, which is great. But I haven't heard one word. It's early days, maybe. Perhaps they all have loads to do before they take their summer break (I've heard this a few times). It is possible the book just isn't commercial enough. I am uplifted, to be honest, that it can happen to someone  who works at their craft, develops it and certainly has paid her dues in the publishing world. There's hope for me yet, then. But there's an element of preparing for disappointment in the waiting. I'm grateful for the opportunity, I really am, I know what a great position I am in just to have an agent. But not all agented work is published. 


Worse, I really want to get on with the sequel, but that doesn't seem like a good idea if I can't sell book 1. I have treated myself to a few research books, but only the ones that are really cheap second hand. The story is telling itself every time I close my eyes at night, causing a number of late night note taking sessions which are difficult to decipher in the morning. I have even found a delicious narrator, the under-valued Elizabeth Jane Weston, the Elizabethan poet who grew up in Europe following her step-father, Edward Kelley, and made a life for herself in Prague. 

Elizabeth Jane Weston

We think of people in the past as hardly going outside their village but so many of them travelled. She travelled a lot more than I have, and she was little more than half my age (and the mother of seven children) when she died. Not to mention having written a best selling volume of poetry. What on earth have I been doing with my life?


So I am uplifted by Rosie's story, but a little sorry for myself, in a pathetic, self-indulgent way. I'm off on holiday, nine days of just husband, no kids, no whiny cats, no household chores and appointments or shopping, and I'm going to try and put the whole thing out of my mind. I shall get some perspective. For goodness sake, Ms Garland had cancer to beat, as well. I shall rise above the whole thing, and get on with what I really get out of writing - crafting my new story. I'm now at 40k with A Baby's Bones, draft 2, and loving doing it. That's the heart of it, not publication. Somehow in the glamour and wonder of hearing about Rosie's success, I lost sight of that.

Cyberfriends and beta readers

It's my turn to be a beta reader, and I'm enjoying the next draft of a book I've seen develop since its early incarnations on the MA. Being able to hand my book over to readers who are able to stand back and take a critical view - and are confident enough to be honest - was a real gift. I hope I can be helpful, too.


If there's one thing blogging has done for me that I didn't expect, it's to connect with so many people trying to achieve the same goal. Fellow writers, all scrambling for the same limited resource, a publishers' attention and a contract. Yet the spirit of support and co-operation is astonishing. Writers dig into their imaginations, into their very selves, and they connect on a deep level. I will probably meet very few of the people I meet online, yet they have been instrumental in my development as a writer. I started my blog thinking it would just be me, and it would be a record of my growth as a writer (partly to draw on for those pesky rationales and essays). It has become so much more. It's partly therapy, as a whinge (sorry) about dead ends, lack of motivation, lack of confidence. It's partly celebration as I master new skills, travel outside my comfort zone, and have little successes along the way. But mostly, it's to connect with other writers. I can't imagine not blogging, and hope some day I can use the blog to publicise an actual novel.


Meanwhile, reading other people's work gives me the inspiration to keep going, keep trying to get better. It's a journey, and reading is a guide along the way. I think you often pick up things other people do, that you should watch out for in your own work. Back to work. I'm at 17k with the contemporary strand, which is very satisfying.

Draft 2

Having spent time plotting and rearranging I am ready to write draft 2, the first whole draft of the book. I have eleven new scenes to write, then adapt previous scenes, and one of the main characters needs rewriting but I find the actual writing easier than the planning! It's all better than just wailing at the phone 'Ring, damn you' and dissolving into chocolate cravings. No news from the editors or the agent. If I twiddle my thumbs much more they will come off. So, write.


Meanwhile, the sequel to Secrets (still called BT2) is starting to gel. Edward Kelley is such a shady character (we don't even know his actual name, he also went by Talbot) I can sort of make up bits of his journey. That will enable me to finish the Dee strand I started in Secrets. I seem to sort it out in conversation in the car. Since it will take eight hours to drive to the Lake District, I should get the rest planned out before I get back!


My crazy daughter is home, having taken a few days from her hectic life in Plymouth, and I'm so enjoying her company. She's new to all these discussions, and full of questions and ideas. I'm looking forward to no. 1 son-and-editor coming home next week. It's been a collaboration, the kids, the agent, tutors, friends, and they all seem to have an interest in what happens next in 'their' story. I just hope I can give them some good publication-type news at some point. 

The motivation for Bones: the well. I pinched it off a house moving website!

The Planning process - not!

Having got to 40k words with Baby's Bones, I printed it all off, scene by scene, single spaced to save paper, and had a really good look at what I actually have.


On the plus side, good mystery, enjoyable historical strand, archaeology. On the minus side...where do I start? Dull main character, inane second character, cliché, cliché...So I arranged the scenes in some sort of order and have gone through with a  pen. Changing scenes, adding scenes, cutting great chunks. I'm always reluctant to cut scenes which is daft, they take relatively little time to replace and if they are not working, they are just so much compost anyway.


So, the secondary character has a back story, is less loveable and much more interesting, and my main character is more accessible. In my distant past, I found myself in a relationship with a 'separated' man. I'm drawing on that slow and horrible disappointment as I (and Sage), realised that just because something is said apparently sincerely, doesn't mean it's real. It's what, at the moment, he wants to be real. I'd like to be grown up and mature about it, but I hope he has warts and his wife has chucked him out. Sage's ex-lover may get his comeuppance, too. 


So the dining room table is covered with scenes, the living room with discarded notes and scribbled time-lines and the worst is nearly over. Tomorrow I hope to sit down and really write draft 2. 

Gruesome subjects

I'm having a lot of satisfaction writing about - well, a really horrible, can't-stop-reading about-it subject. Foetal abduction. This horribly real crime is on the increase worldwide (but thankfully, extremely rare). I first read about a small village in Italy that had two over a period of a decade, I think between the wars, and the facts stuck with me. Women will pretend to be pregnant then befriend or abduct a pregnant woman to attack her and steal the baby. Very few mothers survive, several babies have died. Worse, there are a small number of cases when the abductor has also killed the woman's other children.


Writing about such a painful, horrible crime allows me, as a writer, to dig deep into the psyche: my own experiences of being pregnant, even the painful years when I couldn't get pregnant. How someone goes from longing for a baby to needing one, obviously, is beyond me. Most abductors have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. But the more common crime of abducting babies from prams or hospitals is from the same psychopathology. Women either seek to attach a partner by claiming they are carrying his child, or they are obsessed with having a child and want to experience a parody of birth. They just turn up with a newborn, announcing the birth to have taken them by surprise. 


Anyway, I wondered how other people write the tough stuff, especially people who write about emotional anguish or crime. I can't say I feel upset exactly, but I do prefer to write undisturbed, because it takes longer to get deep, deep into the painful stuff.  

Anticipation

When I was in my twenties, writing a book/short stories/poems/articles was a process of anticipation, followed by despair (no-one ever answered in less than several months) followed by rejection. Or acceptance but with a load of qualifying conditions like 'could you make it shorter/better or longer/lighter and could the heroine be blond and more bubbly?' When my daughter was born I had had some success but the weight of crushing rejections was heartbreaking. I stopped writing because my daughter was disabled, and I did intend to get back to it, BUT I was glad to give up all the rejections. I was successful as a parent, I was largely unsuccessful as a writer. My acceptance rate for creative work was about 10%. I did get a lot of articles published, but they didn't count to me, they didn't seem important (except that they usually came with a useful cheque). Now, I've stepped on that merry-go-round again, with a load of people reading (and probably mostly rejecting) the book. Kind fellow bloggers have warned me: rejections come first, and fast. Deals are often preceded by questions and criticism. One was asked to change her book from a multiple third to a single first person POV (which means the character has to be at all the action, or told about it, to maintain the story). If I do get a deal, it will all happen fast, and can't be predicted.


So I'm sat here, concentrating on the next book, which isn't tainted by all this possible rejection. It's all mine. I've read it over the weekend and a sharper, darker second draft with a stronger story is forming in my head. My children's book is growing fast, and for fun, and a holiday is two weeks away.


Thank you to all the kind and knowledgeable people that have been supporting me.     The blogging community of writers is a generous and creative one. I'll let you know what happens.