Mrr-OWWW!

Recently, I haven't had time to keep this blog updated. This is probably going to carry on being true for the next few months. I am a very busy lady, more often by accident than by design as I am the sort of person who can't stop herself getting involved in things. At the moment I have very little free time, and what free time I do have needs to go on writing, rather than blogulating. I'm sure the writers among you will empathise.

In between now and the next time, please feel free to enjoy this picture of a nice cat.

What does it take to be a writer's other half?

Most of the column inches in this blog are taken up with me complaining about being a writer. The hours suck, it's poorly paid, and nobody ever says "well done". In fact, they are much more likely to say, "Would you please stop filling the house with scraps of paper, and get that bloody laptop off the kitchen table?"

It occurred to me lately that few of us would ever get anything done were it not for the support of our other halves. People of a creative mindset are wont to be flighty and inconsistent. Anything and everything interests us, and we can almost forget that the world is turning when we're absorbed in the act of creation. In my rush to get back to the writing desk, I'll often leave pans dirty and crumb-covered plates all over the worktop. Later on I'll come back downstairs and shout "WHO ON EARTH MADE ALL THIS DISGUSTING MESS", forgetting that in fact it is I who has the softest of hands from never bloody washing up.

Stability, that's important to us. The working life of any writer is filled end to end with discouragement. There is no steady ground beneath our feet. Every writer has her black periods. Quite apart from constantly doubting whether our work is really any good, we face discouragement from lots of other angles. A constantly growing pile of rejection letters or resounding silences, or sniping reviews can reinforce our belief that we're really not all that good at what we do. If we didn't have our other halves to support us when we're moping, or to remind us that we have to re-tax the car or break off to eat every now and again, we would probably be a bit depressed, as well as somewhat unproductive.

And the job of being a writer's other half is far from a rewarding one. You're attached to somebody who spends most of their free time staring moodily into a computer screen; and when they're not doing that, their thought processes are mainly taken up with the process of deciding What Happens Next. Your spouse's head is continually in an imaginary place - an imaginary place completely inaccessible to you until its creator has spent months of her life writing, rewriting, and editing it. On top of all that, what your scribbling beloved requires from you most of all is that you never, ever interrupt her while she is working.

So let's all give 'props' to our other halves - for putting up with our inconsistencies, for doing more than their share around the house, and for placing cups of tea unobtrusively just within reach of our hands when we are deep in the quagmire of a third or fourth edit. We would be nothing without them.

Currently reading

The Outsider Albert Camus
The Cossacks Leo Tolstoy

Being a writer sucks!

Whether you're an impoverished student driven by art and creativity, or a bestselling writer with a series of successful film adaptations living in a mansion in California, writing sucks. It sucks in a myriad of ways that never go away, regardless of how successful you are, or how many times you've been on the Richard & Judy book club. The hours are long, the pay and conditions are terrible, and your boss keeps muttering words of discouragement to you under his or her breath. If there were a union, we'd all be on the phone to it right now.

Last winter, I was complaining about the need to wear fingerless gloves to work. People who do normal jobs (hello Librarians, hello office workers) get to work in lovely warm offices. The heating is always on; not for them the indignity of working in a room where ice drips from the ceiling, nor the need to drink endless cups of tea to keep hands and fingers warm enough to stay mobile. Only the writer, working as romantic tradition has decreed she must, works in an upstairs garrett room with icicles forming on the end of her nose, and the wind whistling through her hair. Readers, for the writer, a harsh winter can be hell.

But I've discovered something worse than writing in winter, and do you know what it is? Yes, that's right: writing in summer.

Writing in summer is the grown-up equivalent of taking a GCSE on a balmy summer's day. As you sit at your desk, worry crowding your head and your pens lined up neatly on the wood before you, you gaze longingly out of the sports' hall window at the golden fields of wheat bending in the breeze, reflecting hot yellow in the sunlight. Children, playing joyously with hula hoops and paddling pools, taunt you with their carefree enjoyment of the beautiful day. And where are you? Indoors, trying to write a bloody novel.

Only a lunatic would attempt writing outdoors. There are wasps out there. And you can't see, anyway; no matter where you sit, the sun is going to bounce off your laptop screen and BLIND YOU. And in any case, most writers, unfortunate owners of that occupational writing hazard the bad back, can't write without a desk. All those hours hunched over scribbling in notebooks or on napkins balanced on their knees have done for their back and shoulders. You cannot take your desk outside. It makes you look mad.

And yet we still all do it, and why? When we have a sneaking suspicion that nobody will ever love us, and when we worry that our books will end up crowding out the shelves of the local charity shops like so much Da Vinci Code? We do it because even though being a writer sucks and YOU, yes YOU will never be as rich or as successful as Dan Brown or Doris Lessing or even Julie Otsuka, we're compelled. We love it and we're driven and we can't stop ourselves.

Now stop looking longingly out of that window and get on with it.

This week, I have:

Finished planning for FICTIONS OF EVERY KIND: CUTS
Begun my first rewrites of a new draft
Worked on preparing a first chapter for a first chapter competition
Knitted a bit of a cardigan.

Hell is other people's music choices...

Lately, mainly because it is colder inside my house than it is outdoors (how can this be?), I've been doing a lot of writing in the local coffee shops. There are many advantages to working in a coffee shop, chief amongst which is that it is warm there, and there is no need to wear fingerless gloves while you type. There are fewer distractions in a coffee shop; your average writer is less likely to procrastinate by suddenly noticing that the skirting boards need ironing, or that there's a mucky teaspoon in the sink that needs washing up right away. In my nearest coffee shops, I can't even get an internet connection. Add to this the frequent availability of coffee and cake, and you have a recipe for excellent writer productivity. In the last week alone, I have finished six novels, eight short stories, and an hundred-line ballad written in iambic pentameter, just by dint of sitting in the nearest Costa. (Only joking.... I don't write poetry).

But srsly though coffee shops of West Yorkshire, what is UP with your music choice? A few days ago, I was rendered rampantly KILLY and ENRAGED by the abuse to which my ears were subject. Coffee shops of the world seemed to have turned to filling their stereos with CDs of pastel coloured, twinkly, no-cunt, irritatingly twee music, designed to offend nobody. There must be a special shop that sells this stuff; I imagine that only coffee shops buy it - for the love of God, I hope that nobody willingly listens to this stuff at home.

This kind of music is meant to promote a self-consciously cool, laid-back atmosphere within the environs. Recently, I've heard versions of 'Tainted Love' sung by a woman with a child's voice backed with what sounded like a music-box, 'Sweet Child O' Mine' gently tickled to death with a xylophone and an accordion, and a version of 'When Doves Cry' played in a jaunty rhythm on a Spanish guitar. I imagine the aim is to reassure your average coffee-shop customer with music with which he or she is familiar, presented in a way that promotes a kind of slow death by passivity: a sort of lift music for the post-modern ironist of the 21st Century, if you will. It's irritating and its twee, and every time I hear one of these dreadful, knowing cover versions, I am filled with an almost uncontrollable urge to punch a kitten to death. And I really like kittens.

Please, coffee shops of the local West Yorkshire area: I AM TRYING TO WRITE A NOVEL AND THIS CAR ADVERT MUSIC IS NOT HELPING.

Thoughts of the day...

I'm still in the enviable position of having plenty of writing time at the moment. I know it's enviable because I told a writer-friend how much I'm getting done at the moment, and his face turned green and he tried to scratch my eyes out, right there on the pavement, in front of the library. The ensuing injuries explain why I haven't had much time to update this blog lately.... sorry.

This week I have mostly been watching (on ghetto Sky+, also known as "Freeview Plus"; apparently kids these days call that "Pov TV", Pov being short for Povvo or Poverty rather than point of view), a show called In Their Own Words: British Novelists of the 20th Century. This is a series currently being shown on BBC4, about writers of the 20th century. It uses archive footage of interviews with the authors themselves, so you get an eclectic mix of writers from Barbara Cartland to Christopher Isherwood and from Jean Rhys to Robert Graves talking about their own work.

It's a fascinating show, partly in terms of the revelations about attitudes of the times in which writers lived (you see Evelyn Waugh being interviewed by a female journalist in the 60s, find out that he only agreed to do the interview on the specification that he was interviewed by 'a pretty gel', and that off-camera he asked the production crew "When is she going to take her clothes off?") but also about the writers themselves. There's much encouragement to be had in the knowledge that even EM Forster suffered from the writer's gremlin. Even after writing some of the finest novels of the early 20th century, books which were critically acclaimed and massively popular at the time, he didn't consider himself to be a great writer. Of his own capabilities, he said: "I don't consider myself to be a great writer because I have only really managed to get down onto paper 3 types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I would like to be. When you get to the really great people, like Tolstoy, you'll find they can get hold of all types." It speaks volumes that even a great writer like EM Forster had crippling doubts about his own self-worth.

So I really recommend this series, even if just for the fact you get to find out Top Facts like that Robert Graves mainly wrote I, Claudius to pay off his mortgage.

Currently reading

One Big Damn Puzzler John Harding
The Language of Others Clare Morrall
Blankets Craig Thompson
Shortcomings Adrian Tomine (FIVE BLOODY STARS, although come on Adrian, stop being such a bastard to your girlfriend).

Get your pen and your tarpaulin: this patch of grass is now your office

The urge to write can bite any time, like a blood-hungry midge wreaking itchy havoc on a set of campers. For your average writer in the street there's nothing worse than being struck with an idea, and being desperate to realize it - but not having the time or paper to write it down. It's the curse that strikes all writers on a more or less weekly basis. It's part of the reason why all writers pockets are full of scraps of paper, scribbled-upon napkins, bus tickets crammed with microscopic writing, and notebooks. You never know when the ideas are going to hit you: that's the devil of it.

Just like that, the desperation to realize an idea can catch us scribbling away in the strangest of places. Anywhere that has room enough for a notebook and pen becomes the writer's office. I admit, I've done it myself, on occasions where that idea just couldn't float around my head a second longer...

On a train. We're not talking 40's style romanticism here. I was heading away for a rowdy weekend of karaoke and booze-facedness that absolutely wasn't conducive to the Big Project I was planning. Consequence: rattling along with my pen in my hand and the smell of catering-car Croque Monsieur in my nose, making strange marks on the page every time the car jumbled over "the wrong sort of leaves" on the track.

Sitting on a wall outside a community centre, in Hastings. Long-suffering boyfriend enticed me into coming away on one of his working trips. He thought I was going to make myself useful: I thought I was going to work on my novel. About halfway through the day, realizing I was holding his flash stand in a sulky and entirely unsatisfactory manner, LSB snapped: "You're no use at all! Go and get on with your writing and stop making my life a misery!" Result! With no way of getting to a lovely warm coffee shop, I instead plonked myself on the nearest wall, pulled my fleece warm around me, and got to work.

Under a tree. I'd read somewhere that CS Lewis used to do this, and so I thought if I did it it would be well literary. However, instead of producing a series of seven children's books that have endured through the ages, I got grass on my skirt and bird poo on my head. It didn't really work out the way I'd hoped.

I know I cannot be the only one parking my office wherever inspiration strikes....

Progress slow: cats to blame

Good post over on Le Rejectionist about how authors' cats impede the creative process. They are, after all, not interested in whether you get listed for The Booker Prize, or whether your work will end up on future 'A' Level Syllabuses (Syllabi?). All your cat is interested in is where the next can of tuna is coming from.

Currently reading

The Long Firm Jake Arnott

Too many hours spent at the day job...

I dream of the day when, somewhere amongst the cabbages and turnips, a man by the name of Mr Pan-Macmillan, or Mr. Harper-Collins, approaches me in the supermarket, and whispers: "Psst! Hey lady!".

I, not being the kind of person who uses the supermarket as a pick-up joint, would ignore him at first. But the "hey, lady!"'s, and the insistent hissing grow ever louder, to the point where I have no option but to pay attention. And so I say, "What?!" testily, because I am always testy in the supermarket. If the fact I could be at home writing isn't enough to set me off, the people bovinely wandering across the aisles as though they've never used a shop before will.

And Mr Pan-Macmillan, (let's use just that name for the sake of brevity in this wishful anecdote), says, "I've got this advance burning a hole in my pocket, and I'm desperate for some writer to take it."

I say, "How do you know I'm a writer?" and he says, "because your basket is full of notebooks and pens".

In my dream, Mr Pan-Macmillan writes me a cheque there and then, and waves me off home to get on with writing my novel, unencumbered by the travails of having to hold down a day job. [Pedants, I know that no publisher operates in this ridiculous manner. Stay with me here]. He is such a thoughtful man, he even provides me with a long-suffering assistant, whose sole job is to do things that I hate, so that I'm free to write. Poor assistant. Fancy spending your whole day doing somebody else's housework and errands. Sorry, imaginary assistant, for making your life suck.

It's long days at work, and weekends full of commitment that bring me to this sweet day-dream again and again....

November: writing season

It's been over a month since the clocks went back, and I've been wearing my fingerless gloves all around the house ever since. This is no pretension on my part: it really is that cold in our house. Most evenings I creep up to the attic to get to work wearing two shirts, two vests, a thin jumper, and a wonky home-knit aran sweater that I made two years ago, and which is too embarrassing to wear outside the house. Putting the heating on is cheating. Apparently, if one wants to write a great novel, one has to suffer like a character in a Dostoevsky novel. That's Ricky's excuse for not putting the heating on, anyway: it's all the interests of supporting my work.

Dark nights can be something of a productivity slayer. Crawling into hibernation after long days at a day job is perilously easy. However, the slide into torpor is even more depressing than 16-hour long nights, rendering the lazy writer a regretful quivering heap by February, when the snowdrops start to emerge.

A winter night is well suited to writing. It's dark, it's cold, there are few distractions. What else are you going to do? It's not like you can have a barbeque, for God's sake. And so, every night after tea, I waddle upstairs in my seventeen layers to do a couple of hours' work.

This November I have mostly been: still embroiled in the very exciting Secret Project I'm working on. At this rate, I'll have the first draft finished by February. Interspersed with this, I've been working on some short stories. I've had some good ideas lately and they've all made their way into the fiction.

For anyone looking for places to submit work this month (be quick, there are short dates on these) here are a couple of competitions I've unearthed lately:

The Willesden Herald runs an International Short Story competition, leading to publication by Pretend Genius Press, who are an independent publisher who run on a non-profit basis. They have about 15 titles to their name, and currently also publish 'zines. They seem like a publishers' with a unique ethos, so go check 'em out.

This is a good comp for anyone who's a bit wordy in their short stories, as the word limit is 8,000 words. Best of luck to anyone who enters this one.... I'm off to don my gloves and get back to work!

Currently Reading

When To Walk Rebecca Gowers
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them Phillipe LeGrain
Before She Met Me Julian Barnes

30267 words and counting....

A week off from the day job, I though optimistically, would give me the time to write a good 10,000 words. Hell, maybe even 15,000. When your productivity rate after a hard day's work is generally around 1000, writing 10,000 words when you've taken the time off specifically just to do that, should be a snip, right...? Right?

It's at these times that the writing malaise always strikes. Isn't it always the way that when you've specifically set aside the time to write, there's nothing you feel less like doing. Give me an hour in a productive meeting at work, an hour in the supermarket, an hour shopping for shoes that fit properly (spit) .... and all I can think is, "I'd rather be behind my desk right now". Yet now here I am, with a whole week to spend behind my desk, and I'm procrastinating. (See entry on "Bradley's foolproof 10-step procrastination method" if you want to know how my time is being wasted).

In times of writing malaise and laziness, I try to inspire myself by reading. I don't hold with this rubbish about not reading fiction when you're writing fiction. If, like me, you're continually writing fiction (ha, except for today, of course) then your reading list would be a dry mix of The Encyclopedia Britannica and The God Delusion. That's the literary equivalent of existing on a diet of dry shreddies and punishment muesli. With maybe a bit of brown rice for variety every now and again.

If you hold with this quite frankly ridiculous notion that writers shouldn't read fiction (IDIOTS), your writing is accordingly also going to take on the same dry texture, until you're turning out 'comedies' that read like academic textbooks, or pacey crime novels that read like nutritional information. There are enough rubbish books as it is, and I can do without funny books that read like the phone book, thanks.

Accordingly, I try and match my reading with the tone of whatever I'm writing. Writing dark, read dark. Writing light, read light. It's a formula that can't go wrong. (Maybe). The current book is a farce / comedy, so here's what I've got on the old bedside table at the moment.

Currently Reading

Carry On, Jeeves P G Wodehouse
Persepolis, Marjane Sartrapi
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
How I Paid For College, Marc Acito

How do you get yourselves going on the dry days?

Writer's foibles

I ought to be working, and so... I bring you this blog entry, not on the theme of procrastination (which I believe has already been quite comprehensively covered both by myself and other bloggers), but on writer's foibles and obsessions.
As a breed, writers are generally accepted to be a neurotic, eccentric bunch. For one thing, a person has to be a bit screwy to want to spend hours of their time making things up. And for a second thing, the conditions that a writer needs to do his or her work - sitting in a room alone, involved with the problems of their characters, depicting and representing what is essentially a 'fantasy world' to others - only exacerbate matters.

Through idly reading through blogs on RedRoom (yes, I should have been working then, as well) and observing my own behaviour - as well as that of writing friends - I've compiled the following list of writer's obsessions.

1. Word counts. How long does it need to be, how many can I write today, how many have I written already, and - horror of horrors - how many might I need to edit out at the end? When so much of our work has an intangible quality, and is subject to - well, subjectivity - word counts give us something concrete, something functional we can hang on to. Never mind the plausibility of the plot, or the coherence of these characters. Word counts are something we can easily judge for ourselves - hell, the word-processor will count them for us - and we don't need objective opinions on. In times of lean inspiration, its the word count who casts his villainous shadow across our work.

2. Comparison with other authors. Am I too old or too young to write a masterpiece like Hard Times? What age was Kazuo Ishiguro when he wrote Remains of the Day? Why did X get his novel published with such relative ease, and what is wrong with me that I can't? Why do I spend so much time messing about on Facebook when I could be working on my novel? I bet Jane Austen never spent this much time commenting on other people's photos. (Only because they didn't have social networking in the 18th century).

3. Notebooks. A separate notebook for everything, and everything in its right notebook. A notebook for keeping track of submissions and competitions, a notebook for writing down true stories from work. A notebook for keeping track of ideas, and a notebook for cutting out funny stories from papers and magazines. A notebook for keeping track of errors and plot lines for the novel, and a notebook for writing to-do lists in. There is no excuse for writing down an overheard conversation in the character-work notebook. Everything must be in the correct notebook, otherwise everything descends into complete anarchy. Boyfriend keeps complaining that there are notebooks all over the house. Suggests that I could perhaps get a notebook to keep a track of where all my notebooks are.

4. Thinking too much. From reading blogs with keywords like "it won't write itself" to "nobody procrastinates like a writer", I've gathered that this is a common problem among us. We all spend hours thinking about what will happen in our books, or what our lives could be like as a 'successful' author (how we define success differs from person to person, of course; for some of us, success is being as commercially successful as Stephen King; for others, success is being as critically acclaimed as Muriel Spark; for others, success might be having a few friends read your work and genuinely enjoy it). From what I've heard, some writers spend hours caught up in these thoughts, and too little time writing. Not that I ever spend too much time thinking myself, with a heavy side-order of unproductivity, you understand. It's just what I've heard from other people.

I realise this is only a short list of four, and that there are probably other writer's quirks and obsessions that I've missed out. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the strange habits of the writer!

Writing Space

I laugh when I read other writers saying, "Write wherever you are". A laudable aim. Who amongst us has never written on a busy train, whilst sitting under a tree, in a cafe, or even in the living room while others are watching the telly?
But the truth is - and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it - I've become precious when it comes to writing space lately. My excellent boyfriend, who is handy with a couple of rawlplugs and a drill, built me a desk right under our living room window, so that I can write and look out over the allotments. Excellent, work, boyfriend. Now what can we do about getting me a bit of peace and quiet?

Our house is not a large one. We live in a terraced house, in a quiet street in a quiet area. The walls are thin, and one gets used to 'tuning out' the sounds of life that come from the adjoining houses: children playing, the sound of somebody else's television, a person who owns only one CD and listens to it repeatedly over and over again. (Why does it have to be Keane?) But try as I might, I can't tune out the sounds that come from within the house. It's these that break my concentration and leave me a quivering, twitching wreck.

I know it's the luxury of silence, and a dedicated writing space, that has made me this way. There was a time when I could write anywhere, even with my housemates howling and chattering over How Clean Is Your House? in the same room. I'm just not the same girl any more. I can't stand to be interrupted when I'm working, especially if it's to be asked a question; more so if it's a stupid question, and most questions seem to be fairly stupid. Whether its "How do you spell tomorrow?" or "Do you want anything from the shop?", an innocently asked question is liable to send me twitching and gnashing my teeth down into the kitchen, where I will stomp around noisily making a cup of tea until the offending question-asker has discreetly removed him or herself away to a safer location.

It got me thinking about what other writers need to write? Do you have the same obsessive need for quiet as do I, or can you write in just about any conditions? I'd love to know!

Bradley's foolproof 10-step procrastination method

Want to get some writing done? Frustrated at your current overly-productive rate of activity? Gurn no longer! I can help you, with my tried-and-tested, guaranteed foolproof low-yield ten-step procrastination method.

Following my advice, any newcomer to the writing game can easily fritter whole days away in the pursuit of less fulfilling activities that produce no writing output whatsoever (unless you count commenting on somebody else's Facebook status updates).

For the purposes of following the method, you need to be at your desk and ready to begin by 09.00. Follow the points step by step, and don't miss any out. It won't work otherwise. Ready? Let's get started!

1. It is still too early to start writing. There is too much else to do in and around and out of the house. Begin by writing a list. Spend no shorter than half an hour writing this list, and include absolutely everything on it, from the physical ("paint the outside of the house") to the metaphysical and / or spiritual ("What is the meaning of life?")

To improve of the efficacy of point 1 as a timewasting activity, you may wish to embark on some of the tasks named thereon. Ensure that you do not complete fully any of these tasks, as completing any sort of task could be considered productive, and is thereby contrary to the spirit of the ten-step procrastination method.

2. To engage brain and to warm up into the writing activity, open three tabs on your browser window: one to Facebook, another to web-based email, and a third to the talk-board or forum of your choice. Spend at least one hour providing ill-informed advice to strangers on the internet and commenting on your friends' status updates. Oh look, are those pictures of Tom's wedding? 256 pictures of people you hardly know! This is procrastination gold. By the time you have looked at them all, there will be more status updates, and more strangers seeking advice. You have already spent up to an hour and a half at your desk, and not a single minute of it spent in the task of writing. Keep up the good work!

3. Jeez, nearly lunchtime. It's time for a well-deserved break, to have a root through the fridge, and to watch a bit of Come Dine With Me off the Freeview Plus box. You can't write on an empty stomach, and in any case, Come Dine With Me counts as research on account of the human drama and the interaction of all those different characters. Also worth watching to get some ideas for lunch.

4. That's enough time-wasting. Seriously now, get back to work. Maybe it would be useful to spend a bit of time updating the old internet 'shop window'. Update blog, spend a bit of time browsing Red Room. (careful now. Overdo it and you might be in danger of doing something useful).

5. This computer is filthy. Clean screen, get desktop vacuum out, vac out keyboard and inside mouse. Carpet and coffee table also need vacuuming. May as well do those since have vacuum out. Look for other opportunities for housework. A clean environment is more conducive to productivity.

6. Still haven't got anything done. Can't fix mind to writing somehow. Seems like very hard work today. Maybe I could concentrate better if I did a bit of exercise?

7. Go for a walk or bike ride, or put on latest Girls Aloud album and dance around the living room. Close curtains if the neighbours are home.

8. If plan has been correctly followed, it will now be around 3 (possibly after) and partner's arrival home from work will be imminent. You have not yet written one single solitary word other than "lol" or "fail". These barely count as English. Allow feeling of destitution and disappointment to gather over you for a few minutes.

9. Time to knuckle down. Straight after this cup of tea.

10. Congratulations, you are a successful (?!) graduate of Bradley's foolproof ten-step procrastination method....