Gardening and Planning

The garden after much levelling and grass-sowing

Last Thursday afternoon I took some time off to tame our feral garden. The sun made an unexpected appearance and I couldn’t miss the opportunity.

We’ve been faffing around inexcusably regarding what to do with bits of our lawn. One large section is a mess, after we had a boat standing there for years (a long story). We sold the boat a few months ago and since then the whole area has been an eye-sore and child-trap: full of bits of rubbish, holes the dog dug under the boat and many vicious weeds.

Husband wanted to fill the holes with top-soil, roller it flat, make it as gorgeous as a cricket pitch. I want somewhere the kids can play without getting stung or covered in mud or breaking their ankle.

In our family, husband is responsible for all things outside and DIY, while I do all things indoors and domestic. I have recently taken over lawn mowing while husband has been away with work, much to my 3-year-old daughter’s bewilderment.

The first time I dragged the lawnmower out of the shed she looked at me as if I’d grown horns.

“Mummy, that’s daddy’s job.”

I couldn’t figure out how to get the mower started and after twenty minutes I was sweating and cursing. Her response was:

“Better leave it to daddy.”

Needless to say she had a quick lesson in woman’s lib and not giving up and I was given the motivation required to approach the task more calmly and find the dead-switch.

As well as mowing this Thursday I decided to tackle the ugly-eye-sore spot. First thing was to shift a giant tarpaulin and wood pile, trying not to scream too loudly when I uncovered a nest of tiny mice. (I covered them with a plant pot and they were later relocated by their mummy.)

As I was moving planks, filling holes, scattering grass seed and generally trying to reclaim half my lawn for the kids, I got to thinking about writing (as I often do when my hands are busy but my mind is not.)

I see metaphors everywhere; it was easy to get distracted by what it symbolised to leave baby mice safely hidden, only to trap them later when they venture into our house, or the futility of planting grass seed for the birds to eat. Maybe the wasted effort of reclaiming lawn when it hasn’t stopped raining for three months and the long-term forecast isn’t much better.

In the end what stuck in my mind the most was the conflicting lures of planning versus getting stuck in. When I write, I generally just get stuck in, and the ideas follow (hopefully) one upon another as I type. I’ve often thought I should plan more. One writer I know sketches every scene before writing anything and has a prescribed number of chapters in a book and so on.

That fills me with awe and terror.

Awe because I can’t write like that and terror because I feel I probably should. How can I call myself a writer when I stumble along hoping a story comes to me as I type? Except I recently read that even well-known published authors occasionally have the same approach.

Looking at our garden my conclusion was it’s okay to just get stuck in, although a little planning doesn’t hurt. If I had got stuck in at the beginning of summer, without worrying about a plan, we’d have lawn by now. A lumpy lawn, full of weeds and holes, but a lawn nonetheless. In this case planning equalled procrastination (to be fair, mostly it was due to my husband being just too busy). However I did lose an hour of gardening time on Thursday having to go buy grass seed, so some planning might have helped. The main thing is, when I look at the flat seeded area now (see photo) I am filled with a huge sense of satisfaction and progress, no matter how uneven the end result.

I have reached deadlock with my Young Adult novel, Dragon Wraiths, because I have to create a new world and a history. I am dealing with two planets and two timelines, and planning really is essential to keep it all straight.

But I hate planning.

I don’t like reaching the end of a day with no increase in word-count. There is no sense of satisfaction, just a growing confusion, and sense that I could probably plan forever and never be fully satisfied. My creativity doesn’t function unless I am actually writing. I may as well be doing school essays.

Reading what I’ve written so far I realise that lack of planning hasn’t held me back from writing some good stuff. I mostly know where the story is going, in my mind, I just don’t always know how it is going to get there until I start writing it down.

So, I could fart about worrying about the details of my world and have no story to enter in the Mslexia competition in September. Or I could break a dozen rules, just keep writing, and add the history in the second draft.

Maybe sometimes you just have to get stuck in and not worry if it’s lumpy and full of holes. After all you can’t edit a blank page any more than you can mow dirt.

Making Butterflies

Today I made butterflies.

It seemed the only productive thing to do, and they look pretty.

Sometimes when my brain is full or aching or lost I find it soothing to sew things. I am rubbish at sewing, but I like having my hands busy and my mind blank. Well, never blank, but drifting, if you know what I mean.

I seem to have reached a crisis point in my life; a quiet creeping sort of crisis that has fallen on me like fog, rather than crashing into my life like a runaway train in a disaster movie as my crises normally do. It is a fog with all sorts of horrible things lurking in it. I hate horror.

All the things I have struggled with my whole life seem to have come crunching together this week. My lack of confidence and self-belief have crunched against my delusional confident sense of self. A see-saw of I’m a crap writer, I can write, I’m a crap writer, I can write. Alongside that, my lazy self is yelling at my hardworking persona. My lazy self says It’s good enough, just move on. My hardworking persona says; you know that’s rubbish. The whole thing needs tearing apart and putting back together again. My Mummy self says, give it up and focus on the children. My working self says; you gotta earn some cash. My sensible self says, well you aint going to do that writing, which prompts the realistic voice to pipe up; best get a proper job if money is what you want.

In the end I arrive at the same point I have reached many times in my life. I want someone else to tell me what to do. So I read some blogs, some books, a load of web pages. I read the helpful feedback on my blog and on other blogs.

And then I go slightly crazy.

They say being a writer is a lonely business, but once you tentatively reach out to the internet, there are a million voices, all offering advice. I started listening to those voices sometime last week, and now my ears are ringing worse than tinnitus.

So I asked myself, what do I want? And here are my answers, in the order they came to me:

1. I want to make money

2. I want positive feedback from my endeavours

3. I want to write

Now even in my delusional state I know that those three things are in the wrong order, and actually the middle one shouldn’t be there at all.

I know that the only way to write anything worth reading is to do it because you are passionate about it, not for financial gain.

I know that if you rely on glowing reviews to give you confidence you are destined to be miserable forever.

I know that very very few people make a living out of writing.

I know all those things as facts, but I cannot change the way I feel. I cannot still the voice that wants those three things. And because those three things are, essentially, mutually exclusive, I am frozen.

Do I go back to attempting to write Mills & Boon, as the way most likely to provide an income, if I can hit upon the style of writing they are happy with?

Do I sign up to a course, such as the HTRYN that has been recommended to me, to beat my current WIP into shape, fixing all the things I know that are wrong with it, such as lack of a decent main character (It needs lots of work to be the novel I know it can be)?

Do I tidy my novel up around the edges and keep sending it out to agents, hoping to get lucky because, hey, I’ve read a lot worse?

Or do I pack it all in for another year, as I did when my son was born, and focus instead on being the Mummy I should be, rather than the Writer I want to be?

I have no answers.

In the meantime, I will keep making butterflies. At least the kids agreed, when they got home, that they are pretty.

Life vs. Writing Update: A New Beginning

Okay, so sometimes sleep deprivation can have its advantages. After a week of broken nights I woke up yesterday, out of a deep three-hour sleep (a miracle in itself), with a complete novel in my head.

Unfortunately, since the new carpets were fitted, I haven’t got around to putting my notebook and pen back under the bed. Plus I had smallest child asleep on me, and eldest child wriggled into our room in her sleeping bag shortly after. Needless to say, by the time I’d got my mobile fired up and tapped out some of what was in my mind, I had lost most of it.

I remember the gist though, because it couldn’t have been further from my last four novels.

This one is going to be a young adult book. In the first person. A mystery, mostly in real-time.

Oh and it has dragons in it.

Not really chick lit or romance. Though it might have some romance. I haven’t worked that bit out yet.

I’m quite daunted about the whole thing. I’ve never written in the first person; I haven’t been a teenager for almost two decades (my kids are nearer being teenagers than me, how horrific is that? They’re only 1 and 3); I don’t have any writing skills or techniques for real-time, suspense or mystery, and I know next to nothing about writing fantasy.

Still, it certainly comes under the Option 2, try something new. (See previous post).

Anyway, with it being Easter and all, my next writing day isn’t until next Thursday. In the mean time, I’m trying not to think about the ideas too much, as I know from experience I need to start writing without thinking, or I’ll kill it before it’s born (I’m a master at self-censure).

I do know the first line (for now), I wrote it down in my phone before the vision faded.

“My name is Leah, and I know the time and place of my death.”

Well, that may well change, but my first lines rarely do, as they are usually the freewrite prompt for the whole novel concept. We shall see.

Exciting though.

Life vs. Writing

It’s all about the carpet.

A few weeks ago we decided the carpets had absorbed as much wee, poo, vomit, coffee and dog hair as they could stand.

They had to go.

Immediately. Because in this house everything has to be done immediately once a decision has been made (although the procrastination can go on for years prior to that.)

So, five years after moving in, we made the decision. We immediately found a great deal on a wool carpet that had to be bought immediately (it was in the sale). You get the idea.

The fitters were booked to come in five weeks, job’s a goodun.

Sounds simple doesn’t it?

Not for us. There is always a chain of events that have to occur whenever anything needs to be done. This is because our house is a disaster zone of unfinished projects.

What has this to do with writing, you ask? Well, everything really.

My novels are all unfinished projects too. As are my husband’s novels. We’re not great at finishing things. We use the writing projects to put off having to finish house stuff, and house stuff gets in the way of finishing our writing.

Also, we get bored.

Starting something new is much more fun than finishing off the fiddly, hard, quite frankly tedious bits that make something look finished. You know, like skirting boards, architrave, painting.

Or editing, formatting, redrafting.

So our house, which could look like a lovely show home, rather resembles a hopeless case on DIY Disaster. Well, not that bad (in case my husband reads this), but close. And my novels, two of which are finished in draft form, are, to be honest, a bit boring. They need all that tedious editing time to make them sparkle.

So, anyway, before the new carpets can be laid we have to:

Laminate the hallway. Which means finish the utility room step, put the new architrave up, take off the skirting boards, fill holes in the plaster and so on. The laminate fitters come today, so husband has been busy for the last two weeks doing his bit. I was meant to be painting the woodwork downstairs, but I’ve been writing this blog instead. Oops.

Now husband has done his part, and hopefully the hallway fitters will actually arrive at some point (already two hours late), it’s my turn. I’m redecorating our bedroom. Since we’ve moved in it is the only room that hasn’t been decorated. We’ve managed to ignore it until now because, well, basically, we could.

I have hated the wallpaper since moving in, but I hate painting woodwork even more, and our room is chock full of it.

I’ve managed to strip the wallpaper (I like that bit), and paint a few feet of dado-rail. Then child#2 got rotavirus and nothing has been done since. And now the carpet fitter comes in two weeks. But the closer the deadline, the more my brain is fizzing with writing ideas – blog posts, new novels, restructuring of old novels. I am trying to emulate Fireman Sam, and do One Thing At A Time (he says it with the capital letters). But I’m so scared of losing an idea, I push them all along together, and ignore the decorating.

Anyway, you may have noticed that this post doesn’t contain any writing advice. Sorry about that. I just thought a little insight into the life of writer/mummy might be interesting. I’m sure I’m not the only person on the seesaw of life vs. writing. Currently life is winning, although I’m fighting back: I’m writing this while on a tea break, waiting to let the fitters in who, apparently, ARE on their way. Then back to painting.

I would love to hear about your battles of life vs. writing.

May writing always win in the end!