Things I'm Learning About Writing A Book

I'm learning ...

I don't write a book in the same way I might train my body at the gym.  It's not about pushing the limits and building up strength.  It's not about endurance. 

And it's not about 9 to 5.  It's about 'anytime'.  My most exciting idea, so far, came while I was walking back through city streets in the early morning, a 5 celsius day.  I was thinking bad thoughts about Antwerp's polluted air.

I smsed my idea to myself.  I had a book for the tram and I know how time stretches and warps on these journeys of mine.  I need to make notes.  Always.  Because I forget stuff.  Even brilliant stuff.

Always make notes.

I have a song, sometimes more than one but usually just one, that I put on repeat ... endlessly on repeat.  It helps somehow.  It disappears into the background but creates a state of mind.  I recently heard Man Booker prize winner, Eleanor Catton, admit to doing it and I thought, 'So it's normal'!'  Many have tried to convince me that it's so far from normal and I should stop immediately.

So, currently, whenever I hear Ben Howard's 'Old Pine' then I know it's time to work.  Maybe I should put a dedication to him in the front of this book.  I've played his song hundreds, if not thousands, of times already. 

Obviously this can only be done when I'm working alone here ...

I am learning to steal the Belgian's bloke's desk-chair the moment he leaves for work, as my chair is an ergonomic disaster, even though we were careful in choosing it and paid more than we wanted to.  He just sighs, rolls my chair away from his desk, and waits while I return his in the evenings.  Thank goodness he works away from home all day ...

Most importantly perhaps, I'm learning not to panic when I can't think of what to write, how to dive in and begin when I have 'just 3 hours to produce something new!!!!'  It will come.  It does.

Oh and if I have the 130 photographs I have chosen (so far) for the book colour-photocopied to A4-size to work on, in batches of 20, then it seems less wicked.  Or is that like the kid playing hide-n-seek, standing in the middle of the room with her hands over her eyes, pretending that she can't be seen.  Hmmmm.

And finally, I'm learning that committing to writing a blog post everyday in November has been more helpful than I could have imagined.

Now,  I'll leave you with Ben. 

Oh ... I've posted this song before?  At least you don't share an office with me  :-)

The Magic of Myth, an enchanted journey by Elizabeth Duvivier

It would not be untrue if I wrote that I love this woman's blog best of all blogs.

I have written of her work before.  A snippet here and snippet there.  Mystic Vixen is where I wander when I need a fix of beauty, both in words and in images.  There's quite some wisdom to be found over there too.

Wandering there is like opening a window onto a beautiful view ... it simply restores my soul. 

And she shares her dogs too.

So, Elizabeth is even more than I knew her to be.  I've attached the video where you get to know a little about her and work.  She's responsible for Squam, as founder and director.  You have to read about Squam to believe it but obviously any place where I read 'creativity as a way of life' in the subtitle I'm going to be interested.

Anyway, the video below, it's all about Elizabeth and an exciting new offering she has created for Squam - The Magic of Myth, an enchanted journey. 

Take a peek ... see what you think.

the MAGIC of MYTH :: an enchanted journey from Squam on Vimeo.

Balance ...

I am always searching for a kind of balance in life ...

I work hard. I work long hours.  There is no income.  However I have finally decided to commit to the life of an artist.  And I'm lucky, my Belgian bloke is pleased  that I am finally writing again.  It was the thing I loved first, the thing friends back in New Zealand most associated with me, it turns out.

So I write in the mornings these days and depending on whether I'm on the school pick-up run, which is lunch-times two days per week, my writing often runs on into the afternoon.  And the evening.

And I edit for friends and causes I believe in the way some people do crossword puzzles. That's my hobby.  I love making texts beautiful.

And I can be lured out of the house to shoot an event or a portrait for friends I admire or whose business impresses me. That was last night.  And I sparkle on the inside.  I love the energy that shoots through me when I'm working with my camera. And I always meet really superb people.  There was this wine-maker last night.  An extraordinary woman that I will interview on Saturday.

So I have all these things that I love doing but they rarely involve money.  And making them earn money while bowing to the gods of taxes, social security, and etc, can only be described as a Kafka story.

Do I kill all the art and get a real job? 

It feels so much like cutting off my nose to spite my face.

I can create beauty.  I'm pleased with the shape the book on Genova is taking.  My photographs seem to please people and even if they don't, I find them pleasing.  I printed 20 of my Genova photographs off as A4 colour photocopies. 

I was like a mother with her new baby.  Who knows if the baby is ugly, I was that mother who was besotted.  The images looked so powerful laid out in front of me.  I needed that.  I was bored with looking at them on the computer.

The scales that weigh the content or purpose of my life are sensitive things.  Sometimes I have them in balance - my work is good, I should continue with photography and writing, the housework, and this crazy extended family of mine.  Other times it's ... who do I think I am.  Some princess who can live so irresponsibly and lightly in the world!?  I must find a job!'

We live in a world where the arts are always first against the wall in budget cut and yet art is the thing that makes humans different to animals, isn't it?  Art is the place we all escape to ... into books, into music.  And yet the raised eyebrow, the idea that we are spoiled ones ... oh how that messes with my head.

I was out with a friend last night and I said, I should get a job.  She said, but you work.  I said but I make no money.  She said you work really hard.  We laughed.  I do enjoy Ruth's company.  She keeps me sane.

So here I am, living what feels a little like life in bubble.  If I float out here, kind of disconnected from the world, then I can write this book I've been carrying inside of me for a long time but ... like being on the edge of a cliff, I can't look down.   If I look down, I'll may fall into despair and despair means I struggle to write and create.  Bitterness is deadly.

Lately I've read through a million job decriptions, trying to work out who would hire me, woman of strange abilities.  And I can't get past what I might gently call the 'wankspeak' of job descriptions.  I think you're meant to apply anyway and then everyone laughs and says noooooo, you're absolutely what we need but we had to write that other stuff ...like,  fluent in 17 languages, with the ability to get our newsletter out into the world in 17 seconds flat.  But maybe it's better those jobs have seemed impossible.

This morning began with a bit of a crisis.  Oh, you guessed.  Maybe I've written it out of me and tomorrow I'll delete this and we'll pretend it never happened. 

But make no mistake, this needs to be read knowing I'm smiling.  I have fought off the despair.  I'm going to write now. 

Adjusting ...

Alice came to a fork in the road. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go” responded the cat. “I don’t know” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “It doesn’t matter.

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Source: Oh Fairies

It's fascinating (for me) to watch myself struggle with having made space and silence to write ...

I didn't realise quite how addicted I had become to distraction.  'Addicted' for want of a better word.  Facebook is perfect as a distraction.  It's full of some of my favourite people and, often, it's the only place I easily and instantly reach them.  It's playtime all day, if I allow it be.  Or forget that it shouldn't be ... on a slow day when I am quite lost and lacking in self-discipline.

And my FB wall was full of interesting folk.  It wasn't the tedious stuff you read about in the 'worst of FB' stories.  They were posting politically and intellectually interesting stuff ... as well as day-to-day life, links to good music, and their stories too.

These days of allowing this silence to fall around me haven't been simple but slowly I'm growing  used to the peace of it all.  Instead of multiple story-lines telling of other worlds running there in my head, I only have my stories ... mostly.

The loveliest thing is that I am receiving long emails from friends who have either already left facebook or who want to stay in touch.  Long emails are bliss and I find myself setting aside time to reply, instead of them being lost in the avalanche of action that my life used to be.  And links to good music are often included.  I would hate to lose those introductions to music others love.

Yesterday I was consumed by a desire to further prepare myself for the long winter ahead.  Bookshelves were moved, the sofa went upstairs to Miss 9's room, replaced by a exquisite yellow armchair I found secondhand and today this office space/bedroom is so much more beautiful.  When the sun angles in through the window behind me now, it is no longer absorbed by the other deep-red bookshelf, instead it reflects off the wall painted a warm terrocotta (I think) and lights the middle of the room with a warm glow.

Light, and that colour range from pale yellow through into a deep gold, they are things that I love.  My desk area is clearer than ever, and the small round red patterned rug that we found is perfect under my chair.

The paddling-people delighted me, in the image below, but so did the house.  If I had a Pinterest board, I'm almost sure that it would be filled with images of houses and rooms made for dreaming and writing in...

Under The Tuscan Sun ...(or a recipe for dreaming)

Whenever I am unable to create my own sense of beauty, I have this book that has traveled with me since the 90's.  The date I wrote in the front reads 'pre 1999'.  I remember how it saved me when we moved to Te Anau, from the disruption and loneliness that is moving, and that it has saved me so many times since.  For me, there is this sense of falling into the beauty that is Frances Mayes prose, like sinking below the surface of a swimming pool, immersed for a while.

Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.  There are places I've been which are lost to me.

I've heard so many angry women talk of Frances Mayes book 'Under the Tuscan Sun' - and make no mistake, I am talking of the book not the movie, which is another story entirely - and these women rage about this book and that woman's unrealistic portrayal of a life lived partially in Italy.

I listen, sometimes I speak up but mostly I quietly decide that they are not lovers of beautiful poetic prose writing ... that they simply lack a dreamy writerly soul. But truly, I'm not sure why I love what they hate.

The outrage ... I would love to unpick it, to understand where it comes from. 

The second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace gleams.  They've made the bed with the new blue sheets and left the terrace door open to the sound of the cuckoos and wild canaries in the linden trees.  We pick the last of the pink roses on the front terrace and fill two old Chianti bottles with them.  The shuttered room with its whitewashed walls, just-waxed floors, pristine bed with new sheets, and sweet roses on the windowsill, all lit with a dangling forty-watt bulb, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell.  As soon as I walk in, I think it is the most perfect room in the world.

These are soul-soothing words for me.  I once lived in the brick house of a friend who was so good to me when I divorced.  It was everything sensible, that borrowed brick house, but my soul needed something else.  I found a funny little 1.5 bedroom cottage out on the Otago peninsula. 

I moved there and was happy.  I would drink my morning coffee out in front of the massive rough wooden-framed windows that made up the front wall of that  cottage.  My view, a few metres of lawn, maybe 2, a small road just below, and the sheltered water of that beautiful harbour.

I require beauty but mostly it's simple.  It's about Nature and good air, it's about views that make you stop and dream for a while.  It's about having a dog, when possible. 

New Zealand spoilt me in a way.  My Belgian bloke understood more of me after our trip home last year.  He realised that while I believe natural beauty is a right, he understands beauty is a luxury.  He comes from a small country, 1/10th the size of New Zealand.  In Belgium there are 11 million people, New Zealand has 4 million.

After a few days, my life takes on its own rhythm.  I wake up and read for an hour at three a.m.; I eat small snacks - a ripe tomato eaten like an apple - at eleven and three rather than lunch at one.  At six I'm up, but by siesta time, the heat of the day, I'm ready for two hours in bed.  Slumber sounds heavier than sleep, and with the hum of a small fan, it's slumber I fall into. 

Finally entering into university studies at 34 was one of the best things I have ever done.  There was an appreciation of all that I studied, an excitement that I might not have felt back when I was 18.  In those days, I lived in 4 different homes along the peninsula.  My first husband and I bought an exquisite cottage down there back in 1999.  We divorced and I lived in a series of cottages on that narrow strip of land between the harbour and the Pacific Ocean. 

Under the Tuscan Sun got me through dark times and lonely times too.  It was like a burst from a sun-lamp perhaps.  It traveled to Istanbul with me, as one of the few things I could take from the old to the new life.  It lives here on my deep-red book shelves in Belgium, a much-loved book that I recently pulled out as these autumn days grow grey and the darkness comes so much earlier.

For me, the book is a meditation on the beautiful moments, written in the prose of a woman who began as a poet and went on with prose.  It's a writers book.  A book for dreamers and lovers of beauty. 

Siesta becomes a ritual.  We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor.