John Bauer and Kerstin Frykstrand
Friday is Writing Day
It’s a lovely idea. I’d arranged to meet a member of my Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators’ critique group each Friday, for some serious, no-chat, just get on with it writing.
This needed equally serious,no-chat, just get on with it suroundings: away from home, and the ever-present risks of dispacement activity. We’re lucky enough to be able to visit the stunning Bishopsgate Institute,with its library of ‘ world-renowned collections on London history, labour and socialist history, free thought and humanism, co-operation, and protest and campaigning.’
It’s a gorgeous, old-school library: all wooden parquet floors, tall shelves and stunning stained glass windows, wonderfully combined with historial artefacts and all the current magazines you could possible want for a day’s displacement, I mean research, activity.
The first two weeks went by with us both unavailable. I opened out the last Friday of the month for any SCBWI-er in London to come along: also making it harder for me to chicken out. So I can report a wonderful day of productivity: steps closer to publication and an unqualified success. Hurrah! Or …
Friday: get up late. Persuade daughter that sad packed lunch of tiny bread and cheese and water is character-forming opportunity to cook for herself later. Swear at person slowly paying for Tube ticket in single coins of unknown currency. Sit in train in tunnel while driver says she isn’t sure why we are there. Make will in diary. Avoid psychotic black cab driver bent on pedestrian destruction. Shiver on icy street. Chat brightly to SCBWI member who has arrived and desperately try to recall meeting them at conference as described.
Gaze at lovely surroundings and take seat closest to radiator. Arrange six notebooks containing bits of writing, plot ideas, character sketches in optimum position on desk. Gaze some more. Hate main character. Gaze some more. Loo break. Look at postcards and consider purchase of tote bag to add to enormous collection of unused tote bags.
Sneaky look at social media. Set up app to prevent sneaky looks at social media. Rewrite first paragraph. Rewrite rewrite. Check how much of scheduled undisturbed 30 minutes has gone on new app. Decide it can’t be only two minutes. Gaze at surroundings. Discuss lunch and possible attendance at free classical concert in next room. Go for lunch.
Return to find out another writer has arrived. Whispered discussion of progress. Agree surroundings are magnificent. Reset app. Spot stacks of books for sale. Examine dozens of books at length. Remember recent clearing of hundreds of books.
Reset non-disturbance app. Rewrite rewritten rewrite. Consider turning contemporary ghost story set in England into historical fantasy set abroad. Start planning series of blog posts for newly-commissioned work. Gaze some more. Find text from friend who has arrived for catch-up. Meet friend for hot chocolate with writer in cafe. Discuss translation, educational IT, websites, photos, daughters and NHS. Announce must return to writing.
Meet staff member and discuss London Fortean Society meetings, children and writing. Agree surroundings are magnificent. Anxious call from A Level burn-out casualty. Plan evening of writing to email for comment from writing partners. Divert to bookshop to buy two brilliant new books published this week by Robin Stevens and Melinda Salisbury.
Read.
Get inspired.
Write all evening.
Photo of Library, Bishopsgate Institute, © Mike Ellis
Other photos from writers’ websites
Books: where is less is definitely more
The great Declutter continues and the focus turns to books. I thought this would be difficult and I was right.
As I mentioned in my last post, Tim Harford’s feature on dealing with the status quo bias that causes stuff to build up at home inspired me. He notes that Christmas books mean double-stacking the book shelves. If only.
Triple or quadraple or any n-aple stacking wouldn’t deal with my book habit. The bookshelves and cases were rammed; cat hair-trap piles had built up behind the sofas and chairs, under the bed and desk, and the out-of-reach hall shelf. Books lurked on pretty much every available surface.
The clear out method Tim Harford’s used, by Marie Kondo, means piling items of one kind from anywhere in your home all together on the floor, then holding each one at a time and asking whether it sparks joy. If so, it stays. It’s also important to do this in one session if possible. And no stopping to read.
Work and family and writing mean this can be challenging but I put aside hours at the end of last week. There’s still one little heap to finish but I’m so pleased with the results that I’m posting this now.
War and Peace: gone. I’ve tried to read that book time and time again over four decades. I’ve borrowed it and bought several editions. It just made me unhappy and guilty and feel stupid. No more. Take that, Russian classic. My copies of Emma and Mansfield Park are falling to bits and I love them and reread them often. But Persuasion went. And so on.
What a liberating, painful, tiring and just downright HARD thing to do. Note the loo paper for a mixture of flu-y snottiness and weeping at memories invoked at the interim, pick up and consider each thing stage.
But it works. I’ve got what I wanted out of it. I can see floorboards, found missing papers and photos used as bookmarks, and removed unjoyful or repeat volumes to allow in the new. Where appropriate, of course. All Moomins, old and new, are still here.
And now I truly appreciate my visible books. I’ve got shelves of books that do bring me joy: personal, eclectic and relevant. There are new Young Adult and Middle Grade gems, precious signed books including Neil Gaiman and Russell Hoban and David Sedaris, and random loves from my diving handbook to a guide to Devon’s hedgerow birds from my honeymoon.
And the rest? Some have gone to people I know. A kind friend helped me load the others into his car and looked out for traffic wardens while I dragged bag after bag into an East London charity shop. The woman behind the desk was cheerful at first: ‘Lots of books? Fine!’ but started whispering ‘Oh my days!’ once I’d filled all the space in her store room.
I hope people will get something from them. I did, of course, from nearly all of those that went.
But now my living room shelves are terrific and, look, the bedside bookcase is just the best.
It’s in glorious order: half of my previously dangerously wobbly To Be Read pile, research for my work in progress and a couple of comfort books in case of storms or insomnia. And room for more … Speaking of which, I liked this story of a reformed book buyer from the Perpetual Page-Turner blog.
Not A New Year resolution
Decluttering is a resolution thing, I know. It’s a constant, time-wasting, procrastinating, energy-sapping vampire thing for me. I’m tidy but ugly, make myself wretched sort of tidy; a make everyone else unhappy while I up end it everything, swearing loudly, every few weeks style of tidiness.
I can never find the notebook I wrote a synopsis in on the train amid so many notebooks on the desk, floor, or in the cat basket. I’m late hunting for my keys and boots. I buy new lip balm because the tin is in another bag. I have a LOT of tins of lip balm.
Then again, my keys may be under the magazine I loathe myself for wasting money on. The one with the experts’ advice on decluttering. I know how that ends: another few evenings of gazing sadly at into a box of unidentifiable cables under the jiffy bags I keep in case of needing them for post. You get the idea. Then I read Tim Harford.
I read his article, got the book on the Kindle and read it until the early hours yesterday. I’m unsure about what process led me to trust Tim Harford when the same tidying expert featured in the magazine I’d had bought a few days before. But I’m glad I did.
The method advocated by Marie Konodo feels made for me. Many of the cases she’s dealt with are two-bedroom flats in crowded Tokyo – not so very different from my home in London. I don’t have a large house or valuable inherited stuff to worry about, and I love simplicity and clarity but feel emotionally invested in objects.
So I started as instructed with clothes. I found clothes hanging up in and in baskets on the wardrobe, baskets in the cupboards, clothes hanging on the back of doors and in the hall, piled up on two chairs in the bedrom and in a suitcase under the bed. And I believed I have no clothes – they don’t really interest me and I wear the same things all the time.
I did the process pretty much as described – held each piece and told jackets they’d done a good job and I was grateful, or they’d been valuable in showing me how they didn’t suit me or hadn’t been a good way to spend money.
Goodbye and thanks to the wildly extravagant bronze silk dress with floor-length trailing medieval style sleeves, bought from a tiny boutique in Stockholm while a friend and I chatted to a gorgeous poet choosing her red wedding dress. And the leather jacket my daughter’s father bought in Amsterdam, when he lived around the corner of Anne Frank’s house, and I spent days felled by food posioning from a dodgy mussel after first wearing it.
There’s the black dress bought for the wedding of a neighbour, who had his heartbroken by a woman making a marriage of convenience. Another black dress was for my 50th birthday party, hated and never worn since.
I filled two carrier bags with socks: mismatched black pairs, As MK says, they’d gone saggy around the top as I’d twisted them into tight lumpy balls. There’s a suitcase full of clothes for the charity shop and a rucksack full to go with it, as well as a tote bag of boots.
Backs of cupboards were stuffed with odd running gloves, a suit jacket with shoulder pads almost as wide as the entrance to the doorways and the surgical-looking strapless bra I got for my wedding.
I found pair after pair of black trousers, a dress I bought for a formal dinner and wore only once, barefoot by a pool in France last summer and the Jack Wills t-shirt my daughter gave me and I wore when I wrote on a naked Amanda Palmer at her Kickstarter party.
That’s the hard thing. Getting rid of stuff when it’s invested with so many memories. Part of me wants to hold on, and it’s a good thing those bags are going to the charity shop this morning before I change my mind and start taking things out to make them look as small and insignificant as possible, rolled up in and hidden behind sofas or sneaked down to Mum’s house.
MK’s customers have done much the same, and she details the reasons why this is not a good idea. So I’ll move on, to the next group of items to be be removed from every one of the places they are kept, and piled on the floor for the process of sorting.
And that next group is books. Same protocol: examine each one but don’t start reading, discard any that don’t bring you joy.
Much of my flat is books. What could possibly go wrong?
January
Annual changing of these lovely illustrations by Kerstin Frykstrand from December to January. A bit late in a day of technologies conspiring against me but it’s ok because there’s been writing, good books and food, and plans with friends.
Happy New Year.
May the Fourth: 4 by 4
On the bus: Steve’s family
Flowers, chocolates and horse
Swedish family
Confetti cones
May the 4th is Star Wars Day. It’s my wedding anniversary, by happy coincidence: we chose it to make a long Bank Holiday for people coming from abroad.
It’s also our 4th anniversary and I like the number 4. I voted for it as the world’s favourite number – see no. 7 here (I think seven cheated to win.) So I though I’d find four groups of four things about our wedding, with the four photos above.
Four Musical Things:
The Swedish Wedding March. A nod to my background by birth, for going into the register office. We’ve heard all the jokes about strangling cats, thanks.
Nick Cave: Straight to You. There had to be St Nick, forced upon a captive audience. The setting limited our choice a bit. One other devotee was happy and she’d traveled from the States; several older guests who’d come from Kent and Herts had a little doze.
North Sea Radio Orchestra. For one reason only. First dance: shortest piece of music from a band we both love.
Arash: Boro Boro. Because you’ve got to have an Iranian-Swedish crowd-pleaser. And everyone gets to do hand-waving and make up their own words.
Four Decorative Things:
Life-sized plastic horse. You can see him behind the table if you zoom in. I’ve said it before, the London Canal Museum is the best place for a party. It’s got the horse AND one of the only ice wells you can look into.
Place names: Friend did the nice writing, paper cut into strips and stuck with a pin through a pink heart chocolate. Soppy but nice. With the replacement of a black jelly baby pinned through the heart for our much-loved Welsh Goth.
Confetti cones. Not to be quirky or wedding-magaziney but because I enjoyed using old wrapping paper and sheet music to make them. And our two bloke ushers looked amusing carrying them.
Orders of Service: Sister-in-law enlisted to help cut paper as above, stick on more paper with song and poem titles, stamp with special name and date stamp, thread with ribbon and shove a bit of rosemary through the ribbon. Took ages: looked lovely. Which brings me on to –
Four Things I Forgot:
Orders of Service. Left at home. My daughter tried to tell me as we got in the cab but I didn’t listen. Sigh.
Vases. Carrier bags with the little vases I’d found in charity shops over months, for flowers on the tables, left under the table with the above. The flowers looked just as good in bar glasses.
Marylebone Register Office waiting room: It is lovely. Actually, they forgot to tell me it existed so Best Friend and I went to Starbucks before and I had to tiptoe around on a ladies’ floor with rather more urine on it than is acceptable.
Sense of humour: Starbucks and the rain made me a bit hacked off for a while. Sorry, Mum and Amelia.
Four Brilliant Things:
Going through London on our own big red bus on the opening day of the Elephant Parade.
My nervous daughter reading poetry in front of loads of people.
Friends from all over and from all stages of our lives.
Family for the first and last time they’ve all been together. Four of my half siblings made it. My birth father. And all four of my and Steve’s parents.
Angel Community Garden, Tonbridge
My first guest blog post: a beautiful and inspiring bit of car park. Not something you say very often.
A guest post by writer Karen Hart
Dirty old plastic bags or lush scented herbs? The glint of broken glass or golden wallflowers? I didn’t need a second to decide when I visited the Angel Community Garden in Tonbridge yesterday.
Do take a look at that link; the Twitter feed shows how the featureless edge of a shopping centre car park has been transformed by volunteers.
Floral displays always enhance towns and cities but it’s extra special when something’s been created by the inspiration, hard work and obvious love of a community.
“It’s been enormously satisfying,” Christine Parker, from Abbey Funeral Services, said when we arrived at the car park. “My car stank of manure a friend gave us, and I ached all over when I got home, but I felt a real sense of achievement.”
Christine – in the stripy wasp top above – gave a donation toward the project and joined the yellow-clad volunteers on April 17 to help plant the site…
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