IWSG – May.

Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to pursue literature a woman needed finances and a room of her own.  Not that I have presumptions towards literature, but feelings of self-righteousness on behalf of Jane Austen, who is reported to have hidden her WIP under letters whenever callers came into the drawing-room, sometimes plague me.  There is another example of injustice regarding a female literary icon who could only write at her father’s desk when, of course, her was not using it.  I know this because it’s in one of my books The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. However this book is in storage. It has been for the last six months.  Also in storage is Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde and an invaluable, if somewhat cumbersome tome on Regency fashions, furniture and architecture.

Why, may you ask have I banished such dear friends to a container?  Well, they were only supposed to be in there for two months.  My boyfriend and I moved out of our damp ridden flat and into his father’s house on the presumption that now we could afford to buy a place we’d only be there until just after Christmas.  Six month’s later the seller’s solicitors are moving at the speed of slime and I’m getting increasingly twitchy because I can’t remember what an Oriental neck cloth looks like.

Add to this the fact that I am living in the bedroom my boyfriend grew up in, the room that is full of all the paraphernalia he has accumulated throughout teenager hood. My stuff, the bits fortunate enough to escape storage, are crammed in the bed side cabinet or in bags between the bed and the radiator.  It is his room, his father’s house and despite reminding myself daily that there are worse domestic situations to be in, claustrophobia has set in.  I always thought I could write anywhere; surely location doesn’t matter because all I needed is my lap top and my imagination.  Writing is my salvation, my down time and what makes me happy, surely it shouldn’t be bound by something so menial as the fact the only desk available is the domain of a large wooden lion, a clutter of toiletries and, dear god, a mirror which means I am constantly making eye contact with myself and getting drawn into conversations regarding how best to use a semi-colon. Suffice to say I now keep a sheet handy.

I have never believed Virginia Woolf more than I do so now.  However I’m finding the it’s the head space that automatically goes with the physical space that I miss the most.  It’s very hard to set boundaries in a house where two people are used to living together, and have their own set routine for doing things.  It’s very hard to keep the bedroom light on past ten at night when your boyfriend needs to go to sleep after being knackered out after a London commute, but it is equally hard to go downstairs and focus in the living room with the TV blaring.  It’s really hard to carve out a chink of time and space that is mine, free from other obligations and processes that I feel I have no control over because, despite the fact it has been six months, I am still a guest.

So, I stay late at work and write there.  I charge up my lap top and take it down to the library at weekends.  I steal fragments of time before my boyfriend and his father get home from work and hope that they don’t notice that it’s at the expense of the washing up or the fact that when it’s my turn to cook pasta is always on the menu.  I cry, a bit, sometimes a lot. And I hope that they don’t notice that either.  The important thing is that I am still writing, albeit in desperate fragmented chunks. . Hopefully, next month, I’ll start putting them back together.

In the mean time I’m happy, and a little bit afraid, that I finally made it this month.  Check out The Insecure Writer’s Support Group at http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-insecure-writers-support-group.html.  I’m over there now to check that I’m actually still on the list.

Round of Words 80 check in

Wow, first and only check in for two weeks.  Haven’t written as much as I expected to of my WIP, but I have been doing an awful lot of research.  As a result I’m planning a day trip to London with my camera and my 1813 A to Z so I can scout out locations.

Although I’m not making head way in the areas I expected hope can be found in the fact that I still have the whole of March to reach my target. NaNo has proved that I can write a novel in a month so keep your fingers crossed for me.

IWSG February

Not much has been happening on this blog for the last two weeks.  It would be nice to say that without the updating I’d be doing more actual work on my WIP, but that’s not as true as I would like it to be.  I have been much less frantic though. Therefore although not much actual writing has got done more of my brain space has been available for untangling plot problems and the like.

My insecurity this month has been about this blog.  Lots of seasoned bloggers out there say that the way to success is to update religiously three times a week.  I’m starting to think that this may all be very well if a book is actually written, but that in my case constantly striving to update a blog is eating in to time that would be better spent on something else.

Of course, if I’m not updating keenly all the time does that mean I’ll start losing the precious handful of followers that I have? Hopefully not. I’d like to think that not constantly updating because I feel I must will lead to posts with better, less rushed content.  Plus, some of that extra time is going to put into reading other people’s blogs.  I’d like to have time to properly sit down and read Bel Anderson’s Sunday Snog and to read some of the stories at Loonyliterature.  Both of which I have been intending to do for ages.

This is what I’m hoping. But I’m still feeling a bit insecure about the irregular posting.

For more information on the IWSG head over to Alex J. Cavanaugh’s blog and share the love.

How is everyone else this month?

 

 

 

 

RoW80 Sunday Check in 20.1.13

Can’t stay for long as my revisions have taken a new turn.  One of my problems has always been too many characters and an overly complicated plot.  This week I have had the brain wave of merging a couple of characters and changing the relationship between a few of them.

This makes everything much more sensible, exciting and streamlined. It also means I’m practically back at square one in terms of revisions again so have more to do. I don’t mind though. It’s fun.

Saturday also saw my short story posted on SFF online so now that’s out of the way I can stop thinking about it.

Hope everyone else is still on top of things.

Epiphany #2

Last Friday one of my co workers left our company for bigger and brighter things. As is customary his line manager gave a sterling speech regarding his accomplishments and achievements during the time he spent with us.  It made me feel woefully inadequate until I started a fantasy about what I’d like said at my leaving do.  “Debbie is leaving us so she can spend the disgustingly large advance she has just been paid before going on a world-wide book signing tour.”  I did say it was a fantasy.  But this fantasy did make me reassess how I feel about both my work and my writing.

I do want to be as good at my job as I can be.  However, in the past few years I have tried a number of projects, department changes and re-training prospects all of which have fallen flat because my heart hasn’t really been in it. That’s because all these aspirations require the finances and time that I’d rather spend on my writing. This may mean that I am consigning myself to slowly ambling up the career ladder while simultaneously reaching for something else that is never going to happen, but that doesn’t matter.  I only get one life and I would rather spend it writing. Writing makes me happy.

Next Friday I will stop being self-indulgent, but until then share your writing epiphanies below.  How do you all feel about your day jobs? Or are you one of those hallowed few who has writing as your day job?

 

Word of the Week – Competence and ROW80 update

‘Money can only give happiness  where there is nothing else to give it.  Beyond a competence it can afford no real satisfaction as far as self is concerned. ‘

Sense and Sensibility.

Here a competence means enough money.  I discovered this by reading What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan.  The chapter on money has been really useful in giving another dimension to one of my opera cape twirling bad guys.

He’s a younger son living of half army pay.  He needs to get money through marriage. Until he secures himself a rich bride, gambling is the principle way he supplements his income.

This realisation helped give him a goal as he’s been bought up in wealth and now forced to try and make his own way in a world where respectable methods of earning money or making name for himself are drastically limited.  Of course he is still self-interested, rather too fond of his own reflection and deluded about his own worth, but I know what truly makes him tick much better now. Essentially he’s a pretty, delicate, incredibly useless piece of decoration and he finds that frustrating.

I’ve also managed to finish the short story I mentioned on Sunday, so no more excuses for avoiding what I should be writing.

How’s everyone else doing?

 

 

 

 

 

ROW80 – Sunday check in

I’m still hanging in there and have overcome some significant milestones.  These are;

• One of the opening scenes in an assembly room where far too much happens and too many characters are introduced. (I cut stuff. Simple solution but I’ve never before had the gumption to really focus on what the scene needs to be and what absolutely has to stay and what needs to go)
• My bad guys are two dimensional opera cape wearing fiends. (I’ve spent some quality time with them and done more research. One will get a mention in the Wednesday update/Word of the Week post on 16^th January)
• I tend to gloss over earlier scenes that I don’t want to write because my back plot isn’t suitably thought out. (I’ve sorted out my black plot and made everything much simpler. Hopefully this will stand up with time)

I’m also going to amend my goals slightly. Revisions will still be done by the 28^th March but I’m also going to state how I’m going to do this as it makes the success of the goal more measurable.

• I’m going to write some of ‘my book’ everyday
•  I’m not going to get distracted by other projects (with the exception of my short story Little People which needs to be revised and on SFF online by the end of January. I’m hoping that can all be done this Tuesday)