Why I hate Mother’s Day

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Yes I know it’s properly called Mothering Sunday in the UK – but that’s not the reason I loathe it.

It’s not the treacly sentimentalism and the cynicism of commerce – a lot of love is expressed through those pink sparkly bits of card and naff bouquets. Many people will share genuine affection in pub chain dining rooms – and I respect that.

It’s the assertion that mother-love is universal, a given, something natural and always to be found.

It’s not.

And when your relationship with your mother is different to this cross-cultural narrative, then the stream of tweets and posts on Facebook and the happy smiling families out to enjoy the day erode the scar tissue over your heart.

The memories of lost mums who were loving are worst. Especially if they are her age. Time is passing – soon there will be no chance to be reconciled, they say. And yet I am helpless. I cannot do anything to change this most fundamental of connections: she will not speak to me.

I’ve tried. Over twenty years I have tried. I do not know what I have done wrong – therefore I can never put it right.

Now people who come from normal families will assume I am partly to blame. Quite possibly I am. But I cannot do anything to heal a relationship with someone who never wants to see me again. You can’t say sorry to a closed door.

I gave up trying on my 50th birthday. I found out she was giving my father grief over it, so out of respect for him and sheer weariness, I stopped..

Just at this time of year stupid, callous hope flares up. I get glimpses of what it would have been like to have a normal mum. I’ve been lucky with both my mother-in-law and my husband’s step-mother. Both loving, ordinary mums – not faultless but kind and affectionate in their own individual ways.

For years, I’ve dreaded this time of year – and inevitably, like catching the inside of your mouth you’ve already bitten, as a teacher my class always did the Mother’s Day Assembly. I know and painfully love the things that normal mums do, that are truly worthy of celebration. I don’t want anyone to cancel Mother’s Day – I just wish it didn’t hurt so much.

There are many things I can thank her for. The love of reading comes first. I was safe when I read. It was an activity she approved of, and a vital means of escape. Then there’s music – a curious mixture: Mozart, Tom Lehrer,  and Hollywood Musicals. I know far too many Rodgers and Hammerstein songs still. Shared enthusiasms for the Russian Revolution, Richard III and St Francis too. There’s Scrabble and crossword puzzles, and all the time spent with various relatives which widened my experience of Yorkshire. My deep, abiding love of the sea comes from all my trips to Scarborough.

I suspect I am still trying to please her, to do well enough that she will be proud of me. I can’t stop my mind’s eye flashing up the image of her coming to  book launch or a prize or something. She never will – she wasn’t exactly known for coming to things even when I was little.

Yet still I have her to thank for being a writer. She won’t read this or even know about it – but still –

 

World Book Day special

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I had a happy surprise for World Book Day: a mysterious package arrived. Inside were a set of Writing Maps which I had won from Mslexia. They are chock full of writing prompts by Shaun Levin and quirky illustrations by Stephen Longwill. All very encouraging when I am in-between novels.

They came with a postcard featuring a detail from Write Around The House – featuring a Library (and geese). So I had to do it – though I will admit to taking a bit of a liberty.

Go-to Characters

  • Eowyn for valour and sisterhood
  • Puddleglum for loyalty and gloomy humour
  • Nanny Ogg for honesty and bawdiness

Guided Tours

  • Venice with Salley Vickers, Donna Leon & Michelle Lovric
  • Caverna with Frances Hardinge – though Cheesemaster Grandible’s tunnels might be too much for me
  • London with Tom Pollock – I want to see railwraiths and light-veined lamp nymphs – although the glass spiders would give me the chills

Wannadoes

So how about you – what would your library prompt?

Stocktaking

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So here I am, fifty nine days into the New Year, heading for another Chi-SCBWI meeting tonight and thinking it’s time for taking stock.

Things I am pleased about:

  • I have written at least something everyday this year so far
  • Write Now/Macmillan wanted to see the rest of ‘Georgiana & the Municipal Moon’ even if they didn’t take it further
  • I shall be doing a workshop on ‘Georgiana & the Municipal Moon’ with Imogen Cooper soon
  • Anne Clark is interested in ‘Georgiana & the Municipal Moon’ when it has been revisited
  • Mslexia short-listed ‘The Selkies of Scoresby Nab’ – although I didn’t win I shall be doing a pitching workshop in Newcastle and a meet-the-professionals event in London in June
  • Times/Chicken House at least long-listed ‘The Selkies of Scoresby Nab’
  • one of my reviews appeared in The Bookseller (via Serendipity Reviews)
 Things I have given a go:
  • PEN/Arvon competition
  • submission of Miscellanea piece to Eggplant Productions
  • fairytale retelling The Bird with Feathers of Gold sent to Untold Press
  • a workshop proposal to David Almond for Bath Festival of Children’s Literature
  • submission to Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan (Selkies)
  • entered Adventures in Fiction competition with The Wedding Ghost
Things I intend to do
  • send a short story in for Mslexia Short Story Prize
  • keep posting here every Thursday
  • keep posting on The Wedding Ghost blog every Tuesday
  • keep curating www.seamagic.org
  • keep writing and reading and reviewing
  • keep my chin up!

 

My Fountain Overflows

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…with apologies to Rebecca West’s many admirers.

I could précis Ali Sparkes’ talk. I took enough notes, for goodness’ sake, but I’d advise you go listen to her yourself. Nothing beats coming up close and personal with a ‘real author’.

Best Boots in Show – Hay on Wye

But I will pick up on a few points. Her story as a writer included ‘a stack of the loveliest rejections’. What mad profession is it that we value the ‘unfortunately...’ responses?  I hope and trust that it is because our driving force is always to write better stories – and that rejections with a hint of encouragement egg us on to try harder.

Ali was nothing if not realistic. Her recount made us well aware how hard she has worked for her success – brain-frazzlingly hard at times.Yet her liveliness and engagement with her work meant this was not off-putting, more reassuring. The same goes when I see my published colleagues’ amazing spread of work.

There were far more of my friends’ books – but I am a rubbish photographer. This is the only vaguely decent snap.

Not only was she rather purple – she was practical. Here are few of the tips I picked up on:

  • self-edit as you go
  • if you’re lucky, you’ll make a living – just
  • hit deadlines
  • do not throw a hissy fit – ever
  • read your work aloud
  • allow plenty of time for marketing
  • consider a professional editor
  • don’t underestimate the time and effort involved in self-publishing
  • fake it !

Not actually from our event – but you get the idea.

Plenty of food for thought – and plenty of food for the tummy too

Now my main purpose in going to this event was to ‘refill my well’. A couple of disappointments had left me feeling less than passionately motivated about my own work. I try to find something inspiring at least once a month to keep me going. Oh, did I get a bumper topping-up at The Fountain.

Not only did I see my  lovely Scoobie chums – but they waxed lyrical about books they had brought to swap. Few things give me more of a boost than the love of readers for books – and the sheer joyous diversity of literature. It helps me believe there could be a curious little corner for my kind of history-with-magical-realism told in a distinctly Northern voice.

What a fascinating list:

  • Things my mother never told me – Blake Morrison
  • Private Peaceful – Michael Morpurgo
  • Trash – Andy Mulligan
  • Paranormalcy – Kiersten White
  • Midnight is a Place – Joan Aiken
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
  • Double Shadow – Sally Gardner
  • The Knife of Never Letting Go – Patrick Ness
  • Once – Maurice Gleitzman
  • Room – Emma Donoghue
  • Framed! -Frank Cottrelll Boyce
  • The Animals of Farthing Wood – Colin Dann
  • Sky Hawk – Gill Lewis
  • The Girl who fell Beneath Fairyland and led the Revels there – Catherynne M. Valente

So in short I’m full to the brim – thanks Ali, Kathryn, Mariam,  Zella, Denyse, Julie, Penny, Jill, Jane, Jan, Jeanette, and Colin from Hayling Island Bookshop.

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Bubbling up

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Tonight, Thursday 7th February 2013, Chi-SCBWI is having its first public event -organised by the lovely Kathryn Evans & Mariam Vossough . I’m really looking forward to it.

I love books.

The theme is the romance of books – originally conceived as a retort to that over-commercialised festival later on this month. Certainly, all the people I know that are attending do love books in whatever form they are presented.

We are holding the event in The Fountain. This old inn dating from 1798 in Chichester’s Southgate has a suitable pedigree for all things literary. There are ghosts – a Roman soldier (to go with the bits of Roman wall inside), and a man and his dog.

I wonder if they will like our bookish chatter?

The inn was once kept by George and Sarah Neal – the grandparents of H.G.Wells (his mother was in service at Uppark not so very far away). In my researches for Georgiana and the Municipal Moon  – the city of Selchester not being entirely unlike Chichester – I found The Fountain was originally run by one Lucy Ladkin. Further nosiness led me to discover she lived till at least 83 in retirement at Fishbourne. Glorious.

He looks like a jolly soul.

Who knows what further literary triumphs will spring up from this event?

If nothing else it should be fun, as we are having the lovely Ali Sparkes to talk to us, we are swapping books we love (so tricky to choose!) and eating cake.

Ali with her old biology teacher and a blow-up turtle. As you do.

I may even partake of a little Tanglefoot as the bus is my taxi.

Now there’s a source of inspiration!

There may be to follow…

 

The Tenth Muse

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I am not referring like Plato to Sappho, or Ann Bradstreet – The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America as she was called in the first volume of American poetry, but Chance.

According to the Greeks, the Muses were inspirational beings:

  • Clio, history,
  • Calliope, epic poetry,
  • Euterpe, music,
  • Melpomene, tragedy,
  • Polymnia, sacred song,
  • Terpsichore, choral song and dance.
  • Thalia, bucolic poetry,
  • Urania, astronomy,
  • Erato, erotic poetry
I cribbed this list from Sheila Finnigan’s The Last Of the Muses

Wonderful names and a surprising set of disciplines you need inspiration for. I do have a soft spot for female embodiments of concepts. The thought that ideas can be beautiful and feminine seems both true and powerful.

Though why not male Muses? Perhaps they would be like the daemons in Philip Pullman’s The Northern Lights – the opposite gender to the person they enthused?  I wonder what other Muses there might be nowadays.

Chance is the Tenth Muse

Sadly I don’t recall who said that. I think it is a translation – probably Spanish and possibly a Surrealist. I think it was at West Dean that I heard it.

At any rate, for me there is a great dollop of truth in there. Not just that things come together in curious, unexpected ways – but that you must listen to the inner voice telling you so. Now it’s up to to you whether that spirit, anima, genius is a concept or a reality – but whatever your view, tuning into that moment of serendipity is essential for all creators.  As Horace Walpole, originator of the word ‘serendipity’ asserted, an individual needs to be sagacious enough to link together apparently unrelated facts to make a valuable conclusion – whilst in pursuit of something else.

Our current world has so many possibilities for making strange, unexpected and wonderful links between things – and so much distracting us all from doing so.

Just occasionally,I am sufficiently ‘relaxed yet alert’ (David Almond’s phrase) to allow such connections to take place. My writing benefits enormously. But I do have to be on my way, but not anxious and blinkered.

How about you, dear reader? Does the Tenth Muse visit you? Do you discover accidental inspiration on your route to something else?

I’d love to know.

 

The cave you fear…

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…holds the treasure you seek. (Joseph Campbell)

People ask me why I choose to write for younger readers. Apart for the wonderful freedom on offer, (which I have posted about here) there is also the company of fellow children’s writers.

I belong to SCBWI-BI. The lovely Kathy Evans talks about reasons to join here. I would add more to her celebratory post. It’s warm-hearted people like all of Chi-SCBWI, and Candy Gourlay and Nick Cross and Nicky Schmidt and…and…and…far too many to mention that I need.

Some of the stuff I do frightens me.

I’m going into parts of my self that are dark and hidden and oppressive.

I really appreciate my support team standing at the surface, cracking jokes, willing me to come back safely, egging me on to go further. All the messages about my recent successes have astonished and delighted me.( A bit of a sugar rush, to be honest.) It may well be that other writers are equally close-knit – but I know I can rely on this lot.

Thank you fellow children’s  writers- and I promise to hold the rope while you go exploring.

 

 

 

Away with the Fairies

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On Saturday 12th January, I went to the launch of the Golden Egg Academy in Bath. I expected that I would meet at least a couple of people I knew – and I could now tell them about my latest success. I had known since before Christmas that The Selkies of Scoresby Nab had been long-listed for the Times/Chicken House Competition. You would think I’d be bursting to tell anyone and everyone – but I felt oddly reticent. Shy even.

I found myself lost deep in La-la land: talking with the Barry Cunningham, finding that Beverley Birch had read a  previous blogpost and remembered it, welcomed by Imogen Cooper as an equal. I had slid into a world of my imagination.

But in my daydreams, it had been easy, I had confidence – not this edgy feeling I have now. I feel I’m tiptoeing on the borders of Fairyland, nervous and full of hope and fear.

Joanne Harris by kind permission of Kyte Photography

I’ve had lovely little glimpses and excursions: a workshop with the much-admired David Almond; twitter conversations with the wonderfully accessible Joanne Harris; and even Susan Hill. There was astonishing interview with Greg Mosse on the MA at West Dean where for a moment he helped me soar, to feel like a proper writer.

But I’m scared. I’m frightened to succeed.

I’ve grown accustomed to being second-rate, an also-ran. Grade B ‘O’ & ‘A’levels, a II:I English degree at Loughborough, not Oxford, a minor teaching post. It’s all been quite comfortable – and I bitterly resent it. It’s also painfully true that I envied Susie Wilde her well-deserved First in her MA at West Dean.

There are times I really don’t like myself.

I wonder, am I bringing my own danger into the Perilous Realm? I really don’t mean to be smug or condescending or self-satisfied – but I hear those thin, superior voices in my head. They distract me from paying proper attention, they tell me I know that or this already.

On one hand, I am so wary of pride that I find it hard to rejoice.On the other, I so desire recognition from authors I wish were my peers that I fear I must be insufferable. I look to see who has congratulated me far too often – yet I am genuinely moved when anybody does wish me well.

Am I hunting for fairy gold?

 

Writers are not rivals…

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…or why I continue to review other people’s books.

I found Jane Friedman’s piece: How Long Should You Keep Trying to Get Published?   convincing and useful. As you do, I read other articles on Writing on the Ether and came across this one written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson:

Amazon Reviews: Damned If It Does and…

I put up with the annoying adverts and read it. I thought about what he said a lot:

Maybe it’s because many authors are only now beginning to grapple with the realities of a business world.

That struck home. And:

And vendors — in this case, authors — can never be seen as unbiased and fair if they’re evaluating and holding forth on each other’s work.

But then I thought longer.

I thought of the lovely Maeve Binchy . She saw us writers as all putting another stone on the cairn, building up our collective work.

We are not rivals – we’re fellow workers.

I am comfortable reviewing Candy Gourlay’s work because I will never write like her. People looking for work like hers won’t switch to mine no matter what I said.

And it wouldn’t even matter if I comment on someone sort-of similar, Frances Hardinge say. She will probably produce a book a year – and so will I. Fans of either us will read more than one book a year I think – so they might like both. No conflict of interest – real or perceived – in my view.

Another way of looking at this: I want a knee surgeon to comment on the effectiveness of a recent  eye operation. I’m more than happy for the owner of a fish-and-chip shop to give her evaluation of Jamie Oliver’s 15. Especially if they tell me what they do as part of that review.

It’s what Joanne Harris said – we know what we’re talking about. You can chat to Joanne on Twitter – and I do – and there is no agenda. She has no need or wish to hide, dissimulate or do anyone else’s writing down.

Of course, I was shocked and saddened by the sock-puppetry scandal. I wrote about this and Roger Ellory in a previous article. It genuinely made me cry. But it’s like No Cycling signs: the beggars who are going to knock old ladies over will ignore the signs – and the ones that obey would take care anyway.

On a more philosophical note, I have another objection to his stand –

Politicians, the smart ones, learn to do all they can to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, even if they have no such actual conflict.

I hate the concept  ‘seen to be doing the right thing’. Just do the right thing.

Concern about appearances leads to tick box sheets and checking up on them – not the thing itself. It’s how we get nurses so busy filling in forms they haven’t time to care. It’s how we get teachers so busy planning by day, week and term they are too tired to respond and adapt to changing circumstances – and marked down if they do.

That would be why you’d get mealy-mouthed comments – more concerned with appearance than honesty.

So I stand by my reviews.

I will continue to do the right thing.

 

 

Snow simplifies

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I’ve been visiting Art Galleries a great deal this last year- a pursuit I intend to keep up in 2013. One of the things I do there is to observe which works have an emotional appeal for me. I try, as best I can, to get over whether I ‘ought’ to like something or not,  and go for the immediate heartfelt response. Recently, I have noticed I am drawn to winter landscapes.

Winter in the Ryburn Valley by J.W.Saltonstall (The Hepworth Wakefield)

I believe it is the plainness: the almost abstract simplification of the landscape down to its bare bones. There is not much in the way of colour to distract, and the purity of line comes through powerfully. The artworks I love manage to convey a precise place and mood  through very little.

The Downs in Winter by Eric Ravilious1934

I like to believe it’s the Northernness in my soul that swells up when I see a broad expanse of pale moorland, that some flicker of Viking inheritance glows when I feel the thrill of the bleak and the bare. Truth told, I don’t want to be out there for too long – but I do love walking by the winter sea or in breezy leafless woods.

Dawns a new day by Ashley Jackson

And I aspire for my writing to reflect that. Not just my love of such things – but for the stories to be strong and bold enough that they don’t need prettiness.

Winter Landscape by Stephen Neal

It’s ambitious – I am all too much of a magpie, easily seduced by the sparkly and the curious. But it’s wise to dream. To see, at least in my mind’s eye, a perfect sparse and bold image.

Starlight Landscape by Edward Stott

Which season does your writing favour? They all have their magic.