Glazed over

A few more layers on one of my abstracts yesterday. There will be several more layers of colour in little lines then some unifying glazes over the top, on each stripe, to get the effect I want. The advantage of the very hot weather of the last couple of days is that even the very high oil content glazes I was using on the other painting are drying much faster than usual.

I've also edited another couple of chapters of the novel, but was hit with another face full of paperwork in my inbox this morning - forms to fill in for starting training this September, most of the questions asking me for information I don't even have yet. I am trying not to let this stress me out in the slightest - back in my consultancy days I generally had not just a Plan B, but Plans C, D and E for my next move. Life is not like that any more.

So what, neither has Shakespeare

So I haven’t written much lately. (title from a postcard that all foreign visitors to London with any literary pretensions are statutorily required to purchase – ask my ex).

I’ve done a bit of editing on “The Rural Nietzsche Experiment,” but only a bit. My spiritual director suggested that I write something about one of my soon-to-be-ex churches, so I have done some of that. I might publish some of it on here, suitably anonymised. The church in question partakes of many of the classic annoyances when a bunch of variously reconstructed people get together and try and get all holy – this might be interesting and instructive to me in future years, and then again it might not. All unhappy families being different in their own ways, and all that.

It’s also an inexorable law of blogging that sooner or later you have to describe what you had for lunch, so I’ll just mention that I have developed a thing for cucumber sandwiches lately. What can it possibly mean?!

NaNoWriMo 2010

I've signed up for my third year of the madness.

Go to nanowrimo.org to follow suit.

Still Writing

Also still painting, still coding... it's been a weird few months, but my creativity seems to be more full-on than ever.

I'm currently nearing the end of the second edit of my NaNo novel*, and find my output is very variable - in quality and quantity. I've reorganised a lot of the content and I am fleshing out some very sparse scenes. My current worry is that my dialogue is really clunky, so I guess I'll have to find some novels in similar genres where conversations come across better and try and figure out what I might be doing wrong.

I'm travelling a fair bit at the moment, not for fun, and at least writing can be taken with me in a way large paintings can't.

*I finished my first draft on 30th November at 120 000 words, with some scenes mere outlines, but I did it - made it to the end of my story, and reached my word target. I didn't mean to stop blogging through the process itself, nor afterwards, but that seems to be what happened.

NaNo mid-month report

NaNoWriMo has been going well - I passed the 50K threshold last week, on 11th November, and 75K yesterday. I've gone down with a bad cold, which I am blaming for the deathless prose with which I ended a marathon typing session on Sunday night: "It was very involving and she felt very involved." You read it here first. In fact, you won't read it anywhere else as I fixed it the next morning.

My story is much more tightly plotted than last year's, and being set in contemporary Britain there is less scope for vague hand-waving about society, technology, or other potential setting problems. I have been pleased to discover that my characters can still turn around and surprise me by wandering off where I least expect it, meeting new people, and having ideas of their own.

One of the people I have persuaded to sign up is going great guns and appears to be enjoying the experience, finding it freeing and fun. It has been awesome, I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in exploring their creativity or freeing up their writing.

Nearly NaNo

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight tomorrow. I'm ready (extra stocks of tea laid on, plot points, character profiles, imagery and random incidents to sprinkle in as necessary) and excited!

I'm also working on a small panel painting, a Madonna and Child, where I've reinterpreted the traditional imagery by having a newborn baby rather than the typical toddler. Drying times being what they are(n't) at this time of year, I'm getting an hour or so done and then having to wait a day or two. Given that I want to reproduce this as a Christmas card, and the craft fair season is almost upon us, I wish it would hurry up. Having thousands of words a day to write should distract me from watching paint dry, anyway.

Novel finished

Last week I finished the novel I have been working on here and there since March 2008, taking several months off at a time to take fiction courses and do other things. This is a first draft, and finally weighed in at 164K words, so clearly a lot more than it's likely to be if it's ever tidied up and re-drafted. (It is only a third of the length of War and Peace, but then War and Peace is better written.)

It was a bit of a surprise - I wrote the ending of the main plot, knowing I had a couple of sub-plots to tie up, but then went back and finished those on the same day as I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. I've mostly celebrated by telling people IRL.

A bit of an anticlimax followed - I took a few days off writing, partly because a massive art project was coming to completion too, then carried on with my research for NaNo. I am now ready for the NaNo writing to start, but in a way apprehensive - it feels like so much more is at stake now that I have finished two novels and been taught The Official Proper Way to Write, and what if I fall on my face? Reminding myself it's supposed to be fun sometimes works for this one.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 09 - drawings

(If you don't know what this NaNo thing is, and you want to, click on the strange machine in the sidebar.)

I'm getting ready for November. Since I have been drawing more recently, as well as writing, I have some sketches towards my "book cover" - NaNo allows participants to upload information about their proposed fiction, including an image.

My story is going to involve someone who already grows fruit and vegetables getting back into painting and drawing despite not having done any for years, so as part of the cover image, I will be using an apple pie and drawing of apples.

The apples are James Grieves and came from a friend's orchard. They are a delicious apple variety which can be eaten raw or cooked, but they are not available in supermarkets as they bruise too easily during transport.




The drawing is approx A2 size in conte crayon. They are also an interesting apple to draw as their skin varies from very plain yellow-green to highly coloured with red and orange blushes and stripes.



The full cover image has a working title - it's a satire on the happily-ever-after Aga (TM) saga, hence the general theme of "That which does not kill you can really scratch the enamel on your Aga." The image is one more hook on which to hang your preparatory ideas, alongside plot plans, character sketches (words or pictures) and other design material.

Writing fiction again

I came across a batch of writing I'd abandoned months ago - the first piece I started writing last year, which was about two-thirds novel length when I put it aside to do NaNoWriMo and the OU writing course. I was thinking I really ought to get around to continuing, some time, especially as I hadn't written much else since the OU course finished in May. That night, I got a set of ideas for NaNo '09 (whilst I was trying to get some sleep before it got light outside again, naturally..) so the next day I started a set of notes for those and then picked up the first novel again.

It's part of my series on a post-ecological collapse dystopia. This story takes place many hundred years in the future, and a couple of hundred years after the civil war that formed my NaNo '08 novel. My plan at the moment is to write all these pieces, probably a trilogy but maybe four of them, in first draft, and then edit the first one. Which is really either the second one, because I started it second, or the third, because I only have ten thousand words for it so far and it will be finished third.

As part of the OU course, I had to write a very short item in a factual style, and then again from the point of view of one of the protagonists. The incident I made up was a fatal car crash. My NaNo idea is to take this as a starting point of a novel narrated by the man who was at home when his wife died in the car. One of its themes will be the reality of country living versus the Sunday supplements or the Aga saga romantic novel treatment. I grew up in the country myself, and have a very jaded view of it because of some major incidents (think Cold Comfort Farm but not played for laughs).

I now have a mixture of plot outline, character notes and so on for NaNo, which is plenty for this time of year, especially considering that this time last year I hadn't even heard of NaNo. I am designing a book cover image - just for fun, as an exercise in imagery, and because they can be uploaded to your book notes in your NaNo profile. A friend gave me some home-grown apples, which I needed for an image - the narrator will be making watercolour sketches of them in a notebook, so I was going to do that myself. She very kindly left some of the leaves and twigs on. I also made an apple pie with some of the extra ones, being a bit busy today with conte pastel drawings of sunflowers and plums to do the apples as well.

Writing inventory

Yesterday I received a preliminary notification of my grade from the OU writing course, subject to possible moderation later. I passed! That and the end of the Great Greek Slog prompted me to check out all the various bytes lurking in different directories on my desktop and laptop. It turns out I have one complete novel first draft, one two-thirds completed, and another with 8000 words written. These are supposed to form a trilogy and the least complete one is chronologically first. I also have three other items of several thousand words each, none of which have a complete outline, nor have they declared to me whether they are going to be short stories or novels - like a lot of my writing, they started life as single ideas or even images and I have expanded them a bit but not given them much structure as yet.

My short story for the OU has the potential to be a novel when it grows up, too, according to the tutor. There are also a ton of little ideas from my courses, and a few from conversations with my writer guest last week. I am not sure which I shall work on next - but I think it might be an idea to pick ONE and structure it a bit, towards the goal of actually finishing something for once.

Having said that, I was writing another piece for the first novel of the trilogy in a cafe today. I haven't touched that story in months, but this place was somewhere my main character would go so I started describing it and took it from there. I went to church today without my Greek New Testament (I am taking a few days off from that) and had an afternoon of cafe-writing and gallery-hopping instead of going to the library with a ton of textbooks, which had been my usual Wednesday afternoon practice for a couple of months.

Backed up with paperwork (the writing course finishes)

Late last night I submitted my second and final assignment for the OU course. This was a 1500-word story and an accompanying explanation - we were supposed to explain why we chose the narration method we did, ditto the tenses used, the place where we began, etc. For the story we had a list of words to pick from as inspiration, ranging from the more abstract to concrete stuff like "hair" or "prison". I used "abandonment" and "music" for my jumping-off points, writing a story about a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and then adopted into a family which was surprised by her musical talent. 

I found writing the explanatory text somewhat clunky. I knew exactly how I wanted to write my piece, so although I dutifully tried out a few alternatives in the way of tense and narration, this exercise pointed up how inferior they were. 

I was reminded of an art talk I attended a couple of months ago. The speaker was talking of her own very intuitive way of working, and one of the many fine arts undergraduates in the audience bemoaned the fact that her college insisted on tons of supporting documentation for any piece. It was not enough to plan and execute a painting/sculpture/installation, nor just to log what you did and keep early sketches, you also had to have a cogent game plan for how you had planned your work and what you hoped to achieve, and had to write this up formally. 

OK, to some extent, this is going to stop someone sitting in front of a tableau of roses/ elephant dung and just doing the same-old same-old term after term, but on the other hand, too much bureaucracy and paperwork seems to be deadening pretty much every area of life. The visual arts are likely to be full of people who communicate better with imagery than words, all of whom are required to submit long written reports. I think Edward Hopper had something to say about this, "If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint." 

If we are hearing complaints from so many areas of life about paperwork - as well as the ever-present statements of teachers, I have heard priests complain about management jargon working its way into the church, and I have experienced wildly excessive performance review procedures at a lot of large companies - probably something is up. Some areas cannot be measured purely on obviously quantifiable criteria, and when we try to use something measurable as a shorthand people will soon start to game the system. (NHS waiting times, anyone?) Then we react by changing the measure, probably by adding new stuff and increasing the admin burden, rather than replacement. Finally we wonder why our artists, scientists, technologists and engineers don't seem as "creative" as they used to be, and our public sector projects have massive overspends and overruns in spite of all the measurements taken. 

"Creative" vs "innovative" is a whole other can of worms - people attempting to excuse bad behaviour by explaining the person is "creative", for one thing. I am wondering, though, if there is really a type of person who simply cannot fit into corporate bureaucracies, and if such people aren't vital (in both senses). I read an interesting book last summer on Managing Creative People set in the ad industry, but with some useful things to say for other areas.

new draft and the fragility of the writing impulse

OK, that maybe came out a bit more pretentious than I meant... today I managed to redraft my final assignment for the OU, due in next week. That was my first bit of writing in a couple of weeks. Writing seems to happen in blocks for me: a fertile time, then a period where I don't consciously think of myself as "blocked" but do other things. In some of the fertile times I can write thousands of words every day for weeks on end, even if I have other things like A Job to do. Then it can stop. And stay stopped.

Painting, on the other hand, is very much a struggle against almost always feeling blocked and unworthy and rubbish and too tired and ... yet at the moment I am successfully making myself draw every week or so, which sounds like nothing but is a big improvement on much of the time I was working for Big Corporation Plc.

This last period of not-writing coincided with the assignments not being that inspiring to me, and with a surge of revision for Greek.

writing hiatus

I haven't managed to engage much with the final block of the OU course. Several reasons:

• lots of the exercises seem to be about writing and re-writing, and re-writing, the beginning of the piece required for the final assignment - I have this aversion to hacking away at it for weeks on end, wanting to keep it fresh.
• I'm busy with other stuff, most notably revising for the Greek exam - and some of the newer tenses and participles (Greek has a LOT of these!) are beginning to look familiar
• it's a bit quiet on the online forum - there's an obvious solution to that involving ME posting more stuff: pieces of my own, responding to feedback requests, etc.

I am starting to notice more about novel construction when I am reading, though. Then again, maybe that is making me feel less confident about ever being as good as the average novelist.
Hmm..

Reading for comprehension

-- a ubiquitous insult on the web if someone thinks their crystal clear point is being misinterpreted by an opponent, which reminds me that I tend to read ultra-fast for "story" rather than to slow down and savour prose, or figure out how a writer is achieving their effects, including making me want to find out what happens. These days, I am reading a lot less fiction, and writing a lot more. I think what I need to do next is to spend more time figuring out these effects and constructions so that I can learn from them.

I took about ten days off writing - completely: OU activities and journals and everything prose-related - after handing in the first assignment. I've just re-started, and raced through a couple of weeks' worth of activities in a few days. The course so far: a little disappointing in its interactive component, in that very few of the people on the course list seem to participate at all in the online discussions (which are a bulletin board format, so can be accessed at any time).

I've learned a fair bit already and some of the suggestions trigger ideas immediately, others not so. I am lucky in that the second assignment is one piece of continuous prose, which suits those of us whose shopping lists tend to be longer than the OU standard word limit for single questions. The assignment is essentially to respond to a list of words - concrete items like "a comb" and abstract nouns like "abandonment". I read through the list, thought, "Hmm," went to bed, and couldn't sleep. About 3am I gave up and started writing about the ideas I had.

Abandonment, unlike the previous "child on a city street" assignment, gives me a lot to work with. I am choosing to write in the persona of a woman abandoned as a baby in the classical dramatic circumstances, on the steps of a city centre church. Although her subsequent adoption has gone well, she wonders about all the things most children take for granted: roots, looking like your parents, where her musical talent has come from.

Talking of churches, I was out photographing and drawing one midweek, for its website. The drawings were quite light pencil, and won't work online - they were for ideas and possible use elsewhere. The photos were designed to give me a set of background and incidental images to work with.



I am also learning Greek at the moment, and have an exam in a few weeks. If past history is anything to go by, I shall probably get increasingly nervous about it.

This is not with the OU, it's a real life evening class, and a very good one. We have been studying for nearly two terms. I did some Latin at school, and I've learned Spanish as an adult, so I am not completely new to the idea of complicated grammar. I also keep hearing that Greek is supposedly easier than Latin (not sure why?) and also that this form of Greek, Koine or New Testament Greek, is the easiest there is. There still seems to be rather a lot of it to take in.

On the plus side, although there are five or six thousand different words in the New Testament, ninety percent of the actual occurrences are of a much smaller core of six hundred words, so a lot of modern textbooks concentrate on making sure you are familiar with those.

Doing this has already proved illuminating. Greek, for example, has several different ways of giving an order or suggestion, all of which tend to get flattened into one form of imperative in English, as it can be hard to get across all the nuances in translation.

First deadline

I have handed in my first OU assignment. I have to say I absolutely hated the first question - which involved writing in the voice of a child. I don't have children, or nieces or nephews in this country, or friends with small children. I've never taught children or worked with them. I grew up as the only child in a house in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the nearest other child, and I didn't exactly get to be a child much myself. All in all, writing as a child is not exactly the most obvious assignment for me.

When I was a child, I read voraciously (still do). That was one of the things that got me through being on my own, but it also meant I lived through books rather than real experience some of the time.

On the weekend writing course, a lot of people said they had 'always' written. Looking back on it, I guess that is true of me too, but I hadn't really thought about it that way. I wrote stories as a kid, and started a journal when I was about fifteen. That had to be kept hidden from family, and later partners, and for most of my twenties and thirties that was all I wrote. I would occasionally get an idea for a short story, and write it out longhand on file paper over a few days, then that would be it for a couple of years. It took several years of doing morning pages, on and off, before I started finding myself writing fiction.

First assignment

I am battling with my first eTMA for the OU course (electronic Tutor Marked Assignment in OU-speak). Yesterday I struggled valiantly with it by reading two novels completely unrelated to my chosen subject matter in one day instead of getting on with any writing as such. Today I opened up the files to find much what I expected - I have three five-hundred word pieces to write, and I already had a draft of the first one and nothing but ideas for the other two. I now have a painfully short draft for the second and too much for the third, but at least there is something there which I can build on.

Recently, writing has been coming quite naturally, but my only ideas have been for pieces of my own - patching further incidents into a novella-length thing I started a couple of months ago, mainly. Once again, I have a "compulsory assignment = block" problem. This didn't happen when I was away for the weekend, there, something would come up within a minute or two at most when the tutor announced the next question, even though there were ten or a dozen of these per day. I think the seriousness level is higher for me - only 3 lots of 500 words to showcase whatever skills I have.

Weekend writing course

I'm back from my weekend in a country house writing. This means I have now shown some of my work to other people, IRL, and lived.

I had a great time, met a set of very interesting characters, and did writing exercises and talked about writing almost non-stop for a few days. There was a very gentle introduction to reading out our writing: starting with a few sentences about why we were on the course, followed by a selection of favourite words and then a paragraph using one of them.

I've belatedly 'remembered' (i.e. let myself remember) how I always thought I 'wanted to be a writer' from approximately two feet tall and then realised writers generally showed their writing to other people. So that was the end of that, then: I'd been bullied pretty much from the word go at various schools, and the last thing I would ever feel safe doing would be to give out extra-effective ammunition in the form of handwritten keys to my inner thoughts.

The discovery that I can actually do this was made in tandem with being reminded that other forms of writing exist, besides fiction, and the suggestion that I might like to try some of them. We'll see.

I did a couple of OU activity exercises in an insomniac 1 a.m. moment too, meaning I am only about 13 behind.

Writing in libraries; writing away from home

Yesterday afternoon I took my laptop, notebooks and course notes and wrote in a library in the city for a few hours. I found the lack of internet distractions and the different location very conducive to work, and also made a few appearance notes and character sketches of some of the other visitors as part of one of my activities. Finally I am getting some ideas and images for the assignments in this course. I started on the second block yesterday and found it relied mostly on extended extracts from a very helpful and witty writing book. I think this, as well as the new setting, really freed up my imagination.

Tomorrow I leave for a weekend writing course in the country. It’s in a big house with extensive grounds, both beautiful and neglected and secret-garden-ish in places, on the outskirts of a small city. I know this because I have been there several times before for pottery, and this is my first trip for any other type of course there. I am, obviously, really looking forward to it, and it will be interesting to see how it contrasts with the OU course. Given that it is IRL not online I will have to meet actual other writers and probably show people my writing fresh on the page, for the first time ever. That could be nerve-wracking. From the course flyer, it looks as though it may be pitched more towards how to go about selling and publishing your work than the OU course, so I’m eager to find out how that plays out when I get there.

Keeping going

I'm still trying to find the right mix of spontaneity and planning. Several of the exercises on this course suggest sitting down at the computer (or notebook etc.) and just writing in one form or other. Others suggest looking at a newspaper or turning on the radio and then picking from the stories you find there, writing one of them from the point of view of one of the people involved or using them as a jumping-off point.

I am also considering how to adapt Morning Pages to serve my new routine. Ever since I heard about these in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way I have been using them (on an off) for regular journalling. (There's a brief definition on Cameron's site) Along the way they helped me to download all the emotions from some very stressful projects, and to find out what I really thought about making art and why I got blocked doing that so often. I have never really had fictional inspirations when using them, and I'd like to change that. The last few days I have taken time to describe a few things I have seen on my walks, or images from the train window, so that I have some material which could turn from description to mood to narrative, maybe (fingers crossed).

Even if that doesn't happen, the morning pages are still good. I feel more serene when I am in the habit of doing them, and since my normal default mode is not serene at all, in fact bears comparison with headless chickens, that is no bad thing.

With a lot of small sessions of writing, I am hoping I shall patch together enough material to complete my assignments on time.

If I have to, I won't

I've realised that the moment I have a writing assignment, rather than just an idea or two, or an inviting blank page in front of me, (yes, some of them actually are inviting) my flow of ideas dries up.

I think it's the syndrome that if something is optional, I can use it as yet another form of goofing off, so I get ideas about a novel set in a post-apocalyptic future when I am supposed to be designing a database. Tell me my job is to write a novel about a post- etc., though, and I start creating databases right left and centre, not a charred landscape in sight.

The way out is probably to allow myself lots of time to mull over ideas, and keep a notebook with me almost all the time to capture them. I am not going to be able to procrastinate and then cram for a creative writing course - especially not when I have ample opportunity to dither over a Greek course.

And some of the assignments! Describe something happening in a city street from the point of view of a child. Great, except (i) I grew up in the country, so none of my own memories are of cities, (ii) I was an only child and have no children myself, nor nieces nor nephews etc. in this country, so don't interact with children very often, (iii) I didn't really get to be a child myself, being more of a four-foot high carer for incapable adults than a kid. Apart from that, then, no problem.