People

In my head, they are people in a room. My characters. The people that I have already written, they are definitely there and the people that I want to write about, complex people with lives and jobs and emotions. Some that are mine, of course, the way to work through an emotion, a feeling, is to superimpose it onto a fictional character and have them work it out.

There’s Emily, of course. She is my very favourite and always will be. If I could get it past J, then I’d give our baby Emily as a middle name. She is so important to me, she started this journey and may very well end it too. If I stop writing, and that seems to be a distinct possibility at this point, she will remain the very best person that I ever wrote. She stands there with her hair curled, slightly awkward, wondering if anyone is looking at her, wanting to talk to the others but wondering what she would say.

Charlie and Ryan are there, my men protagonists, the men that made Emily come alive. Ellie too, older now, entering her teenage years and baby Rosie as well.

Then there are the characters that are half written. There’s Maddie, she was the one I wrote first, I was probably sixteen or seventeen so we’re going back twenty years which is terrifying. I would love to tell her story but maybe she represents a time in my life that I don’t particularly want to revisit. I don’t know. We’ll see. There are others, there’s a mum whose husband leaves her for another woman then comes back with his tail between his legs, there’s a group of women who are in varying stages of having babies and lots more. There’s the characters that I haven’t written yet. The ones that I’d like to write. I’d really like to write a character who has lost a sibling. One who has tried and tried to have a baby and failed. Someone who has turned their life upside down and started something entirely new. There are so many.

But they are all standing still in the room. They are waiting for me to write them a story. And I’m entirely stuck. Entirely unable to write anything. There are four blog posts half written in my drafts folder, even here the words are struggling to come, even here I worry about the writing being crap, here where I wasn’t supposed to set myself any expectations. I just need to write. Need to write and write and not worry at all about who might be reading.

Maybe I need to write about the deep things, the things that scare me, the way that I feel when I am in a room with people I don’t know. The way that I feel when I compare myself to other people. Body image. The tough stuff.

Here’s to the people in my head.

I’ll make them move.

Fiction Friday (4)

I didn’t have to get up. I certainly didn’t have to get up and leave. But yet, I was sitting on the edge of the bed contemplating doing just that. The unfamiliar bed had made my back hurt but that was the least of my worries right now. I stood up and moved to the desk chair, the sort of dining chair so synonymous with hotel rooms and I looked at the sleeping man in the bed.

Charlie slept the same as he always had. I don’t know why this surprised me but it did and I cocked my head to study him again, one arm was under the pillow and the other against his side, slightly bent, looking as if there should be a teddy bear tucked in there. I’d thought that years ago but never asked and I doubt I’d have ever thought about it again had this moment not presented itself.

I sighed and ran a finger through my hair. It was much shorter than he had remembered it and I had raised my hand in surprise when he had commented on it, it had been this short, and to be honest was feeling too long, for a good couple of years and permed as well, a concept that had me reeling when my hairdresser first suggested it, a sure-fire demise into old age. It was now a godsend, a wash in the morning, a tiny blob of product and I was out the door. Well, my hair was, the three year old and her assorted siblings made me far later most of the time than I needed to be. I shook my head, trying to chase the thought of my children out of my head.

‘You OK?’

His voice startled me and I realised that I must have zoned out and stopped concentrating on him. I nodded, the merest of movements and he smiled at me. I could have caved at that moment, that smile took me back, bought a million memories flooding back, no, not a million, we didn’t have enough time for any more than a handful. I had made sure of that.

‘What time is it?’ he asked, and I could see his eyes glancing around the room, wondering where his phone was. It was on the desk behind me and I picked it up, lobbing it gently onto the duvet. He showed considerable restraint not to grab it immediately and relaxed back onto the pillows. He had a crease across his cheek and I mirrored it by placing my own hand on my own cheek.

‘Just gone six.’

‘Oh god, really?’

Another nod and this time I stood up, glad that I had brought long pajama trousers with me on this trip. I pulled my vest top down a little, placed my hand flat on my stomach and tried to smile. ‘I’m going to shower and go, get a coffee and I need to be at the store for eight.’

‘OK. I’m going to sleep for another hour,’ a pause, then a swipe across the covers to pick up his phone. ‘If that’s OK?’

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

‘When do you leave?’

‘Tomorrow. After the store opens.’

‘So?’

I shook my head, the slight curls around my face bobbing about. I made myself meet his eyes, made myself look at him. He was so familiar to me, not just in the way he looked, it was more than that, it was the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, the inflections, the tone of his voice, his body language. All of it, he was like finding an old pair of jeans that you’d forgotten about in the back of your wardrobe and finding that they still fit. I wondered if that was an awful analogy and while I did, he spoke.

‘Emily?’

I met his eyes, took a deep breath and tried to take him in. As if studying a photograph that I was about to throw away, take in every detail. I shook my head and I watched as his face fell.

‘No,’ I said, my voice firm and hard. ‘This was a mistake.’

Self Esteem

Self esteem is a ridiculous thing. It shouldn’t matter, your abilities and talents should speak for themselves without the need for confidence or arrogance or even the ability to promote them. I’m sure for a few, this is absolutely the case, and to be honest, aren’t they the envy of all of us? You see them, the chosen few, beautiful and talented and with seemingly endless opportunities falling into their laps and I wonder breathlessly what it might feel like to be that way, have that life.

I have a lovely life, I have miserable moments, of course. Last night, I ended up in Tesco in tears buying butter after a stupid row about butter. Butter?! Stupid. But I am very good at looking on the bright side, my cup is rarely half empty, I genuinely need to just look at my sleeping girls and I am back to feeling incredibly lucky. But that is my family, it isn’t me.

For me, my self esteem is pretty low. When I left my job on maternity leave, nearly four years ago, I left on a high, fully expecting to go back, twins blissfully happy at nursery, me continuing my career onto heights that I had not even contemplated. I did not imagine, could not imagine, that I would only not go back, but remain a stay at home mum approaching their fourth birthday. I did not anticipate that I would not want to go back, that I would realise that raising my girls would be more important than anything else I’ve ever done and ever will do. I didn’t realise that leaving my girls in a nursery when they were eight months old for ten hours a day would be as mentally devastating as it was. I didn’t work out the financial implications, didn’t do the sums that, in the end, it was costing me money to work.

So I wrote. Wrote a book. A whole book with 115000 words in it. I have wanted to do that for twenty years. So I’ve done that. But does it matter if no one read it? Or reviewed it? And that countless agents rejected it. What does that do to a person’s self esteem? I can tell you what it has done to mine. I can feel utterly worthless as a person. I contribute nothing to my family financially. There is an interesting dichotomy to being a stay at home mum these days. My mum and J’s mum stayed at home to raise us and this was the eighties, it was the done thing, the financial world was different then, rent was not two thirds of an average salary, there wasn’t a dependence on tax credits then. But aside from that, socially it was the right thing to do. You could still raise independent strong girls who wanted to be doctors and lawyers and politicians despite their mum being at home, cooking meals and keeping a house. You could still raise boys who understood the changing role of men in our society, the fact that J took on as much as he did when the girls were tiny, on top of his full time job, is testament to his mum as much as anyone.

The thing is, and this has got rambly and for that, I apologise. The thing is that I believe myself to be a good writer, better than average and absolutely good enough to be published. I am so glad that I have this blog. For so many reasons, but mostly because my love for writing fiction has left me for now. All of my characters seem contrived, their conversation clunky and unnatural, the scenarios I write them into are unrealistic and a little bit ridiculous. I have three books started and I don’t want to continue with any of them. My book was perfect to me, the characters were absolutely the ones I wanted to write, the story was the one that I wanted and needed to tell.

I need to raise my self esteem. I need to promote my writing. Others do, without fear or abject terror of being rejected. I need to learn. I need to write this bloody short story and enter it into this competition without being so stupidly frightened.

I am ten weeks away from having my third child (all being well) and I have two amazing daughters. I have a relationship with a wonderful, funny, frustrating man. I am incredibly lucky. That should be enough.

But it isn’t.

 

Fiction Friday

‘I can’t, Em.’

‘OK,’ she said and for a moment, I could sense the sadness, it emanated from her in waves. She turned and placed her bag on the passenger seat of her car and made a move to sit in the driver’s seat. I don’t know where it came from but I decided to tell her how I felt, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore or it suddenly mattered enough to lay every card I had on the table.

‘Em, you must know that I love you, that I’m in love with you. I wasn’t looking for you, my marriage failed and I was not looking to find anything serious, I needed to heal and then maybe find a couple of women to date for a while to feel good about myself. And then I saw your name on your door and that was that, I didn’t knock expecting to fall in love with you but that’s what happened. I think you’re spectacular,’ I grinned at her, overwhelmed by what I was saying and the intense feeling of relief in getting these words out of my head. ‘I think that you’re beautiful and I think that I will never feel like this about anyone else. I will find someone else, don’t get me wrong, but I’ll always be settling slightly, because they won’t be you.’

She opened her mouth to speak but I shook my head. This was happening now, the entire speech had to be completed today, right now and then I could walk away.

‘I will always be your friend, we will always be friends. I value that friendship so much, I need it in my life but you have Charlie and he excites you and  he’s young and handsome and,’ I laughed, picturing Charlie in my head. ‘He’s ripped and I’m well, I’m never going to be like that. So, however, you feel about me, I can’t be the safe option, the sounding board and the one that is a little bit second best. That isn’t fair.’

‘You’re not,’ she was out of the car now and reaching forward to touch me. I let her rest her hand on my chest and for a brief moment, felt completely calm looking down at her small hand tucked into my suit jacket. ‘But I didn’t know, I didn’t have any idea, I mean, I hoped but-‘

I sighed and took a step backwards, her hand falling away from my body and hanging there for a second in the space between us. She looked at her hand then at my face and just then I did believe that she might love me. But it disappeared as quickly as it came and an image of Charlie popped back into my head, I’d seen photos, found his Instagram profile, looked at the picture of the two of them on the train until it was imprinted on my brain. I knew when I was beaten, and I needed to walk away, to stand here and thrash it out to no conclusion would do neither of us any good.

‘Go and get Ellie,’ I said eventually, as she lowered her arm and sat back in her car, the resignation apparent in the slump of her shoulders. ‘She’ll be wondering where you are.’

I watched her eyes flicker to the digital display on the dashboard and she nodded, not looking at me.

‘Emily, we’re good,’ I said, moving forward and holding the car door. She had tucked her legs into the foot well now and her car keys were in her hand. I wanted to go home, I realised suddenly, but I had no idea where that was. I wondered briefly if Nic would mind me sitting in her living room until the kids went to bed, just so that I wouldn’t have to sit in that beige box I paid rent on. ‘We’re friends, and we’ll be fine. Give this a couple of days and we’ll be completely back to normal.’

‘Did you come today to tell me this?’ she asked, still not looking at me, her voice small as she stared out of the front windscreen.

‘No, god, no, I came to see how you were. To see you. I missed you. I came because wherever I am, I want it to be with you.’

‘Oh, Ryan,’ she said and I shut the car door.

Blogging Fail

I started this blog to write. I know that sounds ridiculous as surely everyone who blogs likes to write, but for me it is absolute the only reason. I have always equated writing with a release. My sister-in-law runs almost obsessively, she has run a marathon and does 10k races at the weekend for fun, and the way that she talks about running is the way I think about writing. If I need to clear my head, I’ll write, I think up scenes/passages as I fall asleep, I take a line of a song and base a whole story around it. And I always feel better after I’ve written. Always. Even if what I have written is absolute tripe.

I have never planned a blog post, never had a list of things that I want to write about, never had a blog schedule, you know, just a photo on a Wednesday or a excerpt of fiction on a Friday. I wonder if I should. It sometimes occurs to me what I’d like to write about halfway through the day and I am genuinely excited to sit down after dinner and write. Sometimes it doesn’t and it is literally a stream of consciousness. Sometimes what I thought I wanted to write about isn’t and I’ll save it, thinking that I’ll write it later. I don’t usually.

It’s difficult to define yourself I think. I’d love to say that I’m a writer, a blogger and I suppose, by default, I am if I do. But I don’t make any money out of either. I have made about £6 from my book and nothing from this blog, and whilst that does matter, it doesn’t matter. I look at shiny, professional mummy blogs and wonder if I should go down that route, promote wildly and hope that I have a post that goes viral. But I don’t have the confidence to impart any knowledge. I have the knowledge, I have raised baby twins somewhat successfully for nearly four years but what do I know? So have tons of people, tons of mums. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than the next person and I almost resent the implication that any mum does know any more than another. We’re all struggling, all working harder than we’ve ever worked before.

I’ll carry on writing all the while I am having babies and then I’ll write when I can when I have to get a proper job again. Because being a writer should be something that is in your blood, not just a passion but a need. It must be a necessity to write, to clear your head of the jumble of thoughts, to sit and pour your heart out. Sometimes it’s really really hard, sometimes you don’t want to, sometimes it’s about forcing out the words when what you’d rather do is watch Netflix.

This is a stream of consciousness post. Can you tell?!

The Library

The library was the very first place I was allowed to go to by myself. I would go on a Saturday morning, down the long road with my little sister, return my books and select four new ones. Only four in those days, none of this twenty business and certainly no such thing as an e-book, but the library was such an important place to me then. I was a voracious reader as a child, had read almost everything in the school library, so the public library was a necessary part of my childhood, allowing me to discover Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume and a million other classics in between.

I stopped going in my twenties, work got in the way, days off were for sleeping and housework, if I allowed myself a day off, furthering my career being the be all and end all. I must have read, though what I can’t remember and then when I had a break up, the library became a sanctuary again, time spent selecting books on a Saturday morning, more books then, books that allowed me to believe in love again, albeit love that existed in quaint villages with tea shops and people called Finty.

And now, I take my girls. They have had a library card since they were less than a year old, they have gone from black and white board books to Julia Donaldson, from books with felt and fur to books that explain about dinosaurs and the cycle of the moon. We have now added long books to our story time, half an hour before bed, sacrosanct and done even when they stay with their grandparents. Most of what we read comes from the library, all over the county, helped by J now working for the library service, bringing home book after book that he thinks they might like. We go to the library of my childhood, it is one of our favourites, and there is something special about watching your own children do exactly as you did thirty years before.

This isn’t a political blog, though I am sometimes tempted, but I do feel strongly about libraries and their place in our lives and in our communities. In East Sussex, there is a proposal to close seven, and while there is probably a financial and just reason behind this, it strikes at my heart. The library is a place I can go when I feel overwhelmed by motherhood, when my children are driving me bonkers, when I can’t do soft play again, when I need to breathe. I am absolutely positive that I am not alone in this feeling.

This post was written in Uckfield Library, inspired by perhaps. And now someone is chewing gum at the next table, so I will have to leave. Libraries have their flaws too….

Short Stories

Jody bought a leaflet home yesterday from work. He works for the library service so he often brings home all sorts, books mostly obviously but sometimes magazines and leaflets, things that we can do as a family, writing magazines that I flick through and then leave as they make me feel utterly despondent and this leaflet.

A leaflet for a short story competition. One I’d really like to enter and I’d really like to do well in it.  There are prizes but more importantly, there is a prize giving dinner for the top six (I think) and I’d really like to go to that. I’d like to sit in a room and talk about writing, perhaps even tentatively suggest that I might be one too. It would be lovely to feel as if I belonged somewhere.

The problem is, and this is a fairly insurmountable one, I have never written a short story before. I can’t remember the last time I even read one. I like novels, long books that have sequels so I never have to leave the characters I like. The book I’m writing at the moment is a sequel as I can’t let my main character go. So this is going to be some challenge. But maybe a good one.

I’m thinking of submitting two, one in my usual sort of style, quite contemporary and honest, probably something about love and then one that is unlike anything ever i’ve written before. Perhaps something in the third person which I don’t usually do, maybe something autobiographical as no one I know will ever read it.

This feels like homework, which is ridiculous as no one is making me do this, no one is making me step outside of my comfort zone, but I do feel like I need to do this. After the relative failure of my book, I think I need to just try this.

However, any story ideas are welcome 🙂

 

Am I in it?

I wasn’t particularly vocal about writing a book. It certainly wasn’t a secret, it just wasn’t something that I volunteered. I’d moan if I’d stayed up late writing, there was a point where I wouldn’t sleep until I’d written 1000 words, but largely I didn’t mention it. I would say to the girls that I was working when I dropped them off at nursery because I was, the few hours that they spent there meant that I could edit or squeeze in an extra few hundred words. It’s funny, when the girls were small, it was somehow deemed valid that I didn’t work, they were work enough it seemed but as they approach four and school age, it is somehow now not. So I would mention it, in passing to my in-laws if they came over to take the girls out to the park or wherever.

When it was finished and out there in the world, J was my social media cheerleader. He tweeted the link out, put tons of photos on instagram, promoted it on his facebook and I just sat there that first weekend, not writing for the first time in about six months and I accepted the surprised compliments from friends and family. A handful downloaded it that first weekend and I had a lovely chat with one of J’s cousins in Australia who was very complimentary and it was generally a lovely few days.

But what was odd was the questions? The big one, is it me? Is Emily, the main character, me? This is, of course, a ridiculous question. Of course she is, to an extent at least. She’s the person I’d quite like to be, she’s a bit more put together than me, she is calmer than me, as lonely, but she isn’t me. Not really. Some of her experiences are mine, the way that her husband dumps her is almost exactly the break up I had with an ex, written slightly differently (but only slightly!) knowing full well that there is more chance of the world ending than him reading it. Another character is based entirely on someone I know. Others are completely made up. I’m sure this is true of all books, isn’t it?

The other question, asked slightly shyly, is ‘am I in it?’. This was asked a lot and the answer was mostly the same. No. It’s too much to try to hide a person, change their hair colour or their name or the amount of children they have just to shoehorn them into a story. You can hide yourself, that’s easy, you know yourself better than anyone but someone else, not worth it.

There is a draft on my computer of something much more autobiographical but I wrote three chapters of it and it felt too hard to carry on. It’s a story I’d like to tell one day but maybe it needs to be a little more fictionalised, a little less me and a bit more padded out. Who knows? The second book, if it’s ever finished, is a sequel to the first. I needed to see what happened next, if Emily ended up happy.

It will be finished. I’ll reopen it tomorrow, read what I last wrote and crack on.

Hold me to it, would you….

The Writing Process

My first book was written quite quickly in the end. As always with me, there were several first draft chapters sitting in my computer, all different ideas, some too personal, almost autobiographical, some half hearted, some a lot better than others. But none really ever got past that, there wasn’t time, it wasn’t good enough and some I had made the mistake of trying to edit as I went so they were then deemed too awful to ever see the light of day.

Then I was in Starbucks and there was a barista there at the time who was a little bit flirty. With everyone, certainly not just with a tired looking mum who always had her little ones with her, but it occurred to me that there was a story in it. What if a barista DID fancy the tired looking mum and something did actually happen?

So I wrote it down. And it was slow at first, the self doubt crept in and I was tempted to stop but this was the first genuine story idea, one that might be good, that I’d had in forever so I ploughed on. No idea what I was doing, just sitting and writing and the words added up. 115,000 of them in the end.

J sent them off, the first three chapters, and the rejections rolled in, very nice rejections, you definitely do not just get a no these days, there was loads of constructive criticism and one not quite a no, one email that requested some more of it. I sent it off, the optimism bubbling just a little then nothing, no follow up email.

I self published in the end. A laborious, ultimately anti-climactic experience. But it’s out there in the world. A book written by me with my name on it. Book Two is in the works, curtailed by early pregnancy and having no energy to speak of, but I’ll write that too and it’ll sit along side the first one. I’m immensely proud of that book, I re-read it recently, having not since I edited it and I forgot that I’d written it to be honest, I just read and enjoyed it. I adore the main character, she is bold and emotional and she makes good and bad choices and I just love her. I wish that I could shoehorn Emily into the new baby’s name somewhere in homage to her but I don’t think that J would go for it. Maybe I’ll get a strange Emily tattoo somewhere….

The writing process is unique, of that I am sure. Absolutely different for everyone, laborious and long and difficult but the only work that you ever want to do. I am a better person when I’m writing, less bogged down, happier, clearer. It is no coincidence that this blog has sprung up in January, in an effort to write more, write anything, write what means something to me without the pressure of 1000 words, of finishing this chapter or editing this scene.

There was a meme doing the rounds after Christmas, in the rounds of resolutions and anti-resolutions that take over social media at that time, and it said that if you had written a book, you were an author. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t sold in Waterstones, or hadn’t been read by a hundred thousand people, you were an author.

I am an author.