Doing, Reading, Listening

Doing; This week has been mostly hanging out with friends who came to visit from Glasgow, I'm loving how Uist is attracting friends, despite the epic ballache that is getting here. We did beaches and exploring and then I got sick and did a lot of sleeping while they walked my dog, cooked me dinner and entertained my children, it was pretty Grade A Friending on their part. Visitors who don't mind when you check out and go to bed and tell them to entertain themselves are the best kind of visitors.

I wrote no words for my big project this week, it's getting embarrassing. I did write this thing about Ammie though which I really love. I haven't written much about my kids or parenting over the last couple of years and it felt a special kind of lovely to celebrate my infuriating, exhausting offspring in words and pictures. 

Instead of writing I have been working on my newest project which is to get my etsy shop off the ground again. It's getting there and I'm really excited about making and selling again.

Reading {paper} I finished Game of Thrones. It was terrible. I can't wait to read the next one.  I started Christopher Brookmyre's One FineDay In The Middle Of The Night a couple of days ago. I love his writing – it's grim, profanity laden, hilarious Scottish crime and he's one of the few writers who can reliably make me laugh out loud. Even his lesser works have lines that make me snorlf;

'St Michael’s RC secondary sat on a promontory overlooking the town of Auchenlea. The choice of site was an indirect consequence of a past mistake in vocational guidance, leading someone who had a pathological hatred of children into town planning, rather than the more traditional field of teaching.' Christopher Brookmyre, 

Reading {internets}This piece in The Pool by Lauren Laverne on finding the meaning in your work even if your work doesn't happen to involve saving lives or creating Great Works Of Art. As someone who has recently realised that perhaps I don't want as noble a career as I once imagined, I found it extremely comforting;

'People started to get in touch. I got to know my regular listeners and I began to understand that, sometimes, a bit of silliness can save your life. Some days, a five-minute distraction is the only thing that gets you through' Lauren Laverne, The Pool

This on the environmental and moral implications of the leather trade convinced me very quickly that I need to think harder and longer about the leather purchases I make. I have always thought of leather as a by-product of the meat industry and I continued to buy and wear it throughout the two decades that I was a militant vegetarian. I haven't bought any leather for 18 months (passively – I've been too broke for shoes and bags) and I think it's going to be a good long time before I do it again.

'Nearly half of the global leather trade is carried out in developing countries – from Ethiopia to Cambodia and Vietnam – where, despite a backdrop of exploitation of animals and humans and the extraordinary level of pollution caused by unregulated tanneries and processors, the pressure is on to produce more.'

And at the other end of the scale entertainment-wise; reddit readers sum up their first sexual encounters with a safe-for-work gif. Their choices are genius.

Listening; the two most recent episodes of Death, Sex and Money – the one with the couple who have been together for 20 years and had three children whilst being raging heroin addicts. That one was gruelling with an ending that had me 'WTF?'-ing out loud, out on the moors (the moors are my go-to podcast walk now, each time I think of that episode of Girls where Hannah lay down in the woods, unable to keep up with her fitter friends, and hugged her This American Life-playing iphone). After that episode I listened to the previous one, an interview with comedian Michael Ian Black, who I had never heard of but really enjoyed. It was wonderful to listen to a middle aged man be deeply neurotic and anxious and hilarious about his weight, a blessed and almost shocking change from the standard 'middle aged (or any aged) woman talks about her body and the neurosis she has about it'

Watching; we are almost finished FridayNight Lights and although I'm sad about reaching the end (again) we are looking forward to to new series of Better Call Saul, which we both preferred to Breaking Bad. As I've been working I've been watching Rupaul's Drag Race which I am loving, LOVING. As a family we've been watching a lot of David Attenborough, which is how my five year old came to ask me 'what is a sperm sack and why is the cuttlefish putting it in the other cuttlefish's mouth?' (cuttlefish are filthy.)  

Five, Ammie.

She pins me down, a weight that still takes me by surprise. Five, how did she become five? How did they become five? They have ten years between them, nobody counts parenting in accumulative terms but they should - I have parented ten years of childhood and yet I'm no less clueless than when I started.

Curled into a ball in my lap she radiates into me, she is my hot water bottle, my lap dog, my ballast. She is both boulder and kitten - skull crashing against my cheekbone, elbows jabbing hard into my tits, silken golden strands tickling my face and silvery down catching the light from the setting sun. Just as I find a way to balance her weight so that the nerve that's been trapped in my hip for weeks doesn't thrum at too high a frequency, she shifts. From curled like a sleeping puppy she stretches, legs sliding forth and draping one either side of mine, t-shirt riding up and exposing a belly as soft and warm as risen dough, head lolling like a bowling ball against my chest. It will be a maximum of three minutes before she rearranges herself again; wriggling, squirming, shifting, constant flux and motion, a lava lamp of a child.

Which is as it has always been, she started kicking the shit out of me as soon as she was big enough to kick. Implanted higher she punched and kicked and rolled against my stomach, then my ribs and finally my lungs. Her sister - desperate for her own space - turned away from her at the first chance she got, nuzzled her head into my pelvis and stayed still and quiet, weathering the punches and biding her time. Once born we had to tie her up to get her to sleep (they call it swaddling but it is what it is), arms and legs bound to tiny body to stop them from thrashing the whole night long. It was with bitter reluctance that we stopped wrapping her, many months later than recommended. The desire to bind her tightly in fabric so that she would just stay still lurked in the guilty corners of my brain until . . . well sometimes it still creeps over me.

She doesn't let me hold her much any more. She is five, she is busy and she needs to be sick before she crawls into my lap, sweating and sniffing and sighing and clutching that same ugly little rabbit she has been carrying around for years. Little Bunny has become more vocal of late; before we left London he was pretty quiet, living mainly in her bed, going unmentioned from morning until night, but since we started dragging our children hither and yon he has had quite a lot to say - for a stuffed animal. His birthdays come twice weekly, he learned French and then Gaelic but decided that he'd rather speak Nonsense. His tastes in food blossomed and shrunk, as contrary as well, a five year old. 'It wasn't me, it was Little Bun' has become the most common explanation for something becoming mysteriously broken or lost, or for when Quiet Time has become distinctly un-quiet.

She has five year of life under her belt, she is learning to read and write and live in this world without her parents there at every step, and yet when her hair (recently hacked off at school in a fit of annoyance) is swept back from her face, her eyes closed and lashes resting on rounded cheeks, she is the same boulder-headed baby she was five years ago, exactly the same, and seeing how little she has changed since she was just brand new to this world my heart aches and grows and throbs. She is my baby, my girl, that tiny scrap who kicked and fought so hard, from conception right the damn way through. May that never change. 

Doing, Reading, Listening

IT'S GODDAMN MARCH PEOPLE! Thank. The. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. 

I wrote that thing after Christmas about January and how great and restorative and blah blah blah it is and yeah, it was fine, but February, man February was a total downer. That it is the shortest month is literally all it has going for it and knocking back vitamin D tablets like they were tic tacs, counting down the days until friends visited at the end of the month and spending long (really long, interminable) evenings in the bath with the lights turned off was the only way through it.

But it's over! Yay! A weight, a 28 29 day weight has lifted and I am feeling sparklings of what's that? Optimism? Woo! 

Doing: this week in Doing I have been writing but not as rigidly as I was. I have worked on my big thing and I've worked on a few shorter things and for the first time it has been enjoyable. I have also been doing a lot of thinking about my What Next? and if that is getting a job or going back to college or throwing myself into starting a new business. None of those things are imminently achievable but neither are they petrifying, like they were a month ago.

Reading {paper}; still Game of Thrones, the first book. It's terrible, I can't stop. Also The Official DVSA Guide To Driving 2015 (the technique changes annually, who knew?). 

Reading {the internet}; Aside from the dresses I couldn't give two shits about the Oscars but I enjoyed this piece in  The Pool on Disney-esque dressing, whether would be be as interested in watching if the women involved didn't dress like celluloid princesses and if there a princess gene that makes some kids want to dress in mountains of pastel satin while others would rather go naked than wear a princess dress? From my small study group of two, I would say that she might be on to something there. 

Do I think Alicia Vikander and Cate Blanchett wanted to look like Disney characters? Do I think that two highly intelligent and accomplished women woke up and asked their stylists to make them into fairytale princesses for kicks? In terms of a brief, “just do whatever it takes for me to avoid the worst-dressed lists, so that I can block the sexist, racist farrago that is the Oscars out of my mind for another 364 days” is more likely. 

The Disney princess analogy, and our willingness to invoke it, says far more about us than it does about any individual actress. All they’re doing is playing the game. They know that if they dress up nicely, Hollywood will reward them for playing their part in a pageant which, let us not mince words, feels as dated as most things that originated in 1929. Laura Craik, The Pool.

Also on the Oscars and fashion and women and feminism, these pieces in the Guardian and again, The Pool about Jenny Beavan, the genius costume designer behind Mad Max who deigned, deigned to turn up to the Oscars in jeans and a leather jacket, with unbrushed hair and NO MAKE UP (how very dare she) and the frankly horrifying reactions of the fuckwits, I mean men, who she walked past to get to the stage.

Alejandro Iñárritu glowered as if a woman in a leather jacket was somehow more repulsive than DiCaprio chomping down a raw bison liver. One man, bless his heart, all but leapt into the arms of his companion as she sauntered past, in the same manner that a housewife in a 1950s cartoon would if a mouse suddenly crawled out from under the skirting board. Stuart Heritage, The Guardian. 

c. VW Golf advert

Reading {the internets} cont. 

Everything by Emma Lindsay, whose piece about what she learned from dating rape victims went viral last week but who is interesting and articulate and moving on many issues.

There’s another annoying thing that often comes up when I date people who aren’t down with their bodies: I often end up feeling like shit about mine. My ex and I got in this fight once where I said “Do you feel like I accept your body? Because I don’t feel like you accept mine.” She was shocked, and told me she did feel like I accepted her body and was upset that it didn’t feel reciprocated. And I asked her, with all the negative things she said about herself, how could I ever feel safe? She was clearly capable of putting her own body through a fucking ruthless judgement, why would I expect she wasn’t judging mine just as harshly? Emma Linday, Medium. 

This interview with John Irving, who I continue to adore, despite it being years and years since he's written anything I enjoyed reading, because he wrote two of my favourite books ever, a handful more of my almost-favourite books ever and knows how to wrestle a bear.

“The bear is almost blind but one thing he will see is your eyes,” he says, in best shiver-making, frontiersman-mode. “So you must never make direct eye contact. Avert your gaze.” He suddenly transforms into a cringing courtier and adds: “Retreat slowly from the bear and allow him gangway. Above all, don’t run. A bear will outrun a horse over a short distance. They chase and kill deer. Look at the way they’re built, with a powerful upper body, like a sprinter’s.” Somehow you can’t imagine picking up hard-won backwoods tips like these from Julian Barnes. Stephen Smith, The Guardian. 

The Pool (again) is running a series on Motherhood, Sali Hughes on Post Natal Depression (but really on all depression) is wonderful.

'I wasn’t exaggerating. I genuinely felt insane. Since the birth of my much-wanted baby, and the death of my father a few weeks later, my life had felt like an interminable movie I was watching from behind a thick sheet of tracing paper' Sali Hughes, The Pool. 

Listening; I haven't been doing a lot of listening, I've been adoring silence where I can get it, but yesterday Lyra and I walked into the moors and I listened to the latest episode of This American Life, it was heartbreaking, and a stern lesson in believing people when they tell you stuff, even if they are not telling you stuff in the way you think they should tell you stuff. 

There are two songs playing in my head constantly (three if you include that godawful Adele one that won't get off my radio); Hozier's WorkSong which is absurdly beautiful and Lukas Graham's 7 Years, which also won't get off my radio and which I can't decide if I actually like or if it's just catchy like flu.

What doeth, readeth and listeneth you this week?

The Bandit Rabbit and the Homicidal Hipster.

Happy World Book Day. 

She became a much happier lumberjack once the tickly beard was removed and an untickly one painted on. Now I await their return from school and the indignant clamour of 'the other kids were dressed as superheroes, you said superheroes DIDN'T COUNT. *I* wanted to be a superhero too.' 

One day they'll appreciate my push for them to be creative, literary, individual, right? Right? 

on writing and the first draft.

but you can edit your first draft.

There is very little flare to my shitty first draft. Aside from those first thousand words that I wrote two years ago and edited until they were gleaming it is just facts on a page, with all of the fluency and grace of a seven year old writing about their school holidays – 'I went swimming then I had a burger then my sister punched me in the leg on the way home so I broke her toy and we both got in trouble and it wasn't fair'. I didn't know that I had it in me to write so badly.

The shitty first draft is an notion that stuck with me after reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird five years ago (and then four years ago and three years ago and one year ago - I love that book). Inspired by Earnest Hemingway's assertion that the first draft of everything is shit, its only purpose to get a writer past the terrifyng hurdle of the blank page to the point where they can revise it and tweak it and turn it into a good second draft and an even better third draft, she wrote a whole chapter extolling the virtues of the Shitty First Draft. It is an explosion of the myth that coherent words just flow from those with a gift for them, that a good writer can just write and that if what comes from your hands the first time around is less than readable then writing is not for you.

She says

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God* likes her or can even stand her.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow.

We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning -- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

I find myself thinking of this a lot at the moment, as the words stack up and they are mostly terrible. Lamott also advises vehemently against editing as one goes, she says that you must get to the end and then edit. Doing this pains me. Seeing all of those crappy words sitting there disjointedly and clumsily and adding yet more crappy words to them makes me feel slightly sick, but she knows more than me and is very clever and I need someone to tell me what to do and seeing as she makes me laugh a lot it may as well be her. Not everyone agrees with her, this guy for instance, but I don't know who he is, he has never made me laugh and he doesn't care for the word 'shitty', so I see no reason to listen to him. 

I'm not sure I can do it right until the end. I am working in six sections and I suspect that once I have finished the first one I will go back and edit it, partly to see if I can make it readable before I flog myself over 60,000 more words, and partly because there's only so long I can go on living with this drivel on my hard drive. What if I die before I get a chance to edit it and people think that it was meant to be like this? Sheesh.

* Lamott writes a lot about God and Christianity and has written some beautiful books about faith and how she got there from being a raging alcoholic. I am not religious, not with any regularity or predictability anyway, and I love her writings on God, they are some of the most calming, reasuring, inspiring, hilarious books I have ever read. I have reread Travelling Mercies even more times than I've reread Bird by Bird. 

Doing, Reading, Listening etc

One week's break from doing these DRL posts is enough for me to have completely lost my momentum, which is no surprise. The reason I impose schedules and routines upon myself is because if I don't have them then I don't do stuff and then trying to make myself do stuff is just about as effective as trying to make myself clean that bit of the toilet that you can only reach with rubber gloves and a sponge.

Doing; further schedules that have fallen apart - writing. I can't remember when I last even opened the files I'm working on. I wouldn't be surprised if my word count has started to drop, sentences dying from neglect, paragraphs eating other ones out of hunger and boredom. I can't bear to look. Monday, I'll do it on Monday. 

Instead of writing I've been doing long weekends, visitors, parenting, storm avoidance, mostly rather fun. Simultaneously though I've been banging my head against the walls of housing, schooling, taxes, employment, unemployment... adulthood in other words. Adulthood is a piece of crap. 

Reading {paper} I finished Purple Hibiscus, it was beautiful. Not as beautiful as Half of a Yellow Sun but not as gruelling either. Still gruelling! Just domestic-violence-and-Catholicism gruelling, not rape-genocide-and-civil-war gruelling. 

Immediately upon finishing it I started Isabelle Allende's Portrait in Sepia, read three pages, fell asleep, woke up forgetting that I'd begun it and started reading Game of Thrones (alternatively titled Murder Tits). It's only writing this now, a week later, that Portrait in Sepia came back to me, poking at that part of my brain labelled 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something, what was that? Did I start doing it already? Did I imagine it? Was it all a dream?'.

I read Allende's memoir My Invented Country in the summer, it was a beautiful if irritating study of nostalgia and homesickness, truth and invention, memory and storytelling and writing one's history. It strikes me that I should probably re-read it, now that those things are on my mind more or less all of the time. I photographed the passage at the top of this post (I love photography as a form of note taking, looking back for this picture I was reminded of exactly where and when I was reading this book - by a playpark, under a tree, overlooking a field of donkeys in a camp site in the Cévennes ) because as someone who finds memory, dreams and imagination to be an irredeemably tangled ball of twine it spoke to me deeply and thrillingly. 

Reading {internets} I have read two beautiful and infinitely helpful pieces about doing and making and being in the last couple of weeks. One is this Huffington Post piece To Anyone Who Fears They're Falling Behind In Life which felt like a letter written straight to me, 

'You don't get to control everything. You can wake up at 5 a.m. every day until you're tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don't want to come to fruition, they won't. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it's not the time, it's just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.'

The other piece was Ted Thompson's The Evolution of a First Novel, written two years ago it's the tale of the painful, interminable process of writing a book, of the stops and starts and false turns and the 'I think it's finished! No, wait, I know it's been five years of work but I'm going to throw 95% of this in the bin and start again.' 

'Before I started this, I was always mystified by how books got written. Like how does anyone get from one of those half-formed 2 a.m. ideas to a bound object with a beautiful jacket and 300 deckled pages? Did that take a couple of weekends locked away in a cabin, or was the author struck by creative lightning after work? It seemed impossible or magical. It seemed like something that could only be achieved by very special people—David Foster Wallace in his bandana, looking forlornly away from the camera, or people who lived in other eras and unironically wore hats.' 

Reading both of these pieces released some of the intense pressure I've felt to Just Fucking Write, the feeling that if I apply myself hard enough I will get it done and I will get it done fast, and replaced that with a more healthy sense of doing it in the length of time it actually takes, not the length of time I think it should take. Of course I haven't written a work in ten days, so maybe I need to dial the pressure back up a little. 

Finally, Laura wrote this beautiful piece about being a mother, Sometimes {Moments From Motherhood} that brought tears to my eyes and spoke to me in a way that nothing I've read about motherhood has done for a long time. Laura is one of those parents who inspires me to do a better job, to play more, to listen harder, to let me kids be themselves and she does it without making me want to hold her head underwater and pelt her with wet toast, that's a skill.  I'm not going to post a quote from it because it's something that needs to be read in its entirety.