the way out

What I talk about when I'm not sleeping

2008-12-02T21:20:36+00:00

My father liked to get a grip on himself in private. This is the first line of a chapter about a third of the way through my novel. I quite like it, as sentences go, and I didn’t know how else to start writing this so I put it here. I’m very tired, deeply so. I’ve slept 4.5 nights in the past 2 weeks. It’s made me a little over-emotional. No matter how tired I get, I cannot sleep. I went for a run after work a couple of times last week. It cleared my head and made me so exhausted I was sure I would sleep, but still I didn’t. All the same, I think I’ll start running more. Kris bought me a non-fiction book by a fiction writer I like, Haruki Murakami – 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' – and this has really got me through the past week. I really recommend it as a metaphor for just about anything. In my case, I know I spend too much time in my head rather than in my body and maybe that’s the problem. You need physical energy to write. That I am sure of. Writing is exercise, the same as training for a marathon. You build on it and get more limber the more you stretch the habit. The length of a novel, the amount of time and thought you have to spend on it – it’s physically demanding. Three years in and I think I’m on the fifth draft of 'The Missing Track', this one following feedback from my agent. I have an agent now, since September. Her feedback has been very insightful without being directive, and I am extremely grateful for that. A lot of people say they don’t understand who agents are to decide what books should and shouldn’t be represented, the same for publishers, because it’s all so subjective. My feeling is, agents are readers, and the more you read, the more you know about books. Yes, it’s subjective, but people who read for a profession are more likely to know what works and what doesn’t. The same goes for any profession – the more you know about it, the more fine-tuned your opinion becomes. At least that’s my opinion. It doesn’t make all of them perfect, but it makes them professionals in their field.

This is just one of the things on my mind. I’ve also been listening to a lot of author interviews on the World Book Club website and am pleased to find I very much like almost all of them, am indifferent to a couple and disliked only one. Writers are good peoples. Doris Lessing, when asked what made her see white people’s treatment of black people in Rhodesia for the atrocity it was, said, “Well I read for one thing.”

God bless books:-)

london ten o'clock at night

2008-07-22T21:40:48+01:00

You can't beat it. Oxford Street when the shops are closed and it's not quite dark but the buses have their lights on and the sky is deep blue and there's hardly anyone on the the road as you cross it. It reminds me of coming home around that time from Birkbeck classes, sometimes cycling, sometimes catching the bus, and always wanting the time to last. It's the best time of day, late evening in summer. That's when I'm not tired any more. Usually if I'm home it's when I'm writing and I've gone past the gruelling warm-up stage and I'm really inside it and I'd keep going past midnight if only it weren't for work the next day. I am not a morning person. I'm a cat person. I wish I could walk home on the rooftops. I really love this city. It would be nice to feel this peaceful more of the time.

doo wop

2008-07-21T22:53:19+01:00

I thought I’d make a comeback with a slick new site, but this will do for now. I took the blog down because I wasn’t sure I would be comfortable if agents googled me and found it. Now I don’t have the time or the technical ability to come up with anything other than a fairly obvious title, select a Drupal 5 design and make demands on K to set it up for me.

On the bright side, I’m in the mood to listen to songs with doo wops in them. I was in a shop in Covent Garden today and Hanson’s ‘Mmmbop’ came on. Remember those kids? When Kris and I have children, I think we’ll aim for a boy band and triplets for backing singers. It’s the best ambition to set your offspring these days. They can be 'Ricochet & The Unicycles'. The shop assistant turned up the volume on ‘Mmmbop’ and had a boogie behind the counter. That’s really a moment to make a parent proud. Sincerely, things like that make me happy. Not speaking of which, reading the opening chapter of Peter Carey’s ‘Oscar & Lucinda’ made me so happy the other day I cried on the tube and kissed the pages. Thank God for good writing. I’ve read a lot of crap lately. It made me realise that of all the regular occurrences in my life, it’s bad writing and washing up that make me most tense. Wasting time makes me tense. I am on edge at the moment and this is not due to washing up. Last week I had exciting news: an agent I submitted the opening chapters and synopsis to came back asking for the rest. I spent the spare part of five days blitzing through the final draft so that even if it goes no further, I will be forever grateful to her for forcing me through the slug of the last stretch. I was really fading, bored by my story, bored by my words. It’s not much fun when you know it so well that none of it surprises you any more. But in the penultimate chapter on the ultimate day I came up with a new scene that I think held a lot of the book together and that was a high. Now a real live professional out there has it and I get to wait…

Other good doo wop songs are:

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’
Cher’s ‘Shoop Shoop Song’
The Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ (doo wop songs don’t have to have doo wops in them)