Lulu Allison's Blog, page 5

Thoughts on the election, part two.

It didn’t take long for disappointment to turn to bitterness, certainty of blame, recrimination. That’s understandable. But I see equal measures, equally certain about what went wrong and who is to blame coming from opposite directions. MPs blaming Labour’s leadership and Momentum for the party failure when surely they should know that some of them won predominantly because Labour’s leadership inspired all the activists who worked on their behalf, perhaps securing their seats. Can they afford to be without them? Equally, more conservative Labour supporters who for whatever reason still believe socialism is dangerous. Can Labour do without them? With an imminent leadership contest, doubtless we will demand the performance of certainty (one of the banes of our politics) and bashing heads will be the only outcome. Imperfect and probably short on analysis of finer points (I forgot to include the charges of anti-semitism, which was a mistake) this is what I think: Click on this link for a pdf: SOME PEOPLE…

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This is Not A Funeral and You Are Not Alone

In 1992 I had been living abroad for several years and was in New Zealand before going back to the UK. Then, I heard the news. Inexplicably, in spite of the damage they had already done, the Tories had won another election. That win felt devastating, even from the other side of the world. The lovely people I met in Dunedin had lives that offered a good alternative to Tory Britain, so I joined them and lived there for another two years. I was very lucky to have that option, to remain outside of a catastrophic failure. I copped out because it seemed that England would always be wrong and I had the option not to deal with it.

This morning I got a message from one of those Dunedin friends basically saying ‘mate, I’m gutted for you,’ And I cried again. Then, I spoke with my two daughters on Facetime, and we took it in turns to cry. They both believed that all was lost forever. The NHS, compassion, the arts, safety for non-white people, dignity for the disabled, anything that mattered. I told them about the election in 1992 to help them see that, though the Blair years were by no means the sunlit uplands, we can expect more, we can expect and fight for things to change. They are still learning about hope and resilience and the endless misery of being a human watching other humans fuck it up. And they are still learning the precious value that we find in our fellow fighters along the way. They do know this already because they are generous, big-hearted and curious young women, both artists of one kind or another. They just haven’t made, yet, the experience of applying that knowledge over and over again to the harsh realities of politics.

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But this election is a huge, painful blow, with real consequence today, tomorrow, for years to come for many people. It is horribly easy to think about blame. Was it a failure of Labour leadership? Of Labour policy being ‘too radical’? Or was it a failure of flaccidly mutable imagination that lead people to believe that socialist policies are actually, literally, dangerous? Was it a failure of care in the Conservative voters? Or is it the fault of politicians who are living out the destiny of their own entitlement with as little self-analysis as is applied to their breathing?

I am angry with all of the people who felt sufficiently safe, sufficiently part of the team not to vote on behalf of those who aren’t. I am sad how horrible a betrayal that must feel. That Emile Sandé song, You Are Not Alone, used in an ‘ordinary people’ election video for Labour is playing constantly in my head as though I have been to a funeral. 

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I‘m trying not to wish the people who voted this dangerous, recklessly harmful government in to power, in spite of Windrush, Grenfell, NHS, schools, food banks – for god’s sake, there are hungry children in every town in the sixth biggest economy in the world – I am trying not to wish that they suffer the harms they have created so that they learn what they have done. I try not to wish it because this isn’t a Shakespearean tragedy. Tragedy is perhaps the most human art form because it allows us to experience and then round off so many terrible things. Life isn’t like that. Our tragedies are awkward, cussed, unframed and ugly. Complacent voters will only ever cry ‘betrayal!’ when harm falls directly upon themselves. A vanishingly small number of them will ever say ‘I was wrong, I get it now’ – let along raging on a heath with flowers in their hair. 

But in times like these, we find our tribe, and we salute the members of that tribe who have been fighting longer, harder, more devastating battles that certainly I, in my relative insulation, can ever imagine. We remember that more than half of us didn’t want this government. Thousands of us fought for that. Thousands fight in different ways, every day, so that they can say, with their hand on their hearts, You are not alone. 

So, I am going to learn from them. For a beginning I want to find out if I can set up a free art class for disadvantaged children whose schools are too stretched to be able to do that, or for the children who might just want an extra chance to flex their vivid, creative minds. I’ll find a place that will let me do it for free, turn up with a sack full of cheap materials and starter ideas, let those beautiful young imaginations make them something spectacular, as they run into all the corners, find all the seeds and sunshines and storms that exist, in them, somewhere in all of us. And I’m going to keep fighting. There will be another election. There are different battles all along the way, and things change, they change a lot. 

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No Ghosts

 

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I was on a long drive last weekend. It was tedious and came on the end of a busy few days. I pulled into a motorway services, parked, turned off the engine and draped a large dark blue scarf over my head and upper body to take a reviving nap. I wondered what this miniature scene looked like to someone passing by. An unknowable human form draped in midnight blue sitting in a parked car in the busy indifference of the motorway services. 

A little later, relaxed into my beautiful Cornish destination, I began to write a short story about someone in the drivers seat of a car in a motorway service station, who happens to have died. The story, it turns out, is about the idea that the world might not be a palimpsest, a reliquary, it might not be a medium that takes our passing, clings onto it, marking a record for those who follow. The earth might be indifferent. The earth might hold no hauntings, none of the presences we so often feel; the sense of knowing that other feet have trodden, other hearts have beaten. The  feeling that we are swayed by the sweeping pendulum arcs of other souls.

We have been too sloppy not to leave evidence, in even the blackest depths of the ocean, the most pristine mountain summits or wildest woodland glades. Our trash is everywhere. Our convenience overlays the world like a pox. It will take a long time for the structures we have built to disappear as though there had been no humans. 

But the story is not about longing for that disappearance, or yearning for a return to a primordial innocence. We are here now, and that is ok. We are simply animals and we fulfil our strange, often disappointing, sometimes glorious animal potential quite logically. However, to the detriment of all, that logic is shaped by a kind of divine frenzy for the new, an uncontrollable urge to change and use up, an inability to learn the lessons of unintended consequences. Our nature makes us clever enough to constantly improve things, not clever enough, so far, not to destroy them in the process. But this story is, as I said, not about that.

I find it comforting to think that the earth really is indifferent, that ours is not the greatest story. It is just a story. Perhaps the sense that we can intuit the richness of past human occupation, the feelings we have about the resonance of a place, are just hand luggage, brought with us like a picnic. The mighty earth is too indifferent to even shrug dismissively at our presumption of leaving a mark.

It would be truly brilliant if we could fix our destruction and keep this home, for all who share it, fit for habitation. But when we are gone, perhaps after all it is better if we leave no ghosts.

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A Language Spoken By touch

[image error]Recently I had the pleasure of meeting artist and weaver Imogen Di Sapia in her Brighton studio. It was a lovely meeting that came about because Imogen bought some of my work and I was delivering it. In my current book Salt Lick, as food production has moved overseas, the rural economy collapses and the countryside is empty and wild. Handfuls of people leave the cities to rediscover and recreate sustainable farming. The central character Isolde is learning to make rope. I had written about a board where she hangs her experiments, scraps of twine with notes about the materials, and there, on Imogen’s studio wall, was just such a board.

People have often said when they read my first book, Twice the Speed of Dark, that they could tell I am an artist. I don’t quite know if that is because the information was there already or because of a particular way I write. Things do get described, yes, to make a picture, but that is so with all books. I wonder if it is this layer of interest in the materiality of what is being described that gives it away.

[image error]In Salt Lick, I described Isolde’s growing interest in materials, specifically those that can be used to make rope and twine, as learning a language that is spoken by touch. The feel and familiarity of how a material will behave when we subject it to various processes is one that can only be learned with the hands.

I read a commentator talking about football some years ago. They were writing about the mathematical brilliance of a free kick, the precise combination of speed, angle and spin. It is a complex mastery of form that would be lost to the master if presented as words.

Whilst writing, I have tried making ropes and twines myself. There is something deeply satisfying in learning that you can twist durability into a material, you can spring-load it with strength. I’m no physicist, but it feels like a profound connection to laws that can be felt and understood in the hand in a way that words, for so many of us, could not convey.

Here is an excerpt from Salt Lick:

By the door is a bundle of straw. She takes a few stalks, rolls and twists them. They are too brittle for a slender cord but with practice she finds the touch and pull, bunching stems to make rope. It is uneven, ungainly, but it feels strong. The smell is earthy, the warmth of summer turning to autumn. The sweet freshness of grass preserved in the drying of the sun. Soon her hands ache from imprisoning the twists that will give the rope its strength.

She ties the ends with string scraps, knots it around her waist. Later she hangs the rope, curved like a blonde bow, on a board hung on the wall of the barn. It is the thickest and longest piece yet. She writes with a stub of pencil, makes notes about the workability, where she made it, that it smells nice. She has become absorbed by these experiments. It is a pleasure that is new to her, interacting with materials, noticing details inherent to each, when a leaf or piece of bark splits, how long the strands, how pliable with handling a fibre will become. She is finding a new language that is spoken by touch.

With luck, Salt Lick will be published some time next year. You can find a paperback of my first book, Twice the Speed of Dark HERE. The ebook is available on Amazon. If you would like to be kept up to date you can sign up for my occasional news letter here.

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Four Questions on Reading and Writing

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My daughter Lilian is a dancer. She’s curious about the human soul, insightful and intelligent. But she doesn’t read books. It’s a bit heartbreaking, and believe me, is not for want of me being encouraging/nagging/moderately unhinged about it. She is mildly dyslexic, primarily affecting the way she is able to deal with large blocks of text, instructions and information. She panics about missing things, misunderstanding, forgetting. This makes reading books a trial. We had a long talk last week that left me with questions and I said I’d take them to other writers and readers here and on Twitter. 

Lilian hates being unable to distinguish characters easily. She asked why writers couldn’t be more emphatic about some characteristic, a description or a trait that would act for her as a marker. It made me curious about how much work we expect readers to do. Lilian feels it is too much, she is annoyed by all she is expected to remember, especially when the gaps between reading can be long. (I haven’t yet asked her how many similar compromises she would be prepared to make in her own art form of dance and choreography [#notmany] to make it more easily understood. It has only just occurred to me that she has the same issues in a different form.)

As writers don’t necessarily want to keep dishing out way-finders, I asked her if a list of characters would help instead. She thinks it would. I forget who characters are too and sometimes get lost. When I read Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, I referred constantly to a family tree that I found online, and would’ve been lost without it. Using a Kindle offers a search function, and some books do have a list of characters, but:

 

1) Could this be expanded so a list of characters become commonplace? Are there reasons not to do this? 

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I also wanted to ask for some recommendations. Because reading is a struggle, she gets bored of background information and scene setting. We had a discussion about all the different readers there are, how some want more, a whole world, a context and a history. I love books where not much happens, but Lilian wants magic, pretty constantly, throughout. So, as a starting point, the last books Lilian read as a young teenager were the Ingo books by Helen Dunmore: 

2) Have you any recommendations for shortish books for a now twenty four year old dyslexic dancer who loves the human heart, life’s dark mysteries, brutal honesty and subtle manipulation, and gets irritated by too much down time in a story?

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This has made me think about accessibility. And the lines around what we want and try to do. It is absurd to try and write for all people. I think, though she loves passages I have written, Lilian might find my books tedious (she hasn’t read them!) and though I regret that, happily accept I don’t write for all, and don’t want to. I like books that drift and roll on unexpected, lurching paths. I like a certain lack of clarity, I like the space for uncertainty. But it seems interesting that we have no easy way to access books according to those kinds of needs. And it made me wonder what other issues around accessibility writers deal with:

 

3) What issues of accessibility have you come across in relationship to books and reading? If you are a writer, have you ever modified your writing on that account? 

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I wish there was a dyslexic reader version of some of the books I have loved. Like a Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare. I know how much Lilian would get from Wuthering Heights, Titus Groan, We That Are Young, Ducks Newburyport, Beowulf. But there is no chance she will read them. Even audio – the time commitment is tricky for someone with a creatively over-busy mind. Abridging books is doubtless a fraught and heavily dissected (elsewhere) topic. But:

4) Would it be such a bad idea? For emergencies?

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This is a genuine question. I really can’t decide. I think I’d rather my daughter read a half-length version of Jane Eyre than miss out, but I can’t say the same of Ducks, Newburyport. I would be glad to hear your thoughts, please do leave a comment, or give me a shout on Twitter: @luluallison77

If you would like to see Lilian’s dance work, her company is calle Callous Affection Dance.  here is a link. to one of her pieces.

Ducks, Drones and Doctor Faustus

(That time I invited Sleep, Thomas Mann, Lucy Ellmann and John Milton to the same blog post and we all hung out. Heaven.)

When starting my current book Salt Lick, the inclusion of a chorus was one of the first decisions I made, though it took a while to learn that it would come from the herd voice of feral cows. I like the idea of an abstract commentary chuntering away, observing all and more than the reader, edging in opinions, overviews, and, in the case of the cows, impatience and ageless wisdom.

[image error]This evening (blocked ear after a cold and all) I am going to see legendary doomy sound-smiths, Sleep. Their songs don’t, quite, ever get slow enough to qualify as a simple drone, but they come close. In music, a drone sound is something I love, whether from cello, bagpipes, black metal or sacred music. Music has a three-dimensional quality; I experience sound from much of the music I love as a linear series of shapes that could be compared to an abstract landscape. A drone is like geology, holding it all, unifying and magnifying. 

 

I was thinking about my third, part-written book, The Model Village: an Opera in Three Acts, which is a version of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. I started it because not only is Mann’s novel depressingly pertinent to these times but because writing about music was so tempting. The main protagonist, unlike Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus, is a self-taught musician, because I’m not fond of research and an educated musician would have a language that I don’t know and would need to learn. Part of my job will be to turn her wordless notions about music into text and that is what tempts me. I thought it would be something like trying to create an afterlife, as I had done in my first book Twice the Speed of Dark, in which I wrote about a black, godless cosmos, made of unseeable energetic forms that create roaring arcs of speed, giant valleys and mountains carved out of waveforms and vibrations.

[image error]Twice the Speed of Dark, published by Unbound
[image error]Paradise Lost by John Milton

That was heavily influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost – the dark thrill of mighty, glittering Satan, the greatest of God’s angels, and the new realm he builds for the rebels in the blackness far from heaven.

I began wondering whether I could invent for The Model Village, or find in another author the literary equivalent of a musical drone. Something like the chorus I am using for Salt Lick, but simultaneously more so and less so. More fundamental, less intrusive. I wondered whether some kind of repeating, subtly shifting, abstract footnote would suffice. But really it should be a solution that pertains to the language rather than the typesetting. 

The only thing I can think of that comes close is the device used by Lucy Ellmann in the magnificent Ducks, Newburyport. Every phrase in the thousand page single sentence begins with the words ‘the fact that’. The initial impact is disconcerting, noticeable, like a tic, but soon it imparts a binding, sinuous quality, so effective that one can almost believe she couldn’t have achieved such heights without that discovery (she probably could though – it’s so damn good.) ‘The fact that’ becomes the bedrock. The book, with its linear passage, its length and listing, lilting structure felt like engaging in a practice. We are given access to another human so generously that a large part of that practice is profound empathy. I miss her and I love that book.  

[image error]Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann, published by Galley Beggar Press

If anyone has any thoughts on this, or examples from other books that relate to what might be considered the literary equivalent of a drone, I would be really grateful to hear from you. I’m not waiting to lift someone else’s ideas, but there’s nothing like the brilliance of other writers to inspire our own solutions and inform our groping ideas – to write, you’ve got to be a reader first.

#MyDayInBooks – 13/08/19 in six books

Book 1, Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann

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Before I got up I read pages 803 – 856 of Ducks, Newburyport. This is such a wonderful book. A place to be both lost and adrift in sweet recognition. I felt so much for teenager Stacy, her clumsy, scary courage, her sullen and awkward groping for her adult self. It is a fine portrayal, both of the girl and the relationship between mother and teenage daughter. It dropped a pin, a yes this, of recognition – a tender examination of the awkward and ferocious and loving misalignments that I remember from parenting my own teenage girls. Ducks, Newburyport thoroughly deserves its place on the Booker long-list and in my view would be a worthy winner. 

Book 2, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, Xan Brooks

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I’ve received the copy I ordered, from Salt publishing. I’ve always believed in putting my money where my mouth is when it comes to independent creators – maybe it’s that old punk ethos. But it’s no good dismissing the market driven limitations of the mainstream unless you actively support the alternatives. Salt sporadically use #justonebook on twitter (though honestly it’s more like # justonemorebook) and it is great to be able to directly support valiant publishers and at the same time get hold of another great book:

“Summer 1923: the modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of an old army truck and is whisked off to the woods north of London – a land haunted by the past, where lost souls and monsters conceal themselves in the trees.” 

Book 3 and 4, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth, The Railway Navvies, Terry Coleman

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I went out to get a piece of fabric and to walk and write. I bought these two in a charity shop on Lewes Road. I’ve never read Philip Roth – in fact I think I was in danger of falling into a ‘boring old white men’ prejudice that pushed me away from certain ‘cannon’ writers, so I decided to put that right.

← And would you just look at this for a blurb! 

 

 

Book 5, my own, Salt Lick

[image error]I think I’ve finally nailed a section (about 14,000 words, not just the paragraph on the left!) that has been giving me a great deal of difficulty. I have been searching for the skill and confidence to write as I would want to read, but it is difficult. It seems that I am great at paragraphs but stumble over longer stretches – the plot, for me the least enticing part of the work, somehow inserts itself, without me noticing how, as a REASON for the writing and I find it clogging up the path. It’s as though in having found the construction of a plot difficult, I then try to prove that it does. It’s crude and clunky. This section was particularly prone as there are big changes and a lot of time passes, and I don’t want it to be too long. But this is my second book, I still feel I am new to writing and overcoming that tendency is surely a part of the apprenticeship. Today I felt like I am finally getting it into fluid shape.

Book 6, Collections of the Royal Castle of Wawel

Another charity shop book, this one I am using to make collages. For this project, I take photographs of the plates then make collages digitally, then print them small enough to paste onto some rounds of wood. I was given a bag of sliced up tree branches and only recently worked out what to do with them. They will go in an Open House exhibition in the lovely home of a print artist in Newhaven. There is a quality to older book plates that I really love, the tonality of the backgrounds, the slight flatness. They’re also for sale in my Etsy shop, Seventy Seven Seas. I’ll be interested to see if people like them. 

[image error]Yesterday’s collage, ready to be printed
[image error]Three I made earlier

Walking Words

My hand writing is getting worse. But no matter. I am doing more of it.

Just as I came to realise that the bump on the side of the second knuckle of my right middle finger, the biro bump, earned through tedious hours of school essay writing and solipsistic teen-journal keeping, has all but gone, and just as my handwriting has become 30% illegible, I’ve decided I need to hand write, in part at least, my book. Or books – all books to come, perhaps. Oh god, what am I doing?

[image error]Woodvale Cemetery, where I sat today to write the latest chapter of Salt Lick

The reason is that I tried walking and thinking and making notes for a passage I was having trouble with, and found the answer with such ease that I tried the experiment again the next day, starting on the next passage of the book. It has, over three days, shown me an enjoyable way of extending the writing day.

I get sick of computer screens. There is an inherent tetchiness to them and there are so many ways to seek a quick break. And quick breaks, like calories, or unwise, indulgent expenses, add up very fast. To take healthy breaks, rather than just dead, alternate-screen cruises, I first tried going outside, then dancing to something. Both help, a great deal. But walking, anywhere, with a skinny hard-back notebook and a pen, just works better.

[image error]Taking a break from the page to look at the gorgeous yellow of this – is it groundsel? I often explore the lovely, neglected edges of the cemetery. One of my favourite places in Brighton.

My way of writing is to edit as I go, all the time. Waft things around, or fuss over little bits. Throw them out sometimes. I can’t think of anything that would be a greater waste of my time than getting the whole draft down in one go. Because I have NO IDEA what I am doing, no idea where, really, I want to end up. A first draft written without editing would just take away all the best bits – that thinking time, all the puzzling out. I would be wasting time on the crappiest first iteration of an idea that I don’t understand yet. So coming back home and typing up the walking words also gives me that first pass.

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In preparation for this experiment I spent a long, long time making people uneasy, walking around various stationary shops handling note books. I mimed writing, weighed it for discomfort, walked around a bit more. Then bought one, came home and chopped it in half, so it was lighter, as well as what felt like good dimensions. Two for the price of one as well – magic. The writing is big and scraggy, and in three days I’m almost through the first half. But there are neater pages – where I stopped in a cafe for a delicious slice of passion cake with a decent coffee and where I sat on a bench in Woodvale Cemetery. There is also a VERY quick sketch of some fox cubs sunning themselves on the road up to the cemetery. Which beats checking in on Twitter for a change of scene.

I found myself this morning, mentally designing a waterproof box that I can build to go around the notebook and pen for when it rains. Or a massive, peaked umbrella hat. I fully admit that may be getting ahead of myself, and were I to go ahead, may cause at the very least my daughter’s to disown me, but in a trade that can feel littered with obstacles,  it feels good when you find a system that plays well, and runs nicely with what you want to do.

Does anyone else walk and write?

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Twice The Speed Of Dark by Lulu Allison

Thanks so much to Inked Book Reviews for this lovely review of Twice the Speed of Dark

via Twice The Speed Of Dark by Lulu Allison

Down With Striving (I’m heading upstream)

New marketing strategies for old
With drawings done by mouse as my tablet and stylus is not working. An enjoyably (for me) crude way of working!

I am in the process of developing a radical new book marketing strategy. It’s so radical it doesn’t involve any book marketing at all. It goes something like this: 

Don’t do any book marketing.

That’s it really. 

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It’s not that I’ve stepped into this strategy from a place of doing loads of book marketing that I have decided to discontinue. No. My previous strategy went something like this:

Do loads of book marketing for a limited time
Berate yourself when you don’t do loads of book marketing
Stop minding, eventually, but feel a vague stress about not being capable of improving your situation

Point three has been default for a while. So, yeah, it’s not like turning a tanker or anything. I could, theoretically, carry on doing precisely the nothing I was doing before. But it turns out to be more complex than that. I wasn’t trying to turn a tanker, I was navigating a small vessel through a series of locks to chug back upstream a way. 

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In the last few months I’ve been struggling to understand something that entirely shapes my life: the balance between how much I give up to write, what I am prepared to go without, and, though really happy with how book two is going, my sense of being unrewarded, under-utilised, underperforming. It is easy enough to reconcile myself to a life low on income and high on freedom – it’s the choice I’ve always made. But I am so tired of juggling the tiny income streams, the seven little jobs that allow me the time to write. It’s so BORING. 

Variants of this dilemma are in the lives of almost all people writing, doing art, making music – all of it involves a constant tussle between work to live on and work to live by. I know some friends who work at the most incredibly demanding jobs full time and write in the early mornings and evenings AND make loads of opportunities to get their books read. Brothers and sisters, I salute you, truly. 

Wherever we sit on the time ⟷ money slider, sometimes change is imperative. 

As the boat chugged through the locks, the gears and cogs turning sometimes awful slow, gravity and water lifting us gradually into the next stretch of open water, it became clear that having a dream is one state and working towards that dream is another. A mindset develops that can’t help but turn everything over and over as though it is an opportunity for advancement. Every art-play and idea could, through a few steps of applied thinking, potentially become something that might earn more than two or three of the seven jobs. Every time I talk to someone new that someone could represent the beginning of a word-of-mouth chain, so theoretically I could be mentally finessing the ‘effortless’ conversational gambit that will drop my book before their customer eyes. The problem is, there is never an end to this kind of thinking. Never. It becomes a white noise brain buzz. It’s so damn tedious. 

This way of operating is an environment of manufacture. It is based on growth, on efficiency, on entrepreneurial chutzpah. And it feels like the air is stale, carbon monoxide heavy, exhausted. Striving – god, how I loath it at this moment in time. 

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The barge and I are heading up stream to quieter stretches of water. If I sell books at all, ever, it will be because they are well written, I dare to hope, beautiful. It probably won’t be because they are popular, exciting, gripping. I like books that ask a bit of the reader, and so I want to write books like that. No judgement either way, just the knowledge that in general there is a smaller audience for those kinds of books. And it follows that if I want a book to ask time of a reader, then I have to give that time to it as an author, many-fold. Of course, all authors give huge amounts of time and hard work to their writing – I’m not claiming greater dedication, but talking about an environment for working well. I want to forget about striving for success/feeling guilty about not striving for success/feeling a vague sense of stress but forgetting where it comes from.

 

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I am not going to not promote my book, or ignore incredibly useful advice from wise people. But I am happy to wait until opportunities come into view, rather than turning over every stone looking for them/worry about not turning over any stones/feeling slightly stressed about stones and not remembering why.

There are some writers who are brilliant at marketing. Hats off to them. Marketing is not a mistake; sticking to anything that saps the oxygen is the mistake. Having a goal that gets warped through the lens of daily practicalities and holding onto the warped version is the mistake. My dream is to write the best books I can and one day, hopefully, do that full time. I am switching my focus to writing the book, let the full time aspect take care of itself.  

If I end up as a cleaner/maker/weird-jobs person who writes books, surrounded by the oxygen-rich air of growth, so much the better than ending up as a cleaner/maker/weird-jobs person who wrote a couple of books and strived goddammit, in order to put to rest a vague stress that she could no longer name. 

But hey, here it is – if you’re interested!

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