Nimue Brown's Blog, page 438

Poetry, Druidry and Ancestors

I didn’t realise until I did the final proof read of Beyond the Map, just how much a companion piece this is to Druidry and the Ancestors. Partly because the writing and research for the non-fic happened in the same time frame, partly because the real life experiences shaping one, also shaped the other. I moved back to Gloucestershire, land of my ancestors, had the pleasure of introducing my child to a vast array of history, story, connection and people. Landing in Slimbridge we lived for a while in a cottage that had been in my family for a good eight generations, and found distant relations amongst the locals, ancestors in the graveyard, and stories. It was quite a journey.

Ideas about family, ancestry, progress and connection lace through Beyond the Map. It was also written during a time when my relationship with my son was at a heightened level of intensity. That process of radical life change and upheaval created a degree of mutual dependence and greater closeness as we dealt with all manner of challenges. What it means to be a parent, what it means to be a future ancestor, were all very much on my mind.

It was also fascinating watching my son developing and changing relationships with his own ancestors. The sense of engagement and connection he experienced, living in that cottage, and meeting people, were really important to him. In the same time frame he also gained access to his paternal family in a way that hadn’t been available to him before, and seeing him find his place there and other feelings of belonging was also powerful.

There’s so much in normal, modern life that encourages us to cut away our own roots. The pressure to move, for work and study, the financial issues around rural living that make it impossible for many people to stay in the villages they were born in, the age divides we’re encouraged to accept… so many things unroot us. I think in the last few years I’ve become more conscious of just how much our cultures have changed around age. The tribe meant everyone. Smaller communities, historically, included people of all ages. The rise of the car and the television combine to reduce our contact with our neighbours, making us less aware of the people around us who don’t engage in our much more restricted social circles. We divide more readily by age, affluence, level of education and leisure preferences than ever before, and its easy to go through life only engaging with other people who resemble us, missing so much of the diversity.

Walking makes a lot of difference. I’ve actively sought spaces where I could engage more diversely. Steampunk, folk and Druidry are notably communities where people of all ages can mingle. That way you get communities with elders in them, shared ancestors of community become relevant and available. Ancestors of tradition are much more present in life.

Beyond the Map is the emotional journey that went with Druidry and the Ancestors. It’s full of comparable ideas and concerns, explored in different ways. I think they go rather well together, which is a happy accident – I certainly didn’t plan it that way, and didn’t even realise what I’d done until this week! The poetry isn’t in order of writing though, there is no narrative chronology – at least, no intentional story being told across the book.

Free Book!

Yesterday I managed to put together the new poetry anthology. It’s an overtly Bardic/Druidy bit of work, unshockingy, and it’s now on the books page as a free pdf download. http://druidlife.wordpress.com/books/ If you missed the first freebie book, that’s also on there – Lost Bards and Dreamers, so do pick up both if you haven’t.

There isn’t a huge paying market for poetry. I think there may be a number of reasons for this – the book market in general isn’t thriving, and poetry was always at the quiet end anyway, until you get back to the likes of Byron and Tennyson who apparently could shift copies. I think this is a bit self perpetuating – people don’t read poetry because aside from the old classics, it mostly isn’t there to buy in the first place, it isn’t much talked about either. ‘Poetry’ so often means the scribbling of angst laden teens, or the trite rhyming glops you get in greetings cards. Neither of those tend to advertise poetry as a thing you might want to engage with. I had a lot of good feedback about the first collection, so am offering this one in the same way, as an expression of my Druidry, freely shared.

What I’m inviting you to do is to own (electronically) and read a poetry collection. For free. Just to see how you get on. I figure if more poetry gets read, then the odds of poetry becoming something people will pay money for, increases.

Beyond the Map was created over about three years of enormous upheaval in my life, as my first marriage broke down entirely, my relationship with Tom went from impossible dream to tangible reality, I returned to the landscape of my childhood… so many things changed for me. I’ve been through a total reimagining of self. Several of the journeys involved in the collection I’m going to talk about over the next couple of days, there being enough to say to make individual blog posts worthwhile.

Poetry is an amazing focus for so many things. Fiona Tinker has written a fabulous book on how to use it for pathworking. Poetry as protest, as evocation, or curse are also considerations. The poetry teacher who most influenced me, Dave Ashbee, used to say that it’s not enough to bleed onto the page, you have to scrape it up and turn it into something. Out of pain can come incredible beauty. Out of suffering comes meaning and insight, and poetry can crystallize these things into the clearest, most intense forms.

On the poetry side, I have varied influences. E e cummings and Mary Oliver, the metaphysical poets, especially George Herbert’s religious work. Blake, a whole host of strange, impressionist poets from 20th century America, read in ones and twos, startling and bright. Last but by no means least, Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne, who personify the modern Bard tradition for me, and whose writing I love.

Cover art is the work of my lovely Tom, and represents a crane. Not so many years ago I was singing Damh the bard’s song with the chorus ‘The crane the wolf, the bear and the boar no longer dwell upon these shores…’ the boar are back, and the reintroduction of cranes has been a huge source of hope and inspiration for me. All things can change.

There’s a paper version if you do have the urge to buy a hardcopy, along with Lost Bards and Dreamers http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/NimueBrown

Why I don’t like bookshops

As a child I read everything I could get my hands on. I did a degree in English literature, reading is one of my main leisure activities, I’ll buy books as my occasional luxury when money is tight, and buy them a lot when it isn’t. I buy books as gifts for other people, I write books, review books. They are at the heart of my life. But I hate bookshops, and have come to the conclusion that perhaps I need to air this.

Walk into a bookstore. The front tables are laden with shiny things. Celebrity books and TV spinoffs frequently dominate. I want to buy books. I don’t have a TV and have no interest in the vast majority of celebrities, so seeing this kind of thing on paper makes me feel sad and like I’m in the wrong place.

Then there are the coffee table books, and ok, some of them are pretty, but on the whole I don’t want a big display item, I live in a small space. I’m looking for richness, depth content, you know, the stuff you get in books?

Move along. There are the gift-cum-toilet-reads. The sort of thing you had over as presents to people you don’t know well enough to be confident of what they’d like. I’ve been bought them down the years. Loosely funny, light on content, destined to provide light relief in your toilet. Not actual content though, or a story or any of that other stuff. I’ll pass on those, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Eventually I will get past all of these sources of misery, to the book shelves. I may venture to pick up a few books and read the backs. The trouble is, I don’t want a thing that is basically a rip off of the last big hit, and I don’t want a story I can predict from reading the blurb or the first paragraph and so I drift onwards, past the stand of comic books that is 90% men in tights thumping each other and 9% Tokyo Pop. The 1% of good stuff is copies of things I already own. Sometimes, in the non-fic section when I get past the TV books and the famous people, there’s something I want to take home. Mostly by this point I want to sit down in the aisle and weep at the sheer, unutterable tragedy of it all.

I want to buy books. I love books. Bookshops make me want to cry. Surely as someone who wishes to buy books, I am the bloody target market? Except apparently I’m not. But I wonder a thing… do the people who love celebrities and TV stuff actually buy that many books? Because book shops keep closing and generally the internet is getting the blame, but, there’s a thing… When I go online I can get niche content, small publisher content, books I want to read. Is it the fault of the internet that the majority of books in book shops are not the ones I want to buy? I wonder if perhaps it isn’t, and the whole assumption about who wants to buy what, and what will sell, and where the ‘sure fire hits’ are coming from may be wrong. Am I the only book lover being turned off by what’s actually available?

This is why I feel moved to speak up, because perhaps it’s not just me, and perhaps some noise can beget change. Worth a shot, I feel.

Dear everybody (part 2)

I hear little voices. These are not ones I made up, once upon a time they came out of the mouths of people. Or were typed. Words of dismissal and incredulity, words of damningly faint praise and scathing criticism. When I can’t sleep at night, they haunt me, like hungry ghosts. Now, if I could hold the belief that every last one of the nay-sayers was jealous/mean/foolish then I could shake it off, but that’s never worked. Sure, they had their reasons, some better than others. Not giving up has depended to being able to subdue those voices, forget them, ignore them. But of course they feed into every doubt and uncertainty I ever had.

A degree of doubt and dissatisfactions seems to be key in creativity.

Get too comfortable and you’re going to stop. It’s that sneaking belief that it could have been better that makes you try again, and again, and again, because resting on laurels, real or imagined, is never enough. It doesn’t make for an easy life, but I’ve yet to meet a creative person who feels totally satisfied by the last thing they did, and who doesn’t wince a bit over the early stuff. There’s a difference between having a desire to do better, and never being able to trust your own judgement and creativity.

The little voices say you are rubbish and bound to fail. You can’t even sing in tune you sound like a cat. You’re not pretty enough. You didn’t go to the right university, and you didn’t study the right subject. You don’t have the right friends, and you aren’t smart enough to handle the industry. Basically you’re going to make a total fool of yourself if you try, and we’re telling you this for your own good, to spare you the inevitable humiliation that will come if you keep down this stupid route.

The little voices say this is not a proper job, you’re lazy and sponging, no one will ever pay you for the worthless stuff you do/create. People like you are ten a penny, get over it. You’re not special, you’re not even good, you will fail. And we will be there, when you’re flat on your face, to say ‘I told you so’ and have a good laugh. Looser.

These are not imaginary voices. These are people, and I have a nasty suspicion that anyone who tries to be creative, picks up some of these along the way.

Last week I fell apart, for lots of reasons. I let the little voices in. I let them shout all their usual rubbish in my head just the way they announced it whenever it was first aired. Smug and self important voices. Disappointed voices. I rolled up in a little ball, ready to admit that they were all right about me and that I should never have tried.

Then that other thing happened, that stunning rush of other voices, here on the blog, on facebook, google+ twitter, by email and text, people got in touch with me. A veritable tidal wave of other voices, saying you have, and you can and you will, and some offering help, and direction.

It felt a bit like that moment in Peter Pan, where Tinkerbell is dying, and Peter asks all the children to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and they do, and she lives. Looking around I realise there are a lot of Tinkerbells out there, spirits of hope and creativity, or inspiration and magic, that are all too easily poisoned, and very much in need of the clapping. I am humbled by what happened last week. I’ve had to sit with it quietly for some days, making sense, getting to a place of being coherent enough to talk about it.

I shall try to carry that with me. Next time the little voices in my head are offering the poison cups, I will remember, and maybe I will do a better job of holding out. I think the odds are good. The other thing I’m going to do I watch out more intently for where else that is needed, those acts of belief and trust and confidence in other human beings, because it’s not just me.

Thank you all.

Of failure and compassion

I re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun recently, and one of the themes has stayed with me. There’s a young, female character who is so pure and innately virtuous for most of the book, she has no capacity for feeling compassion for the failure of others. Believing that all should be as virtuous as she is – by the standards of the day – she can’t relate to the short comings of others, cannot empathise, and is of little help as a consequence.

The more I think about this, the more I realise how easily done it is. Those places we have not been, can so readily look like weakness, shortcoming, lack of proper effort… Mental health is a case in point. From the outside, depression can look like an ailment of not getting your act together, a failure to try, an excess of self pity, a lack of work ethic. From the inside it’s all very different, but for people who haven’t been there, it can be hard to understand.

Many of the same things can be said of poverty. The sense that if only poor people made a bit more effort, they wouldn’t have all these problems. When you’ve grown up in an educated, well off enough and aspirational family, the impact, both practical and psychological, of living in total poverty is hard to understand. We are collectively slow to recognise the existence of things we don’t really understand, and quick to judge. Crime is another one, we blame it on lack of moral character, greed, laziness, an unpleasant nature, and don’t look hard enough at the diets, mental health and education levels of so many people who end up on the wrong side of the law.

The person who has never messed up, never acted in desperation, never succumbed to temptation, probably doesn’t exist, and if they did, they’d be vile. However, it’s all too easy to refuse to acknowledge our own failings, holding a sense of importance, perfection and justification that leaves no room for compassion – either for ourselves, or others. It’s always easier to see other people’s shortcomings, to turn the blame outwards and not to recognise what we do ourselves.

There’s incredible emotional power in failure. It’s a great teacher of how to get things right, a great test of determination and dedication. If we face our own mistakes, shortcomings and stupid moments, it’s easier to be more accepting of the ways in which other people do those too. We’re all human, we all mess up. The person who can admit it, can move on. The person who has to hold an image of perfection in their own eyes, cannot progress. Worse yet is the person who needs everyone else to believe they are faultless and excellent in all things and who will reshape the world to meet their need, at least in their own imaginations.

Falling down and getting up again are part of the journey. If we ask each other to be perfect, we are asking each other not to be human. That seems true in so many workplaces right now, and it’s not workable. We fall, we fail, we make the wrong call. Acceptance of that enables experimentation, real progress, and scope to haul each other up again when needed.

In the meantime, Gods save us from the shining ones who imagine that they are superior and incapable of error, and who crush mere mortals under their boots for imagined shortcomings, much less real ones. As Oscar said, we are all lying in the gutter. Some of us are looking at the stars, I’d like to add that some of us have eyes shut and fingers in ears, la la la I am not in this gutter at all. You miss the stars that way, and the gutter, and everyone else.

The joys of good inventions

I can sound like a luddite sometimes, and it would be fair to say that I have mixed feelings about modern technology. I am very fond of the internet, and of the things I own, the netbook I’m typing this on is of particular value to me. Not that I own much hi-tech stuff. There are some kinds of technology that seem to be made purely so that someone can sell you a new thing. Many of them do nothing for me. I get far more excited about inventions that have genuine impact, aren’t just a faster version of an old thing with more bells and whistles than I have any use for at all. Technology that uses less energy than old ways of doing is a win, technology that enables new creativity. If they make 3d printers that run on old food packaging, then, and only then will I be wildly excited about them.

It’s snowing here today. As a child, snow was a source of fear. I was born with my feet pressed back against my shins, as a result my ankles are dodgy and I spent my childhood falling over a lot. Snow, ice, even frost, increased the risk of falling, and I never really enjoyed snow as a consequence. This stayed with me right up until 4 years ago, when my brother discovered and introduced me to a thing. Microspikes. Also known as fell runners crampons. A rubber upper that slips over the boot or shoe, and on the underside, chains and little metal teeth. They’re designed for those gloriously mad people who want to run over mountainous terrain in adverse conditions. Lightweight, fairly low tech, but absolutely life changing. I can walk in the snow without any need to worry, and that makes it possible to enjoy the snow rather than being mired in fear.

Every year, elderly people, especially women with brittle bones fall on slippery surfaces. Broken hips are an all too frequent outcome, leading to long hospital stays, wrecked confidence, and terrible physical pain. Many never really get over it. Add to the list of campaigns I want to start, one to get microspikes and similar things given to all pensioners as a matter of course. They’d pay for themselves in a single winter, not just in unoccupied hospital beds, but also in the well being, happiness and self esteem of the people affected.

If you’ve got a person with confidence or mobility issues who is likely to suffer in the ice and snow, consider making the investment and getting a set. Being kept in for long periods by bad weather is so isolating and demoralising, and the freedom this little bit of inspired invention gives a person, is incredible. They aren’t totally fall proof, but I’ve walked over steep and ice coated hills in them and never so much as lost my footing.

New Awe Writing Initiative

This is a shoutout for a project that really caught my imagination. There are very few houses out there publishing poetry and very few decent opportunities for new poets to share their words in meaningful ways. I am also very happy to be sharing a call for work that wants new, surprising things.

NAWI is a project designed to provide a platform for original new voices, writing in English anywhere in the world. We are keen to promote writing that dazzles and inspires – writing that moves and motivates, be it poetry, prose fiction, life-writing or essay … virtually any written form you can think of – as long as it makes us go ‘Wow!’ We want work which makes the reader look at the familiar in an unfamiliar way; that makes us appreciate the world we live in, who we are, and what we can be. The poems can be a sequence; and the prose certainly needs to be complete (not a fragment). Both needs to unpublished and original. This will be collected into an (which could become an annual initiative if it works). NAWI opens 21 December 2012 and closes June 21 2013. The anthology will be published late October 2013, to celebrate (a special showcase will be arranged). Contributors will be invited to perform at a launch celebration in Stroud, England (and possibly other launch events). Authors who really impress us might be asked to develop a proposal for a single- author project at a later date. Entry to the anthology will not guarantee publication. The judges’ (3 published authors/creative writing teachers, TBA) decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. We are hoping to present a cross-section of voices, styles and genres. The entry has to be in UK English, either 3 poems (up to 100 lines); or between 1000-3000 words, unpublished, and sent with title, author, address and a 50 word biography to: NAWI, 78 Daisybank, Bisley Rd, Stroud, Glos, GL5 1HG, along with a £10 reading fee (either a cheque made payable to ‘Awen Publications’ or Paypal Transaction ID); and an SAE if you want the work returned. Shortlisted winners will be notified by 1 August 2013. Authors will retain copyright of their work, but will allow their work to be used to promote the anthology. Contributors will receive a complimentary copy, and can purchase further copies at 50%. Their profile will be added to the Awen site. Profits will go towards future NAWI anthologies. Editorial preference will be given to previously unpublished writers (of merit); to daring, new voices, rather than well-established ones.

Follow link here http://www.awenpublications.co.uk/new_awe.html

(If you have a good thing that needs more visibility, feel free to contact me, I’m always happy to give blog space to good stuff, and if relevant will also forward it to egroups or contacts. I want there to be more good stuff, I am dedicating to stepping up in any way I can, to help raise awareness, build audiences for other people, build a market for work with soul and integrity.)

Dissecting the work issue

I realise it may sound like I live in an ivory tower/boat, doing only fancy things, and that as a consequence that post about being totally demoralised may have sounded a tad self indulgent. I do all sorts of things, many of them mundane, banal, unexciting. This isn’t just a justification exercise though, I’ve sat down and thought hard about the nature of work, and figured out some stuff I think has far wider relevance, so let’s test that and see…

I write under other names too, and in a wide range of genres and forms. I’m not precious about that, I’ve written pub quizzes, custom erotica and reviews of household products along the way. I have worked tills and stacked shelves, I’ve washed glassware and spent long days doing stalls. It’s not all poncing about in celebrant gear and dabbling in philosophy! As a volunteer I’ve painted fences, picked litter, done long data entry sessions… I also edit for cash. And sometimes, for love.

The money aspect is simple. We all need money, and to be paid for your work is generally necessary, and also contributes to self esteem. I had no problem writing pub quizzes. I’d do it now if it came up. When the pay per hour is so low that you can’t live on it, that’s both deeply impractical, and in our cash driven society, does seem like a value judgement. I’d like to support anyone whose work was valuable enough to be paid, but who wasn’t being paid enough to live on, and there’s way too much of that out there.

I can bring a sense of meaning and soul and integrity to any job I do, based on experience to date. That’s about my attitude to work, that I know how to bring those things to the most mundane tasks. I think back to the paper round, and other low-brainers. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, and I know if I want to feel something is innately valuable, I have to invest the right things. You can do it on a checkout, you can do it cleaning toilets. There aren’t many innately useless, meaningless jobs out there, and if you find one, there are always issues around how the money is deployed. Supporting a family is meaningful. Financing your planned studies, or your bardic work, or travel; there are many paths to meaning, and that’s down to the individual.

So that isn’t the problem either.

I focused my thinking on the volunteer work, because it takes the money out of the equation, and because when you’re volunteering, the innate worth is a given. Some of those jobs made me happier than others. I was happiest picking litter and painting fences. I was least happy in the job that came with a title and apparent status. Why? It all boils down to how I’m being treated. I spent a month working evenings to get the fences painted at my son’s school. It was a huge job, and although I had some help, it was exhausting. But, teachers, and the head, would stop and talk to me, and they kept telling me how much they appreciated what I was doing, how it cheered them up in the mornings seeing the painted fence. I felt wanted, needed, appreciated, and that enabled me to do a long, hard job for no pay, and to take pride in doing it. The two volunteer jobs that gave me a title came with a side order of never feeling trusted, always feeling inferior, no praise, nothing to sustain or enable. It burned me out, and I saw the same organisations burn out and demoralise a number of other good volunteers too. It’s not enough that the work be rewarding. A little respect, praise, recognition and encouragement make a world of difference.

I took this back to my current working situation. There are places where I feel like a loved and valued member of the team, and places I don’t. There are places where communications have been poor and I’ve been demoralised by this, but, those are fixing so hopefully I will feel better about what I do there. Working for someone who values me is a joy. There are people for whom I would happily wash dishes and fetch coffees if that was where they needed me to fit. I don’t need to feel super-important, I need to feel that my bit, whatever it is, matters, has a use to someone, and is recognised. That comes through, or doesn’t, in the smallest nuances of interaction. Recognising what’s going on here, I shall vote with my feet, where I need to.

It’s all about getting to be a person, and being treated like a person. I’ve worked in a small production space that was fun and happy, even though I was just washing and packaging. The culture of a workplace may be the most important thing. Places where they time and restrict loo breaks, constantly monitor, harass and demand, these are soul sapping. Such employers ask you to be a machine, not a person. There are some people who, seeing writing purely as a ‘product’ want authors to be well behaved little machines that make product. Any employer, in any business who in any way wants their worker to act like a machine, is an abomination. Human respect, human dignity, human expression are, I think, what makes the differences between workplaces that are good spaces to be in, and workplaces that grind you down and make you feel like shit. With the right employer and the right people, the most mundane job can be a joy. And with the wrong person, the most lovely and heartfelt project can be turned into a miserable act of drudgery. Been there. Not doing that again.

Bard not author?

I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that what motivates me far too much is not love of craft or a call to service. I write, or have written, because I want to feel important, because I want recognition, I do it because I imagine I could earn acceptance and a place in the world. I wanted to earn a living this way, and that’s plainly a nuts idea. I’m a good century too late for that to be realistic.

I think it is because my motives are so flawed that I’m not up to scratch. If I was motivated more by love of craft and less by a desire to make this pay I would, ironically, probably be in a better place to make something of actual worth. Perhaps there was a time when I worked purely out of love, but economic pressures, pressures from publishers, agents… realities of the industry, have helped me fail to sustain that. It’s been a very hard few days in terms of facing up to reality to come to this recognition. A bard should be motivated by love of craft and a call to serve, not by ego.

Putting this into a public space is not easy, I am feeling a great deal of shame at the moment, there’s a penitence aspect to this. I find myself thinking about the mediaeval flagellants, wondering if there came a point in that process where the person might be able to imagine that they had atoned enough. It’s not the absolution of a priest or a deity I need, but the means to forgive myself for being so driven by pride and vanity and self importance that I’ve treated a lot of people badly down the years, angry with them because they didn’t see me as worthwhile or useful or any of the other things I was busily pretending I could be.

When I went into meltdown over the weekend, a lot of people said they had a use for this blog. The response has overwhelmed me, I’m just sat here crying over what people have said. I’ll try and keep this going. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to put something up every day – I have no idea what would be useful and am afraid of sliding further into self indulgence. But at the same time this is the only thing I’m writing, and there’s a lifeline aspect to that.

I have to try and find a way to be of some use, to contribute rather than just taking all the time. I have to stop imagining I can cut it as a professional, because I can’t, and I need to face up to the implications of that. If I am going to write at all, I have to refind that place of love and belief, which I think maybe I did have once. I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I think I have the clarity now to understand why I’m not where I want to be. I wanted to be Mozart, but I’m not going to make the Salieri grade, especially not while I keep trying to do it for all the wrong reasons.

I am humbled and awed by the kindness and support that has come to me from many different sources in the last few days. I have to admit that I feel so fraudulent that it is hard to believe any of this is deserved (Alex, Jo, Autumn, I think I deserved your assessments), but I am profoundly grateful to everyone who has taken the time to comment, text, offer help. You are very lovely, generous and wonderful people, and I shall aspire to be worthy of your friendship.

It is not possible, I think, to be both a bard who is driven by soulfulness, service and awen, and to be a ‘proper’ professional author who is driven by industry trends, market research and who is willing to spend more time marketing than creating, as appears to be necessary these days. I can’t have it both ways. Right now I’m failing to be either, I think because I’ve been trying to be both, or imagining I could be both, and I’ve lost my way. I did not start this wanting to do a lot of marketing, to write fillers and disposable commodities. That’s what the ‘real world’ wants. At the moment, I can’t write fiction at all and have little confidence that I can pull off the non-fic project even. But, if I can find those right reasons again, and some way of believing that there is a point (Cat, I hear you, but I’m not feeling it right now), perhaps I can do something in the future.

Once upon a time I wanted to be a professional author working from bardic principles, but I don’t think I can have it both ways.

Dear Everybody

I’m going through some stuff right now. I’m going to try and keep this blog going, but may be intermittent with it, email, and social networking.

When I was a child, I wanted to be an author, not for fame or fortune, but because I believed that I could make a positive difference to the world by writing books. I’ve written a lot of books, under this and the other name. There are published novels out there, and non-fics, and the graphic novel. Admittedly I don’t know how Hopeless is selling, but in all other areas, my books don’t really shift. I promote, I do events, I use the internet, it’s not for lack of trying on that side. It doesn’t help that, despite being up against film, TV, internet, computer games and going out, for your leisure budget, the book industry does not have the kind of marketing budgets these far more successful forms spend. There’s a belief that books are a magic thing that people are bound to want. They aren’t, and without investing in advertising, its no wonder book sales are not great. Archaia, who have Hopeless, work their bottoms off getting word out about books, I have no complaint about them, they punch well above their weight, and are doing a really good job, but the industry as a whole is a sorry mess.

Some days it feels like every other person online is writing a book. The world has no use for that many books. I feel like I’m adding to a pile of crap, not giving something of value, and I’m suffering from profound inspiration fail.

I’ve heard from a lot of sources how an author has to study the market, go where the money is, do what the reader wants. I can’t work that way, it sucks the life and inspiration out of me. Which puts me firmly into the category of the precious and self important author who won’t ever achieve anything. There are a tiny minority of authors who, through sheer genius and innovation get to put something actually new into the world. But I am not Neil Gaiman, or Yan Martel. I’m too ponderous for genre fiction and just plain not clever enough to count as literature.

There comes a time when you have to look at your sales, and how hard it is to get bookings, even when you offer to do it for free, how little interest there is, and look at your contemporaries. People who started after I did have got deals with much bigger houses, can reliably get far higher sales self publishing than I can, sell out at every event they are invited to, and so forth, and recognise there may be a very simple reason for this.

I’m not actually a very good author.

I think I’m wasting everybody’s time, and deluding myself that I could do something of value.

I’m going to take some time and rethink. The ‘proper job’ option is more for the summer, when moving off the boat will mean I don’t have a vast cycling commute to the nearest centres of employment. My body would not be equal to that. I’m going to keep editing, maybe look for more editing work. There are a few people who read this blog, and feed back in ways that make me feel it may be at least as useful as it is self indulgent, which is reason enough to keep going.

I have so little inspiration for fiction – this is not really a choice I’m making, more a recognition that perhaps I have nothing to tell good stories about. This has been building for a long time now, depression, exhaustion, frustration, the shape of the market and my too numerous shortcomings. I’m not anything special, and pretending that I could be has wasted a lot of time for a lot of people, for which I am apologising. I want to do something useful in the world, and this isn’t it. Right now I feel that road sweeping or shelf stacking would constitute a more useful contribution to the state of humanity than what I actually do.