Anna Butler's Blog, page 43

Is it summer yet?

Today is part of Queer Town Abbey’s Is it summer yet? blog hop in which participating blogs are singing the joys of warm weather and flowers and butterflies.

Or if you’re me, wondering which summer memory to share. Because as with most people, my looking back brings up a haze of memories where everything runs into the next image, and I can’t tell if the summer in which I learned to float in the sea (I called it swimming and who is to gainsay me?) is the same summer that my swimming cossie was this darling pale green affair with masses and masses of shirring elastic—it had an odd bubbly effect on the fabric that I remember thinking was terribly chic—and the same summer where I earned sixpence with the beach ponies or spent hours in the barn using the pile of grain for a slide or had toffee apples where the toffee was a brilliant, clear scarlet that no ruby has ever been able to match.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily that as I’ve got older, my memory has started to fail me. For one thing, it was always pretty shite. But for another, I think it’s more in the nature of summers when you’re a child, for them to merge and coalesce into that indistinguishable haze that reminds me of Golden Syrup slowly, slowly, slowly falling from a spoon in a long amber drop: clear, golden, sweet, rich, endless.

When I was a child, my parents were rather poor. There was never any question of us having a ‘paid for’ holiday. Instead, summers were spent with my grandparents.

Mum’s parents lived on Wynyard Park, then the main estate of the Marquess of Londonderry. Lordy sold up long ago, crippled by death duties. He’s dead himself now, piling another set of debts onto the shoulders of his only son. But back then, Gran and Grandad had a whitewashed cottage, one of a row of four for the estate workers. Grandad worked on the home farm with the chickens whose grain feed my little sister and I treated so summarily, and Gran looked after Lordy’s gundogs. He had thirty or more, maybe: springers, and labradors and spaniels in a small complex of kennels hemmed in by the barns on one side where the hens lived and the orchard on the other. There were gooseberry canes at one side of the orchard, I remember. I love the taste of gooseberries, straight off the cane. It was in Gran’s garden that I first learned to love lupins and also learned that *nothing* enrages an impoverished aristocrat more than your discovering that the house walls are perfect for drawing on using crushed dock leaves to give the brightest green effect, less than two weeks after he had had the entire row of cottages re-whitewashed…

Dad’s mum lived on the coast, at South Shields. Most of his family still does, two or three generations on. It’s a funny sort of resort, probably popular back in the 1920s and never really getting over the Great Depression. But the beach was great for learning to float/swim and why it’s a bad idea to touch jelly fish (they are *squidgy*, for a start). I loved horses as a girl. I know. Every prepubescent girl does. There was never any chance I could ever own a pony or even ride one often, except at the beach. A man had a string of ponies, ten or twelve, maybe, and people paid sixpence to climb up and have a little ride down to Marsden Rock and back, the ponies led by an urchin. And me. For one entire day, I laboured at taking a pony on that little circular trek, always with someone else in the saddle. My pony that day was a tough little Welsh cob, a bay. I walked him up and down that beach for hours. And at the end of the day, when everyone was packing up and going home, I was paid. A sixpence. A lovely, shiny silver sixpence. Which I promptly handed back over to the pony man in exchange for a ride down to the Rock on that pony. I had my priorities, you see. Even then.

To get to another participant’s blog, follow the link back to Queer Town Abbey. Get your chance to win prizes, including an iPod Shuffle— check out the Rafflecopter on QTA’s page and enter the Grand Prize Giveaway.

Comments left here on this post will enter you in a giveaway for my completely unsummery novella, FlashWired. They’re in space, you see, so sadly, seasons are irrelevant to them. Leave your email address in your comment if you’d like to enter the giveaway. When the blog hop ends, I’ll stick a pin in the list of names to choose one, and send you the ebook.

 

Have a wonderful summer, when it gets here at last.

 

The Dog Who Swallows Millions

Good title, huh?

The storyline I had planned for The Gilded Scarab isn’t quite going to pan out as I’d intended. Mostly because I’m hitting 76k words (please to note the spiffy progress bar over there to the right—murmurs of polite astonishment and approbation on your part are perfectly acceptable) but I haven’t hit the final third of the novel yet. It’s already getting long. If I take Ned and Rafe off to Aegypt, then my chances of finishing much under 120k words are not great. And that is far too long for a m/m romance novel. Far too long.

So, I have to think of an alternative ending to Gilded Scarab. I already have ideas about that, involving scarabs and the Museum and a rival coffee company, so that’s not a problem other than having to go back and rewrite some bits to accommodate the new ending. But because I very much want Rafe to kiss Ned in the shadow of a pyramid, while mummies roam and jackals howl, while airships chug overhead and aether-powered harquebuses defend them from their enemies, and while they’re lying in a hollow in the sands, looking up at stars so low and bright they can almost touch them, a lion coughs out in the desert, the sound carrying on the warm night air… I’m sorry. Where was I in this complex and difficult sentence? Ah yes. Because I want Rafe to kiss Ned under the pyramid, I really do have to write something where they’re in Aegypt.

A sequel beckons. I have some bits and pieces written I can use there, and I have a title. At some point in the next year, The Dog Who Swallows Millions will be written and take our heroes on some (yet undefined!) adventuring amongst the tombs of the Pharaohs. But it will involve mummies and grave robbing and a serious attempt to assassinate Ned and implicate Rafe.

Sigh. You know, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen to me if only I did concise.

 

On another note, the first batch of my new pens has arrived from the US and they are gorgeous. Honestly, I’d never buy promotional pens here in the UK. The US company has a huge range of very affordable stock, heaps better than anything you can buy here. The only problem is that the US company doesn’t do overseas trade, so I have to get a lovely friend there to buy them and ship them. So a huge thank you goes to artist and sculptor Shelley Hunter for being a true friend. Go and check out her website and admire her work.

The Lily With The Crooked Stem

“In shape Egypt is like a lily with a crooked stem. A broad blossom terminates it at its upper end; a button of a bud projects from the stalk a little below the blossom, on the left-hand side. The broad blossom is the Delta, extending from Aboosir to Tineh, a direct distance of a hundred and eighty miles, which the projection of the coast— the graceful swell of the petals— enlarges to two hundred and thirty. The bud is the Fayoum, a natural depression in the hills that shut in the Nile valley on the west, which has been rendered cultivable for many thousands of years by the introduction into it of the Nile water, through a canal known as the “Bahr Yousouf.” The long stalk of the lily is the Nile valley itself, which is a ravine scooped in the rocky soil for seven hundred miles from the First Cataract to the apex of the Delta , sometimes not more than a mile broad, never more than eight or ten miles. No other country in the world is so strangely shaped, so long compared to its width, so straggling, so hard to govern from a single centre.”

George Rawlinson’s words, not mine; written in 1881.  Wonderfully evocative, aren’t they? And when you look at the map of Egypt’s ancient cities, you can see it for yourself: the flowerhead on its tortuous stem, the bud.  As a name for Egypt, it’s obviously not a workaday, Monday-to-Friday sort of name, but the special kind that you dust off and only wear for best.

Today’s a day for dusting off. I’m reaching the point in Gilded Scarab where I’m going to have to think hard about the Egyptian section of the story: Rafe and Ned have been reunited. They are slowly building a real relationship, instead of one that was pure animalistic sex (not that Rafe thinks there’s anything wrong with that, btw). And in a couple of chapters, the aviator of Ned’s aeroship will be found dead and Rafe will be stepping in to take his place, flying Ned’s archaeological expedition to Cairo at the start of the first digging season of the Twentieth Century.

Something has to happen there that will bring their relationship to a head. An explosive something. A something that will have them pitted against each other, fighting the mystery and fighting to believe in each other.

And I have no idea what.

But I am about to go and read Rawlinson again to see if I can come up with some ideas. Mummies, tombs, grave-robbers, the coughing of a lion carrying across the sands on a star-lit night… there’ll be something there, surely.

In the meantime:

A little progress is made, at least.

 

The delicious tickle of scarab legs

I picked a scarab up once.

We spent our first wedding anniversary in Egypt, touring the ancient sites.  There are a lot of them, too. Egypt is a country that is so weighed down with history, it’s probably several feet further below sea level than it should be. With such a glorious wealth of things to look at, obviously we didn’t see everything. Even all those years ago (and no, I am not confessing how many) it wasn’t safe for westerners to go into the Fayoum, so I had to content myself with the mummy portraits in the museums rather than see any in situ. But even with that bit of Egypt closed to us, we saw so much.

Luxor, with columns still bright with paint and a mosque within its old walls. Karnak at dusk when bats flew overhead and herons boomed and called in the reeds beside the Nile. The guard who took us into a quiet room at the back of Karnak, where lion-headed Sekhmet still stood  - the Devouring One, the Terrible One, the One Who Reduceth to Silence, the One Who Travels in Lightning, Lady of the Bloodbath, Lady of Flame, Lady of the Tomb, Empowerer, Self-Contained, Sovereign. He took my hand and put it on Sekhmet’s breast, then mine, then hers three times – to give me strong sons, he said (thankfully not a ritual that works on infidels – I remain gratefully childfree). Tombs in the early dawn before the sun hammered down onto the bare rock of the Valley of the Kings, with the walls of the empty, dusty chambers of Tutankhamen’s tomb

still bright with the paintings of gods in reds and blacks and yellow ochre. The reconstruction of Abu Simbel and laughing together over the door that led into the artificial hill behind Ramses’ statues, and its key shaped like an ankh. The statue of Horus at Edfu, its head worn smooth with the number of hands that pressed down on it. The narrow dark tunnel up into the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.  Riding a camel under the Sphinx’s very nose. The fishermen out on the water, the sails of their boats inky black against the sunset. The way the sun trembles in the sky for an instant at sunset, then falls down into the Nile like a stone.  The geese, the wonderful wonderful geese from the tomb of Atet in Meydum. The knowledge in the eyes of Anubis, the dark and shining one, he who is on his mountain, Lord of obsidian and gold… the Dog who swallows millions.

I loved Egypt. It’s the sort of place that if it hadn’t really existed, someone’s creative imagination must have invented it. A place of bright light and shadows, desert and the Black Land, gods who walk with jackel heads or lions’ or hawks’.

And, of course, of scarabs.

Out on Sakkara, after walking around and touching the Djoser’s step pyramid, laying my hand on five thousand years given physical shape; after the cool of the Serapeum where bulls were once feted as gods and mummified like pharaohs, there was

a tomb. I don’t remember now whose tomb it was. Some Old Kingdom noble whose coloured statue still sat in the niche where once his family laid offerings of food and wine. In the doorway to his tomb, in a shallow depression in the sand, the scarabs ran and scuttled. They’re big and black. I was the only member of our group who picked one up and let it sit there, filling the palm of my hand. And when I set it down again, and tilted my hand to let it run off back onto the sand, its legs and feet tickled, and I remember I laughed.

I’m in poetic mood tonight, for some reason. I’ve been thinking a lot about that trip to Egypt and how much of it stays with me now, and how the highlight of it was a big black beetle that consented to sit on my hand for a minute.

You know, I’m not surprised that so much of my writing has a scarab running through it: Shield, with the Heart Scarab that symbolises so much of Bennet’s old love and the new; and the gilded scarab with scarlet wings that hangs on Rafe Lancaster’s watch chain. Scarabs are fun. Scarabs are about rebirth and new chances and starting again. Scarabs are about never giving in and how each morning, as the scarab lifts the disc of the sun up on its wide wings, is the start of a new day.

And their feet tickle. You can’t ask better than that.

Pushes baby out of the nest…

I feel a little light headed this morning.

Partly, of course, because Spring is springing away madly – warm sunshine in grimy old London today, folks – and this time of year always fills me with hope and purpose, and I want to get on and do things. The sap must be rising, or something.

But mostly I’m light headed and happy because ten minutes ago I took the plunge, and submitted Gyrfalcon to a publisher –  a mainstream SF publisher, as it happens. Because the Shield series is genre sci fi and an intense love story where the characters just happen to be gay, and is not m/m romance as that genre is currently defined, I’ve decided to try my luck with trad publishing. I suspect that Shield will still be impossible to place into a neat genre, and that for reason (irrespective of the publisher thinking I suck!) I am not exactly hopeful here. It’s also an odd set up in that I won’t get a rejection letter, just silence.  So in four months, if I’ve heard nothing, I can assume they don’t want it. So, check back here on… counts on fingers…  29 June, and I will probably be lamenting. But I have to take the plunge, right? If you never try it, there’s no possibility.

And in spring, I’m all for possibilities. Sap rising, remember?

Happy Spring Sunday to you all.

FREEBIE!! Download FlashWired for free

Rainbow Book Reviews said of my novella,  FlashWired: “This book took my breath away.” And “The thing is, the story is a really good one: great science fiction combined with a deeply emotional love story. Some of it was mind-bending and gruesome, and I cannot say it was a comfortable read. But it was a great read...“

Between 2  - 8 March, you can read FlashWired for yourself, for FREE.

For this next week, FlashWired is free at Smashwords only, as part of the promotion of “Read an eBook Week”. All you have to do is click on the link here or on the cover photo above to get to the FlashWired page, and when you get to the checkout, quote code RW100.

And FlashWired will be yours, for nothing.

I hope you take me up on the offer and that you enjoy FlashWired. If you’d like to leave a review, I’d be delighted but it certainly isn’t obligatory and nor is it obligatory to be anything other than totally honest if you do review.

I should warn you that the two chapters that you get with the novella from Gyrfalcon, the first of the Shield books, have changed since I published FlashWired.  Gyrfalcon will be available soon. Watch this space!!

There are literally hundreds of books on offer this week at  Smashwords. Click on the logo to go to their promotion page and check out the other free or heavily discounted books.

 

Me, myself and I

I have spent the last week doing some real thinking about the current WIP (working title -Gilded Scarab) and particularly around why I’ve found it so hard to gain any traction with it, something like 40,000 words in. I had it as a fairly deep PoV with my main hero, Rafe Lancaster, front and centre. But it still felt drab and lifeless and really rather boring. It needed some spice, and one particular problem was that Rafe didn’t meet his love interest, Ned Winter, until far too far into the book. I mean, I had written that 40,000 words and Ned still hadn’t walked through the coffee shop door!

So, I did two things this week to try and remedy it.

First, I engineered their first meeting to take place much, much earlier. Ned might not have been using his full name at the time, so that Rafe knows of him by a slightly different alias but they meet in a club for very special gentlemen, both of them looking for a casual hookup. They get it. I can then send Ned off to Aegypt for a winter’s digging and have Rafe buy the coffee house and settle into his role there, and when Ned walks through that door in March 1900, it won’t be his first appearance. He and Rafe will have *history*, and history that will need to be sorted out and will spice up the friendship that will grow all that summer and adds an extra twist to their relationships with a third man who is somewhat problematic. It gives the book a much needed boost.

Second, I carried out another little bit of retrofitting. I converted the story to First Person.

I know. I know all the pros and cons of that, not least that I have limited myself entirely to telling the story only through Rafe’s eyes, and he is just not going to be privy to everything. But here’s the thing:

the story is really about Rafe coming home. A character study if you like, of him dealing with some life changing experiences, finding a new direction and the love of his life. There’s an immediacy about him telling the reader directly, a straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth-ness about it. And that fits, by the way, because Rafe likes the odd flutter on the nags at Newmarket.~
if the story is more immediate if it’s completely in Rafe’s voice, with no narrator present, then the emotion should be more powerful, more immediate too. There’s no filter, other than the ones Rafe himself puts in place. Yes, that’ll be a onesided story, but it pretty much was going to be that anyway, using deep third person. I’ve just removed ‘me as narrator’ as an extra filter.
think about the potential for reliable/unreliable narration. Everything will be filtered through Rafe. That’ll be a real test of how convincing his character is, how honest and truthful he will appear. That’s a challenge!

But of course I have worries.

will Ned and the other characters blossom as personalities of their own if they’re always filtered through Rafe? He sees them in particular ways, of course, and I’ll have to work extra hard to let their characterisation show through despite Rafe’s own prejudices and the baggage he brings to bear. For example, his first encounter with Sam Hawkins, Ned’s bodyguard, came from having a harquebus pointed at him as Sam got Ned into an autophaeton. It’s going to be some time before Rafe will warm to Sam and that will colour how Rafe presents him to us. But the characters have to have mannerisms, dialogue, and action that makes them more than cardboard cutouts and hopefully the reader will see why Sam did what he did, even if Rafe is still resenting it, because Sam himself is alive enough and individual enough to show the reader. It’s a challenge, though.
I’m really limiting myself in terms of scope… but then, I always intended a single PoV story, I’ve just deepened it as far as it can go. But if there are things Rafe doesn’t know but the reader needs to, I’ll have to find a way around it somehow. Dialogue, maybe; or documents, diaries, expedition notes. But…
this is where we get into the risk of too much exposition. I already have a tendency to be a touch (cough) long-winded (cough). With only Rafe to explain everything, I shall really have to work hard to stop him talking constantly to camera, off on some windy exposition. If he’s explaining it to us, describing stuff – Cairo in the winter of 1900, for example, when he arrives there with Ned – then the picture Rafe presents has to be compelling and vivid, to overcome the sense of a disembodied voice giving us a sort of narrative travelogue. Show, don’t tell to the max, I think – dialogue in real time, action in real time, character interaction with their settings and each other in real time.
and while I’m avoiding too much exposition, I have to avoid summarising scenes too much. Oi vey. Finding the balance… well, actually, I think that will come from Rafe’s personality. He’s an gregarious soul: fun and entertaining. At least, he thinks he is and so do I! Hopefully that very character trait will prevent him from either being too boring or too brief. He likes to play to his audience and I have to hope that he’s skilled enough to do that well. Basically, I need him to be so engaged himself, that he entices the reader in with him.
Rafe has to have a good reason for telling his story. As first person narrator he’s chosen to explain his life to us, from some point in his future. He’s looking back and sharing with us how he got to where he is. Why?  What’s the ‘frame’ for the story? That’s something I’m still thinking about How far in the future Rafe is, looking back.

So, basically, wish me luck. Rafe’s already a lot happier, I can tell you, being allowed to tell his own story in his own voice. Let’s hope it works.

Have you ever written in First Person? How did it work for you? And as a reader, is it a big turn off or don’t you care if the character is compelling enough?

The Power of The Name

I have two words for you here.

Natty Bumppo.

You know, when it comes to naming your characters, a little thought can go a long, long way. What in heck was Fenimore Cooper smoking, do you think? Do you suppose he sat there at his desk, pen in hand, thinking “Hey, I’m going to write a whole series of books here about a man who’s half poet/half woodsman, and have him running about the American forests having adventures with the French and the Indians… what’ll be a good name for a man like that, a man who will be a diamond in the rough, who will have a purity of heart and mind beneath his frontiersman garb? A man who will show us a way of life that’s closer to nature and to the elements and that has a simplicity and even a sort of innocence that we, in our so-called civilisation, have lost and can’t regain? A man who will embody the sheer, heart-stopping romance, the thrilling adventure and the blood-tingling excitement of the frontier? Oh, I know! I’ll call him Natty Bumppo.”

I mean, didn’t the man know that even if a reader got through prose so dense you could use it for radiation shielding, that no one could take seriously a man called Natty Bumppo? Could you? Seriously?

Two more words.

Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Well, whatever Jane Austen was smoking when she came up with that one, could I have some please? If ever there were a perfect name for a character, don’t you think Mr Darcy has it? Solid worth… check. Aristocratic connexions… check. Hundreds of years of privilege and a family that probably came over with the Conqueror… check. Riches and education… check. Pride… check. A handsome name to denote a handsome, attractive man… check. Brooding romantic hero… double check with knobs on. It works. It works perfectly. Mr Darcy is the quintessential romantic male lead, and how much of that is supported and enhanced by that perfect romantic name? After all, do you think he’d be as iconic if he were called Egbert Shuckleman?

All right, being English, white and privileged, I am no doubt bringing all my own baggage to bear there, and undoubtedly to some different place and culture, Egbert Shuckleman might be the man all maidens dream of. But that aside, my point here really is that the Bard was way, way out of line with the words he put in Juliet’s mouth about roses smelling as sweet even if (to sort of quote the immortal Anne) you called it a skunk-cabbage. And if he’d ever run across our friend Natty, I’m sure the Bard would own to his mistake.

Naming your characters is incredibly important. Apart from allowing the reader to track who everyone is and who’s doing what in the plot, a good name supports the characterisation. It becomes the character. It has to fit. Not only does it need to fit his or her personality and story arc, it has to be of the right time and place, be memorable, have significance, yet not be gimmicky or over-exotic—unless, maybe, you’re writing for the daytime soaps. It takes a little more effort than thumbing idly through a baby names book.

In the Taking Shield series, I was looking for names for my two male lead characters. One, the hero, is the eldest son of a Fleet commander. He’s rich and privileged, well educated, and has had doors opened to him all his life. He hates that. He wants to earn his way on merit. He isn’t flashy or exotic. He’s governed by the principles his family live by, what he calls the family ‘triple goddess’ – honour, duty and service. I needed a name that sounds solid, that can be shortened into a nickname that only the other male lead can use, but that isn’t too pretentious or overly aristocratic (no Fitzwilliam here, sadly). For days I thought about—and rejected—solid old fashioned names such as Edmund or Nicholas (both briefly in the running) and finally ended up with Bennet. To this day, I can’t say why there was a large click! and an equally large light bulb going off when I added that name to my possibles list, but Bennet it is. It works for him. It gives him a slightly earnest feel, a seriousness, a feeling of solidity.

His love interest, on the other hand, was named in twenty seconds flat—and not by me, but by a friend, over lunch. I was bewailing the difficulty of naming a cheerful, ne’er-do-well, devil-may-care Fleet pilot, who loves life and embraces it with huge-hearted fervour; a gambler, a chancer, a man who dances his way through life, taking nothing seriously. Certainly one who’s never taken love seriously, although he is wildly enthusiastic about sex. Brave, loyal, skilled—and insubordinate, free-thinking, independent… a sort of intensely attractive rapscallion floozy.

At this point, J took a sip of her Chablis, rolled her eyes and said. “Flynn.”

I stopped in mid-word, the wind most decidedly taken out of the sails. Flynn. Of course! Perfect. And so Flynn he’s been, for several weeks longer than Bennet has been Bennet.

Those names work for the characters. They’ve become the characters. I could no more, at this stage, change either of those names without having to seriously rewrite their entire characterisation than I could walk on the floods in the Thames Valley. My characters are Bennet and Flynn, not Edward and Rod, or James and Luke.

Bennet and Flynn.

Perfect.

So, how did you come to name your characters, and how important are their names to you? Do share!

Heaven – or something close to it.

One of my favourite things in life is haute jouillerie, particularly tiaras. Not, I add sadly, that I own any, but that I adore tiaras and diadems, with any other sparkly jewellery coming a very close second in my affections, is usually clear to anyone who meets me and talks to me for more than five minutes. A passion, I tell you, and passions are not to be denied.

I was very sorry not to get to Paris to see the Cartier exhibition there before it ended. Very sorry. The best I can offer is this little glimpse of the heaven I was denied.

Enjoy it.

Clinging to the scaffolding

Today, we are talking about structure.

Oh, not structuring your great immortal work of literature. Far more incisive brains than mine have written about that—I can recommend K M Weiland’s book on the topic, if you’re desperate for words of wisdom and are fulminating quietly at my letting you down over it here. I didn’t intend this post as a bait-and-switch, fool-’em-into-coming-to-read sort of thing. It really is about structure.

Not my novel’s structure. Mine.

I had an epiphany this week. I came up with a jolt against the realisation that my life is very unstructured. I am drifting here and there with the tide. Which is, you know, restful and effortless, but sadly, doesn’t get you anywhere. Flotsam and jetsam, that’s what my life has become.

And it’s not pretty.

I’m still reasonably active in fandom. I moderate a fanfiction Yahoo group—let’s call it LW— for a forty year old TV western series, as well as managing one of its main archives, and I’ve been worrying recently about the fall off in activity at the group. It’s always been active and vibrant, you see, but the last few months people have just vanished from it. People who had written lots and who have been the backbone of the fandom community there… poof! Gone. I know that people come and people go in fandoms. That’s the nature of the beast. Some of them are writing their own stuff now and others may have gone on to other fandoms. That’s how it goes. But this is marked. It’s a big drop in activity, and the whole atmosphere of LW is one of decline and unenthusiasm. Another Yahoo group, similar in focus to LW but long moribund, has sprung into renewed life and many of the missing people from LW are posting there. It’s perplexing and worrying.

Then one of the members, off list, said something that brought this great epiphany in its wake. She said to me that for a long time now, I haven’t been posting there as a fan, as someone who loved the show and wanted the fiction to thrive. But that I’ve only been posting there as a moderator: do this, please, people or don’t do that. She was right. Oh boy was she right.

And as I started to defend myself, I sat down and looked at all the things I’m doing:

- final revise of Shield 2, taking on amends suggested by crit group (I’m two meetings behind there)

- sort of writing Golden Scarab. In a desultory way.

- manage the LW archive website – which includes putting up every story ever written (about 200 of them) by the fandom’s most prolific writer. Each one has to be checked for crap HTML, too. Not a simple job, even doing 5 or 6 stories a day. Today I managed 2 stories and it took 90 minutes to clean up the texts

- manage the website for my husband’s orchestra

- beta advice to two or three people (am several chapters behind…)

- a long technical edit for a friend’s second book, and reformatting the manuscript (just finished that).

- crit and comment on two other writers’ works, for a regular Skyping crit group

- daily moderation of the LW group, which at the moment includes worrying obsessively about how to revive it and finding the time to write an article for it on how to offer real feedback. And find time to comment on the stories posted.

- fanfiction commitments – I must finish one story that’s been back burnered for 18 months

- Pinterest and sparkly tiaras! (Don’t ask, but that place sucks up hours that I don’t have to spare)

- my mother. She lives with us now and needs companionship etc

- housework (a too-big four bedroom London house) and cooking. The house is shamefully shabby

- walking the dog twice a day

- my poor, neglected husband…

And I realised that I’m not doing any of this well. I’m not doing it well because I’m not focused, not sharp—not the way I used to be when I was working full time. Then my days had structure. I had project plans and deadlines and I worked my arse off to reach them. The sense of achievement when I did, buoyed me up for the next task. I was enthusiastic and, well, I had purpose. Now my days just have flotsam and jetsom. I’m just drifting from one thing to another and doing them all badly.

The worst casualty (apart from LW) is my writing. We’re half way through the month and I’ve written about 5000 words. That is just unacceptable. I could have sent Shield out to another publisher three months ago. Instead I’ve let that drift. And that, too, is unacceptable.

It’s not good enough and it has to change. I’ve started by looking at my day and all these darn things I have to do in it, and drawing up a tentative ‘project plan’, with times for walking Molly and times for socialising with Mum, but putting the afternoons aside to work. I have a *chart* with coloured blocks on it and earnest little memos to self typed on it: Tuesday is clean kitchen day! and Don’t forget to walk Molly! and Take Mum to shops…

I wish I could show it to you. It is a thing of *beauty*. It’s focused, driven, planned. It takes all the things I need to do and it weaves them into a structured sort of existence where I’m back in control and I have

purpose, and plans, and (possibly arbitrary!) deadlines to help me get back on track. What I want to do is exchange all that nasty horrible flotsam up there (↑) for something honed and beautiful that will bring me pleasure not guilt. To continue the sea metaphor, if I have to have my life tumbled about in the waves, then this should be the end result, not rubbish:

I have a chart. I will have purpose. I will drift no longer.

I’ll start next week…