B.K. Duncan's Blog, page 2

Shall We Dance?

For the past few years my passion has been the Argentine Tango. I’ve always loved the music (and listen to it when I’m writing, in fact) but it was when I started planning a quartet of historical crime novels around the theme of dance that I took things a step further. I’d been reading up on Stanislavsky’s meticulous approach to acting and decided to throw myself into the method school of research by learning the tango.

Tango dancers in Buenos Aires

I  wanted to feel what my character would feel when she stood, ignored, in the corner of the dancehall; I needed to encounter that moment when you totally immerse your body and soul into the rhythms: I yearned to inhabit the music and for the music to inhabit me. I have now experienced all those things — and more. I hadn’t bargained for the desolation of spending a whole evening without once being asked to dance or the mind-numbing difficulty of the steps. My inability to relinquish control and allow myself to be led frustrated me (and still does) to the point of wanting to stamp my feet and cry; and I hadn’t realised how permanently tense my muscles have become with stress. But I had also underestimated the exhilaration, the freedom of abandoning myself to the moment, the sheer heartbreaking joy of expressing with my body what could never be said in words.

I’ve been dancing to a very different tune when it comes to the efforts I’ve been making to transform myself from a struggling writer into a soon-to-be-published author. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow is the tempo dogging my footsteps. Just when I’d think I’ve learnt something about incorporating a widget into my website or classifying metadata or grasping the principles of marketing via social media . . . I’d find I’d misunderstood something vital and have to go right back to square one. 

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

So my progress has been that of a snail. A drunken snail, at that, as I zigzag over the ground I have recently covered. Only, of course, time isn’t moving at the same speed. The spring flowers are blooming already, the blackbirds preparing to nest, and the weeks on my calender to publication day are disappearing fast.

It doesn’t help that I keep telling myself how exciting this should be; how much I’ve always relished a challenge; that I’ve decades behind me of beating tight deadlines. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow thumps through my head and destroys my natural rhythms. I need to learn some new moves, some nifty footwork that will restore my faith in my ability to face the music and dance. And writing this has been the first step . . .

What sort of a dancer are you?

TO SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER, VISIT MY WEBSITE AND CLICK ON THE RED POSTBOX. 

http://www.bkduncan.com

Be Careful What You Wish For

I’ve lost count of the number of times the only thing I’ve asked Santa for has been for a traditional publisher to offer me a book deal. Well, just before Christmas he finally decided I’d been a good enough girl to deserve one. For 19 years I’ve been learning my craft, doing my apprenticeship, paying my dues — whatever you want to call it — and have been teaching creative writing for the last nine. So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d be bouncing off the walls with excitement or whispering those sweet words I told you so to the people on my (very long) list. But I’ve been denied the pleasure of either because since I heard the good news I’ve been wandering around in a state of shell-shock (ironically, one of the themes in my books) with almost all my energy feeding and nurturing the Fear Ogre that has consumed and spat out the carefree person I once was.

SEEKING STABILITY

Somehow it hasn’t helped to remind myself that I had a career before this one in which I was a highly successful senior manager with specialisms in organisation development and facilitation. So I can see the big picture. Undertake strategic planning. Take a holistic approach to change. I’m good with helping people communicate their visions and translate them into achievable goals. Have I forgotten how to do all that? Are my skills too rusty to be honed again? Or is it just the accursed inevitability of it always being easier to tell someone else what to do than to do it yourself? But I was able to recall one of the phrases we bandied about back then . . .

photo taken by Gill Jones: sourced from fotolibra.com

A crocodile has to eat an elephant in biteable bites

And there I was trying to swallow the previously unexplored worlds of marketing strategies, social media, reader platforms, author presence, and blogging all in one go. No wonder I woke up in the night feeling as though I was choking. Comforted by the thought that I would learn everything I needed to as long as I allowed each new concept to be digested and fully absorbed before I shovelled down more on top, I constructed a 6ft high whiteboard out of a pasting table and roll of wallpaper and covered it with mind-maps and flowchart boxes.

FALLING INTO THE ABYSS

And then I panicked. There was too much to do and not enough time to do it in and so I let the ogre take control . . . I set about trying to do all of it all at the same time. Why is it we intellectually know something isn’t the right approach, will be self-defeating, is dissipating our precious energy, and yet we dare not stop because we’ve convinced ourselves that action — any action — is what will make the difference between success and failure? But it isn’t, and it won’t. There is only one thing, one approach, one attitude, that will squash the fear and starve it into submission:

FOCUS
FOCUS
FOCUS

I now recognise that if I can say I’ve achieved that by the end of the day then the rest will come about as a consequence. And I might just have enough of my sanity left to enjoy what the future will bring. I’ll let you know how I get on . . .

TO SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER, CLICK ON THE RED POSTBOX.