Monday afternoon I got a phone call from Niall

 

In the first place . . . thank you all for your responses to last night's blog.  I'm a little overwhelmed.  Merrilee has kept saying to me, Why will they be angry?  You're telling them three books, not one.  An extra PEG and an extra extra.  What's not to like?  —But I couldn't hear it.  I have been so obsessed with PEG II that everything around it is a great barren ring of dust and ashes.  THANK YOU.  You're the best.  I'll deconstruct a bit more over the next few days, as I get used to not being shut up in a small dark cupboard.  Meanwhile . . . 

* * *

Monday afternoon I got a phone call from Niall.  We're going to be short one on Wednesday, he said.  Algernon can't come.  So it's just going to be Theophrastus and Thormond* and me.  So if you came you could ring major.  Niall always has a special little sparkly edge to his voice when he's talking about handbells.  Sensible people flee.  I am not sensible.

            Where is it? I said suspiciously.

            Fantootlington, Niall said off-handedly.  Thormon's flat.  You've been there before.

            Yes, I have, I said.  It's across two trackless deserts and a jungle full of giant person-eating anacondas.  It takes days.  I have a novel to write. **

            So bring a sandwich and keep your window rolled up, said Niall, who suffers from selective deafness.  I'll pick you up at 6:25.

            I was weak.***  I agreed to this madness.  The thing is, I would really like to ring bob major with a strong band.  It's not Gemma's fault she's a beginner, but she's going to go on being a beginner for a while and I need to be surrounded by people who know more than I do so I can improve too.†  Well, that was the plan.        

            As we're driving away from the mews Niall says, in that ominously casual voice, Algernon's coming after all.  We can ring royal [ten bells].

            I can't ring royal! I said.  I can only approximate the ringing of plain courses of plain bob major!††

            You'll be fine, said Niall.

            HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

            I should have remembered that the big boys ring at a hundred million miles an hour.†††  JEEZUM DANGBLATTING CROW.  We started with a little plain hunt royal.  I was on the trebles.  Any fool can ring plain hunt on the trebles to any frelling number.  You just keep counting.  Except when you can't count fast enough, even silently in your head.  I fell over the extra syllable in 'seven' every frelling row.  Sven.  Sn.  GAAAAAH.

            It wasn't much better when they took gentlemanly turns to sit out so I could practise my bob major.  I can ring plain courses!  But not at a hundred million miles an hour!  And when they started calling bobs and singles—which was what I was there for, to practise ringing touches—it was completely hopeless.  Except that a band that good will just chivvy you through the gaps you should be filling till you figure out which pattern the last frelling call dropped you into, and you pretend to ring for yourself for a while, till the next call.

            I'm twitchy anyway, and the more anxious and wound up I get, the twitchier I get.  Roger is always at me in the tower to relax.  If I could relax, trust me, I would.  Trying to keep up with hundred million mile an hour handbell ringing was making me very twitchy indeed.  Until Algernon declared that what I needed was some remedial ringing.  Still at a hundred million miles an hour, you understand.  What I had to do, he proclaimed, was to develop a sense of rhythm.  Well, no doubt.  But I'm not going to develop a sense of rhythm at a hundred million miles an hour, when I can't even say seven in my head fast enough to keep my place in the row.  So we rang plain hunt again while he told me how to hold my wrists and how not to hold my arms and to stop jerking the bells and to ring them gently, and I began to think longingly of cleaning bathrooms and boiling my head.  I was eventually permitted to ring a plain course of bob major again to demonstrate that I'd learned something.  Erm.  I hadn't learnt anything, and at a hundred million miles an hour . . . I couldn't even ring a plain course of bob major without falling over that seven.  Among other things.  You can only dodge when the treble leads if the treble is not a blur of speed so extreme you have no idea if it's leading or not.

            Sigh.

            Niall said on the drive home, You did really well.  Oh, and don't mind Algernon.  He has his little ways. 

* * *

* Who has appeared previously on these pages as 'Tom'.  How boring.  I can't imagine what I was thinking. 

** Again.  Finally.  Yaaay.  I'm trying not to think about the 'end of January' part too much.

*** A foolhardy person posted to the forum last night:  Maybe dial back a little (just a little!) on the other activities and let this new book flow and your year will get better. 

And Jodi answered: 

Robin and I have different processes, but personally, when I can write, I do. When I can't, I do other stuff (like yarn and music and things). Sometimes putting my other stuff away and sitting down to write or else works, but usually what comes out isn't the sort of thing anyone would want to read.

I can't speak for Robin, but I suspect that it's not so much a matter of dialing back other things to focus more on writing. It's a matter of the story muscling ahead of the other things because it's ready to be written. For some writers, it's more about writing when the story's working rather than it is about discipline. 

What she said.  If you're a writer, writing is your first priority.  Full stop.^  You're always sort of checking the temperature of story-in-progress as if it were a kind of complex, surreal sponge for what, if you're lucky, will become an immortal loaf of bread, after you've added the flour and the pearls and the denouement.  You can't help the constant checking.  You're built that way.  And if the story-sponge is ready for you, you will trample little old ladies, break appointments and the speed limit, and fail to go to the grocery store/pharmacy/dump again, even though you ran out of food/toothpaste/room weeks ago, to get back to your desk.^^

            There are not a lot of things worse, for a writer, than month after month after month of a story-sponge that refuses to rise.

            But there's another aspect to this.  I do try to remind you that I lie by omission a lot.  I write the blog about the stuff I feel like making public.  It's not about my life.  It's about certain carefully selected bits of my life, scrubbed up, costumed and professionally lit for dramatic excitement.  What are my two major preoccupations?  Peter's health and story-in-progress.  How much about either of them do you hear on the blog?  Uh-huh.  No one whose chief source of information about me is this blog has a clue about my lived reality.  Please remember this.           

^ There are writers sane and plugged into the real world enough to put their children and families first.  This is not something you want to count on however.  If you're thinking about becoming romantically involved with a writer, think very carefully. 

^^ Almost anything, in fact, but truncate the hurtling of hellhounds. 

† My ringing life.  I'd love to ring bob major in the tower with a strong band too.  And for those of you who don't—for some reason—keep close track of my schedule, by choosing to go with Niall tonight for handbells I missed Wednesday practise at Forzadeldestino. 

†† It's not only that major is eight bells.  It's also that plain bob anything—plain bob doubles, plain bob minor, plain bob major—is the first method you learn on that number of bells.  It's the baby method.  And a plain course is the baby version of the baby method.  I'm only ringing the baby version of the baby method on eight.  

††† There's also a slight but discernable weirdness not so much about being the only woman with a group of four guys, but being the only woman and the weakest espouser of the activity you're together to pursue.  I start kind of looking around for my crinoline.  At least I'm taller than three of them, even if they ring better than I do.