The Changeling Tree: The Time Before

Messy kitchen (not mine, honestly)image by Hans Braxmeier from PixabayWhen I finished my first re-run through the second book in the Changeling Tree series, I thought it was finished but I knew it wasn't satisfactory and at that stage I made a lot of changes to it. For example, I changed the title from The New Girl.

Additions at that stage included all of the Faerie story-line. Previously, there was only the one scene with Carrick near the end. The new Faerie scenes provided more depth to their world and show that, even though Annis failed in her attempt on Carrick's challenge, she's still trying to ensure he doesn't succeed. According to the terms of the game, it's only necessary for him to fail for victory to be hers.

I also fleshed out Agnes's story quite a lot. The bare bones were there, but I added more about her friendship with Florence and about her brothers. Her three wishes were a new addition and I made the parallels between herself and Mrs Somerbird more clear.

One thing I realised when I got to the bit where Robin left Agnes in the cottage in the woods was that I appear to be obsessed with cleaning. My characters always seem to be doing it or living in places that need to be cleaned. This isn't because I'm a keen cleaner myself (far from it), but it's probably got something to do with the fact that when the writing is flowing, it seems impossible to stop and switch the hoover on. It's one or the other: the book or a clean house. So the cleaning in the books is probably a sublimation of my own guilt.

I think it's interesting, though, that there's so little cleaning in books and on television. Ok. Wait. Hear me out. I know that reading about or watching someone wiping their kitchen down after three meals a day would be pretty damn boring, but cleaning is something that people (especially, but not exclusively, women) do a lot. For many women (and I'm not saying it's not the same for some men, but I'm not one, so I can't speak for them), cleaning is tied up with all kinds of emotions. There's why-the-hell-am-I-the-only-person-who-wipes-these-surfaces cleaning, there's aren't-I-the-uber-competent-superwoman cleaning, there's I-need-to-obliterate-every-trace-of-that-jerk-from-my-life cleaning, there's at-least-I-can-control-this cleaning, there's if-I-can't-make-this-place-look-at-least-hygienic-my-mother/mother-in-law/neighbours/mother-and-baby-group/workmates-will-know-I'm-a-failure-as-a-woman cleaning, there's (I'm guessing) look-at-me-isn't-my-life-perfect cleaning.

Cleaning is about bringing order from chaos or clinging on by your fingertips, but it's also about new beginnings: when you move into a new house, you clean; when you make resolutions about being a better human being, you change the place you live to reflect your new and better persona. And there's spring-cleaning, of course, for that moment in the year when the sun first shows up all the grubby marks and smears that you've lived in blissful ignorance of all winter. There are probably more positive emotions around cleaning too, but I suspect the people who could write about those convincingly are too busy sprucing up the back of their fridge to get anything down on paper.

For me, then, the cleaning scenes aren't really about cleaning. They're expressions of determination to make the best of things or to be useful or to hold it together. The really dirty or messy places are expressions of emotion or character too. Sometimes they're showing that someone's overwhelmed or that they've given up, but sometimes my characters are untidy because they have more interesting things to do. Emotions are messy things after all.

[Written on the 26th of June, 2019, when these reflections were fresh in my mind]