Laurie Graham's Blog, page 26

    And so, on the last day of January 2014 this tired old scribbler hauled her considerable ass over her contractual finishing line. First draft is now on the desks of my editor and my agent. I do not want to hear from them for at least two weeks, I don’t care how fast they read. I want my life back.

For the past month I’ve not looked up from my desk. Well, okay, apart from the ten days I spent inside a pantomime cow skin. For the past twenty days I have not looked up. I’ve neglected my friends, neglected my blog. Haven’t painted my toenails. It’s no way for a girl to live. And here’s the thing. I’ll have to pull off the same party trick next January. I’m not, pace T S Eliot, measuring out my life in coffee spoons. I’m measuring it out in thick wodges of diary. Something has to change. I need a best-seller. Suggestions on a postcard, please.

And how am I going to spend my first weekend of freedom? Well, I’m considering staying in bed with a bottle of cough linctus and  Walter Sickert . The only trouble is, 700 pages, hard-bound, I’m not sure my arms have the strength to hold him. I intend giving it my very best shot.

Crossing the Bar is of course a lovely Tennyson poem, sometimes set as a hymn. I’d put it on my funeral wish list only I fear the line May there be no moaning of the bar would provoke inappropriate laughter in the many members of my family who have worked in pubs. I could risk it. It’s not as though I’ll be there.

As I always tell friends who are thinking of blogging, if you’re going to do it you have to post regularly. There’s no faster way to lose readers than leaving them dangling for weeks. So, Laurie Graham, what’s your excuse?

Well, m’Lud, I plead extraordinary pressure of work. Plus a hole in the roof, directly over my desk, just when Mr Roof Repair Man is in Tenerife catching a few well-deserved rays. It never rains etc. etc, an expression particularly apposite in this sodden isle. I’ve solved the desk situation by transferring my laptop to Mission Control, aka The Kitchen.  I may even leave it there. It’s much handier for the kettle.

The pressure of work scenario is entirely of my own creation. First, in anticipation of my absence on pantomime duty, I promised my editor first draft by next Monday. It seemed achievable. Until I started reading and doing a little tidying up when I discovered a whopping time-line gaffe that can only be fixed by a 5000 word rewrite. Can I do it? Probably not by Monday? Is it the end of the world? No. But it would have been nice to lob the manuscript someone else’s side of the net for a couple of weeks. Ah well.

Meanwhile, in Panto Land we’ve had an unprecedented run of mishaps. Three roles have had to be recast and two others still hang by a thread. People can be wonderful. They step up and help out even when they’d actually rather have root canal.  Nevertheless I wake in the night and hear the sound of barrels being scraped. I’m starting to dread the plink of new mail into my mailbox. What next? The theatre under water? Okay, we’ll just bung in a bit of synchronised swimming.

But, as above, I have no-one to blame but myself. I started this panto thing all those years ago. I performed CPR on it on more than one occasion when wiser heads might have allowed it to expire. And it was I who pledged to do one last production before I hand over to someone younger and less battle-worn. The show goes on. It has to. Fans have checked in online for their flights. We  already have two full houses. So, I’ve started packing my bag. Aspirin, throat lozenges, cow hooves, straightjacket, more aspirin.

The curtain rises two weeks tomorrow. Well it would if we had a curtain.

      According to my Sunday paper (and yes, I did swear I was going to stop reading them) for a woman to enjoy career success these days she needs to commit to Extreme Grooming. I’ve heard of extreme sports  -  Downhill Hoovering for example  - but this grooming thing is a new one on me. In order to be taken seriously in the workplace one apparently requires freshly  blown-out hair, gel nails, and regularly threaded eyebrows. Oh, and heels. Never mind what havoc high heels will wreak on your feet and your spine. Without them you may  as well abandon your boardroom ambitions and become a lollipop lady.

This is all over my untended head but it doesn’t really matter because I gave up trying to be taken seriously round about 1966. When you’re self-employed and home-based the only person who sees you is the postman. You can have dry, flyaway hair and ragged cuticles and the quality of your writing will not be affected. You can sit all day in your gardening shoes, and I do.

I do scrub up once a year to have lunch with my editor, a woman of such drop-dead elegance it’s no contest. I feel free to wear the same old jacket and to order a side of fries. My agent is an exhausted father of young children so on the rare occasions I lunch with him it would probably go unnoticed if I dressed as a five foot gherkin.  All either of these people care about is the quality of the stuff I write. I am a lucky woman.  I’m also quids in.  £60 to get your eyebrows done, so they say.

But to be serious for one moment, what an extraordinary turnaround in one generation. Mothers who wore droopy Laura Ashley and long curtains of hair have begotten daughters who to go to nail bars. And are the guys smartening up too, I wonder? That would be something to see. Why do I suspect that offices everywhere are still full of men in two-day shirts and white socks.

Anyway…. people sometimes ask me how to become a writer. I guess my new first rule had better be KNOCK OFF THE MANICURES AND STOP LOOKING IN THE MIRROR.

No need for Santa to swing by for this year because I’ve already taken things in hand. My husband is a wonderful and multi-talented person who sadly is afflicted with the Incompetent Shopper gene so I’ve just treated myself to three books I could not possibly justify to my accountant. Writers don’t necessarily desire books for Christmas. On this weekend of horizontal rain and a mere eight hours of daylight a one-way ticket to the Maldives sounds quite appealing. But books are good. Lower in calories than Bailey’s Irish Cream chocolates and so much better to curl up with by the fire than a new Le Creuset pan.

What did I choose?

1. Stage Blood by Michael Blakemore. A behind-the-scenes bitch about the early days of the National Theatre. Blakemore probably toils over his writing but if so you’d never know it. His style seems effortless. Plus he knows where the bodies are buried.

2.The Danube by Nick Thorpe.  The less I’m able to travel the more I love accounts of other people’s crackpot adventures. In this case an up-river trek from the Black Sea to the Black Forest by a BBC journalist. NOT by Michael Palin, nota bene.

3. Food DIY by Tim Hayward. I hesitated over this one because it was eye-wateringly expensive when it was first published and anyway I need another cook book like I need a third armpit. But I kept going back to it each time I was in a bookshop, taking it off the shelf, putting it back, and then it got discounted (don’t you just love market forces?).  And now I own it. It was meant to be. Strictly speaking it isn’t a cook book, more a technical manual. And even though we’re ten days shy of Christmas I’m using it already to compare the Hayward method of preparing gravlax (dill, salt, sugar) with the Diana Henry method (gin and juniper berries). Watch this space.

So that’s my Christmas sorted.  This book tree is by mediatinker by the way. I believe this kind of craft work is called ‘re-purposing’. I’m keeping it mind for 2014  – a good use for some of the dreck clogging our bookshelves.

     Today has been Book End Day. I don’t know if other writers have this tic but when I get to a certain point in the, ahem, creative process, I feel the book starting to lean and creak towards the as yet unwritten end. So I write the end. Then, feeling better shored up, I go back to where I was in the story.

When I start on a new book I always have a pretty firm idea how it’s going to end. Without that I fear it would just witter aimlessly on. But at that early stage nothing is definite. Over the years  I’ve had some changes of heart, either self-generated or editorially imposed.  One can’t always engineer a happy ending but I can see it makes good marketing sense not to leave one’s readers depressed.

My current work-in-progress throws up a particular challenge there. My protagonist’s true story has some frankly bum moments. All I’ll say for now is that I hope the indestructible sense of the absurd I’ve endowed her with will carry the day.  Anyway, her retaining wall is now in place so I feel I can take the weekend off and come back to the pre-end stuffing  narrative on Monday morning with renewed vigour.

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I have many talented friends, not least the very fabulous poet, lyricist and Olympic standard shopper Caryl Avery. She’s written a brilliant  revue parodying the world of nip and tuck. I’ve seen a preview.  It deserves an audience. It needs investors. You can read more about CUTS: an Uplifting musical here on Caryl’s shiny new website. Finally she listened to me.

But as I just told her, ‘The website is only the beginning. Now go forth and blog.’

Reading the tributes to and anecdotes about Doris Lessing last week one of her famous remarks about motherhood stuck with me more than anything else. ‘No-one can write with a child around.’

Motherhood was understandably a touchy subject for Doris Lessing. I have no intention of judging her because I don’t know the truth of her circumstances when she left her children behind. She certainly seems to have been attentive to a later child. Still, her pronouncement  -  and from a writer of her stature it can feel like the last word on the subject  – her pronouncement irritates me. Which is not to say she was wrong necessarily.

When you start to go through the pantheon,  Austen, Woolf, Eliot… all childless.  Fanny Burney had one son but she didn’t write much after he was born. Charlotte Bronte would have been a mother had she survived the pregnancy but she didn’t, so we cannot know how her writing would have fared with a grizzler clinging to her knee. You can see where Doris was coming from. So what about the vast army of us scribbling away with squished banana in our hair. Has our work suffered? Or do we just take ourselves and our, ahem, profession less seriously?

Someone asked me recently how many books I’d written. I’m never sure. I gave her a ballpark figure. It was, she said, a huge achievement. Well, yes and I did take pleasure in her compliment. But my greater achievement by far has been the raising of four children and the founding of a small dynasty of grandchildren. Nature requires those of us who can procreate to do so and to make as good a job of it as we are able. If our novel-writing suffers, so be it. They’re only novels, after all. And perhaps they’re not weaker or less eloquent. Perhaps they’re  just different.

Publishing is a fickle friend as Lessing’s wonderful Jane Somers experiment proved. More satisfying by far to have heard the twang of the bowstring as you launch living arrows into the future. I’m just saying…

     You’ll excuse, I hope, a granny’s moment of self-indulgence.  My grandson Max started school a few weeks ago. He won’t be five till the spring but they had room for him and he was ready. This week I had the pleasure of witnessing that ‘Aha’ moment when a child gets the hang of reading. I remember that moment in my own life. I was about Max’s age, it was a Sunday morning and my parents, reasonably enough, wanted a lie-in. I gathered an armful of books and sat up in bed deciphering them. By breakfast time I’d worked my way through my entire Noddy & Big Ears library and was ready to read the marmalade label and the HP sauce bottle, which in those days had the bonus of French words as well as English. Un melange de fines epices, if I remember rightly.

Sadly I don’t remember when each of my children twigged reading, only that thankfully they learned without any difficulty. Ditto swimming and riding a bike. That’s the thing about a large family. The memories sort of coalesce.

But today’s parents have everything taped, or saved to a cloud or something and that’s why, thanks to my son-in-law’s quick thinking, I was able to share Max’s reading ‘Aha Moment’ even though we’re separated by the Irish sea.

I tried to put the video link into this post but apparently parents are very protective of such things these days. Lift the paving slab of the Internet and beneath it is a creepy crawly universe of paedophiles looking for images of cute four year olds. What a world. But you are spared my family video, for which you may be thankful.

Suffice it to say Max was visibly pleased with himself, and he can have no idea what a wonderful, exciting door he just opened.

So…. five grandchildren up and reading, four still to go. Life’s little satisfactions.

Well it’s 11.49 and I’ve so far piddled away the morning trying to fix a glitch on my computer. I figured I might as well carry on piddling till lunch time (we eat early in this house.) and do a blog post.  On days like today I actually feel nostalgic for my old manual typewriter and the manila envelopes in which I used to mail my copy.

The first task before me this morning was to file a piece with the Daily Mail. The practicalities of life can be such a doddle for writers now. You type the article, edit it and polish it a hundred times more than one would have done in the days of Tippex, then attach it to an email to your editor and ping! It’s on its way. Leaving you free to get on with the laundry, the shopping or even writing a novel. But no. My laptop, recently resuscitated from sudden death, has lost the ability or the will to attach files. It just sits there, spinning its wheels.

I’m quite a logical person. I like solving problems in a systematic way. I could have been an electrician or a plumber and some days, believe me, I wish I was. But computers are beyond me. They belong to a world that moves too fast for this old bird. I tried my best this morning. Followed the check list. Updated my browser, disabled a few add-ons, cleared my cache (a procedure that sounds faintly gynaecological). Still no joy. The more remedies I tried, the more suggestions popped up. It was as though they were breeding.

Get more out of Bing! Customise your tool bar!

It was only when I got up from my desk to take a break and bang my head against the nearest wall that the red haze lifted and I remembered: I just bought a back-up computer. A nifty little reconditioned machine that came with good old Windows 7 and so sidestepped the universally loathed Windows 8 that masquerades as progress.  It’s been sitting in its case ever since it arrived, awaiting its moment. And that moment was just now, when it booted up nicely, said hello and attached that file without a murmur.

I really don’t know what my senior computer’s problem is but it may just like to consider, we are none of us irreplaceable.

     Many people dream of giving up the day job to become a writer. I remember clearly the day I decided to take the leap. The backed-up traffic on the North Circular might have swung it. The knowledge that come six o’clock I’d be in the same gridlock of exhausted commuters definitely made the risk seem more palatable. My then husband was ambivalent about it. He rather liked the idea of my being at home with our children, but he worried, and rightly, that I’d be giving up a sure thing with a pension for a high wire with no promises.

Anyway, I did it, on the strength of one modestly successful book, and I have no regrets. Even when the wolf has been at the door it’s been better than the North Circular at 8am. All that said, it may surprise those who fantasise about a writing life to learn that writers too fantasise about other careers. I don’t mean teaching writing, or freelance copy-editing, or website building because when you boil it down those are still writing jobs. I mean wanting to do something completely different. Not many of us do anything about it.

I’ve just stumbled, belatedly, on a writer who did.  Polly Hope describes herself as a jobbing artist. But in the 1960s, as Maryann Forrest, she published three novels. I’m currently reading one of them  - Here, Away From it All   – and I commend it to you. Then she stopped writing novels and began making things rather than stories, which was what she truly wanted to do. Her career path (you can read about it here) has been varied, fearless and quite enviable. It strikes all kinds of chords with me because I’ve discovered quite far on in life that I’m never happier than when I’m making things. The difference between myself and Polly Hope is that she has the skill to make things people might buy. Still and all, her curriculum vitae has cheered me up enormously.

Meanwhile, at the weekend workbench, I’m slightly missing working on Violet the Cow now I’ve delivered her to the panto wardrobe. I need a new project. I wonder what it’ll be?  Mixed news from the kitchen. The blackcurrant vodka is superb, the sea buckthorn vodka is going to be flushed down the dunny. Might as well. It tastes okay-ish but it looks like a very bad urine sample.

Well here I am, back in my writing shoes after a two week absence and in particular the Guildford Book Festival via Venice and Walthamstow. Book Festivals are a thorny issue for writers. They take up time and energy and most of them don’t pay. Why do we do them? It’s the most aired topic whenever two or three of us are gathered in a Green Room waiting to go on. Then we go on and remember why we do them. We get to meet people who have actually read our books.

It is truly gratifying and encouraging in what is otherwise a solitary life doing speculative work. You might spend a year labouring on something that a critic trashes in just one short paragraph. So to arrive at a book festival and learn that your event is sold out is very cheering news indeed. And then to walk into a room full of people who want to ask you questions or tell you how utterly brilliant you are, well, what could be a better way to put some spine in you for the next six month slog.

So thanks to the organisers of Guildford 2013, for taking such good care of their guests, to Guy Pringle of New Books magazine for setting me up as a far more interesting speaker than I really am, and to all those lovely readers who gave up their Saturday afternoon to come and listen to lil’ol me.

Sold out! Who’d have thunk it?