narrating kayoz

Monday morning free-write (gardening, chooks, writing, teething)

The motivation to write is definitely limited by the Spring weather calling me to the garden. There are so many jobs to do out there, many of which have immediate payoffs. That is, the effect is immediately visible, like when you sweep the floor after a week of not picking all the toys up… not that I ever do that, of course!

Here’s my list of garden tasks:

• Weed the front garden bed next to the house
• Weed the front garden bed next to the driveway (more work because of the horrid couch grass)
• Get a couple of trailer loads of mulch
• Get some eco-pine sleepers & stakes
• Rebuild retaining wall for driveway garden bed
• Mulch above garden beds
• Newspaper and mulch the new bed to be made out the front, and plant some screening plants
• Dig in some manure to the bed next to the massage room, and mulch it
• Divide and plant lots of violets and in all those beds, and the one outside the study window, quickly while it’s still not too hot and we’re getting some ain
• Finish getting couch grass out of garden bed next to back fence and newspaper and mulch it
• Get a bail of  Lucerne hay for chooks to scratch up
• Move fence around veggie garden to make a slightly bigger space with some shade
• Build new, temporary chook house in veggie garden enclosure (out of straw bails)
• Move chooks down there for a couple-few months, to tractor it up.
• (After Chooks are moved:) replant the Chook yard with rosemary, wormwood, and other chook friendly plants, protect their root systems, also protect the root systems of some of the other trees and shrubs in there (eg with besser bricks or sleepers). Chuck in a sprinkling of grass and clover too, even though they’ll just eat it all and scratch it up as soon as they get back in there – it’ll be a little treat for them.

Okay, this is really not working out to be a proper free-write, as I’ve definitely been stopping and thinking as I go, so it’s not really serving the usual warm-up purpose – more just finding a way to think about what I really want to be thinking about (the garden) instead of what I need to think about (the writing).

I am finding that my motivation re the writing is low right now, not only because of the Spring weather, but also because I am having to rethink the project to try to make it into a 16000 word project, rather than an 80,000 word project, which is what it seems to want to be.

But, I am also starting to really understand the instruction that must be in every writing book ever written, to try to write something everyday. I only work (mostly) on Sundays and Mondays. It’s great having whole days, but it also feels a bit like starting from scratch each Sunday.

The week after next Chris is taking a week off and I am planning to work four days in a row! Which will be fantastic, except as far as Mikaela and Liam are concerned. Yesterday Mikaela woke up from her nap screaming after only half an hour, and since Chris couldn’t resettle (or calm) her, and since I was inside having lunch, I ended up nursing her. That calmed her, but when I said “Mummy has to go back to work” she instantly started screaming again. She’s not suffering much from separation anxiety in general, I don’t think – I think this might be more about getting her second two-year-old molar (despite still only having six other teeth so far!), since it’s been happening a bit at night the past few days as well. And since that molar is partly through, but seems not to have progressed any in a few days. But still, I don’t think she’ll be too impressed about me working four days in a row. C’est la vie, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, back to the issue of writing every day. I don’t do it when she’s napping, because that’s when I either do housework, do garden work, or, if I’m feeling lazy, faff about online (though Liam doesn't usually stand for that for very long). I could write instead, but then I would be feeling even more frustrated by the garden stuff (and I can’t get out the front when Kaely is awake, since she will instantly crawl off to the road if given half a chance) and the flour wouldn’t get swept for two weeks instead of only one!

So that really only leaves night time to write, if I want to write every day. And the fact is that mostly by the time the kids are in bed I am wiped out. Especially lately with the screaming in the middle of the night (for instance I was basically awake from midnight until 3:30am on Friday night, although I did get her down for 40 minutes at one stage in there. And Chris got up with her at one point for about 40 minutes too, but of course I didn’t get back to sleep in that time, because I could hear her not settling down for him - at least when she's with me she can calm herself by nursing, and I can sit down and sort of rest). Plus, in addition to being wiped out in the evening, there’s the fact that that is really the only time Chris and I have together, seeing as how one of us is working every day of the week. And with the kids not being in bed till 7:30ish, and me trying to be in bed by 9:30ish, there’s not a whole lot of time for me to write and spend time with my husband. In fact, by the time the kitchen’s cleaned up (mostly by Chris) and maybe some washing’s folded, there’s not a whole lot of time at all.

But, that leaves me back with writing on only two days a week, which is just not really working well for me, so I am going to have to come up with a solution.

Right now though, I have to get into it, or the morning will be over and me no further ahead in my work.

On being a writing student (some notes)

Discontinuous prose exercise (from the Hazel Smith book I keep mentioning):

On being a writing student (some notes)

A good day in the study leaves me filled with energy and excitement, wishing I could come back in here every day to work. I may have written two thousand words or more, or I may have only written two hundred, but feel I have worked something out in so doing.

A bad day leaves me frustrated and despairing, still wishing I could come back to work in here tomorrow (in the hope of having a better day), but also relieved that I don’t have to.

Things that help:

• finding something in The Writing Experiment (or elsewhere) that speaks to exactly what I want to do (eg, some ideas I came across today about mixed genre writing and fictocriticism - exactly what I have been thinking of doing, without quite knowing I was thinking it)

• sitting out on the deck to write by hand for a while, if the family are out and about (and it’s nice weather)

• just doing it.

Things that don’t help:

• reading that in 2004 only 32 Australian literary novels were published (by mainstream publishers), which was a drop of almost 50% since 1996 (source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18464035-16947,00.html)
• faffing around on facebook
• being sleep deprived
• having a good idea for an entirely different project so that my energies become divided.

A friend said that she is feeling exhausted by the whole thing, the very idea of writing, but listening to me talk about my writing processes is inspiring. Ha! I must have been having a better day then.

Another friend had her short novel critiqued by a critiquing service and they said it had some nice ideas but read like a very early draft. She did not leap for joy.

One of the great things about being a writing student is reading. I can justify reading just about anything as ‘work’ – Virginia Woolf’s diaries, any literary novel you care to name, articles about the state of writing (or publishing) in Australia, articles about the experience of mothers (or non-mothers) in Australia, or articles on whatever else I might be writing about. Of course, one of the things that really doesn’t help is spending too much time reading things that aren’t actually relevant, but just might have that kernel that sparks my untapped genius. They mostly don’t, and they still take just as much time out of my day.

I love that as a distance student the library delivers books to my door (or at least they pay someone else to deliver them), and mostly they give me pouches to pack them back up in and have someone come and collect them from my door, too. Which is much better than when they send reply paid Australia Post postpacks, so that I actually have to leave my house to get the books back to them. Those books are often overdue by the time I drag myself down to the post box.

I’ve just remembered that what I was supposed to be doing today was looking at the story I wrote for Fiction Writing B last year, using my tutor’s notes to see if I can tighten it up (and get it below 3000 words) so I can enter it in a short story competition. Now I will have to wait until next weekend to get into it, which could be tricky since I think the competition closes this Friday. But there is another that closes the next Friday, so I suppose I will still have to do it.

There’s really not much point in being a writing student – or in writing in general – if you never submit anything anywhere. Or sure, you can write a blog and have some people read it, and that can be nice. But if you don’t want to publish stories on there, then really, those stories need to be submitted somewhere else. But first they need to be polished to be their very best. I mostly don’t do that, not only out of lethargy, or even out of a fear that they still won’t be good enough, but because I am a writing student – which means that drafting the next project is always more pressing than revising the last one.

Which is why instead of revising this discontinuous prose exercise, I am going to publish it on my blog, right now. Finally, a post that is not a quote.

'This isn't the way I'm meant to be'

Look in the mirror. (As women do: self as object.) Good bones, don't smoke cigarettes, don't drink much, get lots of rest, eat well, do yoga, go for walks, it all helps, it doesn't help. I thought something would stop this from happening, it wouldn't happen to me. I'm not even meant to this this til I'm 39. You get to an age and you think it was meant to be better than this. This isn't the way I'm meant to be. I'm meant to be younger, and richer.
(from Inex Baranay, 1988, 'Living alone: The New Spinster (Some Notes)', quoted in Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment (etc) p. 198.)

At some point I swear I will get back to writing actual posts, instead of just typing out quotes. But not today.

Feminisim's 'dilemma of difference'

['The dilemma of difference'] refers to the way in which feminism and feminist theory must deny of disavow women's difference, and differences among women, in order to argue for women's equality and to mobilize women women as a group, but must also rely on the concept of difference to analyze the specificity of women's situations and experiences and to theorize differences among women. ...

By insisting on women's difference, for instance in analyzing women's situations and experience of mothering and their effects on consciousness and social relations, difference feminism jeopardizes feminism's claim to women's equal human subjectivity. On the other hand, the possible benefits for feminism and feminist theory of taking these risks of difference are also considerable. These benefits include the rearticulation of understandings of mothering that more adequately conceptualize mothering, more strenuously challenge individualism, and thus more strongly support the changes in the social organisation of mothering that feminism advocates. The difficulty for feminist theory is that, in an individualist ideological context, the subversive and liberatory possibilities of accounts of mothering that challenge individualism in terms of difference are never far removed from the risks of reconsolidating elements of essential motherhood that occur in the project of theorising motherhood.   
(Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood, as previously cited, pp. xv-xvi.)

In other words, if we talk about how women, and their experience as mothers, are different to (say, for instance) men, then we set ourselves up for all the old sexist arguments about women's place (barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen etc). But if we don't, then we can't adequately theorise mothering at all, and also, for instance, can't challenge (western, capitalist) individualism in terms of its emphasis on subjectivity in traditionally 'masculine' terms. It's tricky.

Variety in mothering

"Many mothers report that mothering is a deeply ambivalent experience in which, at one time or another, they feel exaltation, despair, and many other emotions in between." (Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood: feminism, individualism, and the problem of mothering, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. viii.)

Realism is reassuring

The experience of reading a realistic text is ultimately reassuring, however harrowing the events of the story, because the world evoked in the fiction, in patterns of cause and effect, of social relationships and moral values, largely confirm the patterns of the world we seems to know.
(Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd edn, Routlegde, London, 2002, quoted in Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005, pp. 28-29.)

Liam's taken to afternoon naps again

Liam gave up his day time naps shortly after Mikaela was born (though he started resisting them in the few weeks before that), when he was nearly four and a half.

In the past couple of weeks he's started phasing them back in again, but on the couch.

He sets himself up with his pillow and quilt and 'bed friends', and sometimes with a pile of books which he looks through first.

I'm not sure if this is to do with a low grade virus (he has had a bit of snotty nose for weeks now, though he's not been as bad as the rest of the family), or to do with the fact that I've finally got his television habits back under control.

He started watching more TV shortly after Kaely was born, due to a combination of giving up naps and me letting him watch TV while I got her to sleep in the bedroom (or walking around and around with her in the sling, when she was a newborn). But we had a 'screen free week' at school three weeks ago, for which we all gave up tele for a week (but not the computer!). Since then we've kept it to a maximum of half an hour a day, except on one occasion when I did let him watch a whole hour, when he seemed unwell. The penchant for taking naps has coincided exactly with this reduction in television time.

So far it doesn't seem to affect his night time sleep, except in that if it's too late or too long he has trouble getting to sleep at his usual time (between 7 and 7:30pm). Speaking of which, I'd best go wake him up!

The practice of writing

Another quote from Woolf, but from yesterday's reading.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots as my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1954, p. 13.)

This reminds me of a debate that occurred in the blogosphere (only I think it was before the term blogosphere was coined) a few years back, about whether slapdash blog/online journal writing was of any benefit to 'wannabe' writers. I remember there was some high feeling and in fact no little acrimony around the issue.

Each (writing) morning before I start the real work, but after I read VW, I spend some time 'free writing', which sometimes (like today) I turn into a blog post. Sometimes it just serves to warm up my fingers. Other times something really useful comes out. Either way I like it.

The (would-be) writing life...

I am sitting in my dark part-time study, having just come in out of the sun where I was reading Virginia Woolf’s diary. I am reading a few pages of A Writer’s Diary (extracts from her diary published by Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death) each day before I begin work (each Sunday/Monday that is!). It was tempting to stay out there and keep reading, but my point for the day is really writing, which I can do most effectively sitting in front of the computer. Besides, I wanted to record something she wrote in May 1920:

It is worth mentioning, for future reference that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning  a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult. (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1954, p. 25.)

Leonard Woolf comments in the preface that one must keep in mind at all times that this is only “a very small portion” of her diary, and does not constitute the entirety of her thoughts. Otherwise “the book will give a very distorted view of her life and her character” (p.ix). I mention this, because as I am reading there is a part of me wishing to have what she seems to have – so much time to focus on writing. I know she didn't have children, but indeed the entries in this diary are often weeks apart – indicating, presumably, weeks when her diary consisted only of non-writing related observations. And even within this extract she remarks that her time for writing has not been hers at all (evidence by the fact that she has hardly done reading outside her review books). Of course, my reading is also inevitably coloured by knowledge of her suicide two decades later. It’s hard to be jealous of that!

Last week I had an email from a (single, childless) old school friend who is currently in Berlin, having (by the sounds of things) the time of her life. She is there for (I think) about six weeks, following which she is heading to France to visit some friends there, and “then on”. I could hardly read her lovely email without feeling jealous as hell. I think she is living the life I want!

But actually, she’s not. I love my husband and my children and even my house, despite the mortgage. When I first bought a house I was 22*, and more than one person commented that I was the last person they expected to ‘settle down’. I wasn’t settling down, I replied, I was merely committing to live in the one place for a year or so, after which I could rent it out and head back overseas if I felt like it. Up to that point I had cultivated a footloose image - which I believed in myself and which fit beautifully with my star sign. I was carefree and adaptable, ready to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. (According to this site, for instance, Sagittarian likes include travelling and freedom, while dislikes include being tied down, being constrained, being bothered with details). Then I met Chris, whose star sign makes him out to be a homebody (“It is a fundamentally conservative and home-loving nature, appreciating the nest like quality of a secure base” ). You’d think we’d be at odds (if you believe in that sort of thing). But actually, as much as the idea of being able to take off to Berlin appeals, I’m honestly just as much of a homebody as Chris is. Maybe more.

Sure, I have a constant conflict between my role as a mother and my role as a writer, but is there any other option? The fact is, I’m living the life I want. Except for the lack of a rich sponsor of course.

____

*The housing market had just crashed and it was basically cheaper to buy than to rent, once you get past the start-up expenses which I borrowed from my mother, and paid back in dribs and drabs over the next several years. The house I bought then would now be worth over three times what I paid for it.