narrating kayoz

Rioting for the Future

About a year ago I first read about Sharon Astyk's Riot for Austerity and posted about it on Sustainable Suburbia. I was inspired and wanted to join in, but we were prepping for our overseas trip, and as usual I already felt I had taken too much on, so I let it slide.

But just now I read an article in Grass Root's magazine from Asphyxia, about her version of the Riot (using Australian figures, yay), and calling for readers to join in.

Can we do it? The idea is to cut down to 10% of the average use of resources in 7 areas. In the June/July issue of Grass Roots this year Asphyxia has covered how she went about doing that in the area of food (not cutting down on eating, as such, but on the resources involved in getting the food).

Future issues are going to have articles on the next 6 areas, plus there's support through the Grass Roots FB page.

Since food has been my particular focus this year - eating more local, cooking more from scratch etc (and on that subject, can I just say I've just discovered the wonders of pressure cooking and I am SOLD), it seems fated.

I always feel like I'm trying to do too much, maybe something to do with having three kids, a part-time job, running several websites and trying to write a book (I haven't blogged about it here, but that is my Big project at the moment. Around the subject of urban homesteading, but that's all I'm going to say at the moment), and maybe sell a few articles along the way... but we are all about trying to live more sustainably anyway, and somehow the idea of putting some figures around it - even if we make it a 'quiet riot' and try to cut down to say, 50% in some areas - makes things feel more doable - or at least, easier to know what we are doing and what we need to still work on.

So, I'm going to talk to my family about it. We've just switched from cheap milk to bloody expensive but far more ethical (and local) milk. We've been getting seasonal organic fruit & vegies delivered most weeks (I love this because it doesn't give me the chance to not buy vegies I don't usually cook with - I just get them and have to figure out how to use them).

Of course, all this is costing more. The dairy alone is costing us around $30 extra per week (my kids go through a LOT of milk). I read Frugavore earlier this year and have been trying to put some of her advice into practice, like buying organic chicken carcasses and beef bones to make stock with, and cooking more with legumes, like lentils and beans, using dried (the pressure cooker is going to come in handy there) rather than canned beans and chick peas.

But. Cost is still an issue. And, we want to go o/s again (this time to live for maybe half a year) in 2014, before Liam starts highschool, so... I'm hoping I can parlé that into motivation to help us cut down on other resource use. Because mostly, cutting down should cots less, not more.

Right now though, I'm off to check out the Grass Roots FB page and see who's there.

Writing again

I have half an hour before my pilates session and I forgot to bring a book, so I'd really like to write a blog post, but... I've been staring at this screen almost without a break since 8 o'clock this morning (it's now nearly 5:30) and my eyes are fried. The computer's little workbreak program told me to find something else to do around 3pm, but I don't got nothing else to do. This is my job.

However, I am feeling somewhat revitalised and excited about writing again. I don't mean blog writing (though who knows, that may come too) I mean writing writing. Fiction writing, in fact. I am going to start by working on some things I already wrote but never really finished for whatever reason. Beginning with that novel I wrote a first draft of some years back now (where did that time go?), which I never sat down and edited into something good, for a variety of reasons which now seem somewhat foolish (although being tied up with the Masters was probably a valid one).

I want to talk more about this, but right now I just can't do it. Gotta shut down this contraption before my eyes fall out of my head.

Poetry Salon

I've just come back from a 'poetry salon' at Tilleys in Lyneham with the lovely and talented poet, Sarah Tiffen. Who just happens to be a friend of mine too :)

Sarah is poet in residence at Tilleys at the moment. She goes in there a couple of times a week during the day to sit and write and whatever, and she's hosting these salons on (at the moment) Thursday evenings. So far it's just been three of us going (and I missed last week), but we have high hopes of it!

And since it is just three friends there'd be a good chance that we would just sit and chat the whole time, but actually, we really did read and talk about poetry, at least for part of the time.

I remember having this moment, the first year I was in uni, sitting on the steps outside the library: I remember suddenly thinking, feeling, I'm here, I'm at University. Like Cambridge, or Oxford - only not. Actually I was at Flinders Uni in Adelaide, which was only about 25 years old at the time, so did not have the history or ambiance of somewhere like Oxford.* But I had spent my early teenage years reading about Tolkien and CS Lewis and Oxford and the Inklings, and I suddenly had that sense of being there, at university, studying literature, just like them.

Well, the first week of our poetry salon I had a similar moment. Not quite the same awe, but the sudden sense of - I don't know. Like we could do something here. We could, for instance, actually talk about poetry, not just chat on like we usually would. And then we did! Woohoo.

Anyway, it was fun. Sarah wants to take it a bit further - maybe read some of our own poetry, or even have a performance night, or even more unlikely, actually write something.** I don't know about that, but I am going to keep going along. Of course, I can't actually afford to eat at Tilleys (my one decaf coffee tonight cost me $4.70 - can that be right?), but the atmosphere is great.

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*Then again, it didn't have signs saying you could only walk on the grass if accompanied by a fellow, which Oxford does, snotty place.

**Not that I in anyway consider myself a poet, but I did write a few poems that I'm a little bit proud of in the course of doing my masters project last year.

TV free month is almost over (and why I am not writing anyway)

We've just about finished a month with no TV (officially it ends at midnight on Sunday), and I have to admit, in some ways it was pretty much a failed experiment.

Some of the things I thought/hoped would happen were:

1. We'd see an improvement in kid behaviour - this was probably the biggest leap, but I really hoped it might work. On the other hand, in terms of it's experimental value we didn't really do it at the right time, since it coincided with school going back and Liam starting class one, which I think has been fairly exhausting for him, despite how much he likes it.
2. I would write more - if not 'real' writing, then at least surely in the blog.
3. We would have more s-x.
4. We would go to bed earlier.
5. The kids would get out of the habit of asking for TV all the time (a very bad habit that developed during the holidays for a number of reasons)
6. I would get out of the habit of using the TV to give me a rest (from parenting) too often.

I think number five was the only one that really worked. The kids definitely did get out of the habit, and Liam in particularly was hardly bothered by it at all -then again, he is used to the no TV on school days rule, since we implemented it at the end of 2007, with his approval. So again, as an experiment the timing was bad.

On the other hand we didn't really do it for it's experimental value, so much as to achieve numbers four and five, because we'd been doing those things way too much in the holidays. And we did achieve those, but there were still lots of times when I desperately wanted to put it on just to give me a break, so I think I will still need to work at being strict with myself after this weekend.

The other way in which the timing sucked was in that I have started working on a new project at work, moreorless on top of my normal work. So although I only work two and half days a week (for money anyway!), on my two full days I've been doing ten or eleven hours and more each day. And the funny part about that is I really haven't been doing that much extra on the new project, but my normal work has happily eaten into the extra time.

I don't really mind the extra work. If I did I wouldn't be doing it. But I can see that I am going to have to be a bit careful about it. For one thing I think Chris and the kids are getting sick of me missing dinner and bedtime. Also, uni starts back this coming week.

For another thing, I have done (virtually) no writing all month.

And for another, I am tired.

Of course, that could be because I've been awake since four o'clock this morning. Thanks kids

More on motherhood and artistic pursuits...

The Mood Back Home: an exhibition inspired by Womanhouse (at mothering.com news bulletins):

A new exhibition at Momenta Art gallery in Brooklyn, New York addresses the challenges women face in simultaneously pursuing artistic careers, motherhood, and domestic lives. Once thought to be mutually exclusive pursuits, traditional gender roles and stereotypes about what it means to be an artist continue to suggest that women artists can't quite have it all. "The Mood Back Home", on view February 12 through March 16, 2009, disputes that notion, featuring topical work by 12 contemporary women artists.

(more of the article by Laura Andre at the link above)

The divided heart

(I wrote this offline, earlier in the week)

Reading Rachel Power's book, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, I am overwhelmed by the resonances it continually strikes. It's not surprising, perhaps, that such a book should resonate for me. This blog, largely, is about art – writing – and motherhood (or at least it's about the children). But it seems that each page I read there is another quote I want to record, and share, and comment on. I have half written a dozen essays in my head in the past half hour. So many things I've been thinking, or not quite thinking but feeling, are being articulated in this book.

I often feel incredibly lucky: as a writer-mother I have it easy compared to many, if not most. I have a supportive partner who actively encouraged me to start the masters in writing, knowing that writing was really what I wanted more than anything else to be concentrating my energies on. My professional energies that is, because of course parenting requires and equal – if not greater – toll.

Right now I am sitting in a cafe, writing, on a Monday night. My children think I'm at pilates, which is where I usually go on Monday nights as soon as Chris arrives home. But my pilates instructor is away this month, so I am going to this cafe instead, to carve a little time to write, or read, or plot, or research markets. Yesterday morning I spent time writing while Chris took the children swimming, which is a recently resumed habit, since the pool they go to finally reopened just before Christmas, after six months of renovations.

Nonetheless, I struggle with the same guilt that seems common to so many writer-mothers. Somewhere recently I read a comment from a writer-mother about the problem of treating art as a privilege, not an obligation*. I know there are those who feel torn between their salaried jobs and their children. I honestly don't have that issue, perhaps because I know my kids are with their father when I'm at work, or because I only work 20 hours a week, or because I think the benefits to all of us of Chris and I sharing the domestic role as well as the paid-worker role far out way any disadvantages.**

But I do find it hard to treat my writing as an obligation, and I find it hard to expect my partner to do so also. It doesn't pay (usually) and while I hope that it will, it's never likely to replace my public service salary. And now that I am actually enjoying my paid work so much it makes writing seem even more like a luxury that I indulge in at the expense of my family. I long to have my Sundays back – Sundays in my study, that is, like I had before I went back to work, while I was working on my Masters Project. Time to write and think and read as I felt I needed to.

Power writes of "the burden of the artistic imperative, of that constant desire to record everything almost before it's happened" (p . 16).*** Oh yes, I thought. She also writes about sometimes longing to be free of it. "For the first time in my life, I envied the women without strong ambitions outside of the home. Art was like a monkey on my back and I resented it's skittish hold on me, the way it caused me to strain away from my babies, to live a split life. I was burdened by the knowledge of what it would cost my family (financially, but more so emotionally) for me to keep writing – just as I became aware of how much it was cost me not to." (p. 17) Yes yes yes!

I think I've written here before about the sense I have sometimes of how much easier life could be if I could just give up writing. The time I – we, as a family – would suddenly have. The freedom I would have from this constant desire to record, to interpret, to imagine. But I don't know how to be free of that desire. I've had it as long as I can remember, or at least ever since I read Our snowman has olive eyes when I was about eight, which ends with the protagonist deciding to write about her grandmother – sort of an eight-year-old's memoir (from memory, which could be wrong). And although I often think it would make life easier, I don't really want to be rid of the monkey either. I don't know who I would be without it.

This past six months, since I finished my master's project and started back at work, I have written little. I have spent weekends with my family, planted and expanded our vegie garden, planned fruit trees, half covered our pergola (our house faces west, so this is not before time), and of course gotten back into the swing of paid work, complete with occasional overtime. But I have been hankering after my writing time, trying to figure out how to fit it in.

The truth is that I am lazy by nature. I like to sit and read and chat with my husband, and yes sometimes watch television (I gave Chris the last season of Alias for Christmas and we've already watched 5 episodes). Also, since I had children I always seem to be tired. I don't like to do housework – and unfortunately neither does he, so our house is a constant mess, I don't like to get up early, I don't like to stay up late.

Also I do like to spend that precious hour or two after the kids are in bed with my husband. Usually a good bit of that is still spent in domestic labour, be it cleaning the kitchen (Chris usually does that), hanging out washing, watering the vegies or walking the dog. Then, if we're lucky, there's enough time left to watch an episode of Alias (or West Wing – we're on the second season) before I need to collapse into bed. Otherwise we usually retire to the living room for a cuppa and a chat. Sometimes I retire instead to the study to write a blog post or read my email or google something or other, but mostly I reserve that little bit of time to be alone with my partner. And I do that both because I want to and because I feel I should; that it's important for both of us separately and more to the point for both of us together.

Part of our commitment when we married was to nurture our relationship – to recognise that it would not always thrive without some effort on our part, and to put that effort in. Having brought children into the mix that becomes even more important, while ironically also becoming harder to manage. I am lucky to be able to say that our relationship is – I think – as solid today as it ever was. Nonetheless I feel to neglect it is both foolish and unfair.

Or is this simply all justification for my inability to prioritise writing?

I do feel incredibly lucky, as I began by saying, in my choice of life partner, in my well paid part-time work, in my wonderful children. But I still feel guilt when I take 'time out' to write. Especially when I use the time to write something like this, or to read, or to – well, do anything that is not either required for my masters (and I do have one subject to go, which will begin in March), or specifically aimed at getting published. If I'm writing an article or preparing a story for submission, that's not too bad. But if I use the time for writing like this, or what I think of as feeding my writing-self, by reading something like Power's book, I feel like I am somehow being deceitful, like my partner has given me this time (as Power says, time alone is never free, once you have children – it has to be "bought, borrowed or stolen" (p. 14)) and I am wasting it.

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*Maybe at Literary Mama, maybe one of the revolving writer-quotes on Dawn's blog, maybe somewhere else (somewhere offline even!).

** That's not to say I don't feel frustrated by never having enough time either at work or home - I just don't feel guilty about it.

***page numbers refer to the paperback edition (amazon refers to a hardback?), published by Red Dog, Fitzroy, 2008. Rachel Power is an Australian, by the way, who also just happens to be a good friend of a good friend of mine, and who also had her first child within a week (or was it a day?) of mine, but who I've never met.

On mother-writing, mothering and/while writing, and writing as a mother.

If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself.  Alice Ostriker

This is the epigraph to the introduction to The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, by Rachel Power. I blogged about this book before when I heard Power interviewed on the radio, and now I own it, thanks to my lovely husband who bought it for me for Christmas.

Of course, being a mother of children on school holidays, I've barely read any of it yet. But so far I think my favourite two quotes from the introduction (yes, I haven't even made it past the seven page introduction) are:

"Beyond giving birth, however, the stuff of mother's lives becomes worse than taboo - it becomes merely mundane. Mothering is such a prosaic term in our culture that it functions as a disguise for the true intensity of the experience, blocking any insight into the way this singular knowledge could be translated into good art."

You'd think we'd be over this by now, but we so are not! Just this morning I was discussing with one of my mother friends the sense one gets when talking to one's still single (or at least childless) friends - of being old and married with children and living in the suburbs (oh the horror!)*. I think being a mother is a bit like living in the suburbs. Actually, it can be very rewarding and intensely stimulating, but it still has such a dud reputation.  (Okay, I'm going a bit far as far as the suburbs go, but you get my point.)

"Every woman featured in this book defies the myth of the artist as tortured, self-obsessed genius with no option but to damage those who love them. Each is at a different stage along the path of reconciling the demands of domesticity with her desires as an artist...
"All the myths about art, as well as motherhood, are dismantled and reinvented by the voices collected here."

Soon, soon I will get to read more and I will enjoy those dismantlings and reinventions, I'm sure of it.

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*I hasten to add this is not a sense necessarily projected by the childless friends, just a message we have internalised from the broader culture.

The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood

I've just been listening to a radio interview with Rachel Power, author of The Divided Heart, along with two of her interviewees, and just listening to them talk inspired me to get back to writing something - even blogging.

I have written virtually nothing since I started work two months ago. A few blog posts, a few more half blog posts*, nothing else.

I blame it partly on settling into my new routine that includes three days a week in the paid workforce,** partly on a sort of post-intensive study/writing lull, and partly on the fact that I've been sick four (4!) times since I began work. That's roughly every two weeks. Currently I m just getting my voice back after two days without it, but to compensate one of my ears is completely blocked (and weeping!) and every sounds reverberates inside there, mixing in with the constant ringing. And that's not even to mention the sore throat, headache, wet cough etc. And this began two Sundays ago.

Of course another factor is Spring - I always have a hard time settling down to writing in the Spring, when what I really want to do is get out into the garden. Today it is a beautiful, sunny, 16 degree day, and what I really long to be doing is getting out into the vegie garden which has a lot of preparation needed before the Spring planting begins,*** but I know that what i should really be doing is resting, and even standing here at the bench typing on my laptop (which is the only way Kaely will let me get any writing done) is more restful than digging paths and lugging manure and mulch and sawdust. So when my brain is still available at night I've been re-reading books on permaculture and vegetables and herbs, and drawing out plans, trying to figure out how to make the best of my south-west facing block.

But back to the point of this post, which was writing and motherhood and Rachel's book. Rachel Power, I realised half way through the interview, is a very good friend of a friend of mine. A few years back when Liam was a baby, and her first child was a baby, and I was in Melbourne for a month while Chris completed his Rolfing triaining, our mutual friend was trying to get us together, and I remember she told me that Rachel was writing (or perhaps just thinking about at that stage) this book. We both had babies and lived on opposite sides of Melbourne and had transport issues, so we never did manage to connect. But it was partly talking to that same friend, a year or so later, that inspired me to start the Masters degree. I suppose I felt that studying and working part-time would simply not be possible at the same time as being the mother I wanted to be for my son.

Of course me studying did impact Liam. And (equally of course) that is one of the refrains of the book - the balancing act between doing the work you want/need to do and being the mother you want/your children need you to be. One of the women interviewed said that of course her children were impacted, but that for her it was about finding the compromise she could live with. Of course, that's something I suppose all working mothers (and to some extent fathers) live with, but there's a definitely difference between working for a certain pay check and working for a *maybe* pay check, somewhere in the future. For me, I suppose that I could make a living writing if I really really worked at it, but it would be a lot more work for a lot less money. So my writing becomes something that I fit into my 'spare' time, and hope to get bits of peices of published here and there.

Another difference between the at work mother and the artist mother is that the latter, whether she's paid or not, is very often a work-at-home mother, so her work is constantly interrupted and fit in around. Rachel Power spoke about the self-discipline required - that now she has finished The Divided Heart, it's so much easier to make the beds than to sit down and start a new project. Especially, I add, when you know that you will be interrupted over and over again. So far in the time I've been writing this post I have also

• changed a stinky nappy
• set Mikaela up with the trainset
• set Mikaela up with the barn and animals
• set Mikaela up with a pencil case and paper (and moved myself from the kitche bench to the dining room table so as to keep an eye on her and make sure she neither sucks any of Liam's textas (markers) dry, nor draws on my pile of gardening books also sitting on the dining room table)
• put on a load of washing (nappies)
• helped Mikaela with numerous pen lids, and rescued the same from her mouth.

One of the mothers on the radio mentioned the guilt over knowing that your children want to be with you, and yet you are argonising over the exactly word or phrase you need while they watch a video. Mikaela's not yet of an age or temperament where I can count on the tele to keep her occupied for more than about five minutes (although sometimes it will), but I have certainly experienced that guilt with Liam. For me though, when I was studying on a Sunday, it was more the sense that I was depriving not only the kids, but the whole family of 'family time' (since Chris was also working on Saturdays). So now that I am not studying, and Chris is not working on Saturdays for a while, I am relishing our long, two day weekends, but also half wishing I could justify shutting myself away in my study again. I said I was write in the evenings, but so far I haven't done it. Some women get up at the crack of dawn to write or paint or whatever before their kids are up, but my kids are up at about 6am lately, and I frankly am not going to get up significantly earlier than that - I don't get enough sleep as it is.

I am still planning to make the evenings thing work for me, but for the moment I really just need to try to get my health under control, and try to write a little more during the day I think, the washing be damned.

On the up side, I was interested to hear my experience reflected (and I gather this was also a common theme), in that having children actually makes the art easier, the work more efficient in some ways. There's something about knowing you only have ten minutes, or two hours or whatever that can focus the mind, reduce the procrastination, and enhance one's ability to make fast judgements. One of the women also commented that having children makes your emotional nerve endings that much more sensitive, which can actually be quite useful to an artist.

But now I have literally used up all my time for writing this morning. Kaely is moving towards melt down and needs to be fed and put to bed in time to get her up again to go pick Liam up for school. It's possible her nap will give me more time, but just as likely that she'll spend half of it in my arms and then wake up twenty minutes after I put her down. I don't mind too much - I love having her sleep in my arms, and it gives me an enforced rest too, which I could use. Then again I could also use the time to hang out those nappies before while the sun is still high in the sky, or to think about dinner, or perhaps I could plant some of those tomato seeds that arrived in the mail the other day, so they'll be ready to plant out in the garden by the beginning of November... right now though I'd better go organise lunch.

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*Because most of the time when I start writing Kaely interrupts after about two paragraphs if I'm lucky, and then again another para on, and so on until I completely lose the thread and the interest. Which is why the posts I do write are so jumpy from one thought to another - no time to stop and think or save a thought till later or re-structure afterwards, if i do that, it never gets posted at all.

**Which i am still quite enjoying by the way, and at least there I am getting to do a teeny bit of writing - currently I'm working on a story on WWII shipwrecks in Australian waters, as random as that sounds - though mostly I'm doing more mundane work of updating websites with other people's content.

***Our vegie garden has lain fallow since we moved the chooks back into their run a couple of months back, but we are about to get serious about it again - and see how that goes with Lochie and what we might have to do. In the meantime, on the weekend we finally got a couple more Silkies (another white and a blue) to be friends for Fluffy, which was very exciting and is another reason to be spending time outside.

Regular posting and/or writing

Clearly that regular posting thing has gone down the gurgler (is that the word?) since I went back to work.

Also I haven't yet sat myself down to plan out a regular writing time, much less sat myself down to write. However, I am getting there. In the psychology of change talk I think I'm in the contemplation phase (after pre-contemplation, but not yet on to planning, much less action).

I've been back at work two weeks now. This will be the third week (started Wednesday, because Monday and Tuesday are devoted to unpaid house and parenting work). I think maybe next week will be one to get serious about making time to write again. Next week.

Writing Goals

I am setting myself some writing goals. Here they are:

1. Get cracking on querying and writing some articles based on the research I did for my masters project. I came up with a few ideas and even some target markets six weeks ago, but was too focused on finishing the project to get to them. I haven't written or even queried an article since the article I had published in Artlook quite some time ago. Now is the time.

And one of the things I gleaned from the festival session on writing for magazines and newspapers was that I should think about aiming even lower than I had thought - ie not worrying about the money.

I was disappointed, back when I had my ideas and started looking for magazines to target, to discover that several of the most relevant ones accept freelance submissions but don't pay. Now, my concern wasn't so much that I really want that money (and the recognition it implies), though I do. It was that I figured writing for free wouldn't particularly increase my credibility with other markets.

But apparently, that's not true. According to Rhonda Whitton, targeting unpaid markets is fine, just to get the runs on the table. You don't have to tell the next magazine you're querying that the last one didn't pay. You just say "I've had five articles published in magazines," or "I've had articles published in national magazines" or whatever might be true.

2. Pull out that trashy romance novel I wrote and revise it. Or at least look again to see if it's worth revising.

Sometime after that post that I linked to, I decided that i didn't want to write romance novels after all. That was still not what I wanted to be doing, so really I might as well stick to my public service writing job to do the writing that I don't want to do (but that does pay), and focus the rest of my time on the writing I really want to do. Which at the time I claimed was literary fiction.

So I didn't revise the novel.

Was that I bit of an excuse, do you think, to avoid the hard yards of revision? Well, partly. In truth I do still want to write literary fiction, for a few reasons that range from snobbery to the fact that I love that sort of writing (and reading). But do you know how hard it is to make a living from writing? Well, it's a darn sight harder to make a living from writing literary fiction. Or even to get it published in the first place.

I read a trashy romance the other day, for the first time in quite a while, and as I was reading it I felt justified in my previous decision. It was awful. The writing was not good, that was part of the problem. But I realised afterwards that probably the main problem was not the writing, but the alpha male. I *hate* alpha males. But you don't have to write (or read) alpha males.

So I'm going to revise that romance novel I wrote and see if I can get it good enough to be worth submitting for publication. If nothing else it will be a very good exercise in self editing.

3. Look at turning my masters project fiction into a novel. 'm thinking of taking three of the characters and weaving their stories together into a novel form. The way it is now is very distinctly 'literary'. One of the things I would have to decide is do I keep that style - which allows it to do some things that it wouldn't be able to do as effectively as 'popular' fiction - or do I go with, say, a chick lit style. Which has less flexibility (though the term chick lit covers a wide range), but is more publishable.

I do also have another chick lit novel I want to write, that I had thought I might have a crack at starting in nanowrimo this year if I don't happen to be pregnant by then. But, at this stage I'm thinking that will have to wait.

And now I am off to get ready for my last workshop in the Canberra Writers Festival - 'The Big “O” or Opportunities in Erotic Romance Fiction'.

Awesome exhaustion

I am completely exhausted. This is mostly because I have been up since 4:45 this morning, thanks to my darling daughter Mikaela. But it's also because I spent the entire day (from 8:40am to 5:40pm) at the Canberra Writers Festival, which I have to tell you was awesome. It inspired, motivated and excited me. But yes, the sum of all that is exhaustion. And an ear-ache (possibly unrelated).

The best part is, I get to go back tomorrow, and again the next day! Yay ACT Writers Centre.

More details to come later in the week when it's all over.

Writers festival weekend

I am very excited to be spending most of this weekend at the Canberra Writers Festival. I've never been able to do that before. I went to a couple of sessions from the Canberra Readers and Writers Festival (a slightly different beast) a couple of years back, but I haven't been able to make it since, what with me studying on Sundays and Chris Rolfing on Saturdays and small people needing mummy milk at bedtime and what not.

I'm still missing out on lots. For instance there's the session tomorrow night called 'We need to talk about motherhood: Spotlight on Camilla Noli'. If you know anything about my masters project* you would get why I would want to go to a session with that title (even though I haven't read Noli's book). But it's from 6:45-7:45, and after being at the festival all day, I really need to be home with my kids at that time of night.

Tonight I went to a short session which promised to have three writers talking about "their writing, its priority in their lives and how it fits into the rest of their schedule". It was interesting, as these things always are, but as none of the writers appeared to be a mother of young children, it wasn't directly relevant to my own struggles to prioritise - and figure out the priority of - writing. The writers were: one very, very successful Australian romance writer, who's been making money from writing since she was seven (and as far as I know doesn't have any children); one retired diplomat who may or may not have children (but I doubt he'd have young ones), but doesn't have to worry about making a living, since he's retired with - I presume - some decent superannuation, after 30 years in the public service; and one ministerial speech writer, who works from 7:30am till 10:00pm most days, and fits in poetry writing here and there, mostly in her holidays.

They were all interesting. It is always interesting to hear what brings other people to write. But in truth my fantasy panel for this talk would consist of people like my (RL and blog) friends, Sarah Tiffen (author of two recent books of poetry, and mother to three children the youngest of whom is a year older than Liam, and someone who definitely prioritises her writing, but not without a lot of effort), Sue Hines (Canberra writer, mother of two now moreorless grown-up children, and author of YA novels Out of the Shadows, The Plunkets and the forthcoming Water Boy's Story), Dawn Friedman (writer and blogger extraordinarie, who for years managed to fit in (some of) the writing she wanted to do around homeschooling her two children, and now fits it in around her full-time job writing for her company Smart Cookie Communications). People whose struggle and experience is more similar to mine, in other words, but way ahead of me in the actually writing and actually getting published stakes.

Nonetheless, I am very excited to spend the whole weekend (minus the evenings) at the festival. In less than two weeks I will be back at my public service job (or some public service job - I'm not sure exactly what it will be yet, but probably something to do with writing and editing and websites), leaving my masters project and my two dedicated writing/reading/studying days each week to become a distant memory. So this is like a last gasp of fantasy life where my writing is not for a government website (however interesting that may be). I'm hoping it will help motivate me to keep the faith and keep fitting in some of the writing I want to do, as well as the stuff they pay me to do, over the next eight months, without uni.

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*Oddly I'm not actually sure how much I have ever said specifically about my project, but according to the abstract, it comprises a work of fiction and an essay, both of which  "critique some of the master narratives that appear to exist in relation to motherhood, and in particular journeys to and away from motherhood, in Western society and culture.... [focusing on] mothers, non-mothers, infertility and pregnancy loss."

Done!

Yesterday and last night I spent two or three hours just working on the final proofing of footnotes and other formatting of my major project for my masters. The thing I've been working on for a year now. I still found a few errors in the bibliography and footnotes, and spent a while getting the table of contents, headers and footers right (I moved the essay and fiction into the same document, along with an abstract and table of contents at the front, so had to create a few section breaks and what not. And deal with Word's annoying little quirks).

Aside from that I also spent an hour or two finishing a final proof of the fiction and finding a few more sentences to change, and few more words to delete. The whole thing (fiction and essay) still works out to be about 500 words over the upper end of the word limit, but my supervisor seemed to think that was okay. Better than the 2-3000 words it was over at one point.

Anyway, what this means is, that I am done! It still needs to be printed, finally proofed, bound, and of course posted, but basically, it's done. Once it's posted and I am done for real, I will be free of uni for about eight months. Then I'm going to have to figure out how I am going to fit in writing without my set study days, and what I should focus on in that eight months. But first, a well deserved break. And the Canberra Writers Festival next weekend. :)

In mourning already

Even though I have very much been looking forward to having my master's project completed, so that we could have family weekends (or at least family days) again, so that we could get some things done around here, the fact is, I am really going to miss my writing time.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that I'll be going back to work in July and that could be interesting and challenging, and will still give me some days (two and a half hopefully) away from the monotony of housework and building cubbies, which quite frankly, I need for my sanity On the other hand it could also suck - it mostly depends on the people I end up working with, individually and as a team. And as yet, I don't know who they will be, or even what work I will be doing. If it's back to the job I left two years ago then the work will be relatively enjoyable - writing and editing and reading about art and culture and recreation in Australia. So that's not all bad. As to the people I don't know. I know the team has changed significantly since I left.

However, regardless of how that job works out (and in all honesty if I could avoid going back to work I would, despite what I just said about sanity), it's not going to be the same as having two days a week to focus on my own writing project/s. Granted, most of the past year I have been focussed on this masters project, which is also not the same as having two days a week to focus on whatever writing project I want, but - it almost is. If I had another year to work in here (without the requirements of a university course) I would probably focus on something a mite more practical than an academic essay - perhaps freelance articles, perhaps turning the fiction part of my project into a novel, or perhaps one of the other novels that are ticking away in my head. But I don't have another year, so whichever of those things I want to focus on (probably the first), I'm going to have to do it in my copious spare time.

Yeah, I am really, really, going to miss my writing days.

Still, the money's going to be nice.

The cost of being a writer

Somewhere* recently I read a quote from a writer saying something like "to be a writer, you have to give up a lot of life and personal time" - the writer made it sound harder than that though.

Sometimes I think this is self evident, and other times I think - but if only I could win lotto, I could give up my day job (which I am due back at in about five weeks) and have time. And then other times I think - if I'd spent my two days a week for the last year working on writing to get published, instead of on my masters project... well, I might have actually made some money and got some clips.

But then again I have loved working on my masters project, even though the essay has been driving me up the wall (I think I have it nailed now - though have I said that before? - I'll be getting back to it shortly), and I have learned a lot about the writing process I think.

And *maybe* one day I can turn the fiction into a novel. But to do that, y'see, I will have to give up an enormous amount of that personal time the writer was talking about. And in a few months we're going to be starting to try for another baby (probably), and once my masters project is done, we will have at least one day weekends as a family for the first time in years (unless you count the first few weeks after Mikaela's birth, and I don't), for about eight months - until I start studying again, but that will be for my last unit in the course. And and and... well, I'm not sure how or when I am going to motivate myself to sit down and do it.

But even if I don't, I am hoping to get some parts of it published as is (as are), and either way, I learned heaps along the way. In another quote (which I'm sure came from Dawn) a writer said something about writing being a craft you have to learn, just like any other craft. So I'm learning, and it's good.

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* I think this might have been in Dawn's writer quotes, but all my refreshing hasn't brought it back again.

Updated to add: And then I refreshed once more and there it was:

"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." ~Doris Lessing

And the other one was

"Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else." ~Katherine Anne Porter

Essay/silkie/knitting/colds a post in dot points

So much to say, so little time. So tonight, a post in (largely unrelated) dot points.

• My masters project is due in in one week and one day. Luckily my supervisor said (without me asking) that I could have an extension of two or more weeks, because they're all going to be too busy with marking other papers to get a panel together before then anyway. This is lucky because I've just realised that to get it bound and posted is going to take the better part of a week. Also because I am not as close to being happy with either the essay or the fiction as I had hoped to be by this point. On the other hand, I *really* don't want this to eat into my month of two day weekends before I go back to work. So I may ended up working quite hard on it this week.
• My sister gives really good feedback. Think I might impose on her to read my essay as well...
• Our little silkie chicken (who has moved to the front of our house, which is really around the side of the block, to avoid the bigger chickens, who can't fit through the fence) has taken to coming right up onto our front doorstep sometimes. Today she was sitting up there as I came out of the house, with our cat following me. The cat - who has rarely gotten that close to any chicken, that I've seen, almost touched noses with Fluffy (as we affectionately call her), then walked on, disinterested.
• All of us in the family seem to have yet another cold. So far it is mild, but by g-d I am sick of it.
• I am two thirds of the way through knitting a pretty little dishcloth with multiple stuff-ups in the pattern. Diana sent me another pattern (or three) which sounds easier, so I will try that next. My cousin (who has two small children, four months older and twelve months younger than Kaely, and whom I see every week) laughed at me when I told her I was knitting a dishcloth (in the nicest possible way). So I said I would have to write a whole blog post to explain my interest, starting with my urban by composting childhood, in which my parents read grassroots magazine and fantasised about moving to the country, much as I have often done. That post yet to come.

The non-post, which quickly became Me Rabbiting On

From the claytons post direct to the non-post, and I haven't made it two weeks of posting every day yet. I wonder if this spells doom of my plans to make it through the entire month?

Two people I know IRL and one online (but not through blogging) are currently pregnant and happy about it - two via IVF one via an accident (though they were planning to start trying within a couple of months, just hadn't quite got there yet).

I am tired tired tired. Yet the idea of having a newborn in the house does not fill me with dread. Maybe that's just because I'm too tired to feel dread. Actually, I wouldn't want to have one right now. Kaely is not quite two and still seems waaay to young to me to introduce another baby into the house. All those people who have the second when their first is under two (or even under three, truth be told) are amazing to me. How they manage, but more than that, how they can even contemplate having another one early enough to have produced another one that quickly is totally beyond me.

Kaely is seeming quite a bit better, by the way, but still very grumpy.

I went to pilates tonight. I've been doing it since about three months before we started trying to get pregnant with Mikaela. I told my cousin (after her second baby in as many years) that doing pilates is just a price of having children and really must be done. A very middle class perspective.

I start back at work in only about 6 or 7 weeks. Seven I guess. Not sure how I feel about that yet, but it will be for a different government department than the one I left, because of the shuffling of portfolios with the new government, so that's sort of exciting. Or perhaps exciting is too strong a word, but you know what I mean I'm sure.

Liam's school has it's annual Autumn picnic this Sunday, but I can't go because I'll be writing. The deadline approacheth fast. I'm also missing one of his best friend's birthday parties the following week for the second or third year in the row for the same reason.

And now that I have rabbited on and on I am going to bed.

A claytons post (Mikaela, sleep deprivation, and the writing life - sort of)

The post you have when you're not...

Did I mention already that Mikaela was up last night from 11:45pm until 3:15am? And then back up (for good) at 6am? Yes, well, sleep deprivation might seem like enough reason for me to be writing a clayton's post at nearly nine o'clock at night (when my bedtime is theoretically 9:30, old nanna that I am), but really it's because I spent the entire day today with Mikaela attached to me. Either nursing or just whimpering. Up until about an hour before bedtime, that is, when she suddenly decided life wasn't so bad after all (could be something to do with the paracetmol I gave her of course) and started running and climbing and jumping as though to make up for the rest of the day.

That was the main part of my day today.

There was a nice moment when a friend to whom I'd sent a draft of the piece of fiction* I've written for my master's project wrote back to say she loved it and it made her cry at places. But then she asked if she could send it to some friends who she thought would really like to read it and I freaked out slightly and said NO! For one thing it's still a draft, but for another I would like to try to get some parts of it published (it's got a few discrete short stories within the story).. but then I thought, but what about the rest? All that work, it does deserve some readers. And yet it's not a format that I can see getting published as it is - too short for a novella (let alone a novel), but structured like one, complete with prologue and epilogue, too long for a short story. And it's literary/academic in style (as you might expect, given the context of its creation), so that's a small market anyway.

Anyway, I'll have to think on it I suppose.

But right now I have to go have my cup of tea with my husband before it's bedtime. Or before Mikaela wakes up next, whichever comes first...

____
*I never know quite how to refer to this as it's too long to be called a short story - over 17,000 words, though I'm supposed to be getting it down to 16,000 - but too short to be a novella.

Essay writing and the gnashing of teeth

Back when I was doing my undergrad degree, I almost invariably approached essays the way I was taught to in high school:

1. define your terms
2. take a position
3. write an outline, include relevant quotes
4. write an introduction saying what you are going to say (ie doing all of the above)
5. write the essay, make sure you use quotes, examples
6. write a conclusion, saying what you've said

Point six was always the hardest part for me, since it was hard to make it significantly different to the introduction.

That method worked well enough in high school and still went pretty well for most of my undergrad years. It helps, of course, to have an essay question that you are required to address. As a post grad, I mostly haven't had that benefit.

How I write an essay now:

1. Develop an interest
2. Read as widely as possible
3. Start to narrow down the interest
4. Repeat 2 & 3 ad nauseum
5. Start to write - this may be something by way of an introduction, attempting to set out some parameters for the essay, but it's more likely to be some disparate paragraphs supposedly from the body of the essay; presuming the latter:
6. Try to write an introduction
7. Write some more disparate paragraphs
8. Realise the introduction hasn't captured what I am trying to do at all.
9. Try another introduction
10. 7-9 on repeat, interspersed with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
11. Finally figure out what I'm trying to say.
12. Write yet another introduction, hopefully capturing 11 above.
13. If 12 works, move on to actually writing essay. Otherwise, go back to 10 above, only moving to the body of the essay when 12 is finally working.
14. Write conclusion - hopefully this flows easily from body of essay, otherwise go back and try again; put gnashing of teeth on repeat.
15. Having written essay, realise that 12 was wrong after all, and re-write introduction again.
16. Tweak body of essay.
17. Repeat several times, then move to 18.
18. Tweak conclusion.
19. After sundry proofing efforts, submit essay.
20. Breathe.

I've been thinking/reading for the essay I am currently working on since last year. It's due for submission in less than a month. Finally, I think I've aced point 12. Or, it could be that I'm still stuck on 10 but just haven't realised it yet. I'm about to try moving on from the introduction (again). Wish me luck.

Rain upon the roof

I love the sound of rain on the tin roof of my study.* 

It's so much easier to work in here when it's raining out than when the sun is shining. I do hope it's not causing problems for the fence posts Chris and a friend were just cementing in this morning though. We really need a permanent fence for our poor chickens, and soon.

________
*aka the rolfing studio

what ever made me think I would like this?

I hate writing lit essays.

How is it that I've come through a full literature degree (with honours), and most of the the way through a Masters degree (Writing & Literature), and I am still surprised by this? I must be denser than I thought.

what I have been thinking lately (roosters, dogs, kids and writing, for instance)

I don't seem to be doing much with this blog lately. Even the baby book entries mostly just get written in my head, and end up being simple lists of words when I finally get something out.

It's frustrating because I have things to write about.

The kids, of course. How Liam seems to have turned a corner from the (slightly difficult) five and a half year old he was, to the six year old he is now, even though the books say six is supposed to be harder. How I think school plays a part, since he's now one of the older kids in his class (which has two years together, 4-6 year olds) and he seems to be feeling the responsibility (in a good way). How Mikaela is so delightful just now, but I'm still a bit afeared about what is around the corner, because she is such a determined little thing.

About future plans too. How I had a little freak out the other week that if we had another child we might end up with a "special needs" child of some sort and be stuck in this part of our lives (the part with seriously dependent beings) forever. But how I'm moreorless over that now and feeling a bit excited about starting to try to get pregnant again in a few months time, despite the very real possibility that it will take even longer than last time (me being 36 and Chris almost 40 now) or that it won't happen at all.

And that would naturally lead into the post where I suddenly remembered the fertility specialist saying to me that I might, possibly, have an early menopause, because of only having one ovary and who knows, the other one might not be all that great either (though I secretly think it is), and me suddenly realising the other day that I don't want to go through an early menopause for more reasons than just fertility - which is what I had focussed on up to now.

And then I have these posts I want to write about sustainable living, and how Lochie squashed most of our summer vegetable garden, has broken into both chicken runs and let the chooks out, let the chooks into the winter vegetable garden (which is toast now) and eats the eggs. But we're still glad to have him (mostly), though that was all a little depressing for a while. And Chris is starting obedience training with him next Tuesday night. And how one of our two Silkies turned out to be a rooster and started terrorising his sister, so we got rid of him and now she is much happier but I still think we need another little Silkie friend for her (or two, or maybe three).

And of course about The Compact and how that's going and how I feel about it, with a little more detail than that last post.

And then about writing, and how I am back to working on my fiction now (not the essay which I still haven't even got a draft of, or a conclusion for, despite it all being due in less than 2 months!) and am really enjoying the revision/re-writing process. I fact I *love* it. Who'd have thunk? (I always dread revision, and always love it once I get going. Weird.)

And no doubt a bunch of other things that don't come to mind right now because I can hear Kaely in the kitchen and I am wondering what she is doing, and because Liam is off sick today (just a cold with a mild fever I *think*, but there is chicken pox going around the school), but I've just remembered that I have to get everyone dressed and go into the school anyway, because I am the 'class co-ordinator' and I have to put out some pledge forms for the community hours scheme before term ends, and term ends tomorrow...

And now Liam is calling me, and I think Kaely is harrassing him, so I will go be a parent, and save thinking more about this blog for another day.

Writing in the dark

In one of the novels I have just read for uni, Diane Blacklock's Almost Perfect, (yes, another infertility narrative, although the back cover description - romantic comedy - is really more on the mark), one of the minor characters claims that it's good for him to write in the back room of his house, because if his study had a view he would never get any work done.

The character to whom he's speaking (a newly wannabe writer who appears to be a 'natural') feels differently and spends some time making her writing space just right. Until she realises she's procrastinating and just starts writing.

I get both points of view, but I have to say: on gorgeous days like today, I think I would find it easier to settle in to work if I at least had some sunlight in my 'office'.  Because quite frankly, without it, I'd rather be outside.

On the other hand with the runny, irritated nose and eyes I have at the moment, the glare outside would probably blind me. Maybe I should stop making excuses and just get to work. But honestly, after three cups of caffeinated coffee (for someone who usually sticks to decaf tea), that's easier written than achieved.

More on the Panayotov book

I finally finished In Vitro Fertility Goddess. By the end, it finally got me in.

I assume it’s doing fairly well (here in Oz anyway), judging by the amount of publicity it seems to have had, so I wish they’d put out a revised edition – one that’s been professionally edited. Because as Leslie Cannold said, it could be a lot more readable with some editing out of repetition, and (I say) the addition of a few more pronouns and articles.

One of Sol Stein’s “little things that damage the writer’s authority” is glitches that yank the reader out of their experience. That’s what all those missing pronouns etc were for me. Leaving out a few gives an impression. Doing it all the time got annoying (quickly), as I had to keep re-reading sentences to get the meaning.

As regards the content of the book, the only part I found really got me in was the last bit when she was finally pregnant. Despite the subchorionic hematoma that had her bleeding on and off, and therefore worrying constantly, for most of the first trimester, and the placenta previa and its accompanying complications later, it made me want to be pregnant again, or more particularly, it made me want to give birth to a tiny new baby again. Also this was the part of the book where I finally laughed. Twice, even.

I can see how this part of the book might be the most annoying part to people currently experiencing infertility though. Although she suffers miscarriages and took a long time to finally achieve a sustained pregnancy, Panayotov was quickly successful once she turned to IVF. That makes her unusual, despite the cultural image we have of IVF being the quick solution to infertility. Most of the time its not. And that’s another annoyance – that the book perpetuates that stereotype – though one can hardly fault Panayotov for not faking a few unsuccessful cycles for the sake of a counter-narrative.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I have been pregnant, while I haven’t suffered from sustained infertility,* that makes the last part of the book more palatable to me. I suspect it might be as much to do with the fact that it lacks the over-the-top contempt towards pregnant women and mothers, and indeed women in general, that in the rest of the book becomes boringly repetitious at best and quite offensive at worst. It is the sort of comedy that depends on belittling and stereotyping – not uncommon, but not to my taste.

It also probably has to do with the fact that the reader knows from the start that Panayotov ends up with a baby. At least you do if you’ve ever heard her interviewed or just read the back of the book. And it’s pretty clear from the title just how she achieves that pregnancy. So there’s no page turning motivation early on in the book. It’s only once she safely pregnant, following an embryo transfer, that I started to be really interested in the outcome – how will the pregnancy go, what sort of birth will she end up with? Perhaps it’s also that at this point she starts treating other characters with some empathy instead of as cardboard cutouts put there to annoy her.

In any case, I did eventually come to care about Panayotov’s story, but it took a good while. The obsessive insanity aspect of the infertility narrative is probably something a lot of women can relate too, although I think they might relate more if it were toned down some. And of course the outcome – a healthy baby at the end – could be hopeful and inspiring to those setting out on a similar journey. But for those four years into IVF with no baby in sight (or even with a baby, but only after several years and as many egg collections), it could be downright galling.

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*We had only just begun serious investigation – ie going beyond what my GP could do – when I fell pregnant with Mikaela.

Writing in five lines.

Frustration.

A bad first line.

Thank god for delete.

Too much pressure.

Writing sux.

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.

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.)

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.