At Base Camp, Looking Up

When I was a kid, one of my favourite Aesop’s fables was the one about the tortoise and the hare. You remember it, I’m sure. I loved the idea that the ‘underdog’ – the character who everyone expected to lose – actually managed to win, and that determination, not speed, was what took the prize. That appealed to me.

Arthur Rackham’s illustration for ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’
Image: childhoodreading.com

I wasn’t a very sporty child, and so running races was something I really detested – I never won, in the sense of ‘I never came first’. I loved swimming, but the only time I ever thought – just for a second! – that I’d won a race in the pool, I’d actually ended up coming so far behind everyone else that all the other kids were out of the water and already half-dressed by the time I made it to the finish line. When I touched the wall at the far end of the pool, I looked around and didn’t see anyone either side of me, and just for those three seconds before I worked out what had happened, I felt like an Olympic champion.

Even though I never won at anything, though, I understood what the fable was trying to say: take it slow, take it steady, and you’ll get there in the end. Finishing a race became, to me, almost as good as coming first. Knowing I had done it, that I’d met the challenge and proved to myself that I could do it, was as good as a gold medal.

It’s amazing that I seem to have forgotten all those hard-earned childhood lessons when it comes to the race I’m currently ‘running’ – the race against time, to get all my words down before my NaNoWriMo challenge ends.

I haven’t gone anywhere near my NaNoWriMo project since Saturday morning, when I half-heartedly added a few hundred words to it, and then gave up; I didn’t even think about it all weekend. I haven’t opened the file yet this morning, and I’m – can you believe this? – a little bit afraid to. I worked very hard at it all last week, including one day when I wrote more than five thousand words because I felt like I wanted to keep going until I’d reached a certain point, but when it came to the next day – well. I couldn’t even manage two thousand words without bottoming out. I constantly do this – I race too hard one day and end up knocking myself out of the running for the days that follow. I haven’t run out of story for the NaNo project, and I haven’t run out of love for the characters – but I’ve just burned through so much mental and physical energy over the past three weeks that I’m beginning to have doubts that I’ll make it.

I have a shorter NaNo than most other people, insofar as I have to submit my words by this Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, at the latest. I will be away from my computer – indeed, any computer – from Thursday afternoon, and so my challenge will have to end early. If I don’t submit my words for counting and verification by Thursday morning, I won’t be submitting them at all. So, I suppose that’s adding to the worry – I don’t want to ‘lose’ this race. I want to finish it; I set out with the intention of finishing it, and that’s what I want to do. But, if I’d remembered the plucky tortoise from my favourite tale, and if I’d taken things slow and steady, I might not have just over 42,000 words done right now but I’d probably be a lot more enthusiastic about tackling the remainder.

I feel like a person setting off to climb a mountain, even though – when I think about it – I’m actually quite near the summit already. However, getting through these last 8-10,000 words will, I fear, be the hardest part of my NaNoWriMo journey. I’m tired, I’m cranky, my brain hurts and I just don’t want to do it – and that, my friends, is a place that no writer should ever allow themselves to end up. Writing is what I love, and putting myself in a position where I really can’t face the task of sitting down and putting one word after another due to exhaustion or burnout caused by a shortsighted inability to pace myself properly is really, really stupid.

Image: heidelscorner.blogspot.com

So. I think, perhaps, it’s time to stop allowing panic to drive my NaNo train. I’ll take it slowly today and if I get a thousand words written, great. If I get two thousand written, great. If I start going over that, I think I’ll have to rein myself in and let my common sense – my inner tortoise, if you will – take over.

Slow and steady wins the race. I should just print this out and put it up over my computer – or, get it tattooed on my forehead. Whichever works, right?

Good luck with your day’s challenges. Take it steady – or, as we say in Ireland, ‘take ‘er handy.’

 

Teeny-Tiny Tuesday

Hello, all.

I’ve not been feeling well for the past couple of days. Yesterday, I struggled with a headache that strangled my brain to the point of affecting my vision, and today I feel rather like a person who has been shoved into a barrel and rolled, willy-nilly, down a rocky mountain path. I managed to get a good night’s sleep last night, which has – to be fair – worked wonders, but I’m still not feeling my best self, shall we say.

I think the recent hot weather has been playing havoc with my person – and before anyone accuses me of complaining about the good weather, I’m not, okay, it’s been great – but, as always happens, by the time I’m used to the heat, no doubt it’ll be gone again and I’ll have to re-acclimatise to our normal weather conditions. I’m always one step behind, weather-wise! While it really has been wonderful to see blue sky and to be able to go outside without a rainjacket in the middle of the summer, some of us (i.e. me) are built like Yetis and can only function properly at low temperatures. Heat is not my friend.

This is my baby picture. No, seriously!
Image: scaryforkids.com

Also, I’ve been doing my usual ‘mad panic pressure have-to-do-everything-all-at-once’ nonsense again, and I really feel like I’ve blown a gasket in my brain. Yesterday was a total disaster, writing-wise. My blog post took twice as long as normal to prepare, and as well as that I couldn’t concentrate for longer than five or ten minutes at a time; trying to get any meaningful work done was a frustrating torment. However, instead of leaving the writing behind and going off to do something else, like a sensible person, I tried to truck on through. I never learn, do I? I do have competition deadlines coming up, and I want to put my best work forward for them, so I am going to have to try to remember that sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing is not to write. Work you produce under pressure, or when you’re not feeling well, is never going to make the grade – all it will do is make you feel worse, set you back even further and give you a lot of sub-standard words and sentences to unpick when you’re back on your feet again.

So, I’m going to take it a little easier today. I’m going to write, of course, but I’m going to remember that it’s supposed to be enjoyable and fulfilling, not something which makes me cry over my keyboard. If I can only do it in ten-minute bursts, that’s fine; if I need to have a lie-down (which I never do in the middle of the day, on principle), then I’m going to allow myself to do that. I have to realise that if I don’t look after myself, nobody else is going to. Not to mention that I’m going to need my brain, my body and my mental health to see me through the rest of my (hopefully long and happy) writing career, and that means taking care of what I’ve got, however humble it might be.

But then I keep saying this, and I never actually do it. Today, I promise, I will take my own good advice. And I don’t have any fingers or toes crossed!

This picture made me laugh, so I’m passing it on to you. Happy Tuesday!
Image: futurity.com

Have a good day. Hopefully I’ll be back on form by tomorrow, and raring to go for the Wednesday Write-In, as normal. See you then!

As the World Falls Down…

I woke this morning and noticed something strange about the light. Through the slats of our Venetian blind, the world seemed brighter than it should be. The reason for that was, of course…

…this had happened.
Image: rte.ie

We’re not talking the Arctic wastes here or anything – in fact, the snow isn’t even deep enough to cover the grass in our garden. Nevertheless, there have been accidents on the roads, it’s a headline news story, and myself and my husband have instantly turned into two old worrywarts. ‘I wonder will it stay?’ ‘Sure, how do I know?’ ‘Will we look up the weather forecast and see?’ ‘Those lads don’t have a clue. No point in asking them!’ ‘Right so. You know better than the weatherman, of course.’ ‘I hope it doesn’t stick, the whole country will grind to a halt.’ ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ (I’ll leave it up to your imagination which speaker is which in this not-entirely-fictionalised exchange!)

Luckily, my husband has a day off from work today, so he doesn’t have to go anywhere. Tomorrow, however, he’s facing a long journey. So, I sincerely hope the snow doesn’t stay. It looks pretty and all, but after the winters we had here a few years ago I feel somewhat allergic to the sight of whiteness coating the world. I feel like those terrible, heart-freezing winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 took away all my childlike joy when it comes to snow. It wasn’t fun to be stuck on a bus trying to get home from work while watching the snow fall outside so thickly that nobody – including the driver – could see more than two feet ahead; it wasn’t fun trying to skid my way to the train station on treacherous streets made entirely of ice.

I’m looking out at our garden now and the sunlight is pouring into it, making everything look absolutely beautiful. But I’m not fooled. Avast, white stuff!

In other news, I had a busy – but rewarding – weekend. I did a lot of writing and rewriting, playing around with four stories that I’m tweaking for submission. Some of them are quite dark – we’re talking murder and totalitarian states and abusive families here – but some have touches of black comedy at their heart. It’s a tough balancing act at times, writing the sort of stories you want to write while also remembering that you need to place them with a magazine or journal willing to publish them. As well as being your best work, they sometimes need to fit a certain ‘ethos’, too. Sometimes, of course, writing with a particular focus in mind can help you to create. As I’m learning, putting parameters on your work can sometimes bring fantastic results. It almost seems counter-intuitive, but so far it has worked very well for me. Restricted word-counts, restricted themes, using prompts – they’re all worth a try.

Sometimes, though, the problem I have is not finding a starting point – it’s finding a finishing point.

On Saturday evening I was quite tired, and trying to work out the ending of a story. I’d got it to a certain point, and then I hit a wall. I really liked the story idea, and the character’s voice, and I knew I wanted to finish it, but I’d written myself into a dead-end. I was bleary eyed. I could barely see the laptop. Eventually, I had to close the computer down, but there was no rest for my brain. For the rest of the night – even into my dreams – potential endings for this story popped, with metronomic regularity, into my frazzled mind. Some of them were patently ridiculous, and others were clichéd or just, somehow, inauthentic. Finally, I came up with an ending I liked, one I could ‘see’ in my mind’s eye. (Of course, I was supposed to be sleeping peacefully at the time. But that’s just details, right? Right.) My poor husband had been attempting all evening to get me to see sense and stop working, and I did try. Just not successfully. As a result, I woke up even more tired the following day. And, the story is still not finished.

I have learned two things from this. ‘Exhaustion kills inspiration’, and ‘listen to your husband.’

In an attempt to give my brain a rest, I also started to read a biography of Mrs. Beeton, the most famous homemaker/cookery writer (arguably) in the world. I had a notion that she lived to a great age and was the matriarch of a huge, bustling family; you’d need to be an imposing figure to achieve the sort of reputation she has, wouldn’t you? In fact, though, I’ve learned she died in childbirth at the age of 28, and her reputation was largely concocted by her husband and publishers. I sort of lost a bit of my faith in the world when I found this out. However, the book is excellent – impeccably researched and really interesting, particularly if you’re a fan of Victorian era-Britain. It’s so rich with detail and atmosphere that you feel like you’re walking the streets along with the people being described.

Image: books.google.com

I recommend it, despite the fact I’m not finished it yet. It’s a large tome, so I’m only about one-third of the way through it at the moment.

And, as well as all that, something wonderful happened. Are you ready? Here we go, then.

I am going to have a story published in a literary magazine.

I’m not saying which one yet, because the editor isn’t sure when the story will be published, but as soon as I have the details, I’ll be shouting about it here. Needless to say, I am a very happy person.

I hope all your weekends were fun, relaxing and full of good things, and I hope your Monday looks bright.