Month: December 2011

Looking Back at 2011

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the end of a year must be in want of a reflective blog post.

My gut reaction on looking back at 2011 is a big, fat meh. I’ve been juggling exhaustion, depression, low self-esteem and a troubled faith (with bigger repercussions on other aspects of our life than you might expect) and as a family we’ve gone through the wobbling first steps of a new business in its infancy.

So I think I’ll do what any decent procrastinator worth their salt would do. I’ll make a Little List.

5 Worst Things about 2011 (in no particular order)

  • Family struggles. In February my father-in-law lost his mum almost a year to the day after he lost his dad. Being an only child he and my mother-in-law had a lot to deal with alone and although we tried to give them some support it was hard to watch them going through so much from a distance. Obviously, it was also a loss for Andrew who has only one remaining grandparent now. And my own grandpa has been ill, having recently started on chemotherapy for a lymphoma which has been suspected for well over a year.
  • Coming to terms with not having a regular income. Andrew’s going self-employed is great (see below) but it does take some getting used to.
  • Being completely and utterly KNACKERED. Sorry, there’s no more poetic way of putting it. All the years of sleepless nights finally caught up with me this summer and left me in a semi-permanent fog of exhaustion.
  • Rejection, rejection, rejection. Well, ok, maybe that’s a LEETLE dramatic. I usually deal very well with rejection, especially the nice ones (of course), but for some reason this year a couple of rejections led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth and thrusting pen and paper away only to reach for it sheepishly a few minutes later.
  • Babies being poorly. Not seriously, but they have seemed to have had one virus or infection after another. Emily was left very shaken after a nasty bout of chicken pox back in the early summer, and since Daniel started school it’s like he’s stewing in a little petrie dish, brewing up ever more interesting variations on a cold so that our house is solely responsible for the majority of the world consumption of tissues.

5 10 Best Things about 2011 (in no particular order)

  • Andrew’s new business. Finally he’s able to do what he’s good at and manage himself and he’s thriving on it. It’s the most wonderful thing to see someone you love SO MUCH doing what they were made to do. And getting recognition for it too; he’s had some amazing feedback from his clients. Business is coming in strong – so strong in fact that he’s not been able to do the work on his own website! – and looks set to grow in the first few months of 2012. If you want to see a couple of examples, check out Gillian Philip’s website, or The Inkwell Group. If you ask nicely I’ll even get some of his book covers that he’s designed to show you…
  • SCBWI. Yeah,yeah, I know I’ve gone on about these before (here for a start) but seriously, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators has been an absolute godsend to me this year. I have found kindred spirits to meet once a month (and more in the interwebz) and chat, discuss, support, critique and encourage each other and it has kept me going and given me an indescribable boost.
  • Podcasting. My In The Wishing Chair series has brought me into contact with some lovely people and I feel very privileged to have talked to them. I’m hoping it continues to grow next year.
  • Liberation. Yes, I had a rocky time faithwise. BUT on the other hand, it’s sort of given me permission to be open to other ideas, ways of thinking, philosophies that I was, if not closed to, not exactly receptive either. I’ve also learned to be happy in the fact that I have so many different interests and hobbies (see here) and I’m really looking forward to developing my Happiness Project (see here – interestingly, one of my most visited posts by a long way. I guess that search for happiness touched a common chord).
  • Emily developing her character. True, that character sends me to despair and back again at times, but she is so vibrant and alive, it’s amazing to see. And frightening to forecast…
  • Daniel learning…well, everything, really. He’s astonished us with his numberacy, he’s amazed us as he’s learned to read, he’s bowled us over with his curiosity and he’s had us in stitches with the turns of phrase he comes out with. I’ve said it before but nobody can send me to the edge of despair then bring me back to joy like my children can. Life MAY be a rollercoaster; parenthood unquestionably is.
  • Some Life, Somewhere. I published a book! I keep forgetting about this actually but when I remember I get a little skip of happiness. I did it! And I do love going and having a wee look at my reviews *shuffles bashfully then puts up link as if I wasn’t planning to all along* LOOK HERE…
  • Teh Interwebz. I’ve kind of fallen out of love with facebook (it was good for a while, FB, but it just couldn’t last. It’s not you, it’s me…) but it’s still got a place in my life, but twitter is actually a big part of my life now. I’ve made good friends and new friends and strengthened old friends- you know who you are. And it’s led me to some very lucky opportunities, both for myself and Andrew’s business.
  • Writing. I’ve got a confidence in myself that I didn’t have at the start of the year, as well as a deeper awareness of my trouble spots. Not to mention the support networks of SCBWI and the internet – see above.
  • New Year’s Eve. As it turned out, 2011 wasn’t as bad as I thought. When it was bad, it was horrid, but when it was good it was very, very good. But I’m still glad to leave it behind and go into 2012. The difference is that where I was going into 2012 in a desperate, despairing rush to get out of 2011, I’m now going into it with hope and enthusiasm.

Thank you for reading my blog this year. See you on the other side! *blows party hooter and raises a glass*

Words

There’s a song I used to love, twelve years ago when my husband and I started going out. It’s Words, originally I believe by the BeeGees but in ’99 when Andrew and I met it had just been covered by *shameful whisper* Boyzone. It has lovely lyrics, but it’s the refrain that’s the killer:

It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away. 

As any writer or reader, aspiring or established, knows, it’s not “only” words and that line perfectly sums up the power of words – they can take someone’s heart away. Hold that thought.

Last week Daniel learned to read. He’s been desperate to for a while, sitting poring over his picture books and deciphering letter by letter but not quite managing to turn individual letters into words. This week something clicked, the missing magical ingredient I guess. I’m still trying to catch it so I can bottle it, sell it, and retire. Anyway, It clicked and we sat together and he read me a whole story by himself. What happened was he wanted to sit near me while I was making tea so I gave him an early reader I’d got out from the library in case he could manage the odd word. I thought I’d have to help him out frequently but at least he could have a go and then I was on hand to do so. Instead, I stopped what I was doing and listened in growing wonder as he read word after word without my help. Some of them he stopped and decoded sound by sound, others he read aloud fluently as if he’d been reading for weeks instead of minutes.

He then read the same book to his daddy three times and searched out the Oxford Reading Tree At Home books I had ready for after Christmas. That night, our house was all about Words.

The thing is, I had a bit of an epiphany reflecting on the episode. While he was reading I kept asking him what was happening to make sure he was understanding what he was reading rather than just speaking aloud without taking anything in (he was, the little star). That’s when something I’d suspected was really borne in on me.

It’s “only” words.

It’s the Power of Words. The letters didn’t matter. He could recognise individual letters but they were powerless without being turned into words. Being able to read means being able to turn black squiggles on a page into a story and characters and conflict. He has that power now.

He had power over me with the words he was using. He had me asking what was happening, wondering what was going to happen next, and he LOVED it. Instead of being spellbound by a story, he was the one casting the spell because he could read the words. 

Writers have that power over someone else every time a reader picks up their work and is caught by it. We love having that power over people and making them think “wait, but what happens next…?” I think it’s actually a little bit addictive. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility etc, not to mention great guilt, great big whopping holes in self-confidence, but those things are part of the deal and really, it seems like a fair price to pay for the power of one day dreaming that a child or a teenager somewhere is reading my words, and my words are taking their heart away.

I’m off to add some more words, perfectly packaged in books, to Daniel’s Christmas gift list. Have a wonderful Christmas everyone!

Fun, fun, fun!

I have been having a bit of a roller-coaster ride lately. Maybe some sort of cross between a mid(ish)-life crisis, a reaction to the frankly depressing year we’ve had as a family, or just a general “awakening”, but whatever is going on it’s giving me energy, optimism and enthusiasm. It’s also giving me a bit of a realisation that actually, it’s not such a bad thing to be me after all.

In this spirit I’m reading a lot of philosophy and psychology and self-help-sort-of-things, and two merit Special Mentions.

First up is the book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I LOVE THIS BOOK. Gretchen writes about her experience over the course of a year trying to bring more happiness into her life. It’s not a ‘how to be happy’ book, it’s very firmly about HER story and what SHE did but to be honest, she could be me. So many times reading it I thought “Yes, that is exactly what I do” or just “That’s me!”, so many of her suggestions I actually took on board for myself. I hugely recommend the book, as well as Gretchen’s website which is here.

Next year I’m starting my own Happiness Project which I’m going to blog about. Since it’s mid-December now I’m going to use time between Christmas preparations to think about what I’m going to do and January seems like a good time to start!

I finished reading the Happiness Project on Friday and have been mulling things over; then today I got the latest issue of Psychologies magazine. I’ve started getting this regularly over the past few months, tearing out articles that really tugged at me and putting them into a scrap-file. This month’s focus was on having more fun and coming on top of the high that The Happiness Project left me on, it couldn’t have been more perfectly timed.

One of the suggestions (actually, in both The Happiness Project and Psychologies) was to think of things I used to do for fun as a child and see if I can’t do them now. What a brilliant idea! There’s a quote from CS Lewis (a brilliantly quotable man) saying “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” It’s so true, and it’s something I had in a small way acknowledged in reading more and more books for children and young adults – although that can be rationalised as a ‘career development activity’ too, really. But no more – I’m going to have more fun, dammit!

These are some of the things I used to do as a child for fun:

  • dress up – in anything. It’s amazing what kind of costume you can make from tucking up and arranging old sheets and curtains. Curtains, actually, are especially good as you can get some lovely fabrics. I had a dark green velvet one which became variously a queen’s dress, a ball gown or a mediaeval maiden. Not to mention being spread on the floor as a forest/garden/meadow.
  • dolls. mostly paper actually – I did have several ‘real’ dolls, both baby and Barbie-type, but paper dolls were a special kind of magic. Either cutting them out of catalogues or drawing them myself or (a real treat) those ones in comics where you got the doll wearing a vest and knickers and two or three outfits with tabs that folded around to hold them on. I’m actually heaving a happy sigh just thinking about them.
  • skipping
  • bubbles
  • puzzles! I used to get a bumper book of puzzles, especially wordsearches, to take with me on the ferry when we went on holiday every summer and it was such a treat.
  • reading.
  • reading.
  • more reading. (It’s amazing actually when I look at what I like doing NOW for fun, how much revolves around books. Thinking ahead, I realised lately that one of my real ambitions is to run a centre for children’s books. Ya never know!)
  • music – on our old, battered piano; one of several recorders I owned; a tortured violin (major parenting points to my parents for putting up with THAT)…
  • curling up in small, enclosed spaces. I actually used to squeeze in behind the hot water tank. Or a small cupboard. Or the space behind my bunk bed (one of those with a desk and wardrobe under the bed). Or folding the sofa bed into a box and getting in the middle. I was rather odd, when I come to think about it…
  • making things with paper. I already mentioned the dolls but I also tried origami, making paper furniture for my dolls, making envelopes. Someone once bought me a book of paper boxes that you pressed out of the pages and folded and slotted together. And one year my dad got me a huge pile of Discovery  magazines which was a real treasure trove; as well as all the facts on a random range of subjects, many of them had hardly been touched and still had the cardboard models to make. I LOVED doing those.
So part of my Happiness Project will be do rediscover some of these hobbies from my childhood and HAVING FUN. And I might just start now… *goes off to hunt for paper and scissors*

Freedom of the Renaissance Soul

As my long-suffering husband knows, I tend to flit between many and varied interests. I think I have always done so; at least, I can’t remember ever not. When you’re a child, this is ok, even encouraged. The more you find out about the world and the more curiosity you have, the more you can both get out of life and give back. Your mind is broader and your life enriched when you have a range of hobbies as a child.

Getting older, this changes for some reason. Or I think it does, I’ve felt that it does. I’ve felt guilty that I’ve taken up a hobby only to find a Shiny New Hobby a few months later then to return to the original one a few years after that. I feel like at my age (the advanced age of 30) I should be settled enough to know what I am interested in and to stick to it. That not being able to do that means I have the attention span of a flea. Or worse, a child.

This can be quite a depressing feeling, it turns out. If you’re not careful it can easily turn into “I must be a failure because I can’t even stick to a hobby” which turns into “I am a failure at LIFE” which turns into “I need ice cream” which turns into… well, you get the picture.

But a couple of weeks ago I read Psychologies magazine (which I really recommend, some very inspiring and interesting articles in that!) and there was a review of a book calledRefuse to Choose by Barbara Sher. It described me. Now, I haven’t read this book yet but both that and a similar one called The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine are high on my to-read list. Basically, it’s about people who Sher calls ‘scanners’ who have a wide variety of interests that they focus on for short periods of time instead of one or two passions.

The idea that not only is this common enough to have people write books about it but that it’s actually a positive thing (judging by the samples I’ve read) is amazingly liberating. As Lobenstine points out, Leonardo da Vinci ‘dabbled’ in a HUGE range of pursuits. I’m not comparing myself to Leo, but, y’know… *shuffles feet and smirks*

The result, along with a few other things that I’ve been working out for myself lately, is that I feel freed to flit from interest to interest without feeling I’m a failure but more that I’m curious and interested and I want to know more, more, more and that that isn’t a bad thing. I spent a glorious half hour scribbling down all the things I’m interested in (and by the way, people like me are AMAZINGLY easy to buy presents for since a book on any of my many hobbies will go down well! Just sayin’…) and I know that there are certain ones that come up again and again. It turns an attitude of ‘I’m a flippertigibbet’ into ‘I’m a Life Investigator’ (or similarly hippy term of your choice). I went to the library the other day and came away with an armful of books on different things.

A side result is, for a writer, a virtually limitless well of inspiration. For example, I’m currently reading a beginner’s psychology guide, Use Your Head by Prof Daniel Freeman and his brother Jason Freeman which is fascinating but gives me a) a few ideas for future plot points but more importantly b) some psychological tips that will be good to remember when developing characters and relationships.

I imagine many creative people have this tendency to wander from one interest to another. Do most of them see it, as I did, as a failure or a lack of commitment to any one interest? Or do they give themselves permission to be curious and investigative? And how will my children be – more focused or more wide-ranging? Now there’s something to think about…

*Author’s note: This post should have been finished but I wandered off to read about something else…

PS I’d like to just draw people’s attention, if possible, to the fact that my lovely husband Andrew has started his own blog. Have a read here.