Dear writer

So began my email from the Ilkley Literature Festival telling me I'd been shortlisted.  It was a great moment, from my daughter's delight to the good wishes of my on-line friends.  I basked.  And then I waited.

Much time was wasted over the next couple of weeks with compulsive email checking.  Then you reach a point, rather like waiting for the outcome of a job interview, when you realise that the silence does not bode well.  It's strange then that you should feel so disappointed when the second email finally arrives.

After sleeping on the news I feel much more philosophical.  The world hasn't ended, nothing has changed.  I'll tweak my story a little and send it out again.  My friends enjoyed reading my story and, what's more, I had great fun writing it.  That, after all, is the main thing.  Isn't it?

Five long days

My students are all present and correct.  My reward is five long days off work. Bliss.

Of course, I don't want you thinking that I'll be putting my feet up.   My literature course books have arrived and I can't wait to get started.  Before that though, I'll have to make myself finish Dracula, one of the set books.  I'm so bored of it now.  Have I read it long ago or seen the film?  It's all so familiar.  I will persevere - only a hundred pages to go after all.  Then I can set to.

There are also pressing family matters to be dealt with.  A trip to Leamington Spa at the weekend for a bridesmaid's dress fitting.  An electric guitar to be collected from Morecambe.  Plans for my son's birthday party next weekend.  Italian course books to be collected from the post office.  Will five days be long enough I wonder?

I have plans for some writing too, or research at least.  I have an idea for a short story set in Lancaster in the late 1700s.  A trip to Lancaster's Maritime Museum should provide the inspiration I need.

I'd better get on with it then.

Happy New Year

The bags are packed and lunches made.  The summer holidays are over.  The weather is wild and wintry, shaking the fruit from our trees.  And so it's time to wish you all a happy new year.

January is a poor time for a new year.  The nights are long and dark, we're all broke and overweight.  January needs all the help it can get.  September, however, now that's much more promising.  Our whole family follows the academic year, so September it is.  New teachers and new students.  Time for us to reinvent ourselves.

Soon the parcels will arrive.  It's five years since the first parcel of Open University books landed on my doorstep.  I still remember the excitement and the panic.  Now I've learnt that the assignment book that seems incomprehensible now will, with time, start to make a little sense.  This year it's the nineteenth century novel and beginners' Italian.  Molto bene.

The running's going well too - I did promise you an update.  After two weeks of unrelenting work, I'm back on level ground. As with all my projects I blow hot and cold.  I've run four times in five days and it is getting a little easier.  As the working week progresses all my good intentions slowly unravel, so it's good to start on a high.

All of this distracts me (a little at least) from the small matter of the Ilkley competition.  No news yet, but if the time I'm spending compulsively checking my emails, were spent running, writing or reading, I would be wise and fit indeed.

Short stories

I've never been a fan of short stories.  I read Maupassant's Boule de Suif at school. At uni I discovered Ian McEwan and consumed everything he'd written with the kind of gluttony that adult, non-student, life will never allow.  Generally though, I dismissed short stories as inconsequential.  Either I read one and shrugged 'so what?' or I found one I enjoyed and wanted more.  Either way I was unsatisfied.

It was only the OU writing course that got me thinking about the art of short story writing.  I gathered short story collections, read William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Malcolm Bradbury.  Many short stories still leave me with that 'so what?' feeling, but I am learning, at least, to understand their opportunities and constraints and to admire the form.  One or two stories have lingered in my memory, insinuating themselves into my consciousness in the way that good writing should.  Beryl Bainbridge's Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie is one such story.  It begins with a patronising gift of pantomime tickets.  Through a family's response to the gift and the pantomime itself Bainbridge deftly shows the tensions between the family members.  The ending is pitch perfect but I don't want to give it away - you might want to read it sometime.

Joyce Carol Oates' A Hole in the Head is far from understated, but boy does it suck you in.  The end is dramatic, outrageous even, but somehow seems a natural progression.  The initial fastidiousness of the main character makes his undoing all the more appalling.  I won't expand, but I would advise you against plastic surgery of any kind.

So, whilst I still don't rush to pick up a volume of short stories, perhaps there's something to be said for them after all.

Good news

The air has taken on a distinctly autumnal feel and I have taken to my bed.  I'm not ill enough to be off work, but certainly not firing on all cylinders.

But beneath the covers and this subdued exterior, I am turning cartwheels.  I've just heard that one of my stories has been shortlisted for the Ilkley prize.  I was quite willing to believe that they'd only had sixteen entries, until an eminent friend told me that the Ilkley Lit Fest is one of the UK's largest.  On hearing this, the internal cartwheels are threatening to turn into external acrobatics. But here I am, home alone, with no one to help me celebrate.  Where are my family when I need them?

Poem in my head

I woke up this morning with a poem in my head. This has pleased me mightily as I haven't had a poetic thought for three or four months now.  Although I'd been mulling over a idea for some blog posts, writing poetry had not crossed my mind so this is a pleasant surprise.

I am not a patient poet.  In fact, I'm not a poet at all.  I cannot apply myself to considerations of rhyme and metre.  Words just come.  I have a good reading voice and to my mind's ear some words just seem right together.  It's lucky I have some honest friends to tell me whether I'm barking up the right poetic tree.

But less of this frivolity,  two work days down and five to go.  Poetry will have to wait.  For now.

On the move again

Imagine.  I spend all day in a stuffy office looking at a computer screen.  As soon as I get home, I turn on my notebook and I'm off again.  Facebook, email, blog, forums.  It has to stop.  I read an article the other day on how to use social networking to your advantage rather than being its slave.  I do struggle with the self-publicity part. Yes I have a blog, but I won't publicise it.  That would be far too big headed.   But I will set myself a target and tell you about it instead.  That's supposed to work.  Apparently.  I tried to join a friend in writing a 1000 words a day.  After a measly 4,500 words of utter drivel I gave up.  But then it worked for her.

So here's my target: run 10k a week and then do a 10k run by the end of October.  I ran today for the first time in six weeks.  It wasn't easy, but it felt good.

 I have a hard week ahead.  It's university clearing so I'll be working seven long days in a row.  I'll be needing some fresh air and exercise.

I'll let you know how I do.

Howards End is on the Landing

I know I shouldn't have done it, but I just couldn't help myself.   My butterfly mind has already engaged me in more than a year's worth of reading projects, but what's one more book amongst friends?  We don't have an independent bookshop in Lancaster, so the literary smorgasbord of  Fred Holdsworth's bookshop in Ambleside was irresistible.  Briefly distracted by a couple of biographies of the Lakeland poets, I ultimately settled on Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill.

I've only read a chapter and a half, but I think I'm going to like it.  Based on a year's reading of forgotten books, this is part memoir, part meditation on the books that she's enjoyed and those that she'd never read, but had sat on her bookshelves for many years.  I like Hill's style of writing.  Already I feel like I'm sitting in her Small Dark Den, opening that first book with a sense of sweet anticipation.

I'm home alone this evening (something that rarely happens).  I shall lock the doors, slip into my pyjamas and pour a glass of rosé.  There will be no Sky Sports or talk of Pokemon, just the pleasure of losing myself in another fine book.

Growing up and moving on

Parenting young children isn't easy.  It's physically tiring and feels like a twenty four hour job.  Even when they sleep, you never quite relax.  You always listen, just in case.

But then, as they grow older, the burden of responsibility shifts a little.  My teenage daughter is on holiday with a friend's family for the first time.  Gone are the cosy friendships of primary school,  where your can chat to the mums in the playground.  As they grow up you lose control and you have to just trust (and hope) so much more.  I'm not saying that your children need you less, but perhaps just in a different way.  They may need less of your time, but more ingenuity.  You learn to see them as friends too.

As parenting becomes less labour intensive we parents rediscover ourselves as people.  We start to find time for our mid-life crises, or just to wonder whether we want to do the same thing for the next twenty five years until we can finally retire.  Hence I'm now addicted to the OU and can map out the next five years at least in various courses.  All being well, I'll graduate (again) next year.  This time I'll take my daughter, rather than my parents, to my graduation.  I hope I'm setting a good example.

Butterfly mind

The school holidays bring a different rhythm to our household.  I'm the only one still at work, the only one who knows what day of the week it is.  My OH and kids can drift from day to day, or make plans for sleepovers and trips to Test Matches.  I am a little jealous of their six weeks of liberty, but the break from school runs and football training gives me some head space too.

Right now I'm desperate for new ideas, dashing from one book to the next.  I've just finished Virginia Woolf's A room of one's own and have moved swiftly on to Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, a set book for my next OU course.  In between times, I'm reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist and have a book of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower to finish for next month's book group.  I did say I'd have a go at the Booker longlist as well.

Too many books and too little time.  My butterfly mind flits from one to another, delighted with my garden full of flowers.

Are you a writer yet?

Results day yesterday.  When I look at the others who got distinctions, I'm in illustrious company.  There are those already working on novels, others who can whip up a story in twenty minutes or whose poetry and prose make you gasp.  Then there are those who've been disappointed with their results but seem to have poetry running through their veins or write engaging, fluent prose.  I can't help but feel a fraud.  True, I do feel a little proud of the stories I've written but these have not come easily.  There's been much head scratching as I've floundered for ideas and the writing hasn't been any easier.  More like coughing up fur balls.

I'm not a writer yet and not sure if I ever will be.  I do have, it seems, a knack for studying.  Give me a text book, an assignment and a deadline and I'm your woman.  It's a simple feedback loop, with clearly defined goals.  If only the rest of life were so straight forward.  Writing is a completely different kettle of fish.  What's good enough this morning, may seem utter drivel by teatime.  One woman's masterpiece is another one's chip wrapper.

I try and remind myself that writing's not supposed to be easy.  They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  I have a long way to go.