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Something Has To Give.

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Hello, sports fans. Hopefully you’re indoors on this rainy, play-called-off Sunday. I’ve the headphones on listening to Chopin, himself is cooking listening to ACDC (hence the headphones), and the child is either asleep or burning something around here somewhere. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to get a few lines down.

In terms of writing, still managed to get into the desk twice this week at 6.30am in the morning. We have now reached the thirty-one thousand word mark, and I’m reaching the inner landmarks of this novel that I’ve carried around with me for so long. One of them was reached this Thursday, in an early morning session that was just wonderful. One of these characters is, after a dreadful period in her life, regaining her sense of humour. As she lies in bed at the end of a long day, her imagination takes on a long fantasy so comically outrageous, she makes herself burst out laughing, the first time she’s laughed in years. I’ve carried that moment around in my head over and over and over again, a glass snowball of her life and her heart in that exact moment that I have had to write out to finally make free. And this Thursday she and I finally got there, we finally got to see it together.

A lot of paddling to get to that shore…

But all this is taking its toll. I’m exhausted, and really I don’t have much in the way of mental … character left in me by doing this. I normally am scrupulous with what I eat, but I just can’t keep that up this week. I came home and made Chicken Casserole with tonnes of potatoes. It tasted amazing, but the carbs should have been a big no-no. I’m finding my hands full, of all these loose fraying threads, and there is only so much energy I can give to everything. Someone took too long at a traffic light on the way home on Friday and the fury I felt was irrational, exhausted, just nonsense.

By the end of this I’m going to be a basket case. Seriously. I’m going to be nuts.

Don’t care. I think.

Nah I’m grand.

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Ah, the joy of this. We have reached over twenty-two thousand words. I’m seeing the characters all speak out in ways that I can predict and the way forward needs nothing more than time. I can see this doing really well, and the way is onward.

However, all this progress has a cost. I’m up at 5.30 am to do this. My little guy still doesn’t sleep through the night, guys. So at least twice I’m awake at 4 am. Add a 5.30 am start with hard work behind it, and it is hard. Hard. I won’t write it out but just, please, say that word out loud, slowly. I found myself Thursday evening over the stirfry dizzy. Nothing to do but serve up and keep going. (Sorry it was so bad, other half). And that has to happen if I am going to do this…

There really is something about this time of year that I love. I grew up in not necessarily lavish, but large houses, homes with a lot of grassland around them. My mum’s home was a farm in Tipperary, lots of walks around it. I’ve always pointed to that as the reason I love old things. Not even antiques, just old, really old. An old wall, ivy spilling over it, a few fallen stones for good measure, while above the sky is quiet and overcast, is the most soothing thing in the world to me. I was on the bus with Little Man today. He loves the bus, seeing the world from a different angle, and we passed all these old, hidden houses with their broken walls, the sky all quiet and soft with clouds, and the leaves falling like a silent ticker tape parade for us. I thought of how often the image of that old world would come back to me during my life, like some mental comfort blanket for my mind. I don’t live in an old house, or in an old world. But if I had my chance, I would find some place not new, or rushed, and just sit and look and let it age. And let time, like a slow, low, cello note, sooth and smooth and pour over me.

For some reason this is the most peaceful thing in the world to me.

Happy Sunday. Talk to you next week.

Writing and the writers writing it writes.

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Greetings, mes amies. I write from a messy table in a messy kitchen in a messy life. Does anyone ever get this right? No one we’d like, any way. Had an interesting moment recently when on the top of the bus with little Man. There was just him, me, and another mum with her daughter. This situation, where female parents are in close proximity, tends to lead to one of them attempting a “Mummy Off”. It isn’t a smack down, with Ikea chairs broken over-pilated backs, nothing so honest. Instead there is a subtle testing of each other over the worth of little Sebastian or Cassandra. The problem for me is that I don’t care. Little Man does not speak French, nor do I wash his hair with homemade shampoo. The only thing he might win is, indeed, a smack down, and in such a comp I’d advise you to put a tenner on him, kid’s a scrapper.

I had to remove the ruder tattoos…

Anyways. Another week of writing done and behind me. It is Sunday, and I’ve been up at 5.30 am to go into work to write from 6.30 am. And while on Tuesday I got a mere two thousand words done, on Thursday I managed to get a whopping four thousand words done. Wow. Just wow. However, there is a problem with that. Because it was then 8.30 am in the morning, and everyone else was showing up and starting a day’s work. I had to go into a three hour meeting and I found that my brain had no intention of giving it any real effort. It reminded me of something…

Yeah. That was it.

Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead of you…

Le Writing Journal

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Mon amies, bonjour. J’ecrive mon lettre dans l’cusine avec mon mari, et le file ete dormir in the sitting room, and that is about as much French as I can recall in my exhausted state.  Little man has decided again that early mornings are preferable, and I am killed all over again. Added to the wonderful person who decided that the best place to fly a large plane was over my house at 5.30am and I am actually not going to put myself behind the wheel of a car any time today. I’m in that tired state when if you close your eyes you automatically start dreaming. I don’t mean sleep, I mean you go straight to dreaming, so that when you are woken again you have to recollect that that you are the jowl faced old wan you are, rather than the lion tamer worried about the butter cream melting. Yeah. I don’t know what it means either.

It means you want to be a horse.

So, it is another Sunday. I’ve kept up with the writing and we have nicely broken the ten thousand mark. I am seeing the pace slow down, however, as I get better at the writing, rather than just the typing. You can see the seasons as the sky gets colder at that hour, and the moon shines high, and bright, over the insanity of walking across a dark campus at 6.00. I am loving it much much more than the swimming, but ironically the writing is much harder on the body than the exercise. At the end of one of the early morning sessions, I find myself easing myself out of the chair like a hostage without the ropes. Each limb has to be painfully stretched out, sloooowly, to get the blood back in there, and to remind myself that there is a life outside of these women, we’re done with them for now.

“Oh god me back.”

It is an amazing moment, though. It is a weird transition, going from the dark night, to reinventing myself as a worker in an office. It is like shaking off dust sheets while I try to convince others I’m kosher and above board.  Trust me!

Right. It’s Sunday, and I need to cosplay as an adult. Wishing you all a grand day.