Just do it... (writing as therapy)

I've always been a firm believer in the truism that 'A writer writes'.  Except, I've not been doing very much of that recently - either here on the blog or elsewhere - which begs the question; am I still a writer?

I'm not sure.

Life has got in the way recently.  It's drained the energy from me; any creative spark I have is easily snuffed out.  I get inspiration for a post, or a story, get excited about it, start to plan, maybe even begin to write, and then bam!  Out of left-field it comes; another metaphorical body blow knocking me sideways.  Just like that the idea - and the impetus to put pen to paper - is gone.  A brief flare of the match and then, before the flame has even had the chance to take hold, nothing. I know I had it, I could almost touch it, see the words on the page, feel the satisfaction of having written and created something just for myself but now... it's gone.

I'm not sure if it's the life-stage I'm at (that pesky menopause is knocking on the door at the very time I need all my wits about me), or the external influences surrounding me, but for the last few months I've felt about as creative as a worn-out floor mop.

It occurred to me recently that perhaps I should just let this blog go.  I've been writing The Potty Diaries for ten years now, perhaps it's time to move on.  Other bloggers I started this activity with have - perhaps I should follow suit.

But then, why should I?  It's not that my life has become less eventful or that I have nothing to record.  In the last two years I've moved countries, re-assimilated to my home country (or at least, have tried to.  If' I'm honest that's still something of a work in progress), moved house - twice - excavated and sifted through 20 years of the detritus and leaf litter that's accumulated as the result of modern living, coped (yet again) as a week-day widow whilst Husband continues his work abroad, and kept the family more or less intact as we deal with the short-term impact and long-term ramifications of understanding newly diagnosed learning difficulties in one of our children.  That last one's still a work in progress too, actually.

Frankly, I'm exhausted - never a good state to be in if you want to be creative.  But I've been here before, years ago, when I started this blog to - literally - make shit funny, and back then it helped enormously.

Maybe it will again - watch this space.

And so it's November...

Where on earth did the rest of October go?

Life has been busy here for the still-re-acclimatising Potty family, as I'm sure it is for everybody.  And also, as I'm sure is the case for everybody, most of what's been happening is not suitable blog-fodder; either too boring to share (do you really want to know what I thought of Netflix's 'The Crown?  I thought not - but fabulous, just in case in you do), or too personal to put out there.  Consequently, I'm taking the easy way out and will use this post as an opportunity to share another piece of writing I've done; the prologue to a novel I finished (in as much as you can ever finish writing an unpublished book) in the summer.

It's odd, finishing one novel and starting another, as I have done over the last few weeks.  I find it hard to imagine sharing the latter - it's still too fresh in my mind, I'm too protective about it - but god, I am SO over the former. After so long spent working on it I've lost all objectivity and can only see it's faults;  I can easily imagine sticking it in the back of a metaphorical desk drawer and never looking at it again.  That seems a bit of a waste though, so instead I'm putting it up here - at least then some of it will have seen the light of day at some point!

I hope you enjoy it - and no, this excerpt is not too long. At least, I don't think so... (see? No objectivity...)


Finding Katie (working title)

Prologue: October 1993

I strip down to my swimsuit on the nearly empty beach and look out at the sea, a flat grey in the early morning light.

And I know already that I’m not going to be able to do it.

When I woke alone in the quiet darkness of the caravan an hour ago, my mind was made up; this was the only way out.  As I folded my nightclothes and left them in a neat pile on the bed, I was resolute; this was the only way out.  Whilst I made my way through the dunes, purposefully avoiding any other early risers in case they gave me a smile I wouldn’t be able to return, I was still certain; this was the only way out.

Now though, as I stand shivering in the chilly autumn morning, I come to my senses.  This is a crazy plan.  I can’t just walk into the water and… go.  No matter what I’ve found out, I can’t finish it like this; it will devastate Mum and Dad. 

And my brother.  Oh god, my little brother...  It will destroy him.

The memories come rushing back, one after another, and I think back to when he was tiny, Mum was ill, and it was my job to look after him.  I remember his gummy smiles and warm compact little body, and how used to clamp his arms around my neck and cover my cheek with hot sticky kisses as I hoisted him out of his cot in the mornings. 

I think about him toddling across the living room floor pretending to be a car.  I think about the time I took my eleven year old eyes off him for one minute to read my latest copy of Smash Hits and he walked into the door, cutting his head open on the lock.  I think of how he hardly cried as I held his hand in the back of the car on the way to hospital to get the wound stitched up.  You can still see the faint scar in his hairline now, even though he’s fifteen.

And I realise again that I can’t do it. 

I can still call it off – one phone call, and I can still call it off.  And then, I can just head back home and… 

Oh god; home. 

Shivering slightly in the cool morning air, I pick my way gingerly across the sharp stones of the pebbled beach, and force myself to step into the water.  It’s freezing, and I give a sharp intake of breath as goose-bumps run like an electric shock up my legs but I ignore them; this is no time to be feeble. 

The cold laps around my ankles, then my knees, and I keep right on going until it’s at waist-height.  Then I take a deep breath, plunge in – fuck, it’s like ice – and start swimming, away from the shore.

Because it’s time to stop pretending; there is no other way out.

The suspense is killing me...

I've posted before about the fact that I'm writing a novel.  The 'Great Work', as I affectionately and optimistically call it, has been in progress for longer than I care to remember, but finally - FINALLY - I am nearing the end (of the first draft, you understand).

Unsurprisingly, when I mention to people that I'm writing a book, their immediate assumption is that it's chick-lit, or something like it.  Shoes, shopping, expat life, Woman in not so severe Crisis, that sort of thing.  However, it's rather different to that.

I am writing what I have been informed is a 'suspense genre' novel, with a protaganist who is a scruffy 30 year old man rather than a willowy 40-something brunette based loosely on myself, or Juliette Binoche.  (Because, you know, in a certain light...)  And rather than doing the sensible thing and putting a plan on paper before I started, I have allowed the story to grow organically.  The characters have taken shape almost by themselves, rather than sticking to any pre-planned format that I created.

It's been an interesting process, not least because I didn't know at the beginning how the story was going to end.  There's just one problem.

I am within a few thousand words of finishing the first draft - and I still don't know how it's going to end.

Like I said, the suspense is killing me...

Gone fishing? I should be so lucky...

It's the holiday season.  Well, when I say 'holiday' what I actually mean is the Expat Summer Shuffle which, rather than time lying on a beach with a pina-colada to-hand as you wade through the latest paperback block-buster, is in fact solo-parenting time spent moving from one long-suffering family member or friend to the next, packing, unpacking, repacking, buying extra suitcases to contain the supplies of school uniform and clothes for the kids that you've bought along the way in the UK sales, and of course taking any opportunity you can to squeeze in the odd load of laundry when possible.

It's great to catch up with our nearest and dearest, but this lifestyle is not conducive to writing long posts - or, it seems, looking back on the last week or so on The Potty Diaries, any posts - so please bear with me for the moment whilst the Potski familiski makes their summer progress through Northern Europe.

On the plus side, I have come up with a killer concept for my next novel.  Never mind that I have yet to finish my first, or indeed that the 60K words I have already written require some fairly extensive editing; at least I know what I'm going to be doing next.

You know.  In my spare time...

End of term madness, meets BritMums Live!, meets Good Enough Mothering...

I am all for giving children the opportunity to make their voices heard within the school environment.  One of the worst things I remember about being a child was the feeling that your voice didn't really count for anything; adults got to make all the decisions, big and small, so the fact that the Boys' school has a Student Council seems like a Good Thing to me.  No, really, it does.  Just as long as my sons realise that they live in a benevolently authoritative establishment at home.

That means, by the way, that I will listen to their points of view and accommodate them where possible but - when all is said and done - what I / Husband says goes.  Especially on the big issues.  Like, rice or pasta for dinner.  Or whether that crust is going to be eaten up or not (we can discuss 'not' - but then there won't be dessert afterwards...)

Anyway.  The Student Council.  It had decreed that today was Celebrity Day.  (We won't get into a discussion of whether celebrity is something to be applauded here, I think.  I mean, obviously it's not, not really, but when everyone else is participating it seems to be more than a little curmudgeonly to lecture your children on why you are not going to help them pull together a costume when all their friends are dressing up as famous football players or pop princesses).

But let's put Celebrity Day in context.  We are in the last week of term here (do I hear a sharp intake of breath from UK based readers?).  So, you know, I have a question. Whose bright* idea was it to schedule it for this week? (*Add expletives as you see fit).  Because yes, come next Monday my two little darlings will be home all day, every day, until the end of August.

*sighs deeply*

*pulls self together*

Yippee.

So, bearing that in mind, much as I love my sons and am looking forward to spending un-timetabled weeks with them in the very near future, I have to admit that there are just one or two teensy little things I would like to get sorted before that happens.

• Like, finish the copy-editing job I was just sent.  
• Like, finish my novel - a ridiculous dream which is close enough to touch, but not quite - or, in the absence of that, re-read it and come up with an elevator pitch on it's theme.  You know; 'Oh, my novel?  Well, it's sort of Tolkien meets Chekhov meets Maggie O'Farrell...' (It's not, by the way.  Totally different, in fact.  But you get what I'm talking about).  
• Like, gird my loins (as in, work out what the hell to wear) for BritMums Live! this weekend, prepare myself for the workshop and the keynote reading I'll be doing at it, remember to pack my glasses for the opticians appointment I'm squeezing in during my 60 hour whirlwind visit to London, write a shopping list for the same (sleep?  Who needs sleep?), and also batten down the hatches here so that Husband has sufficient supplies (aka pizza and crisps) during my absence.

It's not surprising then that Celebrity Day slipped my mind until Boys #1 and #2 reminded me of it just before their bedtime yesterday evening.  Cue mild panic followed by frantic thinking and creative problem solving.

But, we triumphed.  Well - sort of.  Boy #1 strode into school complete with long brown shorts, white shirt, blue sweater and comma-quiff (courtesy of my Aveda wax) as TinTin, and Boy #2 negotiated the corridors in a dark blue t-shirt tucked into slightly-too short but suitably snug tracksuit bottoms, and wearing his brother's black ski helmet bearing the legend 'Hamilton' written in felt-tip pen on a sticky label across the front of it.

I did spend a few moments last night considering the possibility of covering Boy #2 all over with sponsorship labels so he could look a little closer to the real thing but once I googled a few images and realised that a) we didn't have a yellow flame-retardent jumpsuit to stick them on and b) I would be up all night printing them, it would be much simpler to tell him he was wearing Lewis Hamilton's training kit instead.  (They keep the many-labelled racing kit for race occasions only, didn't you know?)

At the end of term, there was a limit, I decided.  In this instance, Good Enough mothering would have to be good enough...

Onwards and Upwards

I've struggled a bit so far this year.

The Russian Winter seemed longer than ever before, mainly because it WAS longer; it started in October and left it's white dandruff on the ground until mid-April.  (And yes, that, right there - that use of the word 'dandruff' for what I would formerly have called 'snow'-  is a pretty good representation of my disillusionment with a season that in previous years I was enchanted by).  The days seemed darker and shorter, and the evenings longer and lonelier than in the previous years we've spent here.  Again, there is good reason for that; the powers that be insisted on continuing their practice of ignoring Summertime - meaning that the sun didn't rise here until nearly 10am in December and we were 4 hours ahead of the UK between October and March rather than 3 - and Husband spent most of the working week abroad.  He has done since last summer, actually.

Throw in what seemed like perpetually grey weather, a bad back that prevented me from doing the one thing that took me into the great outdoors in previous winters - cross country skiing -and being hit by flu, colds, and children's ailments, and the time between January and May has dragged somewhat.  'Swimming through treacle' is a more than apt expression for how I've felt, if I'm honest.

I've been questioning what I'm for.

A close relative, not so long ago, struggled to come up with anything positive to say about my role in life, and whilst I know that that is because they don't see my day-to-day slog but rather the end result - a family that is happy, nurtured, and wearing clean underwear - it stung.  A lot.  I know that I work hard - but not much of what I do is visible to those who live so far away.  And yes, of course I can hold up my hand and shout 'Look! Look at all the stuff I do, the writing, the blogging, the copy editing, the novel!' but all that's still just so much... fluff... to that person, and frankly, I don't want to.  Why should I?  I don't ask them to justify their career choices or to give me a line by line account of their working day, of the meetings they have, the invoices that result, the bottom line profits which their efforts increase.

But I know why this is getting to me, really.  My inner Judge - the woman who measures herself on results, profits and let's face it, bottom-line contributions, and who I thought I had sent packing after two years of counselling when I stopped working outside the home turns out, 5 years on, to have just been on a long sabbatical.  She's got in touch again, high-heels, working wardrobe and all, and is texting and emailing my subconscious.

'How's that blogging thing going?' she asks  (I can almost imagine her making those really annoying apostrophe signs in the air when she says the word; 'blogging').  'Making any money from it yet?  Are you making a difference? No?  Never mind...  What about the copy-editing?  Getting anywhere with that?  Oh well, bits and pieces are fine, aren't they...?  And there's always the novel.  Isn't there?'  Well, yes, I reply.  Except, I've reached a place that I'm reliably informed many writers do when, approximately 2/3 of the way through their book they get the wobbles, look at what they've written and think 'Well, this is just so much shit...'

But.  Summer is here.  The days are longer, the sun is (mostly) shining, the school run is now by bike rather than huddled in the car, shivering in snow pants and layers of duvet coats, and the summer holidays are on the horizon. It's hard to stay depressed when the sun blazes down and there's a nightingale singing it's heart out in the back garden.

And as far as the book is concerned, I have a plan.  It may be shit, but bearing in mind my subconscious is untrustworthy enough to resurrect the Judge - a part of my personality I thought I had moved on from - I think I will ignore what it's telling me, get some objective advice from others, and just get on with finishing the novel.

So.  Onwards and upwards it is...

The Gallery: Wk 64

This post is for Wk 64 of Tara's Gallery (click here to see the other entries). The prompt this week is 'My Weekend'.

For once my weekend featured very little of the laptop, mainly due to the fact that whilst I was actually at a blogging conference, I was doing precious little blogging. However, I took this shot duing Jay's presentation on photography, and I like the way the keyboard is reflected in the screen. It's faintly disorientating, and to a certain extent (bear with me here) I find that a relevant metaphor for why I started writing things down in the first place.

Struggling to find a sense a self after stopping (paid) work, and driven to distraction by my attempts to potty train my older son who was unwilling to have any truck with this toilet business, I decided that if I could write the experience down, and - crucially - make it funny, it would all seem so much easier and I would have regained some semblance of control. (On the page, at least).

And that was how it worked out. Writing things down became an addictive habit, it helped me to work things through, and eventually, I found that the more relaxed, centred person that I was trying to be in print started to be someone that I also recognised in the mirror.

I enjoyed CyberMummy, although if I'm completely honest I felt that for me it was more about meeting old friends face to face (some for the first time) than about the workshops and the opportunity to interact with brands. And I don't have a grand plan, as so many other bloggers seem to. I certainly have no idea where blogging will take me. I could continue for years, I may stop next week. But one thing I will never feel, whilst it continues to give me the chance to work things through in my mind, is that it has been a waste of my time.

And I suspect that I may always be addicted to using a screen to reflect & focus my thoughts, simply by the act of writing things down.