A few writing-related things have come to my attention of late.  First, Dave Eggers’ “buck up” to anyone worried about the decline of literary culture: “This is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page…Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”  And then literary agent Nathan Bransford’s football-coach-style rally:

Listen up! We got a big submission Friday night, and the publishers out there are going through some hard times. They want to see your submissions sparkling! They want perfection, and as the literary agent of this here team I aim to give it to ‘em! It’s time to look deep inside yourself and step up yer game! This means everything from revising to your queries to your submissions needs to be absolutely 110% perfect. And anyone who wants to cry about it can take off their shoulder pads and get off my field!

Looks like maybe I’m not the only one who’s been feeling a little low lately.  But with my new resolve to make sure this book is finished by September, there’s never been a better time to “step up my game.”  Much as I want to resist succombing to sports metaphors, maybe we don’t get to pick what inspires us.

❧

I’ve had a panic-feeling brewing in my chest of late.  I forget that I’m still susceptible to this kind of worry, that knowing better doesn’t actually make it better.

I received two emails yesteray, rejecting a few proposals I’d sent off.  I almost felt crushed, except that I was so happy that the editors had even taken the time to respond to my queries I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d made some sort of perverse progress.  In celebration, and indeed mourning, I decided to take the long way home.  I cycled through Port Meadow, surprised as always by the city dissapearing before my eyes.  There were kids on bridges, leaping into the brown Thames.  A trio of boys with an old bicycle attached to a rope, pedalling at high speed towards the river, over a hump, flying a few glorious feet through the air, splashing and sinking.

I cycled along the river pathway until I reached a nature reserve, somewhere between the Osney lock and Folly Bridge.  To my left, the canal, the narrowboats with their potted plants, their sun-worn owners puffing smoke from deckchairs on the shore; to my right, the train tracks, the industrial detritus on the outskirts of a city: but in the nature reserve, nothing but green.  I walked my bike in a circle through the heat.  I passed only a man with a walking stick, and a sunbathing couple.  Nothing to suggest my location (maybe I’d dreamt all this up); except the rush of a train, sometimes.  Except the bells ringing out four o’clock from a church tower. 

Maybe I’d been out in the sun too long; but as I cycled down my street at long last, almost an hour later, I started to feel truly strange; for though the day was only an ordinary one, though I’d been to work in the moring, eaten in the cafeteria as usual, had my two cups of coffee, I was returning home from the wrong direction.  Do you know what this is like?  Every day you cycle down Hurst Street from the James Street end, and now you’re cycling down Hurst Street from the Magdalen Road end.  All the things you usually see and do on your commute (passing the Radcliffe Camera, gazing through the gates at All Souls thinking how cold, how unfriendly, yet how much you’d like someday to be allowed past the gates; crossing Magdalen Bridge, hearing bells if you’re lucky; struggling up the Iffley Road, the relief of turning finally into residential turf) erased.  I did it deliberately, to shake myself out of a rhythm I think I had ceased to enjoy, to make myself see my world anew, but as soon as I’d arrived home I wondered if I’d been too ambitious, if I’d done something too drastic, if my spirit would recover its balance, if the vertigo would fade.

Later I tried to nap upstairs with the window open, but the dry air made my lungs feel scratchy and the heat went to my head, gave it strange thoughts.  By evening I worried I was getting ill, and then I realized I was making myself ill by worrying, and then I worried that I wouldn’t be able to control anything, and felt even iller.  Then I tried to be reasonable and count the worries, but this is harder to do than it sounds and I wound up just making dinner and sitting half-asleep on the couch with the Man, which was the most comforting thing of all. 

****

But having said all that, having laid it in melodramatic stone, I must also say this: it’s a more productive breed of worry than I’ve often experienced in the past.  I see progress in rejection and comfort in simple things (food, company); I can stay my mind from straying too far into the future.  I can even, though the thought is still in its fragile infancy, consider that I may need to make some major thematic and contextual revisions to the book which will require hard work and strength of heart but which will ultimately make it a far better (more readable, more marketable, and indeed, more authentic) piece of writing.  More on this, I’m sure, to come.

❧

Writing, for me, will never be a straightforward process.  I’m realizing this lately.  I’ve reached a stage in The Book whereby everything about the project disgusts and repels me.  Even a single sentence has the power to fill me with so much doubt that I tell the Man, calmly and confidently, that I’m thinking of just giving it up altogether.  I’ve become a Queen of Melodrama (”where are you going?” I cry when he gets out of bed, puts his trousers on, and heads downstairs).  Mostly what I think to myself when I sit down to do some work on the wretched project is: I wish I was writing something simpler. My next book will definitely be a novel.  No more genre-crossing, mind-bending, intertextual nonsense.

Then I remember that even if I was writing a straightforward novel, I would be struggling just as much.  I do have one, hidden in a folder on my computer somewhere.  I’ve never written a single bit of it in a logical way; it’s all bits and pieces, tied together by the tenuous string of a single character.  And every few months I decide to make a massive change to the entire premise.  Which means that though I’ve been thinking about the book for years, I may as well have cooked up the idea yesterday.

On days filled with denial, I like to think that it’s anxiety that makes me like this, that if I had a steady income, a stronger foothold in the literary world, I would be able to sit down with my laptop on a Saturday afternoon like today, listen to the wind and the rain and the overgrown tree in our front yard lashing against the window, and push forward.  But I’m inherently doubtful and inherently scattered in my thinking.  That, in many ways, is the whole premise of this book.  And it’s not a bad thing.  So remind me, will you, next time I say something in a telenovela-worthy tone of voice, like, “that’s it, I’m starting over, this just isn’t working,” that my process isn’t any better or worse than anyone else’s.  It’s just mine.

*see here

❧

Yesterday we woke in a converted manor house somewhere near Cheltenham.  The sky cracked like an egg over the lake.  Silver light flooding the morning.  This house was translated from a dream of mine, I’m sure of it.  When we drove up in the taxi on Wednesday I felt a little like I imagine Charles Ryder did on seeing Brideshead for the first time.  The lake, the gardens, the rolling green humps beyond.  I went swimming.  An indoor pool; the air thick with warm mist.  I’d forgotten what it feels like to submerge your body, to float, to push against the water.  Things I used to know so intimately, lost in the move.  Remembered in an evening.  We ate in the dining room, sipped after-dinner drinks.  Slept thickly.  In the morning, we read the paper and drank fresh-squeezed orange juice while looking out onto the grounds.  He skimmed news headlines while I read a story about child welfare officers in London.  A family of seven, a self-harming mother.  Squeezed into a single room.  And here we sat with all this space.

After breakfast I went for a stroll around the grounds.  Found a swing overlooking the lower lake; snuck past a slumbering swan.  Sat on a bench in the garden batting away insects.  Sank my wellies into fresh grass.  Gazed up at the house itself; precise, stately, exactly measured.  Touched the stones with my toe before I came back inside.  Somebody built this place.

Then trains.  Maybe it was the rhythmic motion, maybe the journey on that swing to childhood and back, maybe the unusually early hour at which we woke, but I fell almost instantly into sleep.  Awoke in Swindon, hating the sound of the word.  Swindon.  Listening to a man on his mobile saying, “I can see you but I don’t know how to get to you.  I can’t get out of Swindon station!“  Slept again.  Didcot.  A concrete jungle.  Gone were the yellow fields of rapeseed; the same rapeseed we’d seen driving to Bath at the weekend, the same yellow, the same green.  A doze.  Oxford.  Oxford under a heavy sky; will it rain?  He had to go to work so I got on the bus by myself, carrying my bags wearily now.  No glamour in the journey down the Cowley Road.  The corner of Leopold failed to interest me as it usually does; the murals only looked depressing under the gloomy light.

I started to think about this schizofrenic existence we lead.  I have one foot in the manor house, one foot in the poor house.  My last day of school yesterday, indefinately; but have I ceased being a student because of it?  I think my mind is having trouble catching up, my body struggling to adjust to how swift, how vast, the changes are.  I suffer wanderlust in this season and have dreams of hot, fragranced places; but also, I’ve taken to wearing a six-year-old pair of shoes whose heels have rubbed off because they smell less than the rotting ballet flats I own but seem more seasonal than the boots I wore all winter until the soles began to peel back.

It requires great leaps, this modern way of living.  Great leaps of the mind, great leaps of faith.

❧

The Man and I are taking an impromptu midweek holiday.  We’re spending the night in a swanky Cotswold hotel (one of the more unusual perks of the Man’s unconventional set of jobs).  So of course the morning dawned cold and wet.  Already late for work, I spent twenty minutes reading Sharon Olds in the dark house.  Then got on my bicycle and swam through sheets of mist.  Remembering something a friend told me last night about using the balls of my feet for more power, about imagining not that I’m pushing the pedals but that my legs at each revolution are being lifted up.  Maybe it was my imagination, my willingness today to believe all things are possible, but I think I expended less energy than usual getting to the office.  This feeling of possibility started yesterday evening, after I’d spent hours hard at work on The Book and we were at the pub.  Blowing off steam.  Live acoustic music.  Somehow listening to that music gave me a strange sense of power.  Or maybe it was the red wine. 

But now, here I am, hours away from what should be a much-needed romantic and relaxing getaway (nothing better than abandoning the week halfway through, pretending to live more spontaneously than we do), trying to mentally pack, and all I can think is this (and I know it’s shallow, but somehow the fate of this experience seems tied to how well I’m dressed when we arrive):

What on earth do posh people wear when it’s raining?

❧