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. 

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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.

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I have this memory of a 12-year-old-me, in torn blue-jeans and muddy riding boots.  It was a stormy day, mid-December, the sky dark and heavy, and I don’t know why, what made me think this, but I remember with alarming clarity looking down at the dirt road, leading a horse back to his stable, and thinking, I can’t wait for school to be over so I can just hurry up and become a lawyer.

Where exactly this aspiration went, I couldn’t tell you.  All I can tell you is this: when somebody asks me these days what I’m planning for September, which seems to be a suddenly-approaching deadline of indeterminate enormity, I panic, look around and flap my hands, mumble, er, um, well, panic some more, change the subject, and then spend the next few hours deeply engrossed in my own powerful anxiety.  To be honest, just about the only thing I can probably tell you for sure is that in spite of all odds, in spite of what the 12-year-old me would have told you, the one thing I won’t be in September is a lawyer.  They haven’t yet invented a word for a freelance (maybe)-writer-who-wants-to-do-a-PhD-but-can’t-afford-it-and-has-a-manuscript-but-no-money-and-just-wants-to-curl-up-until-success-strikes, you see.

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So I got up “early” this morning (read: not five minutes before I have to leave for work) so that I could write something, but now I’m going to scrap that something in favor of something else. See, I opened up Firefox this morning and saw my Google quote of the day (yeeeeah….I’m a certifiable nerd), courtesy of Stephen King:

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

At first I thought, okay, fair enough. I see what he’s saying. If you have to search for something it’s probably not going to be the most natural word in the sentence, it might obscure the meaning, it isn’t necessary, blah blah blah.

But then I thought, hang on. Stephen’s success is undeniable, but it’s not for his, er, literary prowess that he’s famous so much as for his accessibility. Am I wrong? Am I missing something brilliant about the way he crafts phrases? Because last time I checked, I wouldn’t actually want to write like Stephen, no matter how much I’d love to reach his level of (monetary) achievement.

(And do you know what? I just used an online thesaurus to find an alternative to the word “success” (“achievement”) because, frankly, it’s earlier than I’m usually up and my brain isn’t working properly and SUE ME, STEPHEN.)

My writing process has changed over the years, though not drastically, but I’ll tell you one way in which it has: I’m a more careful writer today. Part of what I do when I write something which isn’t rushed and ranty (i.e. this) is spend a lot of time considering individual words. I will actually stop halfway through a sentence and reconsider one word because the rhythm is off, say. And in instances like that I find searching for synonyms is not so much like searching for answers as for inspiration.

So in short, I beg to differ, Stephen.

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I’m on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn’t even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a–let’s call it a “healthy interest”–in bookshelves. Anyone who’s been to our house knows that the Man and I don’t seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it’s actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I’m such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there’s something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist’s studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we’d chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here’s what we’ve ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn’t do the incredible green real justice). It’s called “wake-up call” and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn’t realized it at first. How apropriate:

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I have another cold; it’s bleak midwinter outside, all grey and frost and bare, spindly-limbed trees. It’s Christmas, almost, but it doesn’t feel it: I have the sense of running at full speed towards something that I can’t see, that’s just, perhaps, over-that-hill-there. We were meant to babysit tonight but because I’m feeling so rotten I’m staying home to soak in the bath and drink cup after cup of tea; somehow the prospect of spending the evening without The Man seems dark to me, even though I know I have a lot of work I need to get down to doing, anyway; even though I’m not great company at the moment anyway. I think this is what they call man-flu, maybe–but I’m not officially admitting to it, just throwing it out into the ether as a suggestion.

But in my avoidance of work, which today so far has taken the form of perusing The Guardian’s Books section (a far more highbrow form of avoidance than usual, to be honest), I came across this, which amuses me to consider. But my problem is not so much all the books I’ve bought but refuse, for some reason or other, to read, but all the books I’ve bought and would really really like to read but haven’t yet because other books keep getting in the way.

Take George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books: I’ve been on page three for nearly six months now, because I keep reading other things. Or Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The File on H by Ismail Kadare, all of which are lingering near my pile of “books I’m currently reading,” as if they, too, want to be included; all of which I’ve dipped tentatively into at some point and then withdrawn so that, in their stead, I’ve finished Orlando, The Night Climbers, various novels by Colin Dexter, and an über-academic text on Walter Benjamin’s writings on The City (as a literary idea, so therefore, in my mind, it deserves unecessary capitals).

Then again, maybe I’m just in denial. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me that actually, I don’t really want to read these books, in spite of the fact that I think I do. Or maybe I should just buckle down, concentrate on one thing for longer than fifteen minutes without finding something else more interesting, and actually read them.

But somehow, I think none of this is going to stop me from buying oodles of books this holiday season.

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