Tag Archives: Writing

Notes in the margin…

17 Sunday Mar 2019

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On reflection, I may have used this as a subject tag before. No matter – I’m not writing the same thing (at least I hope I’m not.) I’m writing about notebooks – which are, like every writer I know, part of my toolkit. I’m not imaginative in my choices – there are few pretty, decorated notebooks in my collection. I am choosy however. I write in pencil & eschew the shiny paper which most notebooks are made from. And lines. I don’t do lines.

A5 art sketchpads fit the bill exactly. The mildly textured paper is perfect for pencil. They can be expensive though – artists are even choosier than writers! I’ve been known to spend stupid money on a simple notebook. A few years ago, to my delight, I discovered a line in a local shop where nothing costs much. They have plain, unromantic black board covers & they’re spiral bound, which I also like.

For each book I write, I make copious handwritten notes & can fill up to six notebooks before I type a single word. Currently, I’m working my way through the ones pertaining to Book 4: Underwater The Stars Shine Brighter. Last year, Janey, my writing sister who knows me well, bought me one with exactly the right paper but an unexpectedly green cover. Lush!

notebook 1 (2)

Book 4 unfolds in two time frames. The first, involving my main character’s backstory, is told through a diary she wrote, for about a year, when she was eighteen going on nineteen. The events of that time hugely impact on the second element of story told in the present, nearly sixty years later.

One of the early motifs involves Grace falling in love. For the first & only time in her life. Reading through the green notebook this past week, I came across several scenes I’d written ages ago – so long I’d forgotten them. They almost made me cry. This is still a work in progress; these are very much notes in the margins. But this is one of the ‘notes’ I made which I think will stick…

I want to be like her. Wear the same clothes, make up my eyes the way she does, with black lines & layers of mascara. I want to walk the way she does & dye my hair black. I wish I’d heard of Billie Holliday before I knew her so she would have been delighted when I told her. I want to hold a wine glass the way she does. With the stem at an angle so it looks as if the wine will spill, only it doesn’t because she’s in absolute control. I want her to be as much in love with me as I am with her.
© Carol Lovekin

Grace - aged sixteen  grace 10

I love Grace… I’m pleased she won’t let go…

As the hashtag says #amwriting…

Ritual

10 Sunday Mar 2019

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This morning my writing mojo rolled out from under the bed. Somewhat dusty, tangled in cobweb but definitely made of words. And for the past day or two there have been CROWS.

CROWS - Copy

Far more than usual & although I imagine the wild, windy skies have tempted my feathered sisters to the dance, I like to think they’re here for me too. Eyeing my frustration, knowing that scribbling notes is not enough. Lousy, lazy ligaments notwithstanding (ha!) I need to work.

My new story (Book 4) is also an old one. Those of you who follow me will be au fait with Riverbook & know it’s history, be familiar with Grace – the central protagonist – a woman of a certain age. Twice, poor Grace has been set aside to make way for younger, livelier characters. At one point I wondered if I might be writing the wrong story but it won’t give up. Once the manuscript for Wild Spinning Girls was complete & I returned to Riverbook, out of the blue, it acquired a proper title: Underwater the Stars Shine Brighter & all at once there was a fresh connection.

It felt like validation – confirmation that the story wasn’t dead (pun alert) in the water.  And long before I broke my leg, at our weekly writing group sessions I’d tossed ideas around with Janey. (She’s very good at taking a glimmer & running with it.) Since I broke my leg I’ve filled two entire A5 notebook with scribbles – ideas, tangents, re-imagined versions of the story’s essential premise; scenes & all manner of scraps.

But it’s no longer enough. It’s time to crack on & return to the story proper. I’m bored by inactivity – physical & mental – & a sense of wasted days. And I’m an Aquarian – the mistress of the Plan. Ritual gives shape to my days & I need to reclaim one that works. A familiar one made of discipline & word birds.

Bird girl - Copy

Onward & sideways, dear reader.

Don’t tell anyone – I have another book deal…

03 Sunday Mar 2019

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It was the best Solstice gift ever – an email from my editor confirming acceptance of my third book, Wild Spinning Girls. Protocols & paperwork meant I couldn’t immediately go public. I was able to tell my nearest & dearest which mitigated the frustration a little.

In all honesty, I quite liked having a bookish secret. It’s different from a debut, when you want to Tell Everyone In The Entire Universe Immediately! You can relax a bit. And if you’re fortunate enough to be published by a tiny press, you learn to be patient. Mine – Honno, the Welsh Women’s Press – consistently produces classy books to an exceptionally high standard & takes infinite care with its authors’ words. The book won’t be published until some time next year & that’s okay too. All good things & so forth.

In any case, there’s a great deal to be said for space between books. I’m not sure how I’d fare in a world that required a book (or even two) a year from me. How do people even do that? Okay, some stories write themselves (Snow Sisters did); others are far harder & need nurturing. Wild Spinning Girls is done, but still not finished. There’s more finessing to do & I’m glad. I know I haven’t yet reached the stage where I’m ready to relinquish it, because I know there’s editor-driven magic still waiting to be conjured.

All of that notwithstanding mind – get me! Who knew, back in March 2016, when I first held a copy of Ghostbird, my debut novel, in my hand, I’d do it not once more but twice?

Wild Spinning Girls is another story set in Wales. It has many of the elements of the previous two books, not least an old house. This time, a very remote one… There’s a ghost too & a secret…

MY CLOUD HOUSE 2 - Copy

It will be down to my reader to decide if a level of familiarity is a good thing.

I’ll be revealing small hints over the next however long it takes; small clues & visual images. My favourite fairytale, The Red Shoes plays a part. If you examine it closely, TRS is both a fascinating & horrible story. Hans Christian Andersen hated his sister Karen so much, he gave the beleaguered heroine of his grisly tale her name. As a child however, training to be a ballet dancer & loving fairytales, it was inevitable this one would fascinate me.

BALLET SHOES 3 - Copy

And because I don’t do even numbers, here’s another hint.

CROWS GIRL

Island life is still a thing, never more so than during the past eight weeks. Breaking my leg was a thing too. A massive shout out to everyone who wished me well, not least in the writer/reader community. As for my tribe, the sisters who came to my aid, day after day, you have my gratitude for ever.

Suspending disbelief

18 Sunday Nov 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process

Dear reader – I know, poor, neglected blog. My writing process being the point of this thing (& I am writing, I promise) you’d think…

Book 4 is emerging & now being written in third person present which is interesting. Those of you who’ve followed me from the olden days will remember me referencing a story I called my RiverBook. It’s been set aside several times & almost drowned to be honest. I’m firmly of the belief that some stories aren’t meant to be written & ought to be allowed to pass peacefully. (TreeBook anyone? I think not…) RiverBook refuses to let go however – largely because the central protagonist is old[ish] & curmudgeonly. She keeps nagging. I’m acquiescing then & embracing Grace…

ranunculus-fluitans1

The other thing – & why I really came here this morning – concerns a conversation I had last week with my writing group sister, Janey. We were discussing the nature of magic & how, in authentic magical realism, the author asks only that her reader suspend disbelief. I wondered if it was sometimes a lot to ask & perhaps, I write for a fairly niche audience.

Alongside my sisters, mothers & daughters, I write so-called ‘witchy’ characters: wise women with one foot in the ‘normal’ world, the other on the threshold between the veil. Ordinary women who happen to have that wee something that sets them apart. An affinity with the natural world & a heritage connecting them to the Old Ways.

OLWEN

Janey made an astute & very smart observation. We live in a land steeped in magic, in myths & legends. Unlike almost anywhere else in the world, as a nation we Brits (Welsh, Irish, Scottish & English) have magic embedded in our history, our bloodlines & our collective psyche. We find it easy to believe in ghosts & spirits & the supernatural. We love a haunted house, a ghost story, a dragon & a faerie; we relish fantasy & myths brought to life in ways we can relate to. The huge success of the BBC drama series Merlin (2008-2012) is a terrific example.

Other, older ones, Janey pointed out, are numerous: from Mystery and Imagination (1966-1970) & Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1980s) to The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012) to the recent re-imagining of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. Documentaries & dramas – we love them equally. And if we don’t, it’s more often than not because we’re too scared to watch them!

Yes – skeptics abound – but I’m less concerned than I was a week ago. I shall continue writing my ‘wise women’ characters, place them in their odd cottages, twisty houses & magical gardens. Set them baking good spells into bread, stitching protective ones into curtains; healing with herbs & kindness. I shall write them wrapped in mystery & concealing clothes, allow them to conjure what enchantments they will.

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The characters I conjure come from my own ancestral memory bank. Lili in Ghostbird & Mared, the grandmother in Snow Sisters. My own ‘disbelief’ is non-existent, frankly – I’ve been wandering between the veil since forever. Nothing to frighten the horses, but I know stuff & every now & then, it’s as real as breathing. And my characters know it too.

Showing up … with a new notebook.

26 Friday Oct 2018

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“[I] am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.” 

Virginia Woolf was talking about her diary. She could just as easily have been referring to her books. She often had a haphazard relationship with both. As do I. Although, unlike Mrs Woolf, I keep a sparse diary these days. More a daily, brief note frankly. My writing style is equally random. All over the shop to be honest – rarely linear but it works for me, so onward & sideways…

My third story is out on submission. It’s time to show up & write another. And so I bought myself a new notebook. Partly because I need one & also because the focus for #Book 4 has shifted hugely. It already exists in a complete first draft. The writing of it has happened over a period of several years. It’s been a thread, winding in & out of Ghostbird, Snow Sisters, a story about a fire-ruined house & #Book3. (Don’t ask – I’m terribly superstitious & until/if, too terrified to reveal the title.)

#Book 4 then kept getting eclipsed. I wondered at one point if it was one of those stories that wasn’t meant to be written at all. But I kept going back to it & to Grace, the central character. Grace is unlike anyone I’ve written before. She’s older for one thing. I’m very keen to write an older woman protagonist & I’ve been thinking about Grace a lot over the past week or so, wondering if I can finally write her & do her justice.

arthur-rackham Fair Helena

There will be a selkie too, although not in the way most people imagine. Mine bears very little resemblance to the ‘conventional’ selkie myth & she’s never been near the sea…

The distance between my original vision for this story & being ready to write it properly means it was inevitable that aspects would change. And so it’s proved. This is the best time of year for me to write. Darker evenings, lush morning mists, nights drawing in… So yes, bought myself a new notebook…

Girl is a feminist issue

08 Sunday Apr 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process

This week I completed a draft of my third book. (Hoorah! Cake! Etc!) As I edit like a loony along the way, I don’t tend to number drafts. Technically, it’s the first complete one; realistically, it’s part tidy & part messy. My next trick is to print a hard copy which I’ll leave in a darkened drawer for as long as I can bear the suspense. In the meantime, I’m attending to the ‘throwaway’ words.

And pondering the title.

Like it or loathe it, Girl in the title of a contemporary novel, however ubiquitous, appears to sell books. As a woman who writes largely about women (albeit about girls as well), I have long eschewed reaching for the Girl word. And yet I find myself unexpectedly in love with a title I conjured several months ago for this story. It contains the word Girls – plural – & I like it. I allow it as it’s part metaphor & because it takes into account the fact that some women in some stories (as in life) will always be girls. (Two of mine certainly are. One is a girl of seventeen so points anyway.) More importantly, regardless of age, some women will always be intimately connected to their girl self.

Against all my previous feminist conviction, I’m now convinced Girl can work in certain kinds of grown-up fiction titles. And I’ve reached this conclusion after a great deal of thought. It’s exercised me in a way nothing has for a long time. And I think – for me at any rate – writing the story of Ida & Heather has sealed my certainty; I know why I’ve changed my mind.

It’s because both pain & a sense of wonder are never completely eliminated from most women’s lives. Girl in fiction is part of an important, ironically feminist, narrative. At a certain age (ambiguous in itself) women are expected to conform to a norm no one really understands. (Certainly not men.) And for those of us of a certain generation, not least our mothers (surviving the patriarchy by the skin of their collective teeth.) These excellent, brave, hopeful, frustrated women, insisting we were old enough to know better & yet too young to understand.

Go figure.

I deliberately made my Girl character seventeen. It’s my own go-to heart age. I may not recall eight or twenty-five in any detail, I remember being seventeen as if it were yesterday. It’s a magical age: girls on the cusp of womanhood, when they have more power than they have the wisdom to appreciate.

The woman, as Girl, is saying she isn’t prepared to let go. Girl allows her to reach back & touch the luminous moments. Girl keeps her safe & her dancing dreams alive.

Blue Shoes

It’s a wonder all by itself. So I’m risking it – it feels too right not to.

#GirlIsAFeministIssue

‘A note…*

01 Sunday Apr 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process.

A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf is a book that accompanies me. By that I mean, it’s a companion. I don’t take it with me when I go shopping, but I don’t stay away from home overnight without it. My copy is heavily annotated (in pencil) & I return to it over & again. This morning, I opened it randomly, at Wednesday, November 14th, 1934.

* ‘A note: despair at the badness of the book: can’t think how I could ever write such stuff – and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up and down – and Lord knows the truth.’

The passage is underlined & the word ‘Rewriting‘ written in the margin. This writer has been here before, methinks [knows]!

I’m indulging myself in a moment of angst. Even though I have it all – blocked in & laying the foundations (in some instances, the detail) for the final chapters – I’m still beating myself up over this story. I oscillate between ‘the badness‘ & ‘thinking it good again‘ like a wildly out of control lighthouse beam. (To the Lighthouse? Some puns have no sensitivity whatsoever…)

woolff      woolf diary

Mrs Woolf said this too: ‘My head is a hive of words that won’t settle.’

Hives & lighthouses, bees & beams. Whatever, it’s all absolutely in my head.

Onward & sideways.

 

Tempus fidgets…

25 Sunday Mar 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process

There are mornings when it’s as if I ordered the mist. Oh, the smother of it – draped like adornment left over from a Fäe wedding! Concealing & tricksy too: time, at the beck & call of Daylight Saving, catching me unawares. (I’m a winter person – I like the dark.) Last night I was ready for it – only not ready enough it seems – this morning finds me trailing.

My Irish mother was a great one for playing with language. It was she who defied Latin & came up with the notion of time ‘fidgeting’ which to this day I approve of. Time, for a writer, is often a luxury & even for me – retired from the day job – storytelling gets done between other commitments. Waking up & finding I’d lost an hour reminded me how time is never static & not always compliant.

One of the things I do in the morning – because I can – is write in bed. I read a bit, over the first cup of tea, but more often than not set the book aside in favour of the notebook & the pencil. My brain is alive in the morning & I love writing by hand. And I have a cat on Cat Time which means early mornings absolutely are a thing. (I’m no owl, so early nights are by & large a given too.)

I’ve reset the clocks & mentally reset the body one. It’s Sunday – Withering Heights sits in the mist, adrift & rather lovely, paying no regard to time. And I have notes.

Onward & sideways. (Also my mother.)

Up the down staircase (with a parachute?)

25 Sunday Feb 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process

It’s highly likely I’ve used the above title before. (Sans the parachute reference.) No matter – if the cap fits & so forth.

Two weeks ago I was feeling a bit aimless. After waffling on about Saggy Middle Syndrome (Except it’s Further On & a Bit Of  a Worry) & my options, I knuckled down. That was the plan at any rate. Monday morning found me knowing what I wanted to write (what I needed to write) only quite lost because the way in alluded me. It’s a thing with me – every now & then I find myself armed with a good scene or chapter & stumped, because I have no opening line.

It took me two days to write a single chapter.  I was all over the place – the words were there but without that essential first line, it had no heart. Good first lines aren’t confined to the opening chapter of a book. Every chapter needs to entice. (Closing ones are pretty important too.) My enticing skills had deserted me until – in the end (so to speak) – it was a simple as this:

She hadn’t closed the curtains.

Who knew? And don’t ask me where those five words came from – I have no idea, only that some dear bird took pity on me & left them in the edges of my hair. I was off & it’s been a lovely week. Writing early each morning – still in my PJs – putting in the hours before my bit of the internet woke up.

I still have no idea if this story is a flyer – I think it is but there are no guarantees. It’s well quirky & in places quite off the wall. Bits of it please me hugely – lots of it will need serious attention.

Above all – I’m mad about my new characters. I love them, even though a good deal of the time they lead me a merry dance & it is like going the wrong way up (or down) an escalator. If I hang on to the invisible parachute though, I’m fine.

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As for my ghost, dear reader, I adore her. Would you like a little more?

   It isn’t my job to make things easy for you, Ida – I am not yet at peace. Until I am, I’m tricksy. I’m the tick of that old clock and the wordless whispers in your cobwebbed sleep. I’m the scent of apples and soot and feathers. I slip through open windows, in and out on your whim now, not mine. I drift through woman-shaped keyholes as easily as breathing. Slip and smile and you taste me on your bitten lip.
© Carol Lovekin

And that, as they say, is your lot!

…time to write…

28 Sunday Jan 2018

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process

There are several ways to interpret those three words. Prefixes abound & the writers among you will know them. You, dear reader, can almost certainly guess & guess well.

Having, needing, making, finding & the ubiquitous: I don’t have… twin sister to: there is no… 

There are more of course & you are welcome to reply & add to the list. In my world though, the one that most resonates is the one I wake up to each morning: This is my time to write…

With my birthday on the horizon & the knowledge that another year has flashed by (Hello?) the urge to write doesn’t flag. I’m over half way through Book 3 & have another one sitting, like a patient bird on an egg, until such time as I can give it my full attention. There is a completed first draft of another story, set aside too many times albeit for good reasons. And in the outer reaches of my thoughts, caught in the ends of my hair, are more. I sense these stories like ghosts, not quite ready to reveal themselves. (Like most ghosts, they need only kindness & a little attention to be heard.)

It isn’t always easy to find time to write – make space for your craft. Women (mothering & bread-winning ones in particular) have the day-to-day to deal with. I’ve been there & largely done that. I waited a long, long time to get to here: twice-published, a little more confident, hungry to be a ‘real’ writer rather than one making excuses not to take the risk; to say, I have a story & I’m going to submit it. Now I’m writing to keep up. I have no time to waste, so yes, this is my time to write.

Thank you for listening.

And by the way, I collect bird frocks & I wear them…

bird frock 1