For reasons best known to itself, the Mighty ‘Zon has lowered the price of “Away With The Fairies” to £6.65 (UK, not sure about US). There’s no way of telling how long this is for, so if you’ve been wavering about grabbing a paperback copy, maybe best to get it now.
Might make a great Easter present (to yourself, even) or a Mothers’ Day gift. Or hide it till December.
Today I have the honour of hosting a post by Roz Morris, whose latest book “Not Quite Lost” came out a week ago today. I very much enjoyed this tale of travels (mostly around Britain) and recommend it as a light-hearted but thoughtful type of memoir; beautifully written and full of humour and pathos, it’s just the kind of book to enjoy this autumn.
Over to you, Roz!
How travel feeds creativity – the sea that swims around us
I’ve always kept a notebook. I can’t go anywhere without wanting to doodle a thought about what I’m noticing, or an unsuspected angle on the book I’m writing. Creative people – not just writers – always have bursting minds.
But they don’t always burst to order. We all know that sitting at our desk can sometimes be paralysing, like being locked under an interrogator’s spotlight.
Which is where the environment comes in. A moving environment, particularly. Travel – as defined by the period of making a journey. I love driving a familiar route in my car. While muscle memory handles the motoring and motor functions, a brain is free to unspool. The train is particularly intoxicating. It is a lullaby. An instruction to just sit and be. There can’t be anyone who doesn’t know that JK Rowling dreamed up Harry Potter as she idled on an intercity.
Travelling under your own power is good too. I’ve always liked running. Correction: it’s not the running that I like, as in getting tired while going somewhere. I admit I enjoy the occasional burn to a blasting piece of music, but more usually I get bored once I realise that strenuous movement is also uncomfortable. But I really like what running does to my mind.
Fatigue, the need for determination and the knowledge that I’ll have to endure it for an hour seem to squeeze my thoughts into a concentrated channel. While my inner exercise mistress says we must do the allotted time, the writer mistress grabs a random piece from a storyline or character and frets it to death.
A run inevitably turns into an aggressive problem-solving session, with a focus that I simply don’t get at other times. Sometimes these are problems I never even saw until my trainers started trotting. I do exercise classes too, and get infuriated with the repetitive exercises to brainless music. But I seem to split into two halves. Exercise mistress pumps out the reps with a resentful eye on the clock. Writing mistress brings up an urgent flaw and storms it until the final cooldown. When I flail out of a 45-minute Body Pump, I’m usually gasping for a notebook.
These are my go-tos for grappling with the routine work on WIPs. But we also need to add new stuff.
And this is the great thing. Go away and the brain drinks in new things. Not just the big, obvious features like a famous mountain or an ancient palace. Away from home or familiar environments, everything is reinvented. The texture of chairs in the waiting room of a station. The distinctive regional accent that flavours every word you hear. The smell of a country as you step off a plane. (Singapore: mangoes. Mexico: diesel and drains.)
That last point makes it sound as though I travel abroad a lot. Actually I don’t. I’m not that well organised. Anyway, I’m so easily entertained by any differences that I’m just as happy to sling a suitcase in the car and head for the motorway. Even staying in a friend’s house makes you renotice the things you tune out of everyday living. No two places have the same night sounds – jumbo jets in one place, a trickling stream in another. Your host’s coffee mugs might invite you to draw conclusions about them. What writer doesn’t always make sure a trip to a friend’s house includes a visit to the bathroom, regardless of whether it’s physically necessary? Be honest now.
A notebook is essential travel gear, of course. I have a special one I use when I’m off home turf. It’s an old leatherbound book embossed with the name ‘visitors’ – because it is the book I write in when I’m a visitor. (And now it’s just been published in its own right, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction. But that’s another story.)
Ideas are all around. An invisible current of them, like the phone signals, wifi and remote control instructions that swim around us all the time, all the minutes of the day. If we’re not the intended recipient, we don’t see them, but still they are there. Travel – whether a deliberate trip or a simple state of being in motion – might let us turn the receiver on.
Roz Morris is an award-nominated novelist (My Memories of a Future Life; Lifeform Three), book doctor to award-winning writers (Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012), has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter and teaches writing masterclasses for The Guardian. Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction is her first collection of essays. Find her at her website https://rozmorris.wordpress.com/ and on her blog https://nailyournovel.wordpress.com/ , contact her on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RozMorrisWriter/ and tweet her as @Roz_Morris http://www.twitter.com/roz_morris
Links
My Memories of a Future Life https://rozmorris.wordpress.com/my-books/my-fiction-me-as-me/my-memories-of-a-future-life/
Lifeform Three https://rozmorris.wordpress.com/my-books/my-fiction-me-as-me/lifeform-three/
Not Quite Lost https://rozmorris.wordpress.com/my-books/not-quite-lost-travels-without-a-sense-of-direction/
C is for Cat
There is a theory that people are either dog people or cat people. Personally, I think this is mostly rubbish. I’ve lived with many animals, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, snails (yes, really) and would love a small menagerie of my own. Each animal is an individual and therefore expresses that. We’ve had more cats than dogs, admittedly. Our last dog often behaved in a more cat-like way, but that was because from puppy-hood she was brought up by several cats.
Cats were once worshipped as divine (ancient Egypt, obviously) and I suspect they have never quite forgotten this. People who don’t much like cats often say they are merely mercenary, and regard us as food providers at best but recent research suggests otherwise (http://time.com/4714823/cats-very-social-study/) and I’d agree.
The purr of a cat is a very soothing thing, but it’s also thought to be healing. http://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-healing-power-of-cat-purrs-infographic Our newest cat has the loudest purr I have ever heard; she sounds like a distant chain saw.
Other research has concluded that having a pet enhances life, and may even extend it; pet owners apparently live longer than non-pet owners of the same socio-economic group. Cats are a relatively easy pet to share a home with; they don’t require taking out for walks, though some take to leads well. Our late Watson used to go for walks with us, (sans lead) and used to walk as far as the primary school my daughter attended, wait at the school gates and then walk back with me.
One other snippet: cat actually means dog. The word catulus in Latin means little dog or puppy (according to QI anyway) http://old.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=16080&view=next&sid=21e3c60a74f8d4d0dcbb06a4f7d60500
A is for Amber
In my life, I’ve had a number of ongoing obsessions. One of those has been with rocks, gemstones and crystals. I began collecting when I was at school, finding a few tumble-stones of tiger’s eye, and then when I went to Germany on a school exchange, we went to the Natural History museum in Frankfurt and that was when it really began. The museum had a collection of rocks and crystals like nothing I’d ever imagined; a quartz boulder the size of a small car, things that sparkled and glowed and called to me. I bought a rock crystal pendant in the gift shop that I still wear.
But the gemstone that I wear most is amber. Amber is not technically a rock; it’s the petrified remains of tree sap. It’s something that is truly a delight to wear because it is light and it is warm and living to the touch. There’s a lot of mythos about amber; the price sky-rocketed in the aftermath of the first Jurassic park films too, making it suddenly much more expensive than it was, and for a while beyond my reach. My first amber beads came as a result of a small sum of money that came to me with only the proviso to buy myself something lasting and just for me. In my late teens, three close friends of the same age died suddenly in the space of six months and my father, like many parents from the school, took out a sort of life insurance investment policy for me that matured when I was 27 (and hadn’t died!). The money that it made was given to me, and I bought an amber necklace with some of it. The beads mean a lot to me; they remind me of my friends who never made it beyond sixth form and they remind me that I lived.
(The following link is to an article that relates to amber, that I wrote about three years back. Do go and have a read)
https://zenandtheartoftightropewalking.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/tales-of-amber/
Day Twenty
Angel lights and angel chimes
The putting up of the Christmas decorations is my cue to get out my collection of angel lights, and also the angel chimes. Angel lights are little metal whirligigs that hold a candle; the heat from the flame rises and sets the thing spinning. I have five or six, all with slightly different pendant themes; some have angels, some have deer, some have stars. When they spin they create patterns of light and swirling shadows in a darkened room. It’s a simple, magical thing that brings me great pleasure.
I wrote a short Christmas tale about an angel light that you can read here.
Day Eleven
Getting greetings from old friends
The traditional Christmas card is a strange thing. I send fewer than I did and often send e-greetings instead, but when ones from old friends pop through the letter box or into my in-box, it gladdens by heart. We made it through another year, more or less. It’s a tiny moment of recognition that our relationship still matters, even though life has been frantic, busy, overwhelming and exhausting.
I see the words on an envelope and my heart lifts when I think, “Oh that’s So-and-so’s handwriting!”. Sometimes there’s a letter, often the round-robin newsletter, but I read with interest. I resolve, next year we’ll try and stay in touch better, and sometimes I do.
Sometimes gifts arrive as well. Because of all sorts of regulations, ones from the USA cannot be fully gift wrapped (in case customs open the parcel) so I am aware of the contents. One much beloved friend has sent me some truly beautiful Christmas ornaments over the years; tree baubles shaped like hedgehogs for example. It brings out the child in me, to open parcels with glee and anticipation. I’ve learned to have a sneaky peek at ones from that friend, because they’re usually items that enhance the home specially at Christmas, so I open those and put them out once the decorations and the tree go up.
There is something magical to realise that someone, somewhere, often continents away, has thought of you, and thought kindly, at this time of year.
Well, St George is the patron saint of England, even though he probably didn’t slay any dragons (endangered species!) and was certainly not English. However, for some reason he’s our patron saint and I’m very English and so are my books.
So, in light of that, Away With The Fairies (contains no dragons or saints, as such) is on a special countdown offer starting from today and will be 99p (or thereabouts) in the UK for three days before rising to a mere £1.99 for another three days before returning to its original and very reasonable price. It would be vastly appreciated if you pass this on to any friends, family and social media network as the greater the reach, the better the book will do. Thank you.
It’s a great debate, nature or nurture, when it comes to who we think we are. While we may think we are our own person, that person is shaped both by upbringing and genetics and the experiences we go through in life. As a novelist, the shaping of characters is a curious process, half unconscious and half deliberate and I’d like to think that the fusion of the two has meant I’ve created some memorable folks amid the pages of my novels.
I was asked recently (several times) if Chloe’s grandmother in Square Peg is based on my own grandmother. My answer is that she’s not based on anyone(as such) but she’s probably how I’d like to be seen when I am granny-aged. I’ve also been asked how much of Chloe is me (just as I was asked how much of Isobel in Away With The Fairies is me) and I’d answer that question in the same way: a good deal of me is in her.
Yet Chloe’s Gran and her unconventional upbringing shaped her and brought her to the uncomfortable place she’s in at the start of the novel. Gran was one of those free-spirited women who blazed trails through history yet get almost no acknowledgements for the work they did. Trained as a doctor, she chose to spend her working life amid the poor, oppressed and marginalised people around the world, travelling and finding new challenges in a risky life. At some stage, she met and fell in love with someone whose child she came back to England with. She never saw him again, and returning to her home town and parents, people assumed she’d married while abroad but kept her maiden name for professional reasons. A generation before it would have been a massive scandal and a generation later, something fairly unremarkable, yet at the time the birth of a son out of wedlock was something she needed to keep private. As soon as her son was independent, she left to return to the work she loved, only returning when her son lost his wife in an accident. In the intervening years, she visited her family and sent presents home, usually gifts that reflected the community she was living in. Chloe and her sister are sent a colourful Pendleton blanket, packed with white sage, suggesting that Gran was living among Native Americans, perhaps acting as doctor on a reservation. The battered sandalwood Buddha that sits on the hearth is another such fixture in Chloe’s home.
Like so many women called upon to care for those who need it, Chloe’s grandmother reluctantly returned but never fully settled into a life of a suburban general practitioner and her restlessness was only assuaged by working with the fringe communities, like Romanies and other travellers. Chloe spent enough time as a child among these communities that she grew to identify unconsciously with the marginalised and the outcasts and not with respectable middle class values of those more expected to be her peer group. She also learned a lot of very dubious skills, like how to fight and use a shotgun. Combined with her plain-speaking grandmother’s influence, who taught tolerance for differences of faith, ideology and race but resistance to blind convention and mealy-mouthed maintenance of a status quo of injustice, Chloe arrives in a place where she’ll be tested to her limits simply to survive without going under or losing integrity by acquiescing to the kind of hypocrisy that would make her grandmother spin in her too-recent grave.
It’s not only her grandmother’s influence that has brought her to this turning point in her life. Her childhood and her student days shaped a woman who is combative and uncompromising, yet her choice of husband has also changed her. Clifford has not tamed her, but rather has seen her wildness as something to cherish. He sees her plain speaking as a virtue; not as the college wives do, as rudeness and a lack of community spirit. He’s not the kind of ordinand who wants or expects his wife to be a stereotypical help-meet, organising prayer groups and baking scones; it would bore him senseless and the spark he has with Chloe would gutter and die if she became meek and conventional.
Chloe isn’t someone who needs a horde of friends, but she does need kindred spirits to keep her from sliding into despair, and she’s lucky to find one in her first year of college who keeps her from the darkness of total isolation. But it’s not until their final year when the anarchic Isobel arrived with her ordinand husband Mickey, and a bond is formed between two square pegs that will endure some terrible times. Isobel is someone better able to walk the line between being outrageous and acceptable. She’s had a bit more practise, swapping from a degree chosen to placate her father to a degree in art to please herself, and somehow keeping it secret long enough to produce work her father can see is potentially a career builder. She’s also able to accept some compromise, cutting off her dreadlocks and removing her piercings before she and Mickey start at college. She sees them as peripherals and not really that important to her identity; she can go ‘plain clothes’ for the duration and not see it as infringing on her core identity. She makes the perfect mole.
Authors sometimes talk about back story, of knowing who your characters are, and how vital that is even if little of the background appears directly on the page. It’s about knowing marrow-deep precisely who they are and how they came to be that way. Chloe inherits her grandmother’s not-inconsiderable intelligence, her red hair and her questioning nature, but perhaps not her tough and resilient hide, impervious to the opinions of most other people. Her time growing up with such a role model taught her not to suffer fools gladly but it’s only experience that teaches how to spot rogues and frauds, and only experience that can teach self preservation in impossible situations. There’s a saying that the secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go, and that’s the one secret that Chloe’s Gran really needed to have taught her.
For a limited time only, Away With The Fairies will be on offer at first 99p then going up to £1.99 before returning to its normal price of £3.08. UK only.
Why do we care what others think of us?
I sometimes see people declaring that they don’t care what anyone thinks of them. I envy them this, at times, because I do care what other people think of me. I know that can’t change anything, and I ought not to be a people pleaser (and I’m not) but nonetheless, it bothers me what others think of me.
It upsets me when people have a poor or negative opinion of me. I know it shouldn’t but it does. It means that I hate the idea of anyone visiting when the house has slid from being amiably Bohemian to being an out-and-out mess. I have a sliding scale of how far into the house people are allowed to penetrate, depending on how much I trust them not to judge me and find me wanting. There are few people I would allow near the scullery (it’s a utility room but I like the old fashioned word more) because it’s inevitably a chaotic mess of recycling, cleaning equipment and it’s also where the cat litter tray is stationed. Very few people are ever allowed upstairs; not because it’s a mess (though sometimes it is) but because it’s the most private and personal area of our home.
But why do I worry about the state of my home? Surely no one has any right to judge how I run my own house? You’d be surprised how many would consider they have every right to denigrate someone for their lack of pride in housekeeping. That aside, it comes down to shame. I am ashamed of being such a poor home-maker. The script in my head runs like this: It’s not as if you actually work, you’re home all day after all, how can you live with all this mess, doesn’t it bother you that you haven’t washed up yet, what have you been doing with the time, you lazy, feckless waster….
Familiar?
On a good day I can counter this with evidence that actually housework isn’t important to me, that I do what’s really needed, and far from not working, I work very hard. But the script does keep on running and running, and I’m far from conquering it with the realisation that I’m not a housewife and never will be, that I have another calling. Because writing is a vocation and like any vocation it takes more time and energy than those who don’t write can imagine. The end results of writing (like this blog post) are the one tenth of the iceberg that’s visible.
Another area I get upset by is my appearance. I’m never going to be a size ten, let alone a size zero. My illness has meant weight gain, and there are days when leaving the house feels like I am a lone mammoth heading out into the vast empty steppes for hunters to throw spears at me. Of course, the spears are unkind words, and thankfully they are rarely voiced directly at me. Yet the disparaging comments that are directed daily in torrents at the overweight and obese fill up a space that we all hear. The assumption is that fat people are lazy feckless greedy pigs, stuffing their faces and never shifting their lardy arses to get any exercise. It permeates social media and it permeates society. I’ve heard people dismissively condemn the overweight as stupid too, claiming that since the equation is calories in, calories out and adjusting to make sure you eat less than you expend is hardly rocket science, ergo fatties like me are also thick as pig shit. Needless to say, it’s far from that simple but I’m not discussing this right now.
Surely it is easy to say, ignore it all, that people who don’t like me/you do not have opinions worth valuing?
Well, that may be true but it’s been noted that it only takes one negative opinion to outweigh dozens of good ones. Most writers forget about their swathe of five star reviews when the one single starred one pops up. We remember pain and censure more readily than we do approval and kindness.
So. Why do we care what others think of us? Why does it matter so much?
We’re social animals, tribal beings. To lose approval means to risk losing your place in society. At one stage, to be ostracised (here is the definition of it under Athenian rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism) meant certain death. If everyone turned against you, you were doomed. No one would help you, no one would sell you food. You ceased to exist to all intents and purposes.
Most of the research on the psychology of ostracism has been conducted by the social psychologist Kip Williams. He and his colleagues have devised a model of ostracism which provides a framework to show the complexity in the varieties of ostracism and the processes of its effects. There he theorises that ostracism can potentially be so harmful that we have evolved an efficient warning system to immediately detect and respond to it.[29][30]
In the animal kingdom as well as in primitive human societies, ostracism can lead to death due to the lack of protection benefits and access to sufficient food resources from the group.[31] Living apart from the whole of society also means not having a mate, so being able to detect ostracism would be a highly adaptive response to ensure survival and continuation of the genetic line.
It is proposed that ostracism uniquely poses a threat to four fundamental human needs; the need to belong, the need for control in social situations, the need to maintain high levels of self-esteem, and the need to have a sense of a meaningful existence.[29] A threat to these needs produces psychological distress and pain. Thus, people are motivated to remove this pain with behaviours aimed at reducing the likelihood of others ostracising them any further and increasing their inclusionary status.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rejection )
The anxiety that the first signs of rejection bring to us, are, I believe part of our collective unconscious. These days, it’s unlikely that we could be rejected to the extent to which we would die from lack of social acceptance, but I do feel that a part of us dies or becomes deeply dormant, the further we are rejected and reviled.
It becomes a question of caring, not too much but not too little either. People whose opinion we value will seldom actually reject us, but it’s deeply painful when they do, for a reason that goes beyond the fear of social isolation. It’s because it taps into our fears that those pejorative terms our inner critic hurls at us may actually be accurate representations of who and what we truly are.
I fear that I am lazy, feckless, untalented, a show-off, ungrateful, chaotic, greedy, etc so when this is played back to me by suggestions made either directly or indirectly, it magnifies that horrible inner critic to shouting volume. And that feeds in powerfully to the fear that once one person has rejected me, everyone else will follow.
In the wild, it has been observed among chimps that an individual who is cast from the group will often wander away to lie down and die, even though there is food and shelter around them. Like chimps, humans can and do die of loneliness.
Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking 