“It’s the quiet ones you need to watch…”

“It’s the quiet ones you need to watch…”

When I wrote Little Gidding Girl, the world was a different place. We’d only just got broadband internet, and compared to dial-up (remember that and shudder) it was lightning fast. Each member of my family owned a mobile phone but smartphones were not yet on the market. We all had a computer but mine was deliberately not connected to the internet; if I wished to go online I had to wait till the computer in my husband’s study downstairs was free. Looking back, I can see how many hours I spend a day just noodling around online and not being productive at all. I wrote six novels like that, without being distracted by googling goats or otters or weird symptoms.

Another thing that has changed is the way that female main characters are portrayed. There’s been a significant rise in the feisty, fiery, sassy, outspoken and kick-ass heroine; they existed before, obviously, but it would seem that writing women has become a problematic matter if they are anything less than the template that various tropes and memes depict. Isobel from Away With The Fairies and Chloe from Square Peg both have qualities of that template; they’re women who are generally confident of who they are and of their own value. It’s the shaking of that confidence that provides some of the tension and the driving force behind their stories. Jenny from The Bet falls fairly and squarely into the strong woman camp but she is also venial and exploitative and selfish; she qualifies more as a villain than a heroine, but it’s not these qualities of self-belief and self confidence that make her so. Rather it’s her lack of ability to see others (especially the hero Antony Ashurst who definitely qualifies as a quiet one…) as people rather than things, that twists her into an outwardly attractive character whose heart is pretty nasty all round.

I wrote Little Gidding Girl immediately after all three books mentioned and Verity, the main character, could not be more different. She has little confidence and her self-esteem has all but vanished, but to my mind, she more than qualifies as strong. She endures without crumbling a variety of life situations her adult life brings to her: a dead-end job with a bullying boss, a set of parents who abrogate their responsibilities to run away from debt and failure, an unplanned pregnancy that scuppers her and her husband’s plans for joint careers in teaching, and the passing of a grandfather who was mentor and rock to her during a critical phase in her younger life. But though she does not crumble, she does not thrive either. She goes inward, thinking the things that Isobel or Chloe would have said, loudly and with utter confidence. Her rebellion towards her hectoring boss Juliet is silent and unspoken; her acquiescence to her old school friend Carla is only nominal and superficial.

Yet for all this passivity, she’s not actually passive at all. Under the surface, deep currents are stirring and rising, becoming steadily more inexorable as a better equilibrium is sought for her life. I can’t help thinking that many of us will find this both restful and exciting, because we’re constantly exhorted that if we don’t grasp our futures with both hands, nothing will ever come to us. It’s exhausting, that sort of philosophy, and it’s infiltrated everything in the years since I wrote the book. It’s the complete opposite of the idea that what is meant to happen will happen without us needing to lift a finger. I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle, but at the moment, the pendulum has swung so far in one direction that many of us feel worn out and defeated by the demands on our time, intelligence and interests. It’s no longer enough to simply enjoy a hobby like knitting, or jam making or even writing or painting; we are badgered to make it pay, make it into a business or high art. Sometimes I think this may be the dark root of why I have found writing so hard in recent years, this constant internal and external pressure to be the best, to sell the most, to be (I have begun to hate both word and concept) professional about it all.

It’s when the quiet ones rise up and stand firm that the world will quake, because in my estimation, there are more of the quiet ones than there are of the other sort. The quiet ones are the ones who conform to every request from employers who have leaped into the gap made by the Dunning-Kruger effect, until one day, enough is enough and they say NO, and walk away or resist. When the quiet ones find their voices, the mouse will roar and the lions will cower.

Going live…

Little Gidding Girl is in the process of publishing. The UK link for the ebook has gone live here. The paperback link is here (they will be joined up at some point)

The Launch party on FB is here.

I shall be sharing more blog posts over the coming weeks about the themes and so on of the book (and some guest posts too) but this is just the heads up to the readers of this blog who are interested.

I’ll add links as the day goes on.

US version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07315QQ5N

German version here: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07315QQ5N

Canada here: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07315QQ5N

Australian here: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07315QQ5N

India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07315QQ5N

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B07315QQ5N

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B07315QQ5N

Other stores (Japan, Spain, Mexico) please use the links above and alter the dot whatever in the URL to whatever suffix is needed. So far I haven’t sold anything in those countries’s stores so do surprise me if you use them!

What to do while you’re waiting for the postman…

What to do while you’re waiting for the postman…

About ten days ago, I wrestled my way through the long-put-off edits for Little Gidding Girl, excising any direct quotes from T.S. Eliot and adding in numbers for footnotes so that the discarded lines could be referenced by readers should they choose to do so. Then I did yet another read-through for typos and stuff of that ilk, before uploading the completed text to Createspace. After the usual twelve or so hours wait, I got the notification that I could now order proofs.

Said proof copies are due to arrive by the 2^nd of June. All of a sudden, it looks like this book might actually be happening after all.

Truth is, I’m unprepared. My brain seems to have gone into a state of acute fogginess, and my psyche has become frozen and unable to respond. Everything feels like it’s been slowed down; holding a conversation feels like I’m talking on a satellite phone to someone half a world away. There’s a delay between hearing and understanding, and another delay between understanding and replying.

I know that by this stage in the game other (successful) writers have their strategies for launch day in place. Blogs have been written, giveaways organised, tweets scheduled, FB party invites sent out, interviews conducted and your Street Team are all ready with their pom-poms and chants. Me, I’ve done nothing.

This is the first full-length piece of fiction to be released since Square Peg was published in April 2013. Four years is a long time. Yes, I managed to get The Hedgeway out in the October of 2014, and I’ve got the book of essays out and two books of poetry. But I’m a novelist who hasn’t released any novels for four years and I worry that the momentum I’d built has long since dissipated and readers have found other authors to enjoy.

I’m not even sure what LGG could be classified as. Broadly speaking it fits into “Women’s Fiction” but only because the main character is female. It’s not a romance, though love is involved. It’s not a mystery, though mystery is involved too. It’s not paranormal, though elements of it veer into that area. It’s not magical realism, or fantasy or coming-of-age, though again, it has aspects of all of them. No wonder my unlamented agent never managed to place it with publishers; there’s not a single nice easy label to slap on it and shove it out into the world. I’d call it literary fiction but there’s a pretentiousness that many associate with that genre that I’d rather avoid.

So despite a lot of head-scratching and cogitating, I can’t find any niche where it’d gain any sort of prominence amid the countless thousands of books released every week. It may be doomed to sink under the weight of those thousands and of my incompetence.

You may already have read the blurb, here or elsewhere, but here it is again:

At seventeen, Verity lost the future she’d craved when Nick, her enigmatic and troubled poet boyfriend, drowned at sea. At thirty-five, in a safe, humdrum and uninspired life, she finds that snatches of the life she didn’t have begin to force their way into her real life. This other life, more vivid and demanding than her actual life, begins to gather a terrible momentum as she starts to understand that her un-lived life was not the poetic dream she had imagined it might be. Doubting her own sanity as her other life comes crashing down around her in a series of disasters, Verity is forced to re-examine her past, realign her present and somehow reclaim a future where both her own early creative promise and her family can exist and flourish together. Exploring the nature of time itself, the possibilities of parallel universes and the poetic expressions of both, Verity searches to understand why and how Nick really died and what her own lives, lived and un-lived, might truly mean.

It’s a book that I think might well strike a chord or two with many women, but if you’re expecting a kick-ass heroine like Chloe or Isobel, you might get a surprise. Verity is quiet, but they say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch. She thinks things she never says, and she lives under daily bullying without apparent complaint; she puts others before herself and she lives a half life that many women might really relate to.

So what am I doing while I wait for the proof copies to wing their way across the Atlantic? Not a lot. I can’t set a date for a launch party until I’ve seen those copies are what I want them to be. I’ve had too many false starts with this book to want to risk that. What I would like, though, is for friends here and on social media, if they have read and liked my books, to consider potentially hosting a blog for me, or doing an interview (especially after they’ve read the book) asking questions about the book and its themes, over the next few months. People have said that the majority if a book’s sales come in the first weeks, and that might well be the case, but I am hoping that enough folks have been waiting impatiently for this one for some sales to be guaranteed at least. The staggered approach means that more exposure is likely to happen once the initial surge (please!) has begun to ebb.

I’m terrified, to be honest. What if no one likes it? What if no reviews happen? Away With The Fairies finally made it to the magic 50 reviews a few months back after being out for six years, but realistically speaking, I think that getting lots of reviews in the first few weeks might well carry more weight in the mysterious algorithms.

And there’s a shockingly large amount of me in this book, too, so it’s a risk, sending it out into the world, because not only are some of my own poems included in the book, but some of my own, secret, never-spoken-about, history is too. I’ve not mentioned this aspect because, well, because it is secret and private. It’s entirely fiction, yet in many important ways, it’s not at all. I’d tell you more but then I’d have to kill you… (that’s a joke, by the way)

So while I wait for that familiar brown parcel, I ought to get my thinking cap on and write some more blog posts, for here and for others who might be so gracious as to host them. I seem to have mislaid that thinking cap, so perhaps a scarf might do.

Synchronicity and going off the map.

Synchronicity and going off the map.

Life as a journey is a bit of a cliché, really. I said once, “If life is a journey, then any short-cut is a death trap,” and I stand by it. My own journey has been an odd one. A long time ago, I looked at the metaphysical map and I saw that at the margins, around the edges, away from the established paths and well-known routes, there were areas marked “Here be dragons,” and I thought, I’d like see dragons. Ever since then, I’ve made forays into those areas of the maps that the map-makers couldn’t fill in properly because too few people had been out and explored them and come back with useful information. Most came back babbling about strange things they didn’t quite have the language for, and travellers’ tales that defy belief and rational understanding.

About ten years ago, I really set off in earnest, leaving behind any adherence to defined paths. You cannot step off a path without stepping off it, if you know what I mean. Real adventures do not come with a guarantee of ever coming home, or of safety or security. It’s hard to explain why I did it; I imagine that you’ll either understand or you won’t. I could talk about calling, vocation, daemon, destiny until the cows come home. Initially there were constant signs and hints and hunches and intuitions. I’ve long had an affinity for the phenomenon known as synchronicity. A week or so ago I finished a book on it, which irritated me. Synchronicity by Chris Mackie was heavily hyped as being a guide to synchronous living, but the author had become bogged down by a fascination with the phenomenon itself (despite being warned in no uncertain terms in a synchronous meeting with someone who really understood the matter) and lost his grip on the purpose of synchronicity for him. It’s absurdly easy to become fixated on the method of delivery rather than on the message itself, because it’s one of the things that can be mind-blowing when you first encounter it. There’s a saying that when a wise man points at the moon, a fool looks at the finger.

As my exploration took me further and further from known landmarks, I have been obliged to rely on my own inner compass. I have a decent sense of direction, not infallible, but solid enough for most things. But like any explorer, you need to get your bearings, take soundings and check from time to time that you’re not going the wrong way. Once you leave the beaten path, finding signposts is unlikely. You have to start relying on other senses, and other knowings. Sometimes you see traces of someone who’s gone ahead of you, a bent twig, Indian-fashion, a note left in a tree-hollow, cairns of stones carried up mountains by other pilgrims who’ve gone this way. On occasion, you see the bones of those who have died en route.

The further you go, the fewer the signs are until you can find, as I did, you are in a wilderness, a barren, mountainous land and there is no evidence that anyone else has ever come this way. There’s no obvious way to proceed, and when you stop to rest, you lose all sense of direction.

This is what happened to me. It began about five years ago, this nagging sense of unease and of disquiet. The questions began, and so did the doubts and then the fears. It’s reached desperation point, painful and unpleasant. What if I’ve gone the wrong way? What if all I have been exploring is a waste of time and energy? What if all my cherished beliefs and principles are all moonshine and bullshit? Should I go back? Should I give up and die, here, amid the empty lands, the wastelands?

Round and round the questions fly, never letting up, never letting me just move on. I read last year of Jung’s descent into his own personal hell, of a breakdown that became his breakthrough, and his insight that he had to do something and it didn’t matter what. His explorations using active imaginations started from mundane things, and no matter how humble the starting point, each led him deeper into the matters of true importance. I did a fair bit of active imagination work last year and yet, I have still found myself asking, am I doing the right thing, am I going the right way?

The problem is there is no one to ask, who is able to give me a clear subjective answer from a point of understanding, of having been to the same places I’ve been. Jung recommended working closely with someone who has been through the same sort of journey, and while I have good friends in the same line of exploration, they’re all folks who live half a world away, and whose kindness I could not presume upon, except as an occasional event.

So I am alone in the wasteland, unable to proceed because of fear that I am going the wrong way (which then brings with it the whole host of agonising extras, like has my entire life been a waste, and other such delights). I’ve recorded and worked with dreams, journaled, painted, drawn, meditated, played, sat in nature, done everything from the mundane to the ridiculous and yet, I am so bogged down by doubts and fears that I cannot move.

Then yesterday I went somewhere. It’s a place I’ve never been to, despite growing up not far away, and driving through the dank winter fields of Cambridgeshire, with the vast skies and the tiny winding roads hemmed in by hedges, past tiny stone built churches that date back eight hundred years and more, amid villages that have dwindled to almost nothing.

There was a pair of buzzards calling when we got out of the car, and bird song that held the first notes of spring, though it was still early January. The ground was wet as an old bath sponge, rich with moss and algae, and the unprepossessing facade of the church did not hold much promise.

Inside, it felt more like a college chapel, with pews face to face rather than facing the altar. I walked round, feeling the stillness, the moment of time that seems held like a drop of amber that holds millennia within its shining core. I took photos, I read the embroidered banners. There is a small room just off the sanctuary, a vestry originally but now a sort of inner room. I went in and looked up in shock at the window. Vivid stained glass, quite old, but simple and striking. One side held a quartered circle, a cross made of ears of wheat, in coloured glass; the other side, in another roundel of glass, some words:

“It is the right, good old way you are in. Keep in it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Gidding

Embodiment ~ muscle memory, belief and the complexities of the human soul

Embodiment ~ muscle memory, belief and the complexities of the human soul

Ever heard of embodied cognition?

No, me neither till the other day when an article in Church Times caught my eye. Don’t underestimate this paper because of the title. While some of it is inevitably the dull warblings you might expect, they have some very intelligent columnists who turn out some excellent articles. Here’s some snippets from the one I read by Mark Vernon:

“But what if faith is not primarily about facts and theories? They may come, but only after time spent exploring a way of life, committing to practise. …[redacted] But surely most people are likely to find faith because one day, perhaps by mistake they walked into a holy place or were helped by a Good Samaritan or were caught by a visceral experience of love or loss. Thinking about what it means is vital, but belief rests on, and stays alive because of the embodied experience.

“A new area in science suggests these intuitions are right. It is known as ’embodied cognition’ which roughly translates as: what we think, feel and do depends not only on the brain but also the body. We are not brains in vats. ‘It is not the brain alone that gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness is grounded or contextualised in the body,’ says psychologist Canon Fraser Watts.”

I’d love to reproduce the article in full but there are copyright issues at stake. However, the ideas had chimed with things I’ve been pondering.

As many of my readers may know I have very long hair. It’s long enough to sit on, and I started growing it when I was in my mid teens. For the first year or two while it grew long enough to play with and try out myriad different styles, I used to use a dressing table with winged mirrors that meant I could see the back of my head. Not to style my hair (because that’s incredibly confusing in mirrors) but to view the results. It’s probably thirty years since I did this now. I get asked by folks whether it’s hard to style your own hair and the answer is no, not really, once you have done it a number of times you can see with your fingers. Recently I watched a video http://earthsky.org/human-world/video-re-creating-the-hairstyles-of-the-early-roman-vestal-virgins of how a very ancient hairstyle was probably done. A comment thread developed on Facebook and most people were dubious that the style could be done by the woman herself. It looks incredibly complicated (and it is, fairly) but actually, I feel sure that those Vestal Virgins may well have done it themselves, with perhaps a friend to hold an end from time to time. I know this because when I was about twenty, I recreated a style very similar, to try and imitate the style Roman brides wore (which is pretty much that of the Vestals). I’d intended to perhaps have it for my wedding. But the results were not pleasing and I didn’t go ahead. After many years of French plaiting and other apparently fiddly styles, my hands and my fingers and my senses could perform tasks without being able to see visually what they were doing.

We do not have the five senses we are accustomed to thinking; there are over twenty senses accepted by science, and others less well accepted such as the sense of being stared at (also a book by Rupert Sheldrake, http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html whom I met last year http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sense-Being-Stared-At-Extended/dp/0099441535/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359889760&sr=1-1 )

It would appear that belief is not merely an intellectual thing, but something that becomes viscerally real. Like memory, which it is becoming increasingly clear is not stored exclusively in the spongy matter of the physical brain but also within the muscles and even the guts, belief is lodged deep within the physical matter and the experiential layers of the human being.

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

This excerpt from T.S Eliot’s Little Gidding (from The Four Quartets) illustrates this well. The act of kneeling in a sacred space creates or recalls embodied experience, links to things deeper and more ancient often than we realise.

Even words, those things were throw around so carelessly, carry this embodied cognition in a way. Check out this article. Brains viewed under MRI scanners have been shown to light up in the same areas when certain words are spoken as light up when the actions those words represent are performed. Thinking the word SMILE, for example creates the same effects in the brain as actually smiling.

I’ve been pondering about the concept of therapeutic literature. That’s to say books or poetry that have a measurably beneficial effect on the reader. I’m not talking about books that are all sweetness and light and which steer clear of dark topics, but rather ones with an indefinable something that triggers a change in the reader. It might be infinitesimally small but cumulative. I’ve always found poetry(not all poetry but some) to do that for me, where the sound of the words is like a balm on sore skin, and some novels have been an authentically beneficial experience. Do you have any books that do this for you? I’d love to find more. I want to explore the experience of letting words take me places but without the imposition of heavy handed directive narrative because embodied cognition is something that takes place in the body, not in the bright, shallow, brittle thought processes. I can talk myself out of benefits of ideas but not out of the feeling of them, and it’s the feeling that speaks longest and loudest when the darkness draws in and intellect falters. 

Returning from a Pilgrimage

 

“And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.”- TS Eliot, Little Gidding

It hits like an earthquake or a flash flood, or thunder in a clear sky, this sudden understanding, this making plain of what was obscure. It’s like being hit on the head, the violence and the unexpectedness of the realisation that now, now  you understand.

And yet, in the moment also comes a realisation that the chances are you will never be able to explain what you know now and how you come to know it. Everything becomes a metaphor, a finger pointing at the moon.

The first time this earthquake really shook my brain I was nineteen and I’d just had a professor of astrophysics explain the Theory of Relativity to me, quite cordially over a cup of coffee in a senior common room I really wasn’t meant to be in. It had taken about fifteen minutes and when he paused and looked at me to see if I “got” it, the ‘quake hit and I did. I had the sense of my own intelligence being too small, too puny to retain it and relay it back to another person, but for a few seconds I “got” it and it made sense. Then the synapses involved seemed to implode and the fragile connections were lost. But for a short while I understood.

Perhaps I might have understood for longer had my field been physics or even mathematics, but my subjects were English and Latin and I was a sneaky interloper in this world of mad professors and bad coffee.

These last weeks have been full of goodbyes, some permanent and some apparently temporary. I’ve been discovering that I am homeless, in a very real sense, but not the literal one. On Sunday I attended Quaker meeting as I occasionally do. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Quaker worship consists of sitting in silence for an hour and listening to…well, inner thoughts, God, the collective thoughts of all. I don’t know. For me, it’s always been an oasis of peace and time to be, for a short time at least, a part of a greater community. This Sunday, I felt an outsider again. Nobody’s fault; I suspect it’s always been the case. I am unable to commit to being anything other than an occasional attender and on Sunday I realised that while it may be still of benefit, it’s never going to be Home for me.

Yesterday we made an impromptu pilgrimage to Walsingham.

It was unplanned in the sense that we didn’t spend days or weeks deciding we would go, but we went on the spur of the moment. It’s maybe an hour and a half’s drive away, when the traffic is good and it’s been some three years since I last went, I think. Walsingham has been the centre of pilgrimage since 1061, with a break during the Reformation until about seventy years ago when the Well was rediscovered. I’ve always liked the quirky little town in the middle of nowhere near the North Norfolk coast and enjoyed the Anglo-Catholic pomp and ritual, with a small smile of amusement, and I have had great respect for the well itself. The Shrine church is a masterpiece of bad taste and worse art and yet, amid the many flickering candles I used to sense the spirit of the place and of God.

But yesterday, while I enjoyed the visit, it had ceased to be special and meaningful for me. My purpose in visiting had been to touch base with my spirituality and yet, when I was there, nothing. I attended the sprinkling of the waters, drank the waters and was grateful and yet, beyond that, nothing.

When I got home, I remembered the words that had been in my head before we went:

“You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.” TS Eliot, Little Gidding

That was true enough. I had indeed gone to pray and yet, my purpose in being there was indeed “beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.”- I had come for something and yet, not knowing what it was, truly, even then I had found it was not what I had come for.

I had come for something else. I had come to find something I had believed I would find here and yet, I did not find it. I don’t even know if I can get further than this with my explaining.

“There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle.” TS Eliot, Little Gidding

Something has changed in me. I am between two lives.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.” TS Eliot, Little Gidding

I am the explorer, waiting for my new journey to begin.