Thirty Six

Today is my thirty sixth birthday.

A chaotic December meant I didn't do this last year, but I thought I should try to review this year, particularly as it featured such big chunks where I've been decidedly unwell, and there were so many things I wanted to do, had agreed to do or half-started that I then had to give up because of my deteriorating health. Before I started writing things down, it felt like there would be very little to say, but I did really quite a lot in the spring and haven't been completely idle since. This is going to read like a dreadful bragging Christmas Letter, but it's my birthday and this is mostly for my own sake.

• I had started doing a bit of editing for the F-Word towards the end of last year, but I think it was at the beginning of this year that I officially became Features Editor. Then my health deteriorated and I had to give it up this summer, but it was a very interesting and satisfying experience - I had previously enjoyed the mechanics of editing other people's work, but the best bit was facilitating others to say what they wanted to say to a significant audience. 

I model a winter lettuce - a woman with a lot of hair holds
a lovely green lettuce as big as her head.

• Early on in the year, I planted a load of vegetables. As the spring progressed into summer, my health meant things got a bit out of control, but those things that weren't killed off by neglect included tomatoes, lettuces, a small amount of pak choi (the caterpillars do love the stuff), radishes, baby sweetcorn (that was particularly good), peas, strawberries, French beans and runner beans. Oh and potatoes - lots of potatoes grown in sacks. I now have two table-height vegetable patches in the garden so I don't have to bend down.

• I had written this article last December but it was published this year and I'm very proud of it.

• We looked after a lovely old border collie for about a month, which was rather nice.

• I have had a lump in my armpit for the past six months. After the first two, it triggered NHS Lump Panic, eight individual strangers got to see my naked breasts in one afternoon but it was all fine. All this happened at a time when I could really have done with a break, but the care I received at the Breast Clinic was extremely good. Do get your lumps checked out.

I model the mermaid's tail - an enormous
mermaid reclines in a wicker chair with a
somewhat seasick expression on her face.

• I made a mermaid's tail sleeping bag for my niece. I scrapped an earlier attempt because it was a bit too small - at least, a four year old would grow out of it in no time. The finished version should serve her well if she is still interested in being a mermaid into middle age.

• I wrote quite a few blog posts and a couple of features for the F Word in the first half of the year. My favourite is this about women who, by virtue of being disabled, old, fat etc. are considered sexually and romantically unattractive by our culture.

• I drove a car! I have had a provisional license for a few years, but this year, on one occasion, I actually drove. It was awesome!

• It was the twentieth anniversary of my becoming sick in August, so I wrote a series of posts about chronic illness and coming to terms with loss. As, if you're reading this, you are almost certainly aware.

• I have been writing and editing fiction. Just not nearly as often or as enough as I would like.

• In the midst of everything, they happened to discover that I was very deficient in Vitamin D. I've now got an evangelical zeal about telling folks who also might not get out much that they should get their Vitamin D checked. However, I am too polite to give unsolicited health advice, so this may be the only time I ever mention it. 

• Purple Prose, a book about being bisexual in the UK was published. It includes some of my words as well as the words of far more interesting and brilliant people.

• My Dad retired, which has been absolutely great. His work was stressful and now he is not only very much more relaxed, but we see a lot more of him and have had some modest adventures together.

• I had lessons in the Alexander Technique to improve my posture, which is something I have fancied doing for years. Of course it hasn't fixed anything, but it has dramatically reduced certain kinds of pain in my back.

Snuffles the hedgehog - a fluffy brown hedgehog eats from
a dish of mealworms. She was one ill-tempered hedgehog.

• We installed a camera to watch the garden after we'd gone to sleep, to monitor the full extent of hedgehog activity. We saw a lot of hedgehogs and one night, a tawny owl landed in the garden and sat down with one of the hedgehogs to have a meal.

• Stephen acquired a tabletop game called Zombicide, where you go round killing zombies with dice rolls. This turned out to be tremendous fun and we have spent several happy evenings liberating prison blocks from the zombie hoards. 

• We saw a little more of our nephew and niece this year and had some really good times with them. They are both fantastic children and so much fun to be around. 

A young blackbird - a brown bird with pronounced beak and
speckled breast, sitting in a bush with white flowers.

• We think at least one hedgehog was born in the garden this year, as were some sparrows and a blackbird (left). This chap startled me when I was trying to see if he was still in the nest.

• Politics has been pretty grim. The world's progress towards being a more peaceful, freer, happier, healthier place - which has been considerable, even in very recent times - is in grave danger of stalling. A very great number of good folk have brought that progress about through hard work and I hope, a similar effort by very many people in both big and small ways will get us back on track. That may sound a bit crass amid all this light personal news, but like a lot of people, politics has been deeply personal this year.

• We managed to get to the theatre for the first time in a few years to see the Cambridge Greek Play do Antigone and Lysistrata. The latter was particularly brilliant, satirising the ongoing political nonsense and with songs in Ancient Greek we were all invited to sing along with. 

Two happy people at a picnic bench
with a field in the background.

• As everyone knows, Stephen is an amazing person, but he has been particularly heroic this year. We've always performed care for one another in ways which merge with everyday kindnesses and physical expressions of affection, but this year the work of keeping us going has shifted very heavily onto his shoulders. While it has been tough, we have not only survived, but we've often had a great deal of fun.

• It's been a very difficult year for several of our friends and family; other people have had major health crises, bereavement and money worries, as well as the personal effects of the year's disastrous political events. Thus I come to the end of 2016 with a heart full of love and hope that next year is much much better and brighter for those who have had to battle through to this point.

I hope that anyone who actually read down this far has a wonderful, peaceful holiday season whatever you're doing with it and a very happy New Year.

Mother's Day, 2010

I had read that you should try to write fiction with just one particular reader in mind, even if your reader is an entirely imaginary person. It’s a mistake, I read, to write for a broad audience. It’s easy, I read (and found out for myself) to get distracted by the idea of different people reading your work. You can’t please everyone. You may shock, annoy or offend some of them. And you don’t want to write the book that wouldn't shock, annoy or offend anyone at all. 

Instead, I read, you should identify someone who you think will really enjoy what you’re trying to do. If you don’t know anyone like this, invent them. Make them up and keep them in mind.

I didn't know anyone like that, so I made them up; my imaginary ideal reader. Not someone who would unquestioningly adore every word I wrote, but someone who would love what I wanted to achieve. I made them up and kept them in my mind. They were quite appealing to me so they became a secondary character in my novel, a love interest in a rather unromantic book.

I made them up. Then a friend sent me to their blog.

………..

My novel was near completion when 2010 came around. I had worked so hard, for so long, with so many damn set-backs. There had been periods of months where I couldn't write, because I was too sick or because all my energy was otherwise spoken for.  There had been periods of months where I couldn't write because my confidence had been comprehensively flattened. And now, finally, I was nearly there.

A satellite image of the UK in January 2010.

This was a long, hard winter, the coldest in my life time. There was snow about for weeks. My then husband had had an argument with his family at Christmas and was spiraling into depression. In January, my friend Jack died suddenly – the third friend who, having enthused about my writing and looking forward to my completed novel, had died before I was done (I’m putting this in the context of my novel-writing; this was not my first, second or third thought on hearing of Jack’s untimely death). This was the year I would turn thirty and I started doing a Project 365, taking a photograph every day. 

There was something else going on. I would like to say that a rational calculation was taking place, but it wasn't. I would like to say that I was beginning to stand up for myself, but I wasn't. I often say, of this time, that my marriage was falling apart, but I didn't know that. Not yet.

I was very happy. I was not happy. I felt extraordinary well-loved; for much of my adult life, I’d been lonely, believing I was little more than a convenience or a useful ear to my friends, but that had all changed. Despite pessimism from my then husband (nobody will turn up and I’ll have to pick up the pieces!), I was planning a thirtieth birthday party with my three close friends. Two of them were old friends by then, but I’d only recently realised what that meant.

And thus, I felt full of love, but a love like molten lead; I was weighed down by it, burning up with it, in danger of starting a fire if I stood too close to the curtains. Sometimes I basked in the warmth and light of it all. Other times, I wanted to open a window and scream for help. That last sentence isn't a metaphor.

The last two blog posts I wrote before I finished my novel were On Not Being Beautiful #1 and #2. These are strange to me now, because what I wrote is perfectly valid, but I know they are written by someone who is regularly being told that she has the face of a Klingon, the skin texture of a pizza, her arse takes up all three lanes of the motorway or some variation of the above. At the same time, she has friends who casually tell her how good she looks, who greet her “Hello gorgeous!” or sign off e-mails, “Keep smiling, beautiful.” She's trying to navigate the dissonance.

Everything was rather like this. My friends were excited as I moved towards the end of my book, while my then husband said I wasn't going to make it and mocked every error or slur in my speech with, “I thought you were supposed to be good with words.”

………………

During the last month of novel writing, I went a little mad and this madness was that bloody novel. It sounds dreadfully pretentious - suffering for my art - and I do know it was completely unnecessary. If my life had been better, it would have not made me sick and, crucially, my work could have improved.  I didn't have to bleed all over the page (metaphor), I didn't have to go into hell and back just to get the words down (not sure). These days I can write with greater power and much less pain and mess. Back then, I was in pain. I was a mess. 

This is the sort of thing I got up to at this time.
(A sort of pyramid made up of white blister
packs on top of a wall socket against a red
wall. A tiny metal angel looks on.)

I couldn't work all day long, but it became very much harder to shut down my mind or escape into other things. I couldn't sleep when I tried and fell asleep with my fingers on the keyboard. I lost interest in food. I was sometimes confused about whether I was living in the story of my life or the story I was writing.  

I listened to music of flight and music of falling. I did a little yoga every day and always finished playing Otis Redding's cover of (Can't get no) Satisfaction. I played the Cranberries’ No Need To Argue album an awful lot, just as the daffodils came into bloom. 

Other things too, I would understand differently later on; my long exaggerated startle reflex was now ridiculous. Someone could casually approach me, no loud noise, no sudden movement and I would cry out in alarm. Then there were moments of high drama, threats and shouting where I noticed I felt nothing - worse, I was thinking about some trivial aspect of my novel, as if what was happening in the room was some unfathomable soap opera on the TV in the background.

I was also trying to help my then husband, because he was really very unwell. Every day I spend time looking for jokes or funny stories to provide a moment's relief. I rented movies I thought he'd like and watched every one by myself first, in case there was something that would upset or annoy him. At one point, I bought him smiley potato faces in a desperate childish attempt to put a smile on his face.  

The night before I finished the novel, I told him that I was starting to panic about the deadline I had set. He responded, “I don’t care.”

The next moment, an e-mail from Stephen; How It Ends by Devotchka. I began to listen, thinking, Oh god, this is long and I have no time, it’s got accordians in it and I’m going to have to say something polite about it! but then the piano started. It was oddly perfect. I listened to it on repeat as I worked. In the morning, I played it again four or five times until I got up the courage to send the long rambling e-mail I’d been writing, complete with a 144,000 word file attached.

In this e-mail, I tried to tactfully address the fact that Stephen might recognise himself in one of the characters, but he mustn't read anything into it. After all, Stephen has a different reason to walk with a stick and references Dawn of the Dead rather than Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town as an allegory for human endurance. The personalities may be identical, but I wrote all that before I knew him. I made him up! I don't want Stephen to think I am secretly in love with him or anything. 

I couldn't say all that. So I wrote around it. At a great length. 

 ..................

(The bottom of an unsent e-mail, reading
"Got to... click... send... button..")

It is Sunday morning; Mother’s Day 2010. I take this screen grab and put it on Flickr. Only one other person, apart from Stephen and I will see it and know what it means. But I am compelled to make some public record.

Then I click send.

Everything has changed. I've written a novel. I am not the same person I was yesterday, when I hadn't written a novel.

Stephen e-mails me with photographic evidence of my novel safely on his e-reader. He then sends the Thomas Truax cover of I’m Deranged in response to that weird rambling e-mail.  Half an hour later, he e-mails to tell me he’s read the first chapter. He's loving it so far.

(An e-reader held in a hand.)

I haven’t mentioned the fact that I've finished my novel to the man I am inexplicably still married to; I really hoped he would ask. But I tell him that Stephen's read the first chapter. No congratulations. He says, “Sure he’s not on top of a tall building, about to throw himself off to avoid reading the rest?”

My then husband is thinking about death a lot and imagines I have the same effect on everyone.

It’s Mothers Day. I must spend time with my mother.  

My parents and I go to my cousin’s house, where we have a meal with two cousins and an aunt (we’re supposed to be eating with my Granny, since it’s Mother’s Day, but we've managed to mislay her). We catch up with what was happening with everyone’s life, apart from mine. We talk about my sister, brother-in-law and nephew, we talk about other cousins, their partners, aunts and uncles, we talk about Granny and the great uncles and aunts. Even a couple of second cousins are mentioned at one point. Nobody asks me a damn thing.

I notice this - I do notice it, from time to time, the way my family believes I have absolutely no life to speak of - but I especially notice today because I’m thinking, 

This is the most important day of my life!

This really is. I consider blurting out, “I just written my first novel!” but I don’t. And to be honest, it’s just good to be out of the house and away from everything, to hear about other people's lives and dramas. People write books; it's not all that extraordinary. It's just extraordinary that I should.

It’s also good to have some time away from my laptop where I might anxiously await e-mails from Stephen. When I get back, he's e-mailing to complain that he had a sleep during the day and my book gave him nightmares.

The produce of my imagination has entered another person's subconscious. 

…………

On the Monday, while Stephen is still reading my novel, my then husband and I have a big talk. He tells me that he doesn't love me anymore. I am boring, unattractive and very difficult to live with. He knows he’s depressed and things may well change in time, so there's no point doing anything about it right now.

I have heard something like this before, several times. The routine is that I go on a sort of probation; try harder, avoid pissing him off so much and after a while, I will say I love you and I’ll get it back: “I love you too.”

But this time, I take it badly. A big chunk of the lovely awful molten lead inside me breaks off, leaving a deep physical pain, a gaping aching space in my chest where there should be no space. I weep. It is like witnessing a death, the totality of loss I feel.

Yet, straight away, I feel lighter. Lighter in a lost and listless way, but definitely lighter.

A friend and I have talked about me staying with her in Wales for a week sometime. I call her and we make a proper plan.

…………

On the Tuesday, Stephen finishes reading my novel. We talk on Skype for about two hours. He loves it. He is brimming with praise and talk of the bits that scared, moved or amused him. He is so proud of me, he gets a little choked up saying so. There are issues with pacing. There are a shameful number of typos. There are a few points of slight confusion. But he loves it. 

When we've finished talking, the man who doesn't love me anymore warns me, quite seriously, that I mustn't trust Stephen. He’s too nice. He couldn't possibly be being honest about it.  

I believe otherwise.

On writing & listening to music

My iPod is rather like a vortex manipulator; the most primitive transport through time and space. Music can make me feel most like myself, my secret cool self, the self where all things are possible and then again, music can make me feel most like someone else entirely. Music in an effective way of changing gears. Music is an effective way of changing masks.

If you know what sort of music a person likes and particularly, the way they hear it, you know an awful lot about them. I find it really useful to give distinct musical tastes to characters. Outside fiction, of course, you nearly never know how other people hear music, which is why it can be so reassuring that Barrack Obama cited Ready or Not as his favourite track, yet so devastating when David Cameron professed to love the Smiths. Yet, try to consider just how David Cameron actually might listen to the Smiths. The lyrics change their meaning. The colours of the music are completely altered. Can you imagine? He hears “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate; it takes strength to be gentle and kind.” and is moved to demolish the welfare state while vilifying the poor.

The article I linked to documenting Cameron’s love for the Smiths quotes him as saying, "The lyrics – even the ones I disagree with – are great, and often amusing.”

That's interesting, because not everyone listens to pop music thinking, "Now, that's an ideological point of view I disagree with, but that cat sure be laying down some the phat rhymes."  So that's another thing to consider, when using music to tune into fictional characters; Charles Manson thought that the Beatles' White Album was all about race war. People hear and interpret lyrics differently; sometimes they don't matter and sometimes they're everything.

Tragically, David Cameron is not a fictional character, but if he were, understanding how he enjoyed the Smiths would be very useful to his creator. Playing the Smiths while writing about him would be useful. No reader need know about any of this - the subject need never be raised. But it's co-ordinates in time and space.

That having said, there's no harm in musical references. A detective with an eccentric taste in music has become a cliche in British detective fiction, but that's only because it worked so well with Morse (classical, particularly Wagner) or Rebus (rock, particularly The Rolling Stones). I’m really excited in movies and TV shows when they pick distinct music which a character actively chooses to listen to - McNulty listening to The Tokens' version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight while tailing Stringer Bell or Walter White racing along the desert highway to A Horse With No Name.

There are people – and therefore there must be fictional characters – who either can’t or don’t appreciate music (I have known a few extremely lovely and poetic people who are either deaf or just not bothered for music). In these cases, it may be necessary to plug into some other piece of culture that a character is into; a favourite movie, TV programme, a favourite painting or whatever. Only naturally, you can’t do that while writing, and it often takes more time and consideration.

Beyond the matter of character, I use music as an aid to concentration. I can only work for short spells and time, energy and peace arrive at fairly random intervals. I have to get in there as quick as I can.

This music is not music that I would particularly enjoy in other circumstances, because it has to meet the following criteria:

1. A track has to be at least four minutes long. Longer is good.
2. A track can't have a lot of variation - the classical music I love provides long movements, but often with too much going on.  
3. I must be very familiar with this track for some reason, even if that reason isn't love for the music.

There's a fair amount of classic music that's good for this, as is goth music; Bauhaus' Bela Legosi's Dead goes on forever. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry's Talk About The Weather is shorter but you can play it on repeat and not notice that it's ended and started again. Dance tracks from the 1990s which became numbingly familiar on the bus to and from high school are also very useful; Adamski & Seal's Killer or What is love? by Haddaway. That kind of nonsense. 

I don't dislike this music, but if I were a fictional character, it would not be mine.  

There are dangers listening to music when writing, apart from obvious things like singing, dancing and spending half an hour rearranging a playlist before you’ve even got started.

The first is feeling it too much. When I was younger, I treated fiction-writing much as I treated dramatic performance, as if, should I only feel everything a fictional character feels, the reader would too. Only actually, feeling it all makes it impossible to write. Your tears may short the keyboard but that doesn't make for articulate prose. As music is such a catalyst to strong emotion, it’s sometimes best to listen to a tune before writing in silence. You can take notes. No, don't just copy down the lyrics - what are you? Twelve?

The second is feeling hampered by the fact that nothing you can write in words can ever be as expressive and exciting as music, because music is the bomb. You’re thinking about the way a character feels, you listen to a track and know that you cannot express their feeling better than what you just heard. It’s true, you really can’t. But music cannot tell complex narratives with all the richness that entails. It's different. You can practice your guitar later on.

The third is the temptation to nerd out about music in writing, which is always unwise when one's purpose is to get on and tell a story. There are exceptions - here is one, from Howards End. 

5 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Violence

Content warning for references to fictional depictions of extreme violence.

One of the many things the late Iain Banks could do that few other authors can or choose to do, is to write about depravity like it's something that human beings do to other human beings. In his novels, I read about rape, torture and murder - including child rape and murder - but I always felt safe enough to carry on reading. Okay, so squeamish people need to avoid some of those books entirely, but Banks took me places I wouldn't have followed most other writers.

I was thinking about this when we watched the first episode of The Fall (which as of writing is still on iPlayer, thus the odd timing), a television detective drama that's come into some criticism for the depiction of violence against women. We gave up after the first episode because neither of us could trust the writer; it was going to get nasty and it wasn't going to be worth it. Allan Cubitt's defense in the Guardian confirmed to me that we'd done the right thing.

Human beings do not have an insatiable appetite for viscera and violence and it is not the case that folks who have the capacity to be nauseated, offended or triggered by fiction are somehow unsophisticated (my gut feeling is that our tolerance for violence and gore peaks at around the age of fifteen). Almost everybody has their limits, but good writing stretches those limits. We're not going to win them all and sometimes graphic, horrifying events are necessary to tell a story. But it's a reasonable desire that we use these elements to best effect.

There's also a moral and social justice element here. Handle these subjects badly, and we're in danger or perpetuating stereotypes, glamorizing certain types of violence and desensitising people to terrible things. Fiction is not a platform on which to preach, to talk statistics or analyse sociological trends. But can be a tool for telling truths and lies about the human condition.

So, then things writers need to remember when writing about violence:


1. If it's not telling the story, it shouldn't be there at all.  

In that Guardian article, Allan Cubbit, writer of The Fall, claims

"...there were several decisions I made early on to help deal with my own concerns about having women as victims. The first season of Spiral starts with a mutilated, naked female corpse in a skip. The first season of The Killing opens with a girl running for her life through a carefully lit wood. I never felt – even in 20 hours – that I got to know that victim."

I strongly disagree with his assessment of The Killing especially, but there's also a big point being missed. At the start of Spiral, the victim is dead and the team set about discovering her story. At the start of The Killing, the victim is running for her life, free and alive, hoping to survive. In the first episode of The Fall we saw brief snippets of the victims life before a lengthy scene of the killer generally enjoying himself while the victim lies, tied-up, gagged and without any hope or power, doing nothing. You can't humanise a character by, well, dehumanising them.

This isn't about social justice, but story-telling and trauma. While the victim is helpless but not-yet-murdered, there is no story going on. We already know that this guy takes pleasure in the helplessness and suffering of women. So what's the point but to shock, upset or possibly titillate the audience? Because if taken seriously, it is upsetting, far more upsetting than a mutilated corpse or someone who, however slim their chances, is still fighting for her life. (I'm not dismissing the possibility that this scene is, in fact, being played for titillation, that the idea is for the audience not to take it too seriously and therefore get a thrill from a scantily-glad attractive woman tied to a bed. But this isn't 1968 and Vincent Price didn't appear dressed as Dracula - an earnest crime drama is not the context in which to play those games.)

Even showing a mutilated dead body is better than showing someone helpless and suffering for no reason. There are plenty of stories, especially detective fiction, which successfully humanise a character who is already dead (something The Killing achieved in part by showing the victim's film-making skills).

Meanwhile, one of the most graphic rape and murder scenes I can recall, in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, justifies its considerable word-count because it is a plot-defining fight; Sara Tidwell continues to fight until she is dead and, of course, battles on for vengeance in the afterlife. There is ongoing interaction between Sara and her attackers, even when she is being raped and thus, this is part of the story.


2. Good and bad things, funny and sad things, happen to everyone, all the time.

Only in the deepest depression - when a person more or less stops feeling - does this stop being the case. Fiction's business often lies in negative dramatic events; either in the descent into tragedy or the diversity heroes must overcome. But people who experience nothing but suffering are not real. They are total victims. They are difficult to invest in because when they are killed horribly, they've not exactly lost much. Meanwhile, unrelenting misery is jolly hard work to read.

I recently read Belinda Bauer's Blacklands which has, at its heart, a great story; a young boy trying to extract the location of his dead uncle from the paedophile convicted for his murder. However, this kid's life sucks so much that when he was thrown into peril, I found myself thinking, "Well, at least his suffering would be over and his god-awful family might finally notice he once existed."

Contrast this with Donna Tart's brilliant The Little Friend, also about a child trying to solve a child murder that destroyed her family. Harriet is incredibly vulnerable and surrounded by inadequate friends and family members, but it's a far more mixed bag - it's far more realistic. Even though she has no rock solid adult allies, there are adults who are kind to her and she has friends who care about her even if they're not always capable of doing the right thing. Whereas for Stephen in Blacklands, everyone he meets either exploits or rejects him. (I had a similar problem with Lionel Shriver's We need to talk about Kevin - no way did that kid never do anything cute!).

Even Frank in Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory has a friend and funny experiences (often very darkly funny), and he's got problems.


3. Character's voices are often more effective than authors. 

In Anthony Burgess' The Clockwork Orange, Nabokov's Lolita and Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, many horrible things - animal cruelty, child abuse, rape and murder - are narrated by the perpetrator. These writers knew how you can get into the mind of a monster without exploitation. All these narrators are articulate and passionate yet completely unreliable. In The Clockwork Orange, Alex speaks a poetic slang which obscures the horror of his crimes. In Lolita Humbert Humbert is unable to read other people's blatantly obvious feelings, while The Wasp Factory's Frank doesn't even understand who he is.

In other books, for example E. Annie Proulx's brilliant The Shipping News, extremely grim events are described by characters in speech, often by the characters who had these terrible experiences. Naturalistic speech is often far more effective than an authorial voice because if your friend tells you a story about something awful that happened to them (or even something awful they did);

• They'll only give pertinent details. Some of this pertinence may be personal (e.g. they noticed the carpet, they didn't notice what colour the walls were.)
• They won't use verbal flourishes that may romanticise or eroticise the events described, unless that's how they feel.
• The emotional emphasis of what happened will be unambiguous.
• The way they tell the story will be emotional, because the subject matter is.

I imagine the most disturbing way you could learn about a murder, for example, would be to real a police report, all detail but no emotion. This would be disturbing, but it would also be unaffecting; it might turn your stomach but would you really feel for the victim? Would you understand what happened and why? Fiction is about communicating intellectual and emotional ideas, not merely documenting made-up events that are a bit like events that happen in real life.

Going on from this...


3. The way characters respond to nasty things makes the world of difference.

In real life, events are made more traumatic when we face them alone or when people around us react very differently. Some of the most unpleasant experiences I've had through fiction have been when horrific events are not treated as such by the other characters - when we see someone suffer a horrible death in graphic detail and nobody seems very upset or, perhaps most commonly, when someone is raped and nobody calls it rape (a famous filmic example would be High Plains Drifter where the rapist gets to be the hero of the day).

Iain Banks and Stephen King - two very different writers, but both with a tremendous capacity for dark writing - manage to write about horrific and weird events whilst having their characters respond with every ounce of emotion that you'd expect. This places violence in its proper context, which is both about telling the truth as well as reassuring the reader that they are on a journey and haven't been thrown into hell for the sake of it.

In modern detective stories, there's often such an attempt to portray a hard-as-nails and cold-as-ice detective who has seen every horror the world could throw at them, that they respond to the most outrageous crimes with cold detachment. This can be a big problem. For one thing, there's a reason why senior detectives often come on the telly to say this was the worst case they'd ever had to deal with, without a serial killer, and sometimes without even a murdered child in sight. There are realistic limits to the degree of professional detachment anyone is capable of.

But if the reader or viewer is to understand events through the eyes of a particular character - whether or not this character is wholly sympathetic - there must be some emotion there. If not, then we're back to reading police reports, gaining images for our nightmares without any hope of catharsis.



4. You don't make up for mishandling violence against women by having "strong female characters". 

Skyfall surpassed all our expectations, but the heavy use of Judy Dench and a well-rounded new (black British!) Moneypenny doesn't magically make up for one woman being treated as a pretty object that James Bond steals from his enemy, only for the enemy to destroy it. Allan Cubitt's defense of The Fall rested heavily on having a "strong" female detective (played by the glorious Gillian Anderson) who demonstrated her strength of character in the first episode by propositioning a lower ranking officer she'd just met in front of their colleagues (which in real life, would be seen as aggressive, embarrassing and intimidating).

In fact, too often writers contrast weak passive victims with a physically and mentally tough female protagonists (or at least, more important characters). The tough woman may be thrown into danger, but she will stay safe because she's smart and brave (and often, sexy enough to attract a rescuer). Victims, on the other hand, float into harm's way like leaves on the breeze. They've pretty much got it coming to them and so their fate matters less.

Given that we live in a culture which repeatedly dismisses violence against women on the grounds that only certain types of women are in any danger (whether because of their sexual behaviour, race or immigration status or because of ideas about their character (she has a "type", she has low self-esteem etc.), these fictional dichotomies are almost as bad as scenarios where women are always victims.

That having been said,


5. If you're going to write about sexual violence, positive representations of consensual sex is going to help.

There is a long shameful tradition in fiction of a muddying of normal romantic and sexual behaviour and sexual violence (something I've written about at length). Brilliant writers can play with these boundaries - Angela Carter's rich fairytales often do and Bram Stoker writes passages of erotica, thinly disguised as horror for his Victorian audience. However, too often rape and other violations are seen as indicative of overwhelming romantic love or sexual desire, rather than the power trip these things are all about. Beautiful women are seen as vulnerable to men in general, on account of their irresistible charms.

Banks' Complicity is particularly good on this because it portrays kink - even pretend rape - where everyone enjoys themselves alongside rape and torture. Both are written about graphically and skillfully and the difference is absolutely crystal clear. Writers who write realistic consensual sex (especially good sex), where people talk to each other, where characters respond to verbal and physical prompts, are extremely unlikely to blunder when it comes to sexual violence.

In horror especially, but also elsewhere (such as in the Bond movies - see above), consensual sex is so often an act of hubris, especially on the part of a young woman, who will later suffer some dreadful physical indignity and probably death. Sex becomes part of a person's downward trajectory, joined together with really bad things. Not only is this a troubling message, but the connection means that both sex and death will be given the same titillating treatment; we were enjoying those breasts jiggling about a little while ago, and here is the naked woman once again, covered in blood.  She was only a body to begin with.


See Also:
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Sexuality 1-5
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Sexuality 6-10
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Disability 1-5
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Disability 6-10

On Loneliness

(Don't forget Blogging Against Disablism Day!)

A masculine hand and a feminine hand, holding.

I can talk about loneliness because I have passed beyond it.  It's very hard to admit to at the time, because there's something a little pathetic about the admission. Because successful loveable people have soulmate partners, plus close friends and family around them, and would never feel that way.

The loneliest period of my life was my twenties, especially my mid-twenties. I was in an abusive relationship and not the kind that's sometimes very bad and other times great. As well as the isolation of living with someone who didn't really want me to interact with other people, illness stopped me getting out and reduced my capacity to keep in touch.

....

I think I have a lot of equipment which helped me cope better with loneliness than I might have. For one thing, I was never without decent friends or family, it's just that my contact with them became complicated, muffled by physical distance, caution and dishonesty. I have always had a complex fantasy life. It's less complex, now I'm happy - and that's good: I can focus on the stories I'm writing, as opposed to being whisked off into the stories I want to live. It used to be very strange to me to think that some people, sitting on a train, walking along the street, were not imagining themselves as someone else, in a different situation, on another mission entirely. I didn't even know that you could have sex and your mind stay in the same room. When I wrote about my imaginary friend, we were still in regular contact.

Plus, it helps that I have this. I don't mean this blog, which really did help enormously (despite the fibs I used to tell). But when I have thoughts, I am inclined to write them down. I still occasionally write letters that I don't intend to send to people, just so I can clarify my own feelings.

It also helped to make things and paint things - portraiture is pretty good. Making gifts, imbuing them with love for someone elsewhere. And helping people, in some small way. Anytime I felt useful, I didn't feel lonely.

....

One way I was less well equipped than some was that I was brought up to believe that you never do anything that isn't for a purpose and there are no purposes that don't involve other people. I was criticised as a child for my story-writing because it wasn't for school, I often started epic stories which could never be finished, so never read by anyone else and no-one was interested anyway. I was wasting my time.

This made me - makes me - not so good at looking after myself or entertaining myself, outside music and my own imagination.

....

Fiction allows people to be very alone at the beginning of a story. Few adult protagonists have both parents, and unsiblinged orphans in their twenties and thirties are so commonplace it's rarely remarked upon. But here, solitude is a useful thing. As well as being character-building, it allows a person tremendous mobility - without anyone to worry about them, a lonely person can take off when they like, go where they like, interact with others on their own terms, walk into all kinds of situations of peril, responsible only to themselves. I couldn't do that.

Meanwhile, loneliness is usually temporary. The lonely protagonist has no problems interacting with people and by the end of the story, they've often found their one true love who will fulfill their every psychological need and made a few good friend-for-life along the way.

And loneliness in stories is often a false construct.  Having missed it all in my teens, Stephen introduced me to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and now we're watching the selected highlights of Angel. The character of Angel isn't just another loner PI; he knows the loneliness of immortality, of being a vampire with a conscience, hated and feared by humans but condemned to conflict with his own kind - the actor's face seems locked on constipated brooding, so it must be pretty grim.  But Angel hardly has a chance to be alone, let alone be lonely. He has good friends, he has all kinds of friendly acquaintances and almost everyone he meets appreciates and reaches out to him. He perhaps just needs to read this excellent post about bowel health.

I can't think of another fictional supposed-loner with such a vast and positive social network, but the majority of supposed loners are not, in fact, alone. Plus, they're generally men - and fairly macho men at that, isolated, in part, by emotional... well, constipation. Women are rarely placed in even the most romanticised heroic position of solitude (even Ripley, having been frozen for decades as the sole survivor of Alien, is given a child to save (Aliens), then a man to have a fling with (Alien 3), then an alien to have a weird and mucussy maternal relationship with (Alien Resurrection)).

In any case, a lonely person in a story is never truly alone, because you are there. You are with them all the time. And happily, for the duration of the story, they are there with you.
....

Of course, I was being abused. I would have been much better off had I been single and lonely, because (a) personal safety, (b) it would have freed me from the paradox of being lonely whilst "in love" and (c) I would have lived life very differently and may have been less lonely as a result. It is difficult to separate the effects of the abuse and the loneliness, but I'm sure I would still have been lonely if the marriage had been unhappy in a more banal way, or if I had been single and sick in a bad geographical location.

Two empty chair backs in silhouette.

But loneliness begets loneliness.

These days, I assume that people who talk to me like me and people who don't take much interest are either disinterested or have too much else going on.  I'm sure that I irritate or offend people once in a while, but in the absence of any clear evidence, I give us all the benefit of the doubt.  In fact, I imagine that a lot of people I interact with a little bit would like to get to to know me better, if only there were a few extra hours in the day - because that's how I feel about many people.

(It's not that I never wake up in a cold sweat, thinking, "Oh bloody hell, I said the wrong thing there!", but it's not often now. I know it doesn't matter all that much, even if I did. People are forgiving.)

Back then, I assumed that I irritated the people who talked to me and that I deeply offended people who didn't. Other people's problems were about me; if people were in a bad mood, it was because I had pissed them off. I used to think I was paranoid (and I was, a little), but I was living with someone whose every bad mood, whose clinical depression was my fault. My words, my attempts at love, made other people ill.

And this was the greatest pain of my loneliness; I had a heart swollen up with love and nowhere for it to go. So, in my mind, it fermented and oozed out, inappropriate and toxic. I held back from my friends and family, except when I gushed to them. I lied to them, putting a positive spin on my marriage to rival any Thatcher eulogy, but I was also dishonest about my health, I hid my sexuality for a long time and I wasn't very good at simply talking about my life, because my life had to be as dull as I was.

It's a dreadful New Age cliche that you can't love another person until you can love yourself, and I can't say it's true, but self-loathing is a slight obstacle. I didn't love my kith and kin as much as I could have (as much as I do now) because I felt I couldn't afford to; my love was dangerous and everything was fragile.

This is loneliness. That jagged rock in your chest, that inarticulate need for other people (What is that need even for? Love? Company? Physical contact? A sense of belonging? Just enough of the right kind of social interaction?) makes you quite bad at this stuff. You clutch at people, only to hold them at arms' length. You mistrust their intentions and you mistrust your own feelings. You lay awake thinking you must have overstepped an unseen mark, you must be feeling the wrong thing, you must be manipulating the people who bother to be nice to you. Then you fall asleep and dream about it.

...

Nobody gave me the advice, but I knew that lonely people are told to seek out the love they're missing, to find those new and brilliant people who are bound not only to exist, but to be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner, with a similar person-shaped hole in their lives. Not only are neither romantic love or friendship easily sought out, (do we, any of us, know anyone who has found a friend or partner by putting on a pith helmet, clasping a big net and hunting them down?) but the seeking, the feeling around in the dark for a profound connection, is  bruising. Because you know John isn't your soulmate, so the fact you get along so well means nothing. And Jessica is lovely but doesn't seem instantly smitten with you, so best move on. If you set about looking for friends - let alone lovers - then all social interaction becomes about desperate hope, disappointment and rejection, sometimes on both sides.

It gets hard to be charming. Your desperation may not show, but you can get defensive and snappy (I like corduroy - you got a problem with that?), or self-deprecating to outlandish adolescent degrees (I'm a terrible, terrible person and if you don't hate me already, you soon will!). You blurt out how much you like someone when your actions were happily speaking for you or, afraid to hint at your feelings, you do nothing and show nothing and nobody ever knows.

...

My happy ending was complicated and largely accidental. It wasn't about romantic love or assembling a new cast of better friends - I was and still am very lucky with friends.  It wasn't even about escaping my abusive marriage - I escaped  after I stopped being lonely.  By then, I knew I had friends, I knew I would be loved, and I had noticed the difference between how my friends made me feel and what was happening at home - the difference between conversations that concluded Go fuck yourself and Keep smiling.  It was a combination of things, which enabled me to trust myself and to trust others. I became a better friend. Less clutching. Less distance.

...

People vulnerable to loneliness, through introversion, illness, sensitivity and intellect, are my people. So I know - and love - people who express loneliness and even though I've been there, I don't know how to help. I was about to talk about a friend who described herself as having no friends, but two different people have done this in as many months. And I think, "But I am your friend." and I want to say that, but I can't.

After all, a lonely person doesn't want increased contact with just any old person, perhaps especially not someone who has noticed their loneliness - how could they trust that, even if it was, in principle, welcome?  Love is not a favour you can bestow on a person because they are in need of it, and loneliness can make even the most genuine spontaneous interest feel like that; they just feel sorry for me, or worse, they're just doing their good deed for the day to feel good about themselves and even, most shamefully if they like me, there must be something wrong with them.

We have the opportunity to be kind, to pay attention, to take an interest, to bother with the people around us, to make ourselves available for connections we might not be aching for, but would consider welcome. But loneliness is something folk need to find their own way out of - not because it is an act of will, but because it is private tangle, with cutting threads and complex knots that can't even be seen from the outside.

I suppose we can talk about it.

32

Today I am thirty two, which is a happy number.  When I said last year was the happiest of my life, I meant it sincerely. And when I say that 2012 has been even better than that, it really has.

So much has happened this year that I'm in danger of sounding like one of those awful smug Round-Robin Christmas Letters (the family recently received one with the line "According to my calendar, I didn't do anything in September - but I expect I was simply too busy to write it down!"). But I am proud of what a full life I have now, and memories of arriving at so many birthdays with a sense of disappointment, shame and the desperate hope that next year would be better, make me want to celebrate the fact that I now enjoy my birthday and only hope that next year will be half as good as this one.

Of course, this year's not been plain sailing; my health is more stable than it used to be, but there have still been several periods when I've been stuck in bed all the time. Stephen's health has been up and down, there's been stress, serious illness and death in the extended family, and earlier in the year we lost a special family friend.  However, today is all about the good stuff.

My thirty-second year in bullet points (but no particular order):

Stephen, a beautiful white man with dark wavy
hair and glasses, behind a birthday cake with
number-shaped candles reading "30".

• Between us, Stephen, my sister and I organised a surprise party for my Dad's 60th birthday - which remained a surprise until about twenty minutes before the event. This was a massive undertaking, negotiating with my mother, organising food and drink and smuggling a gazebo in the boot of Dad's car under the pretense that the weight was just books and clothes. I also made a great deal of bunting in the early spring, not realising that, with the various events in the summer, I would have been able to buy bunting for a few quid a mile. 

• Stephen himself turned 30 in May. That was a fantastic day. 

• Stephen had his graduation in March. We traveled into the centre of London (the first time in seven years for me) and attended the graduation at the Barbican. 

• We made our first music video, which went viral and became the ukelele precursor to (and possibly the inspiration for) Gangnam Style.

(Click CC button for closed captions.)

• I entered a painting into the National Portrait Competition. That was exciting. I dragged Stephen and Mike to Shoreditch as a detour on our way to Stephen's graduation and about a month later, Mum went on a railway odyssey to pick it up again.  As expected, nothing came of it - the winner was very well deserved - but it was a very positive and interesting experience. 

• I didn't do a great deal of painting this year, but I did paint an A1 (about 600x800mm) portrait of Dad for his birthday. It's very tricky to paint on a canvas that size without an easel (I have a suitable easel, but I didn't have it with me). It's also fairly tricking to move such a painting and its frame around without a person you live with noticing. Fortunately, he's not very observant.

• I made cards and things as I always do, but my favourite artsy things this year was designing a plate for Alex. I bought Sophie a melamine plate with a lion on for Christmas and decided to look for something similar, but a bit more grown-up for Alex. I couldn't find anything I liked even slightly so with Stephen's help, I got a plate made from a design I had drawn on paper and coloured in on the computer.

• The plate was partly inspired by the fact that this year, one of us got the best diagnoses ever.  Find physical impairment emasculating? Fed up with bodily difference being considered a sign of weakness? Try Viking Disease! 

• Stephen's photography was featured in an exhibition at Guildford Cathedral. He exhibited two photographs and somehow managed to sell three.

• Another week of photos, and I will have completed a Project 365 (or 366 - I did get in a muddle and I do appear to have lost a day somehow).  You can tell the parts of the year when I was unwell, as I have taken one or two hundred momentously boring photos. 

• We also made an incredibly realistic alpaca puppet. Yes, that is a puppet. No, honestly - if you look really carefully, you can see the strings.

• The low point of the year was, after having had surgery to remove a tumour on his kidney, Stephen's uncle became very seriously ill. For several weeks, we were almost certain that he was going to die, with one crisis after another - internal bleeding, accumulating gasses and MRSA - until he finally turned a corner. And now, despite the fact he still has what amounts to an open wound on his belly, the uncle is fit as a fiddle and has been recently driving round France. Meanwhile, so much of the tissue of his kidney died that it seems very unlikely that the cancer will come back.  

• Stephen invented and constructed the PlyPi, Raspberry Pi Case which has been featured in all manner of geeky places.

• In July, Stephen and I got engaged. We've set a date for next summer and we've talked about it a lot, but to be perfectly honest, that's just about as far as we've got.

Sophie - A pale-skinned baby with dark eyes and a wide mouth
looks up and smiles. 

• Our niece Sophie was born. We went down to the New Forest to meet her, which was a huge day but a really special one. Sophie visited us in Surrey in November. She is an incredibly smiley baby, and my sister's family seem extremely happy.

• I didn't expect to be affected by the Jubilee in any way, shape or form. As it was, the Sunday of the Jubilee weekend with Stephen's Monarchist family was a very special day, I wore my tiara, we violently spatchcocked and barbequed a whole chicken and then had hysterics over the BBC coverage of the Jubilee Flotilla (this coverage was later criticised, but it was as if Brass Eye had done it, so it was great). We fell asleep at some point and woke up to see the chamber choir singing in the rain. Now that's what I call pluck. 

A Union Flag flies amid the greenery.

We ended up watching more sport over a two week period than I have in the last twenty years. I really enjoyed the Olympics, although I felt much less positive about the Paralympics.

• I entered my first novel into a competition to have it read over and assessed by a literary consultancy. It won the free read, and I got such a lovely flattering e-mail about the sample chapters that I printed it off and stuck it to the notice board. I received the report last week and it was really positive - there were weaknesses I knew about, and my reader pretty much spelled out what I needed to do. Enough time has passed that I'm quite looking forward to going back and polishing it up a bit. 

• Despite so much going on this year, my second novel is progressing at a pace, and it feels really good.  Of course I have massive wobbles in confidence, but other times, I think it is bloody good. I never felt that way about my first novel whilst writing it. I hope this is another sign of increased confidence, and not a tragic delusion.

• In the last few weeks, my forth wisdom tooth is on the move.  Yes, I'm still teething.

A very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a peaceful, relaxing few days to everyone else. I hope you all have an excellent 2013 - you all deserve it. And thank you, one and all, for your ongoing presence and support.

Never Been Thirty-One Before

Today is my birthday and I can safely say this has been the happiest and most productive year of my life. This doesn't mean I've not had rubbish health, worries and a fair few minor disasters. Just that there's been so much good stuff packed around the bad. 

So my year in bullet points...

• I absolutely loved being thirty. I hope I will love thirty-one just as much. I have never wished to be another age, but I have particularly enjoyed my age. I do now. I feel like I earned thirty-one. I have a lot of stories to tell, but I've still got everything to look forward to. Oddly, entering my thirties has coincided with being met, for the first time ever, with the assumption that I am younger than I really am. Previously, people were always adding ten or fifteen years.

• This year, things seemed to get done. I'm amazed at what I have just got done this year. Art projects, craft projects, writing projects. This year, it seems, if I put my mind to something, it just happened. Not that I finished everything I started, achieved everything I wanted or didn't have set backs. My health is still pretty lousy and sometimes very lousy indeed. But during good periods, I painted more, wrote more, made more stuff, learnt more than I ever have before in any twelve month period.

• I've embarked on the first tentative steps towards getting my first novel published. This has been terrifying. It is the closest thing I have ever done to applying for a job.  Fortunately, when you try to sell yourself as a writer, qualifications and work experience aren't very important, or else I'd be in real trouble. It's still very scary. It's not even fear of rejection. I can't really explain it.  

• I've written between half and three-quarters of a non-fiction book, which will have to remain under wraps until it's done. And I've started on my second novel, which just now, I'm very excited about.  Just now, I'm thinking, "Well, this will be better than the first!" which I think is a very good thing, given that I had had so many set backs and finished the first against such tremendous odds, and that story wouldn't let me abandon it. 

• I have continued to be brave, in all kinds of ways, many of which remain unbloggable.  However, I am rather proud that when I needed fillings for the first time in my life, I had five of them, in one go, without annaesthetic. Conclusions? Two of them hurt a lot, but it was brief and perfectly bearable.

• I have worked through and overcome so much emotional nonsense that I carried after leaving my violent marriage last year. At the beginning of this year, I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now, that's reduced to a bit of a scar which gets sore in damp weather. 

• I've seen three plays, which is fantastic. I love going to the theatre, I always have, but it takes some doing and it was seven years since I'd last seen a play. Admittedly, the productions I saw this year were too long and pain overwhelmed me towards the end. The best was King Lear, performed in an abbey ruin in Wales, complete with realistic storm conditions throughout the second half. It was August, I was very well wrapped-up but I can't imagine I will get as cold as I was then this winter. It was a superb production, but I came to the conclusion that the play itself is overrated - it's often said to be the ultimate Shakespeare, but I can't see it myself. The oddest was Clytenmestra (the Libation Bearers) by Aeschylus performed in Ancient Greek at the Oxford Playhouse (Stephen reviewed it here) and the other, Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley, was fairly odd in that neither the audience nor the players seemed to know whether we were dealing with a thriller or a farce – in any case, we laughed throughout.

• The only thing I really haven't done enough of is reading. But I did re-read the His Dark Materials trilogy with Stephen, which was an absolute joy. When we set out to take turns to read it to one another, I thought it would take a few years – especially as neither of us can read out loud for long and both of us are prone to falling asleep when we are read to. But we got through the whole thing in about six weeks. Unfortunately, my Texan accent was so bad that Stephen almost cheered when Lee Scoresby died. We also made a CD of poetry for my nephew Alexander, who is an avid reader but doesn't get exposed to much poetry.  At first he wasn't much interested, but now he listens to it so incessantly that his parents must be thoroughly fed up with Roald Dahl's Red Riding Hood, despite Stephen's critically-acclaimed performance as Grandma.

• I'm so proud of Stephen and everything he has achieved this year. It's been the most wonderful thing to share in his life, and to share my life with him. In the spring, we both spent months totally immersed in Greek Drama as Stephen wrote essays about Aristophanian obscenity in the work of Snoop Doggy Dogg and  prepared for his final exams. He now has a 2:1 BA (Hons) in Classical Studies (Please watch his vlog if you didn't at the time). He then had to deal with both DLA and ESA forms, both of which we managed without too much trouble. He's also whizzing through learning Latin and has learnt how to play the ukulele, very well, in the space of four months. And together we've mastered the art of making Turkish Delight, pain au chocolat, chicken and black bean sauce and the world's best vegetable casserole.

• We're making a success of the whole having to live with parents for the forseeable scenario. Making this work is an ongoing project and there have been times when we've found my parents particularly difficult.  But we're taking responsibility for things, even if we occasionally behave like the desperate parents of children who can't play nice together - like when fed up of their bickering, we sent my folks for a Segway lesson. What can I say?  It bought as a period of peace and harmony.

One of this year's negatives has been that the political situation for disabled people in the UK has deteriorated during a time when I wasn't up to doing much about it. Now, as various bills which threaten our independence and even our lives reach the end of their process in the House of Lords, Lisa has compiled a list of mostly very simple things you can do to help.

But for now, I thank you for hanging around and cheering me on these last twelve months and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! 

This post is brought to you by the numbers 3 and 13

Like much of the blogosphere in August, things are a little quiet around here. My health has been up and down, and when I've not been ill, I've been using my energy to either work on the book or get out to enjoy the sunshine. I've got lots of things I want to blog about, but forgive me if that happens slowly. Thank you all for sticking around.

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my getting sick. I don't mind it too much, I certainly don't mind the anniversary. I just hope that, being a teenager, the Dreaded Lurgy doesn't now try to hook up with other chronic illnesses. I'd be very happy if it throws a tantrum and storms off, but this seems unlikely.

It was also the anniversary of going to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, my finally getting my essential GCSEs (nine years) and of my sister going into labour (three years). So Alexander is three today! I have made him a fire-fighter's uniform, as he is currently obsessed with putting out imaginary fires and rescuing people at the moment. I shall maybe add a picture to this post if someone takes one.

Have not deserted you. Will be back again soon.

I wish I had a river, I could skate away on

It's coming on Christmas and I've done almost nothing. For some reason, this is making me terribly and stupidly anxious. At least something is making me anxious. And this anxiety is getting on my nerves, since I really have nothing to worry about.

It has been a bad brain week though. And I've had the usual niggle as to whether I can't write or paint because I'm just knackered or because I am lacking motivation, or at least in the wrong frame of mind. This is the great problem with fatigue and anything creative; if it was just sums, I could either make myself do them or I couldn't, whether I wanted to or not. Whereas people in perfect physical and mental health have creative blocks.

I suppose there are clues. Fatigue causes muddles and mistakes. Fatigue begins lots of sentences which, you know. um...

Trouble is, as soon as I ask myself whether my frame of mind is part of the problem, I begin to feel guilty and miserable. And being rather miserable, I have even more reason to suspect that it isn't just fatigue. Which makes me feel more guilty and miserable. And anxious. That and the Christmas thing. I was going to make cards and I realise that my cards are going to be crap, consisting of a great deal of glitter and not much else. If I actually finish them. Oh who cares? Do you care?

It took me all of today to write this. And that pisses me off.

Also, I realise that I was doing great last week, but feel like I haven't done one productive thing in months. And that pisses me off. My ingratitude! I am by far the most irritating person I have ever met.

Writing bodies

One of the odd problems I've had with the B. F. Book is writing about bodies without impairments. The problem arises in unexpected places. For example, I have no problem writing about people running about, dancing or fighting. But I really struggle if two characters have a conversation standing up.

Of course, I don't need to describe what it is to stand up, what it looks like or what it feels like, but it makes me uncomfortable just writing scenes where this is going on; I'm inside the characters, you see, it doesn't matter what details of a scenario I actually need write about.

In real life, people have standing conversations all the time. I do that sometimes, like when I go to the door, someone's trying to sell me something and I'm too polite to interrupt. But my standing conversations are a bit like when Lara Croft is swimming underwater; as she steadily runs out of oxygen, so do my legs, and I can almost see the side bar filling with red (it's a very long time since I played Tombraider, so my memory may be wrong about what that gauge looked like). If I'm stood up when you're talking to me, I'm probably not listening.

And queuing. I find it distressing to even think about people standing in line and waiting for an indefinite period. Standing is generally a bad idea – when The Weakest Link first came on the telly I thought it a horrible quiz simply because everyone had to stand up – what a relief it must be if you were voted out.! Human beings evolved to walk on their hind legs, but I reckon we're simply not built for standing still. Personally, I wasn't even particularly good at standing still before I was ill; I could walk or swim, even run for miles (well, jog), but in the St. John's Ambulance Cadets we once had to stand to attention for about an hour for inspection and after about twenty-five minutes, I fainted (could have fainted in worse places; further injuries were sustained in the crush to put me into the recovery position).

As I've said, drawing attention to pain makes pain worse and on bad days, thus thinking about characters standing up for a long time makes things worse. But otherwise, I find that I make characters sit down sooner and for much longer than they really would. This isn't a big deal, but it has surprised me; I thought I was immune to this particular problem.

Authors don't do too badly writing about bodies that are different from their own, so long as they don't feel too different. The most recent example I came across was in a thriller where the hero had arthritis in his spine. From the acknowledgments, it became clear that the author's best friend had this condition (and was himself praised a hero of suffering so bravely) and the author had done a fair amount of research.

So, for example, there were worthy attempts at writing scenes of sexual tension whilst the hero has frozen vegetables stuffed down his trousers (inexplicably, this was the only relief the hero could obtain; nobody had suggested a cooling pack or gel; every night it was the frozen vegetables). And whilst I've known people with arthritis whose conditions vary significantly, well I've never know anyone who was curled up in pain one minute, then carrying a grown woman about in his arms, then writhing on the floor in agony, then having athletic sex with aforementioned damsel – the sort of sex which would be bad news for anyone's spine.

All this was happening from moment to moment and he spent a great deal of time in between moaning about how very miserable his life was – a mindless cycle of casual sex and frozen peas – with lots of statistics about arthritis that happened to come to the hero's mind:

The murdered man was said to have been worth twenty-one million dollars. Smith noticed that this number of dollars happened to coincide with the number of Americans living with osteoarthritis.

(I exaggerate somewhat but it was quite bad).

It was an American novel, and of course this chap had missed out on a great sporting career when he started getting twinges in his back. There are lots of American heros in books and films who tragically missed out on a great sporting career; I guess it must be character-forming.

The book sucks

So I'm reading through one of the most difficult passages in my book, a moment full of sexual tension and intrigue. Unfortunately, I read that my heroine remains

hoovering by the door.

Characters do take on a life of their own, but that's ridiculous. I'm trying to bring things to a head and she's worrying about the domestic chores.

You can take me where you will, up the creek and through the mill

Sometimes in life, we rely too heavily on directions and forget to examine the map. It's not until we find the road ahead to be blocked that we realise that not only are there two or three alternative ways of getting to where we were going, but there are all manner of other destinations which we might consider heading towards instead. However, in this modern age of Sat-Nav (and indeed before then for other reasons that this metaphor flounders over), it can be very easy to forget that there is a map in the glove-compartment at all. So you sit at the roadblock and weep.

Every time things change with my health, I tend to panic for a while before I remember to do what I have always managed to do previously. More than panic; it does cross my mind that this is it, that this is one obstacle too many and I've gone as far as I'm ever going to go. This seems incredibly melodramatic in hindsight, but I never learn.

Because whilst there usually are several unexpected paths to take, not everything is possible. I can't learn Judo or the Tango (both of which have always had some appeal, oddly enough) because all the conceivable routes to those things are blocked. If I am able to work for a living, then I am yet to discover that road; it's either very well-hidden or may involve taking a short-cut across a field (hmm, I hadn't really thought that one through).

So it's not totally irrational that I despair; if I cannot see it, it might not be there. But past experience suggests it probably is. I just need to study the map again.

Writing is a deeply unsatisfactory exercise just now. The windows in which I can work are extremely narrow and infrequent. Some days there are none and some days there are very few; things are getting better but there are still days of thick white fog. And how much you can write or edit in five or ten minutes doesn't really seem worth it. You lose your mental thread between times so it can take several of those minutes to find your bearings. And then it occurs to you that those four or five sentences weren't particularly good so in frustration, you delete a day's work. That's if they're actually there at all; if you timed-out at the end of the last session, you might well have closed up without saving. Which is a bit of a bummer.

But it is a very simple choice; either I wait until my health is good enough such that I can churn words out for much longer periods at a stretch or I find a way to make it work now. That way it happens slowly, but it happens. After all, at some much earlier juncture I had to accept that I couldn't write all day without very many significant breaks. And everyone has to accept that whatever they're doing, however much they are into it, sooner or later you need to eat, sleep and have a bath.

A particular bugger if bathing consumes almost all the energy of one day. But then you can always wash less often.

So I guess it'll have to be one sentence at a time, sweet Jesus.