Slow down!

I've hung up my day job pass for three weeks holiday and I cannot tell you the 'ah' moment that was. Three whole weeks in which I can edit the work in progress, read ridiculous numbers of books, pull together all the little writing jobs I have on-going and generally get organised. Oh, and, of course, spend time with my family and enjoy a trip away, maybe tackle some decorating . . . 

I'm two days in to all this glorious r and r but I don't seem to have stopped rushing around. I really struggle with time because I always seem to have so little of it but I've been reading a great book about how what you think is what you attract and I'm always so busy running about like a headless chicken trying to cram all the stuff I have to do into every last second,  that I'm always busy running about . . . you get the picture. So now I'm practising feeling that I have all the time in the world and taking lessons from my daughter who has got this perfectly. If she's stressed because she's up against a time deadline, she sits down and calms herself and time slows down for her. She is achieving so much in the same timeframe it's astounding. I am trying very hard to be like her - I couldn't quite manage to sit down and be still when I got in from work last Thursday and had twenty minutes to eat and get changed before dashing down to London to see a play, but I may have managed to silence my squawking about how late I was for a minute or so.  Next time I'm aiming to be chill personified. Or maybe the time after that - I'm a work in progress here . . .  

Fair's fair, isn't it?

You may have seen this in the media this week, you may have missed it. I'm talking about a very sobering article that appeared in The Guardian showing how, for the majority of authors, their income has plummeted to 'abject' levels. 

The article's here - 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey?CMP=fb_gu

It's a very sad indictment on the state of our society where people will happily hand over £3-4 for a coffee that takes a barista a couple of minutes to make and which is gone within ten minutes and yet they baulk at paying the same, or more, for a book which has taken an author at least a year of their life to craft and will provide them, the reader, with entertainment for a few days or weeks or even years if it gains a place on their bookshelves. I wonder if you know that the author of a book on which a movie is based is not invited to the premiere as a matter of course? And in the squabbles on payment that have erupted between amazon and publishers over the last year or so, who do you think ends up being squeezed? 'Celebrity' biographies swallow much of publishers' budgets leaving virtually nothing left with which they can nurture new talent - Val McDermid admitted recently that in today's market she would be a failed novelist. How sad for us as readers to have never enjoyed her books nor the TV series generated by them and how ironic for the publishers if she had never gone on to sell the 10 million books she has sold. I attended an author event a while ago and was shocked by the number of household names the writer quoted that would also be failed novelists if they were starting out today.

When will publishing wake up and realise that if a career in writing becomes the premise of the rich, all creative sectors will suffer. The image of a writer starving in their garret while writing their 'great work' has never been closer to the truth. 

Camp Nano - get out of your way!

Today you'll have noticed it's the first of July and this means two things - it's halfway through the year (yes, really!) and Camp NaNoWriMo begins today. For those not in the know  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) happens every November and the challenge is to write a novel of 50,000 or more words in 30 days. You can plan beforehand but, in the true style of the challenge, you don't write a word until the first of November. When you've typed the magic words "the end", you can encrypt your work and upload it to a special members area where the word count is verified and you're sent the prized "you did it!" certificate. I have two of these certificates on my wall and they make me smile every time I remember the manic panic that made up my Nano experiences.

Purists will throw their hands up in horror that you cannot possibly write a novel that fast. In a way they're right because editing a Nano novel is a long job, with lots of "did I really write that?" moments of horror but also some "did I really write that?" moments of wow. Where Nano excels is that it teaches you to get out of your own way and gives you permission to write something, anything, to get you onto the next chapter – there's no place for thinking about the perfect word in the perfect sentence on that deadline. And that's okay because come the 1st of December, you have something you can work with, where, without Nano, you may only have had a blank screen. Nano shows you what you can achieve and takes away any limitations that you put on yourself. And it's often those limitations that are the most . . . well, limiting. I wonder how much more of our dreams we’d achieve and how much faster would we get there if we didn't put our own ceiling on them.

Camp Nano is NaNoWriMo but in July. I'm not doing it this time as I've just finished a first draft but, on checking out the website, when I saw the word count can be anything between 10,000 and 1,000,000, I heard myself shrieking in my head "one million! one million in a month!?" and, right there, is one of those limitations. Why not one million? That would really encourage you to go for it, wouldn't it? If my experience was anything to go by at the end of that you wouldn't be able to string any coherent words together, nor would you have any letters left on your laptop keys, but think of the brilliant achievement if you only hit a tenth of that.

So to those who are taking part, I salute you and hope you hit your magic number. As for me, I'm entering edit city, fountain pen and big smile at the ready because this is where I make my Frankenstein beautiful.