Doing an Anthony Trollope

This morning I told my husband that today I would be ‘doing an Anthony Trollope’ and, even though he’s used to unfathomable things being produced by my brain, he looked at me as if I’d lost the plot. But it sums up exactly what today is for me.

Last night I finished the first revision of my next book, one day ahead of my schedule, yes, I was pleased! Now I need to go through it again (it’s lucky revision is my favourite part of the novel-writing process) looking at world-building - I am hell on wheels for having my characters talking to each other in a vacuum - and all the other things I forget in the white hot burst of creation when the words flow so fast I get RSI trying to capture them before they’re lost.

So how does this tie in with Anthony Trollope? Well, yes, I’d like to be as productive as him, he was one of the most prolific novelists of the Victorian era. I wouldn’t mind someone of Tolstoi’s calibre saying nice things about me, Tolstoi reportedly said he wished he had the same amount of talent that Trollope had in just his little finger.  To have the words you put on the page still being read over a hundred years after your death wouldn’t be too shabby either.

Trollope worked for the Post Office for most of his working life and is credited with having introduced the pillar box. Every morning before work he would settle down to write as many of us writers do, squeezing the most out of every spare second.  But on one instance, when he finished his current work in progress fifteen minutes before he was due to go to work, instead of throwing down his pen and celebrating, Trollope pulled a clean sheet of paper in front of him started Chapter One of the next book. You’ve got to love that persistence.

So tonight, instead of taking a night off to celebrate being on holiday or that I have finished revision pass #1, I am pulling my clean new manuscript in front of me and beginning revision #2.

‘Doing an Anthony Trollope’, isn’t that great? I think we should adopt it into our everyday vocabulary, what do you think?

Hang on a minute

I’m going to scare you a bit – it’s Easter next week. Well, okay, it is early this year but even so, we’re a quarter of the way through 2013 already. Just three months ago we were all talking about our New Year resolutions, how are yours panning out so far? Is it time that’s holding them up? I don’t have time to go the gym this week, I don’t have time to write today, I’ll have to call that friend tomorrow.

There’s a lot of talk on the internet about time speeding up, I am sure it happens in our house every night when I close my eyes and the clock ticks off hours at the speed of minutes . . . Maybe it’s because there are so many things to occupy us now that it feels like there’s less to go round. If you ask people how they are, it seems the first thing everyone says is ‘busy’!

One of my writing friends celebrated a milestone birthday this week, hitting the big 30. I remember my own 30^th as being the start of my first life falling apart, not something to celebrate at the time although now I do. But thinking back to that time, I can’t believe how long ago it feels and how fast I seem to have got from that point to today.

So if we have more than ever before to do, and less time to do it in, well, maths isn’t my strong point but something doesn’t add up somewhere. But it seems defeating the time monster can be as simple as deciding today you will do that one thing you've been meaning to for just five minutes.

Baby steps are the way I’m trying to beat it while I’m fighting it to get my edits done. As many minutes as I can snatch here and there every day, 20 minutes before work, 30 during lunch, some while I juggle cooking. Yesterday I reached half way through (pause for celebration, cup of tea and dark chocolate, bubbles come when I reach ‘the end’).

‘A year from now you will wish you had started.’ Karen Lamb says and in 365 days, think what you could have achieved.

This video will change your life

While hubby was messing around with the Apple TV, he stumbled across a page of videos one of which was boldly titled ‘This video will change your life’. He called me in to watch it, interrupting my editing, as he said it was important. And he was right.

As Alan Watts says, too often we get caught up in the minutiae of living which usually means doing something we don’t enjoy doing to live longer to  carry on doing more of the thing we don’t enjoy doing. And yet there aren’t not many career talks that begin the way this video does, and how different would our lives be if they did!

Juggling writing with a day job and a family is hard, even though it’s something I love, sometimes it’s really, really hard. On the nights when I don’t manage to sit down to write until 9:30pm, my head is telling me, ‘are you mad, it’s time to unwind not start again, go to bed with a book, watch TV, have a bath’ but my heart is telling me, ‘write, sit down, fingers on keys and write’. When I’m tired and fed up sometimes the last thing I want to do is sit in that chair, staring at a blank screen searching for inspiration but that’s exactly the time I need to get into my story, walk amongst my characters and bring more of it to life.  The sense of achievement and fulfilment when I’ve made myself do just that on those tough days is worth every bit of the struggle.

The video’s here, it’s 3 minutes long, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siu6JYqOZ0g enjoy and ask yourself the question, what would you do?

What's in a book?

I am not a sporty person. I can’t run or catch or throw or jump and my participation in school sports

days was excruciating – imagine still hurdling when everyone else has finished the race on the 

track used for the Commonwealth Games where there was nowhere to hide and the rest of the high 

school were in the stands watching  . . .you get the picture. So my haul of trophies and certificates 

for anything athletic from nine schools was precisely zero (don’t think I can count the pity certificate 

for coming second in the high jump one year, when there must have just been two competitors and

I was so shocked when the headmaster read my name out, he had call me so many times, he 

actually asked if I wanted to collect it). Imagine then my delight when my intermediate school held 

a reading competition. Over the 9 months of the school year alternating fiction and non-fiction, the 

person who read the most would win a prize. I had the school’s permission to read every spare minute

I could? That almost made up for that year’s sports day fiasco. 250 books later and the prize was mine.

These days I find it much harder to fit the reading in, amongst the writing, family, day job I have to 

squish it into days that are packed to bursting with places to go, things to do. But in queues, watching 

the dinner, arriving at appointments a few minutes early, waiting in the car to collect kids (torch app is 

very handy), ‘racing’ the youngest to encourage him to read more, it’s amazing how much time I can 

claw back. I was very proud when the youngest was asked at school age 5 what his parents did – 

he wasn’t sure what daddy did but mummy was definitely a reader.

So why a post about reading and not writing? Well, (apologies for another Stephen King quote but the 

man knows his stuff!)

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

He says it much better than I can, and gives me licence to read, reaches swiftly for my Kindle . . .

Spooky choice of reading material, finishing this 

where Henry VIII met Jane Seymour!