Am I still blogging?

At a pre-Christmas lunch, someone asked me, ‘Are you still blogging?’ This person had read my blog in its earlier days and said nice things about it, but I guessed she hadn’t looked at it for a long time, or she would have realised that it’s been a very long time since I last posted. We started talking about our writing, encouraging each other and congratulating each other on our small successes. Soon we were talking about finding time to write. I have a couple of big projects I’m working on, and my writing friend is starting to get a bit of traction writing regularly for a couple of publications. We talked about how we had to decide what things we would not do in order to keep our minds and time focused on our goals.

It’s easy to enter a competition, attend a course or workshop, set up a blog, or join a critique group and then find the work involved takes you away from your goals, not closer to them. I wouldn’t give up my critique group because it keeps me accountable and working towards one of my goals. But I have become more ruthless about everything else. A course or a workshop? No thanks, not unless it will help me get closer to my goals. Another book on the craft of writing? No, it’s time to write, not just read about it.

And that leads me back to the big question, for me, about blogging: does this get me closer to my goals? Sadly, the answer is no, not really, not at the moment. There is such a lot of time involved in blogging, both writing and also reading other people’s blogs. I fell into the trap of procrastinating by spending hours reading blogs. Now I just follow a small number of blogs that I really enjoy and look in from time to time on quite a few others.

Some writers see blogging as part of their writing, a means of expressing themselves. I’ve realised it’s not like that for me. Blogging can be fun; it’s a challenge and rewarding when the stats start to improve; it’s an interesting way of sharing ideas and snippets of information. But at the moment, because my focus is elsewhere, it has become a distraction.

And so I’m going to take a bit of pressure off and stop blogging for a while. Who knows, I might come back to it sometime in the New Year.

Too old to change?

I was half-listening to a radio interview about the new Windows 8 operating system when the interviewer asked a question that made me stop and listen. Actually, it made me stop and think, because I didn’t really listen to the answer.

The question was whether older people would be able to cope with the steep learning curve and the change from keyboard and mouse to touchscreens.

I don’t think it is age, but use. A tablet user, young or old, might find the new system more appealing than a desktop user.  I’m in the latter category and use two large screens for my work. If I had a touch screen (which I don’t) and if I could reach it comfortably (which I can’t) touchscreen functions would require me to make more sweeping arm movements in a day than a windmill.

What made me stop and think about the interview question, however, has nothing to do with Windows 8. It was the unspoken and unexamined assumption that as you get older, you become less willing or able to change and to learn.

When I started work a ‘golfball’ typewriter was the latest technology and everyone wrote drafts in long-hand and took them to the typing pool. Nowadays I retrieve documents online, work on them and then upload them. I do things I could never have imagined doing previously and can work from home as a freelancer, which suits me just fine.

Of course, the advent of computers is just one of many changes over the past few decades of restructuring, upheaval, and social and technological change. The physical and social fabric of our workplaces, home life and community life has changed dramatically.

The older you get, the more changes you see and master. It goes with the territory. I’m a baby boomer and I can’t think of anyone I know in my generation who has thrown up their hands and said, ‘Oh it’s just too hard; I can’t cope with all this change.’ It was never a choice. And yet we are perceived as being slow or unwilling to adapt. Nonsense, I say. What do you think?

A challenge!

It must be serendipity. I was wondering what to blog about when Daniela from the Lantern Post tagged me in The Look Challenge and told me it’s a fun prompt for writers with either a published book or a novel in progress. It works like this:

Search your manuscript for the word “look” and copy the surrounding paragraphs into a post to let other bloggers read. Then you tag five blogger/authors.

Daniela might remember the piece I’ve selected for the challenge because I wrote the first draft for a writing class we both attended a few years ago. I played around with a few extracts from a novel I’m writing, but they all needed context to make sense, so I decided to use this short stand-alone piece instead.

 Blue Skies 

It’s a chill autumn morning in the 1950s. My brother and I are bundled up in our red woollen jerseys that Mum knitted, and Mum’s doing the washing. I’ve just turned four, and my brother is almost three.

Mum does the washing on Monday mornings. She likes to have us within eyesight, which means we’re outside, playing on the concrete between the kitchen door and the washhouse. We can hear the thump of the agitator in the bowl of the brand new washing machine. We’re not allowed in the washhouse for fear that we’ll feed our little fingers into the wringer and mangle our hands and arms.

While we play outside, Mum fishes the sheets and towels out of the machine and feeds them through the wringer into a concrete tub of cold water. She loads the colored clothes into the machine and pushes the lever to turn the agitator on again. The sheets go through the wringer again, into more cold water stained with blue to make the whites white, and then she pushes the sheets through the wringer for the last time. They slide in concertina folds into a galvanized tub, our baby bathtub, ready for Mum to shake them out and peg them up on the line to dry. Mum then does it all again with the colored clothes, and finally Dad’s work clothes, thick with dust from the paddocks and grease from handling the sheep.

This takes all morning. My brother plays with his toy truck and I have my fat doll with hair the colour of ripe wheat and eyes that open and close. Nothing happens where we live. We’re too small to be out on the farm, too isolated to play with other children.

Mum’s carried a load out to the long line that runs from the wattle tree to the gate that leads out to the yard. As she pegs the sheets on the line with hands half-numb from the cold water and the cold air, we scour the sky. Today we’re lucky; in the distance we see a black dot. ‘Look! Look! Over there!’

We watch the dot grow large and silver in the sun. The vapor trail streams through the blue sky, whiter than Mum’s sheets.

We run to the edge of the concrete and look up. I know there are people up there, riding on the plume of vapor. We wave with both arms, willing the pilot to see us and dip a wing in greeting. The people must surely be looking out the window; they must surely see two little children dressed in red, standing in the middle of the plains waving at aeroplanes. I’m convinced they’re waving back.

We’re still waving, still excited, as the plane fades from sight and the vapor unravels and the sheets flap in the wind.

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One of the best things about this challenge was discovering the blogs that Daniela tagged. I’ve only tagged three, but I think you will enjoy them. Here they are:

 Janet’s Notebook
(No, not me; another Janet)

Chris Martin Writes 

Cresting the Words 

 

A gem of a critique group

It’s almost the end of the weekend and I haven’t managed a blog post. I still haven’t nailed a regular blog post schedule, but try to post something in the weekend. My excuse for this belated post is that I was busy getting something ready to send out to my writing critique group.

I know writers have different experiences and views about the value of critique groups, but for me the one I belong to has been invaluable. It’s kept me going and ‘accountable’ many times when it would have been easier to let the writing slip.

Our group is small—4 or 5 members (numbers fluctuate over time) and we’ve been together for several years. Before each meeting we circulate our work and read everyone else’s work. At the meeting there is no tedious and time-consuming reading aloud, which leaves plenty of time to discuss everyone’s work.

We meet face to face once every six weeks. Looking someone in the eye when you critique their work is a great incentive to make sure that you are clear and specific and can justify your comments. At times the critique is robust, but it is always constructive and no one gets defensive.

We’ve all been writing long enough to be able to offer useful critique and we’ve all had our share of rejections and also encouragement. I think this is why we have such a positive dynamic with no grandstanding or points scoring. I’m the only woman in the group and enjoy having a male perspective.

Of course all the reading and preparation takes time, but it’s worth it and I’m always much happier after I’ve revised work following a critique. The group is a wee gem.

Poetry school dropout

Last weekend I opted out of attending the last in a series of poetry workshops. They were great workshops, but I just couldn’t produce anything more than scribbled word lists and assorted unrelated lines. It’s not that I can’t write poetry, but my output is minuscule and I don’t enjoy writing poetry as much as prose.

Not long ago I was chatting with a writing friend. We both belong to a local writers’ group that runs two competitions a month. My friend, along with quite a few other members, makes a point of entering one or both competitions every month. I enter when I have something suitable, but I seldom sit down and write specifically for a competition. I suspect my friend is much more productive than I am, thanks to this regular discipline.

This conversation plus the poetry workshop experience led me to think that it can be useful to have a strategy about writing. Mine is to stick to my knitting.

I have tried my hand at different types of writing and quickly discovered that some genres suit me better than others. It didn’t take me long to develop a love-hate relationship with poetry; nor did it take long to discover that short stories are not my thing. To me, they are incredibly difficult to write and I have no aptitude for this genre. I could sit down and work at short stories: put in the hours, seek out feedback, revise, submit, collect rejection slips, re-write, start again…

But that would take me away from writing what I really want to write. It would take me away from my novel. This is in its third revision and may never see the light of day—but it’s my apprenticeship novel and fun to write and has taught me so much. And then there is narrative non-fiction. I didn’t even know there was such a genre until a few years ago, and now I think this what I’m meant to write.

I’ve decided that when it comes to writing, I’m going to stick to my knitting and focus on what I do best. I’ll still dabble in poetry, as a treat, when it doesn’t distract me from what I really want to write.

Do you ‘stick to your knitting’ or have you found another strategy suits you better?

Books by hand

What sort of a book has blank pages but is full of stories? Here’s one. It is a photo album made as gift and waiting to be filled with photos telling their stories. 

Even with blank pages, the album has its own story. My clever husband made it himself. For the cover, he used marbled paper we bought in Florence a couple of years ago.

In Florence, we navigated the narrow streets a couple of blocks away from the main tourist thoroughfares, looking for Alberto Cozzi, a bookbinding and paper marbling workshop and shop. It took three tries. The first time the shop was closed. The second time we arrived to see a man and a dog emerge. The man locked the shop behind him and headed out for a walk with the dog at the very time the sign in the window said the shop was due to open. The third time we were lucky.

We arrived just as Ricardo (the man with the dog) was setting up a large tray full of a type of glue the consistency of wallpaper paste, the first stage in marbling. He spattered a multitude of different coloured paints over the solution, and the paint spread slightly and sat suspended on top of the glue. I wondered how such an unlikely colour combination was going to produce anything beautiful. Next he dragged specially made combs through the paints and the colours arranged themselves in swirls.

Finally he floated A3 sheets of paper over the paint and carefully peeled them off, holding up the finished product for our admiration before hanging the paper over rods to dry. All the time the dog lay in the back of the workshop (weary from his walk, I suppose) and watched through half-open eyes. 

We selected half a dozen sheets to buy and packed them in a tube which we carried through Switzerland and France before returning to New Zealand. Well worth the effort, don’t you think!

Saturday morning

It’s Saturday morning and I should be writing a triolet. Instead I’m writing a blog post and reassuring the dog that I’ll take her for a walk, soon. I should have written the triolet days ago; it’s homework for a short course on writing formal poetry. The next session starts in two hours, so if I write at the pace of four lines an hour, I might just make it! I’m a dabbler in poetry; I prefer writing prose, but I have had a couple of poems published, so I must be doing something right.

The course is run by Joanna Preston who has an enthusiasm for all things poetic and an interesting way of teaching that is based on reading as much as writing.

The triolet is one of the forms we looked at last week. It was new to me. Eight lines, the first line repeating at lines four and seven, and the second line repeating at line eight. Oh good, I thought, all that repetition means hardly any lines to write once I’ve got that first line.

My first line is going to be: ‘Am I right in thinking…’  The line is from the title of a book about letters to the Telegraph newspaper in which correspondents such as ‘Outraged of Tunbridge Wells’ vent their dismay at the state of the world and in that frightfully English way ask rhetorically whether they are the only person who thinks as they do. I can see the scope for a satirical little triolet, but whether I can accomplish that by 10.30am is another matter.

Am I right in thinking this is an odd way to spend a Saturday morning?

Alzheimer’s Awareness Week

September is World Alzheimer’s Month. This may not be of interest to anyone who doesn’t know someone with dementia, but there are a lot of people in this category when you consider the alarming numbers of people around the world with dementia. I’m interested in the subject because I saw my own mother move from slight confusion to severe dementia over a period of twelve years. Since then I have read and thought a great deal about dementia.

Alzheimers New Zealand ran its own awareness month, which I have watched with interest. I believe that we need much greater awareness of dementia.

We can help

The sooner we know, the sooner we can help. This is the message Alzheimers New Zealand is pushing in its Awareness Month campaign. Alzheimers NZ works hard at promoting awareness of dementia and providing support to those with dementia and their carers. Through its local branches around the country it offers fabulous support services and education sessions. Several years ago when my mother was still in the mid-stage of dementia, I went to some of the education sessions here in Canterbury and found them supportive, constructive and very helpful.

A major part of the campaign seems to be a television advertisement, but every time I see it screened, I can’t help thinking it misses the mark.

The advertisement shows a series of pictures: toothpaste on a razor, an overflowing hand basin in an empty bathroom, keys in the refrigerator, a car in the middle of a busy street with the door open and the driver gone. These are presumably intended to be signs of possible dementia, and viewers are urged to talk to a doctor they think they or someone they know is showing signs of Alzheimer’s. The lighting is gloomy and the music is an odd combination of tinkly and ominous.

Would this encourage you to seek help or diagnosis for someone who showed ‘signs’ of dementia? Would it encourage you to seek help for yourself? The anonymous ‘we’, the vague, unstated nature of the ‘help’ and the bleak mood of the advertisement would put me off.

Another reason why I feel uneasy is that I can’t see how the advertisement diminishes the stigma associated with dementia. It plays on popular misconceptions and fears: Granny left her keys in the fridge; she’s probably got dementia so let’s haul her off to a doctor as soon as possible. It seems to me to be over-simplifying and inviting people to jump to conclusions.

In my view, there are better ways of raising awareness and reducing stigma than this particular advertisement. Just look at look at the IHC advertisements and the ones about depression.

The remaining light

During Alzheimer’s Awareness month there have been other comments and stories in the media. The best I’ve seen is an article in the October issue of North and South by Mary de Ruyter. She writes about her mother’s dementia, now in the mid-stages. But the article is about so much more. It is suffused with the sort of awareness and acceptance that can help remove stigma, and it is balanced with realism.

Ms de Ruyter provides enough information to show how dementia has affected her mother plus a lot of background information about the disease. Her key point is that there is the opportunity for years of living a meaningful, purposeful life. As she puts it, ‘There are also misconceptions:… within a few years of developing it you’re in full-time care dribbling into your soup. The reality is different.’

The article captured me when I read, ‘The more I learn, the more I understand how the light in each person remains.’ This is just so true and it is what I found with my mother. Although nothing can prepare you for the severe stage of dementia, I can see from the tone of the article that Ms de Ruyter will keep looking for that light, and I know that if she keeps on looking, she will still be able to find the remaining light.

A real launch, a virtual book

I went to an unusual book launch last weekend. All the usual features were there: yummy nibbles, a glass of wine, interesting people who are all interested in writing. The venue was in the hill suburbs and we had a panoramic view of Christchurch, but were far enough away to be able to imagine how beautiful the city once was and might be again.  The author, Jane Seaford, read a few pages from her newly published novel, Archie’s Daughter. What was unusual was that there were no books to be sold and nothing for Jane to sign because this was the launch of an ebook.

Jane is enthusiastic about ebooks, but has commented that often people assume that an ebook is self-published. Not necessarily so. Archie’s Daughter is published by Really Blue Books, an independent Australian digital-only publisher. Just like a traditional publisher, they select what they publish and follow the usual editing and design processes.

I came home from the launch and bought a copy. I’ve heard several of Jane’s short stories broadcast on Radio NZ so I’m expecting the book to be just as good. Archie’s Daughter is about families and mental illness. I’d tell you more about it, but I haven’t been able to lay my hands on my Kindle since my husband downloaded the book and started reading it.

An anniversary to forget

It is two years today since the first big Christchurch earthquake. It has been the lead News item all day, but it’s not as if we need any reminders.

The aftershocks are finally subsiding and a few days ago we were informed we had had a whole week with no quakes strong enough to be felt. The same report did note that there is a 74% chance of a 5.0 to 5.4 magnitude aftershock in the next year and a 32% chance of a 5.5 or 5.9.

This evening the sky turned black and we had a thunderstorm with hail and sheet lightning. The thunder didn’t come in bursts or claps but in long, rolling roars. It was the same sound as we heard two years ago, but this time coming from the sky, rather than from under the earth.  I prefer the thunder.