Challenges for writers

I have signed up for Janathon. It’s a challenge that runs through the month of January (hence Jan) and is based on running (as in (mar)athon) therefore Janathon. Those who undertake the challenge will try to run, or take some other form of exercise, every day for a month, and blog about it.

Even before I signed up I knew that I would log the least mileage of all the runners – even the ones who get injured on 1 January will probably have covered more distance in their first run than I will in a month. But that’s not the point, as least for me.

I’m doing it to force myself to blog daily for a month, to exercise daily, for a month and to prioritise those two aspects of my life for a month that, frankly, I loathe. January is a great time to try new things, but I shy away from making resolutions, never having kept one, so far. I do like going for challenges though, and as long as I’m allowed to bend the rules almost to breaking point, I generally enjoy taking part in group-based ones.

So in the month ahead you can expect lots of musings on the relationship between exercise and writing, some thoughts on how I use running to solve plot problems, sidelong meanders into the world of the Runner’s High and its relationship to the production of good erotica, and brief updates on my actual running process – I might even manage to find my old Garmin and start logging how many miles I run!

Where to begin?

There was a time when I had things to blog about all the time – now, just when I know that I should be building my ‘platform’ (which my mind insists on translating to ‘scaffold’) I have almost nothing of interest to say.

The thing is, I no longer ruminate on the practice of writing because I’m worryingly busy doing it, which makes for a boring to non-existent blog.

This week I have:

• Found 67 words suitable for use as positive synonyms when describing cruise ships. I found about 40 others that weren’t so positive and therefore had to be ignored.
• Received my copy-edits. Looked at my copy-edits. Panicked very slightly.
• Been shortlisted for something
• Been not even long-listed for something else (I got those two completely the wrong way round: which pleases me greatly as the one I expected to place in was a kudos only contest while the one I didn’t expect to place in has some cash for the top three as well as kudos for all.)
• Had an odd inspiration that took me from writing about things marine, as in my last blog about the Shaun Levin workshop, to crocheting a sea anemone muff which has been extremely pleasant to use in the recent cold weather
• Filled about 50 seed packets with seeds to give away to promote ‘the book’.
• Remembered that I am allergic to lupins only after packing up a dozen packets of lupin seed and therefore managing to give myself the equivalent of a collagen implant lip at zero cost.

It’s not exactly high–performance is it? Maybe after Christmas I shall get some coruscating literary insights to share … in the meantime I hope you’re all keeping your hands warm.

Googlism

Somebody has been in touch with me (hi Matt!) because he found me through Googling – not so surprising, perhaps but what he Googled was having his window hit by a snipe and that led him to me. His snipe (in Birmingham) also flew off fairly soon after the shocking impact with plate glass. He, like me, was shocked by the experience. It just goes to show that there is nothing quite a strange as reality. Also, and not particularly surprisingly, it shows that if you share details of your life online, you may find the Venn diagrams of your existence intersect with the lives of others in some very unlikely ways.

Back to book promotion, or not, as the case may be. "Minding my Peas and Cucumbers” seems to be a popular title – in the sense that people tell me they like it, as a name for a book and in the sense that people are placing pre-orders on Amazon. Terrifyingly, the first pre-order was placed before I had actually delivered the final copy. Even more terrifyingly, the copy has been accepted and the book is unstoppable save (presumably) by Act of God. I have now stepped back from the writing frenzy and reflected on the truth: while I have changed names and locations, and in some cases nationalities and genders, I have been writing about real people who may try to indentify themselves in the narrative.

Excellent agent breezily pointed out that this could be A Good Thing as it could encourage sales and A Better Thing if it leads to the material for book 2. I envisage myself waking up with a horse’s head in my bed. Actually it wouldn’t be a horse’s head, as I don’t have a horse, it would be the decapitated tops of my prize globe artichokes, set to flower edibly for the first time this summer. She points out that a book about me having to start again on a new allotment site having been hounded out of my old one could be quite funny. My laughter is hollow.

In an attempt to remind myself that I also write fiction, I took an excellent workshop last weekend with Shaun Levin, organised by New Writing South. It dealt with all things marine, from sea creatures to sociological observation of tourists and was a fascinating and dense exploration of what the sea can mean in literature. It certainly unlocked some insights into Max, the unreliable hero of the 1920s novel I am supposedly revising.

I am also rewriting my eco-thriller, although slowly. And you know what? I’m really bad at re-anything. Except re-reading, which I have also been doing this week, as Sarah Salway’s book, Something Beginning With has been reissued and rightly so – it’s one of those rare books that defies easy categorisation but lends itself to seductively easy reading. I’d forgotten just how pleasing a journey it is to read a really well written piece of fiction and I recommend it to you if you’re looking for a Christmas gift book.