On Writing. Or Not, as the Case May Be...

I have written pretty much since I was eleven, some seventeen years ago now. Never anything earth shattering; the usual ideas for books that will make millions but never get further than two pages in. Short stories as a bluff because I can't follow a plot through. Angst riddled poetry of your average irritating fifteen year old.

Still, I wrote. Endless journals, observations on scraps of paper at work, slightly better poetry when I was a bit older.

And then, one day, as if somebody had told me it was all or bust, I decided to give everything up and go to university. To write. The first thing we got told was that we are writers now. Don't call yourself a student (we writers must begin our illustrious careers as we mean to go on, undoubtedly with a lie) and it was as if a fire had been lit in a place where the sun doesn't shine.

I went home and wrote a poem I am still proud of. I met a great, great friend on my course and we are writing a sitcom together which genuinely makes me laugh out loud. Then, one day, I woke at three in the morning. This isn't one of those boring “I awoke to an epiphany!” stories, I have a baby and so waking at three AM is a fairly routine occurrence. But as I lay back in my bed, I had a brief idea for something I thought could be a pretty alright stage play. I jotted it down so I wouldn't forget, baby brain is a cruel thing, and went back to sleep.

The next day I looked at my piece of paper and I knew. I knew what was going to happen, I knew my characters and I knew my first and my last scenes. This had never happened before. A fully formed idea with a beginning, a middle, an end and a reason. It had just enough of me in it to make the feelings and the motivations work, and just enough of a plot to make it interesting. It was an intimate idea, which I enjoy on the stage but think can get overlooked in amongst jazz hands and music.

Genuine excitement fizzed away under my skin, making my finger tips itch.

Somewhat inevitably, this is where the curse begins. Now I have an idea I love, with pretty well formed characters sitting in my head, begging to be written about. I also have a two thousand word essay and three assignments to finish. Still, ideas don't come along every day so I see it through. I write and write and annoy people for opinions and I manage to get the framework down in a week and a half.

This was at least two months ago and I am now stuck at page 26, I have been on page 26 every time I open the file since what feels like the dawn of time. I've written the start, I've written the middle and I've written the end, but bits in-between are missing, and I don't know what needs to happen in them and I don't know if my entire second act is actually just the second half of the first act. In short, I am stuck.

This I could cope with if I was simply stuck, but my characters won't leave me alone, their emotions sit heavy on my chest just asking to be smeared on the page. They want it done, and so do I, but how? How does one move past the treacle to play again in the great sand pit of the English language without any more clear ideas?

So I sit in my bed in the middle of the night and curse the day I ever picked up my pen. The light from the screen lights up the headboard as my husband snores on beside me and I ask my characters what they would like me to do with them next. All I get in reply is a slow, monotonous blink from the curser, and I wonder just how long I will be forced to blink blankly in return.

Rachael's Twelve Top Ten Songs...

Earlier, I found a very nice website where guest DJ's picked their ten favourite songs and explained why. I liked this, somewhat inevitably from someone who spent much of her youth online, filling in pointless questionnaires to pass the time. And so, here I am, pretending people are interested in my vague thoughts, and I am going to tell you my ten songs. Which I shall pick at random as I go along, because who can possibly actually just have ten favourite songs? These are in no particular order. Obviously.

1. Give a Little Bit – Supertramp (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Uicc-6I-M)

My husband and I had this song played during our wedding ceremony, somewhat unorthodoxly I suppose, and I just love it. I love it for it's honesty and it's simplicity and it's real grasp of relationships. It doesn't promise everything, but it means everything. It's beautiful.

2. The Battle of Evermore – Led Zeppelin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4axrTFBV3cU&feature=related)

I always wanted to like Led Zep, but remained slightly unsure until the moment I discovered this song, roughly age sixteen and just as I was lurching into being a massive Lord of the Rings geek, and had it on repeat on my portable CD player for longer than I care to remember. I remain incapable of turning it off if it starts, even if I am late for something, I must wait until it's finished. So I apologise if this song has ever meant that you've been standing waiting for me somewhere, but I won't admit this is why. Besides, I have it on my iPod now, so I should be punctual in future.

3. Excitable Boy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eUsSXXc8wU) and Desperados Under the Eaves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0J3ossUzhU) – Warren Zevon

Trying to pick one Warren Zevon song is a bit like trying to decide which air particle you favour breathing. It's an impossible task, so I am afraid I've had to pick two. Excitable Boy is from the album of the same name, being the first of his records I owned. It's mad, stupid, and demonstrates all the wit and ridiculousness I love about his lyrics. Desperados Under the Eaves is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, in my humble opinion, and is sorely unknown by most people.

Nobody can write lyrics like Warren Zevon could, they can be completely outrageously stupid, as in Excitable Boy (and also Werewolves of London, the only song of his you're likely to have heard of), or he can write uncompromisingly beautiful, haunting lyrics you'd like to have etched painfully into your heart, like Desperado's.

4. Big Love (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZZp76M4NGc) – Lindsey Buckingham

When I was about twelve, my parents had friends from London come to stay with us. Along with themselves, they brought a video of Fleetwood Mac, The Dance. It was the first time I particularly remember properly appreciating a band not associated with the charts or how pretty one of the members was. I sat, completely enraptured, and thought about how stunning it was. And then Lindsey Buckingham stood on his own, with one guitar, and played as though he had five hands and fifty strings and I knew I would always love this song.

It has since followed me about from year to year, from house to house, from relationship to relationship and if I could write something with even half the skill in it as this song, I would be a contented woman.

5. Blue – John MacLeod

I can't give you a link to this song yet, I don't think, but still there it is. My brother's songs have sound tracked much of my misspent youth, but in particular the year I moved from our family home and into a mid terraced house with my then best friend. Most of that particular year was spent out, drinking with friends, usually at the pub John also called his regular.

The Full Moon used to be a bikers' pub until a while before we started frequenting it, when it became the absolute place to be if you wanted a good atmosphere, excellent beer, and wonderful live music. Sunday night was Open Mike Night and we were always there (well, we were always there pretty much every night) as was John, playing killer set after set. I picked this song because my favourite memory of these nights was sitting at a big table next to the stage, playing Risk and begging John to play this song.
Which he did, beautifully. I didn't win the Risk though.

6. We're Going to be Friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfD8d3XJok) & A Martyr for My Love for You (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDfsYnjrOtw) – White Stripes

Remember how I said I couldn't pick a song for Warren Zevon? I can't pick a song for White Stripes either, so I had to pick two again. I'm such a cheat.

We're Going to Be Friends is the reason that I got into them in the first place; we had a random video that came with a music magazine and a video of this song was on it. I went out and bought the album and for quite some time, my pop addled brain could only really listen to this and Hotel Yorba, but during a night time encounter with my on-again off-again insomnia I listened to We're Going to be Friends roughly a hundred times, and somehow I still love it. So it must be good.

A Martyr for my Love for You I am picking just because I think it's a wonderful example of Jack White's ability to come up with a brilliant riff and incorporate it with great lyrics. It's catchy

but poignant and beautiful and slightly rock-y all at the same time and I can listen to it forever.

7. The River (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAB4vOkL6cE) – Bruce Springsteen

Okay, yet another person who I can't possibly pick just one track for, but I thought I couldn't cheat again, so I've just had to come up with one which I find myself coming back to more often.

This is a song I've known reduce grown men to tears, it's so heartfelt and, honestly, storytelling at its finest. This is not a personal account of Bruce's life, though inspired I am lead to believe by his brother, but written and performed so stunningly that it is almost painful to listen to.

8. Gin Soaked Boy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXP1oLtPyDA) – The Divine Comedy

This is the song which always, without fail, makes me wish I had written it. There's not many songs which make me think that and I can't even put my finger on why, but never the less there we are. I wish I had put pen to paper and discovered this on the page afterwards. It opens simply with a voice and one instrument and build up and up until you feel like you're riding on a wave of joyously fabulous lyrics. And it ends on the line “I'm Jeff Goldblum in the fly.” If that doesn't sell a song to you, I don't know what will.

9) Lilac Breeze (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj7Zf9dG7Ag) – Eels

Eels were probably one of the first 'proper' bands I liked, mainly because I was trying to be moody and angsty and cool all at the same time, so bought a lot of albums I didn't really want. Thankfully in doing so I stumbled upon Eels, who I actually ended up adoring, much as you can adore anything whilst attempting to be moody and angst riddled. This is a slightly more recent track than others I might want to pick, and one I've been listening to a lot lately. Loud and shouty and perfect for a sunny day in a car with the window down.

10. Tombstone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9CdGIoIjLc) – Crowded House

My brother got a tape of Crowded House's Best Of just around the time they split up and we all said “shit. They've split up, now we can't see them.” And thus began my relationship with Crowded House, still going strong a good sixteen years later. I love this song because of it's lyrics and heart. The short story which got me into university was prefaced with the line “Look at all the plans I made/Falling down like scraps of paper”, taken from this very song and so I now also see it as a lucky charm.

Anxiety and Me

Panic has been a part of my life for a long time, a bit like an acquaintance you don't really have any time for but who just won't leave you alone until you go for a drink with them, it sits there over your shoulder. Waiting.

A brief history of my anxiety is this: I don't remember being able to stop thinking. Ever. I don't remember a time when I haven't worried myself into knots about something and lay in bed at night just listening to the jumbled, rambling nonsense of my brain. When I was about sixteen or seventeen it got worse, and by the time I was nineteen and twenty I was having panic attacks nearly everyday.

I haven't had a panic attack in five years, but I would quite like to tell you about them anyway.

A panic attack, when it happens, is a strange phenomenon, not unlike having an out of body experience (not that I can claim to have had many of these to compare to, I grant). I know what is happening but yet can do absolutely nothing about it. They are, oddly, usually started off by something absolutely trivial which I can't remember at the end of the whole thing. Never the less it happens, the muscle of my throat contracts, becomes a tight, solid, useless mass and all the while my brain is saying 'you know how to breathe', and I do. It's In. Out. In. Out. Right? So that's what I do, but instead it turns stupidly into inoutinoutinoutinout. Making all the right moves just not, you know. Breathing. I suck air in at an astounding rate and send it nowhere except uselessly back out where in came from. How can you concentrate so hard on breathing but not be able to breathe? Inevitably the hysteria of ohchristi'mgoingtodie kicks in (not so helpful when trying to breathe) and eventually I pass out on the nearest available surface/person, thus taking matters out of my control. Thank God! My body cries, Now I can get on with it properly! And it does, and I wake up and got about my business.

I used to spend a lot of time and energy pretending to be a "normal" human being, but recently I find myself believing that this person doesn't exist. What is a normal human being anyway? I tell people I haven't had a panic attack in five years and they smile and nod and say "Oh good, you're better then!" And I smile and nod in return, thinking it would be rude to tell them that I don't think I was sick in the first place, so how could I be better? I don't tell them that I have worked very hard on not panicking, that I have methods and ways, that when I feel the panic rising in my gut to twine about my throat I close my eyes, open my lungs and breathe from my toes. Because even after all this time, and even though a little part of me loves my anxiety for making me who I am, it still feels a touch like admitting you're always going to be crazy.

Even though I know I am not.

And I write this blog not to get sympathy or because I feel an overwhelming desire to share, but because I hope it might reach even one person who is now where I was seven years ago. Anxiety can be a lonely place if you don't have the right people, and so I don't often ask you to retweet my link, or talk about my blog, but I hope you might this time. Because it would be very nice to feel I've helped, even if it is just in this tiny way.

Post Festives

The tinsel is back in the loft, we're all so sick of turkey that if we saw one roaming the streets we'd be tempted to give it a kick, and dead Christmas trees line the pavements like rotting corpses. Christmas is over. And didn't we all have a lovely time? Well, yes actually, despite the worlds best efforts to make it otherwise.

This was to be the first year that hubby and I would stay at home alone for Christmas, with our son. So we went to visit relatives the week before festivities began and returned, via a six hour hellish journey in our car so small that even my 10 month son manages to look cramped, to discover we had been burgled. Merry Christmas!

Thus an evening at my friends house ensued whilst hubby waited for police and locksmiths and then we decamped to my brother in-law's house and took Christmas with us.

Oddly, I felt even more in the mood for Christmas than I had in the first place, and this leads me to wonder why? Maybe it was all the kind messages people sent me which made me realise how many good people there are in the world? Maybe it was the reminder that material things don't really matter when you're surrounded by friends and family? Or maybe it was the fact that all our presents were in the car with us and there was a ten foot tree in my brother in-law's flat to put them under? We'll never know...

Thus we ate as if we were in a feast from the end of the Asterix books, and drank endless snowballs for five days straight. It was a glorious triaumph of a Christmas. We watched The Snowman and Scrooged, inserted out son into an elf outfit and the obligatory Christmas Morning dressing gown, laughed, played games and completed jigsaws.

And then, as quick as that, it's over. What happens the day after Boxing Day which suddenly makes the decorations look vaguely sad and the food somehow unappealing? Suddenly I am overcome with the urge to finish the chocolates (nothing new there I hear you cry) and shove the baubles back in the attic.

And, lo, Christmas comes and goes with much the same speed as the rest of the year, only magnified by the amount of money you know you've spent on it, and life continues on into 2o12.

I hope the festive season treated you as well as it did us, preferably with a little less theft, and I promise (in a none fickle New Years Resolution kind of way) to keep this blog more up to date than I have of late!

A Boy Called Harry

I should probably be writing about something important and life changing, like the London riots that spread nation wide. Instead, I am going to write about Harry Potter. Important and life changing for me, much as I probably shouldn’t admit it.

Let me tell you about mine and Harry’s history. When I was 17 and working as a Saturday assistant in my local library, I got overly annoyed about the amount of people ordering a book so thick that the thousands of copies we were having to stock were clogging up all our shelves. This thick red tome was entitled Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire. “These damn people with their faddy reading!” I proclaimed, whilst trying to plough through The Lord of the Rings without so much as a scrap of irony.

So outraged was I that half the population of Newcastle under Lyme seemed to be reading a badly written cross between Mallory Towers and The Worst Witch (had the witch been a boy thus retitling this classic as The Worst Wizard) I made yet another grand proclamation.

“I’m going to read the first one, just to prove how shit it is!” And thus began my, to date, ten year love affair with a boy named Harry.

After a slow start, momentarily thinking I was right, I soon realised I was in love with this world. I actually wanted it to exist and, for a brief (read ‘drunk’) moment I might have thought it did. I bemoaned the fact I was a muggle as Harry’s world was by far and away better than my own. I entered it as often as I could and, though I realised there was much derived from other sources, I saw the skill. J K Rowling had managed to entice me in to a land filled with Bertie Botts Every Flavoured Beans, Hippogriffs and Chocolate Frogs.

I spent late nights curled up under the covers with my reading light on, demolishing books in a way I hadn’t done since the giddy early days of The Babysitter’s Club. I will also admit that, whilst I own and read many books, I haven’t read as desperately and earnestly since The Deathly Hallows came along and finished off the series.

When devouring The Prisoner of Azkaban for the first time, for example, I found myself at a crucial point in the story on the eve of an AS level exam. I needed to revise, but I couldn’t put the book down in the middle of this particular chapter, so I continued. Well, I would at least need to reacquaint myself with some key words and phrases before the night was through, but that would give me time to just finish this next chapter. In the end it became as desperate as “Well I will need to get 4 hours sleep before my alarm goes off.”

Needless to say, the exam was not my finest hour. But did I care? Not a jot because Sirius and Buckbeak had escaped and I was there to cheer them on.

Because, you see, Harry is like the boy you were always trying to impress at high school. Always there, always entertaining, and always calling you over to the dark side. The only difference being, the whole family likes Harry. To this day I think about what a shame it is that my Grandma never got to finish the series after loving the first few.

Amazing high brow literature this may not be, but J K Rowling did something astounding, she reminded people how exciting it can be to sit down and turn page after page. Boys and girls alike drew lightning bolts on their foreheads (Again, Drunk) and queued to buy the latest books whilst wrapped in Gryffindor scarves (sadly, Not Drunk). Children who used to come to the library to pull books off the shelves and hurl them across the building were suddenly coming in to read the books instead – and once they had finished with Harry they would move on to something else to tide them over until the next instalment arrived on our shelves.

And I found myself thinking how no thanks could be big enough for this world I now felt a part of. Knowing that someone could create all this and make it seem so real made me aspire to be something better, write something which might inspire one person in the way Harry has inspired millions.

And now it is over, there is no more Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lives now lives without the glare of the masses and I think to myself; No wonder there’s riots, what are we supposed to do now?

Sick Down my Shoulder and a Song In My Heart...

So, and here is the absolute truth, I wasn’t going to have children. I was going to be the super cool aunt who the nieces and nephews got over excited about seeing, with a lovely house. I was going to get a well paid job in London, hopefully working up to running a storytelling business. I was going to live in Greenwich, flitting around the market on a daily basis and now and again fitting in some work. Sitting in front of a roaring open fire at Christmas, looking out of the window of my huge central apartment I would watch the tourists bundled up in scarves and gloves marvelling at the place in which I lived. And I wasn’t going to have sick down my shoulder.

And so I sit, in Plumstead (it’s in the BOROUGH of Greenwich, I’ll have you know) and, shockingly, not that many tourists make it out here unless they want to know what the definition of the word ‘grim’ is. I am in an end of terrace house which is pretty well falling down, with my husband and our baby. The only bit of storytelling I have managed in the last year is for a friends 60^th birthday party (but who doesn’t enjoy reading Down the Back of the Chair to sixty 60 year olds? Genuinely amazing fun) and the most cosmopolitan thing I have done recently is shave my legs. And, incidentally, there is sick down my shoulder.

This is not, as it would first appear, awful. It is just so different to what I had anticipated when I used to come to London in my knee high boots and cookie hats thinking “Oh I can’t wait to slot right in to London life!” It is the dawning realisation that real life continues even when you think you’re probably, more than likely, about to live the life of somebody who only exists in a film. Bridget Jones I am not, no matter how big my pants are.

But this has led to the most exciting thing to happen in my life, apart from the birth of my Son of course, which is that I am going to university. I am going to study creative writing, who would have thought? A prospect which I always thought actually impossible, even in my make believe London world, but is even better than that of telling stories to children for a living. As you can tell, hard graft is not exactly my wont. And while I currently sit here with formula milk strewn about my person, raisins on the floor because I’ve not had chance to tidy up yet (apart from all the time I’ve spent writing this. Obviously), cracks up the wall which appear to be groaning open by the second, and a man standing outside my front door about to slot the fifth takeaway menu of the day through my front door even though it’s only 10:15am, I still couldn’t be more excited.

At the age of 27, Rachael, welcome to the beginning of your life. Embrace it with open arms! Then go and wipe that sick off your shoulder…

Big Society, Big Mistake

David Cameron thinks that the big society will help us all to become better people. He thinks that we will live in a world where people don't need money, because they will all volunteer to work in various public sector places and live off air.

I am a childrens team supervisor within a public library and I would like to mention a couple of the things I do as part of that job. I organise events for children within the library, I run story and rhyme sessions, visit schools to take assemblies and also help run groups for children who don't have very high reading abilities, go to post natal groups to advertise the library and Bookstart, manage staff and work on the shop floor serving customers. This is for the princely sum of £15,000.

What a nice little job, people say to me as I tell them where I work, I bet you get to read a lot of books! And I forgive the assumption, but what worries me is that seems to be the illusion our dear Prime Minister is under. I would like to tell him that it has taken me ten years to be able to do my job up to a standard I am happy with, I would like to tell him that I wouldn't have done that if I weren't being paid to do it.

I am not adverse to volunteers, we use them already to help us behind the scenes but what I am adversed to is people telling me that my job is not worth being paid for. I realise that because of libraries there are children who wouldn't be able to read taking books home with them, people who wouldn't have any access to computers emailing family members abroad, and people who wouldn't have anywhere else to go who are warm and have someone to talk to.

Libraries are not just an elaborate storage system for Mills and Boon, they are a hub for societies, places for people to meet and share their lives, to learn things they wouldn't know,or to find things they are looking for, or do things they perhaps wouldn't do otherwise. You need staff to facilitate these things; how are you going to organise all of that with volunteers? And what are you going to do when your volunteers don't show up? Don't get me wrong, I think a library run by volunteers is better than no library at all it's just that I am fairly certain one is simply a precurser to the other.

Big Society may sound like a wonderful idea in theory, but in practice it will make for a smaller, bleaker society. A society where mums will only be able to go to music sessions with their babies if they can pay for it, a society where older people wanting to learn how to email their children and grandchildren on the other side of the world probably won't get a chance to do it, a society where vulnerable people looking for a place to go to for company won't have one because it's a sunny day and all the volunteers are having ice cream in the park. Basically a world where David Cameron hasn't got a clue what he might be doing to communities in the real world. He may say that the responsibilities lie with the local governments because he didn't tell them where to save the money from, but when you're giving insane figures to people who also run schools and social services, what else are they supposed to do?

Well done, David, you got exactly what you wanted whilst managing to shoulder none of the blame. How lucky for you that we were financially screwed when you came into power, because lord knows you would have done it anyway.