I haven’t been here very often recently and I have been once again pondering the future of a gallimaufry.
As ever, the problem mainly boils down to a lack of time.
I am still reading lots of books I’d like to write about here. The trouble is that I generally don’t have a spare moment to type something up until days and days have elapsed and I’m already far into another book and have lost the desire to write about the previous one. And the details have faded a bit from my memory. Plus, for reasons that are about to become apparent, I am reading a lot of children’s books and I am not sure that people want to read about them.
Why am I rather strapped for time? Well, I would here like to make the point that I am somehow much slower about everything than most people. It takes me a day to write a review. It takes me anything between three and eighteen hours to prepare a three-hour English lesson. And I seem to require a certain amount of time staring blankly out of a window or disappearing down Internet rabbit holes in order to get round to doing anything constructive with my time (such as earning a living). I would hate you to imagine for one nano-second that I am a dynamic and busy person achieving lots of important stuff all the time. I am just inefficient and a bit lazy.
Meanwhile, I have decided to pursue my dream of becoming a professional fiction writer. Like probably eighty per cent of people, this was my fantasy as a child. As I grew up, I discovered that writing was not as easy as I’d imagined as a seven-year-old, when you just wrote a story about a witch and drew a picture, bam finished, everyone loves it. Writing involved putting in a lot of work and – horrors! – maybe having something to say. At university, I studied English literature and learnt that the world was already full of amazing books, who was I to be troubling readers with my hollow-ringing efforts. Other Eng. Lit. students published their work in the college magazine and it was very obviously in a different league to mine. So I stopped, and a forest of trees breathed a sigh of relief.
When I became a parent, I started reading to my daughter. Children’s books! How amazing they are – so many wonderful ones to choose from! And I felt inspired by them. I realised that I wanted to write for children, and that I did have some stories to write but they were better suited to children than to adults. I wrote one. I finished it! That’s about all that’s good that could be said of it. I tinkered around with it, and to my eternal shame sent it out to a few agents, none of whom ever replied (thankfully).
I started writing a second book and that is what I am working on now. It’s taking much longer than the first because I keep changing my mind about fundamental aspects of it and because I am actually learning how to write a book rather than believing I can just do it. I’ve read books on writing. I’ve joined the Golden Egg Academy, who specialise in teaching the craft of writing for children and young adults, and completed their twelve-week course, which was brilliant and very practical. I applied for their twelve-month course and didn’t get in the first time but was accepted the second. I started it in September and tomorrow I have my first one-to-one meeting with my assigned editor to discuss my synopsis and first 10,000 words. On the one hand, I can’t wait, it’ll be so useful; on the other hand, maybe I’m going to discover that I’ve been deluding myself and I should consign my book to the nearest bonfire and take up knitting.
Anyway, endlessly thinking and writing and rewriting, joining a critique group with some of my fellow Eggers and discussing our work (so amazingly helpful), doing the coursework and reading lots of children’s books has kind of killed off this blog as a book-reviewing space. Maybe I will write something else though, something that comes a bit more easily than a book review. I want to use this for something…
If you’re really unlucky, I’ll end up posting my book here.