Missing October 2012

I write blog posts in my head all the time. (I try not to think about whether this is normal. I get on well with the voices in my head and since they don’t tell me to do bad things, I’m assuming they’re relatively benign.) Still, it distresses me that I’ve stopped being able to put the blog posts down on ‘paper.’

Poor old October didn’t get a mention on the blog and it was a pretty wonderful one with a trip to the UK, friends, family and millinery. I just noticed that November was in great danger of being missed as well, so… here I am.

I could write in a paper diary and therefore keep my inanities to myself but I’ve never kept that up. Failed by January 13th. There is something about blogging - publicity? Commenting? Interaction? – that has enabled me to keep going. We might have had an uppy and downy few months (year?) here at Tea Stains but we are approaching our 6th birthday; much, much more success than a paper journal. (I have had many an attempt at writing a diary primarily because I need to write but also because I love the way that paper that has been written on both sides, begins to curl and crinkle like it’s almost changed its chemical make up.)

The truth of the matter is this: while you are most welcome here and I love it if you enjoy what I write, I blog for me. It’s giving a voice to the voices; remembering our conversations. Concocting them in my head seems to be enough at the moment but I get a good deal of pleasure going back over past posts and rereading things I’d forgotten.

So I’m just going to get quietly on with putting them down on ‘paper’ again.

A random blog post

So there’s a weakness in my recent “I am going to blog more frequently” plan. Uhm; what to blog about. I’m not doing anything very exciting at the moment. (I am mostly teaching myself Adobe Illustrator at the moment but I trust that won’t fascinate anyone?)

I have a theory though. The only answer to a block is to start doing it anyway: play with your materials, whether they be paint, words or musical notes. What results might not be brilliant but it will gradually break the paralysis. I still needed a subject though so I turned to the internet to tell me what to write about. I googled ‘random blog topic generator’ and lo, there are such things. I opened the first three, here, here and here.

The temptation, indeed the instruction on one of the generators, is to keep pressing the button until you get something you fancy writing about but I thought that might be a bit dangerous. It might not go on infinitely; the generator might suddenly emit a big sigh and stop producing ideas because nothing could please me. So I decided I’d press each of the generators once and then I’d have to choose from one of those topics.

The first one gave me: “One of my favourites is Bagels.” One of my favourite what? And why the capital letter? Is Bagels a place I haven’t heard of? I let out a big sigh and clicked the next tab.

The second one was: “Aristotle’s philosophy” Oh dear. This is somewhat shaky territory. In my dim and distant past is a classics degree. So dim and distant that I can remember almost nothing and Husband has been petitioning me for years to return my degree certificate to the university. Today, though, I search around in my head and ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ appears; my mouth goes dry and I feel a bit faint. I go and have a look at Wikipedia. After consideration I’ve decided that I haven’t forgotten it, I’ve actually suppressed it and for very good reason.

I move on to the third randomly generated topic: “What do you think of your children?” Crumbs. We’re on really hazardous ground with that subject. What I think of my children is that they know how to find my blog and that’s all there is to say on that subject.

Still, I’ve written a blog post huh?

Bad blogger goes absent without leave

Whoops, sorry for that absence without leave.

I’m drowning here.

My unread feeds (other people’s blogs I read) number 467 as I write and it’s climbing all the time. (What IS all this obsessing about ‘is blogging dead?’ Jeez, it’s irritating. You’ve fallen out of love with blogging? That’s fine; don’t do it. Personally I think you’ve got to love it. It’s a commitment that you won’t keep up unless your heart is really in it. No, I probably won’t blog for ever but while I enjoy showing up here to post pictures of my adopted home and talk nonsense I shall continue to do so whether or not blogging is considered (by whom?) to be on the wane.)

I’m drowning under my 348 pages of manuscript too. Will I ever think it’s good enough? That’s not looking very likely right now. I’m enormously grateful that I can read it and tell there’s something wrong; more obliged still to the writing gods when I can identify what is wrong… but it would be useful to know how to go about putting it right.

So I’m not being a very good blogger friend right now; I’m probably not coming by and commenting but it’s not because I think blogging is dead. It’s because I’m drowning….

Off to Scotland

Husband says if I don’t start blogging soon he’s going to start his own blog. He says it’ll be called "Tales from the big empty apartment, watching the cactus grow." In spite of the dodgy title I bet it would be entertaining; Husband is a funny man… he can be amusing too.

Anyhow, for Husband and anyone else who’s not got bored yet of checking a non updated tea stains, I’ve scheduled some blogs to come out while I'm away on some of the exciting things we’ve been up to in the last ten days.

I’m sorry I haven’t been leaving messages much to your messages. As soon as I get back to Bangkok, blogging life will carry on as before.

This evening I’m off up to London to catch a sleeper train to Inverness in Scotland for the start of my Arvon ‘Writing Mainstream’ course.

Is it wrong to be as excited about the sleeper train as the writing course?

It seems I must blog...

This ‘not blogging’ thing isn’t really working. Ever since I said I hadn’t got time for blogging, I’ve done considerably fewer words. Maybe blogging is my warm up…

So, I missed word count confession yesterday because I was out gallivanting. This week’s words then are 3,584 which is a fine and dandy word count but if I want to finish the draft by the end of the month, I’ve got to do better than that.

I finally finished Love in the time of Cholera which had been November’s book club’s choice and I hadn’t managed to finish for the meeting. Each time I picked up the book to read it I enjoyed it but I was never desperate to get back to it. It felt a bit like wading through treacle – quite pleasant but hard work. I think if I’d studied it I would have enjoyed it so much more. Is that okay? It’s not the immediate gratification that I want with a book I’m reading for pleasure but the depth of love can be so much greater if it’s been studied. Does anyone write with the hope that their book will be studied rather than just read?

Why is Florentino Ariza so entirely revolting? With his comb over and his constipation? Is it simply that love conquers all or have I missed something?

I don’t know what’s possessed me but my next choice is The Time Traveller’s Wife. No, *sigh* I haven’t read it already: my heart sinks at the notion of time travel – it’s the suspension of disbelief that I struggle with. Still, it was held up somewhere recently as a fine example of moving its readers (making them weep for all the right reasons) and I found myself thinking ‘oh, okay, perhaps I’d better read that.’ And... it has been on my TBR shelf for years and I'm getting SOOO much grief for the overflowingness of the TBR book shelves at at the moment that I thought I'd better read it… one down, 352 books to go.
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Busy

I fly tonight and I haven’t packed yet.
I had book club today to discuss The Little Stranger. It was an excellent meeting.
I wasn’t going to stay for lunch because I hadn’t packed yet, but I changed my mind, saying ‘well, I’ve got to eat…’
I’ve come home to pack now.
And here I am blogging.
I have to go out in one hour because Paul Theroux is coming to talk at Neilson Hays Library. He is in Bangkok for the Sea Write Awards.
And now I must go and pack.

See you in the UK.

Slumps

I’ve been reminded that this is a writing blog.

It used to be much more about writing but that was in the days when mostly I was blogging about not writing. Or the posts would be about how I’d working out what the problem was and now I was on track again.

A couple of days later, I’d be posting about not writing again.

So mostly, it’s accurate to say that I when I talk here about writing … I’m not… writing, that is.

I haven’t been writing recently. There seems to be so much else to do but I recognise that I’m not using my time efficiently. I could do it all; I could certainly do more. So what is it?

There’s often talk about the 30,000 word slump or the 70,000 word slump and I’ve never been able to join in because I didn’t know (other than the No Word Slump, about which I can expound for weeks) which was my personal slump.

Anyway, I’ve got it: I think it’s the 50,000 word slump.

I’ve managed so far to weave in my various story lines between all the characters and now I’ve got all these balls in the air and I haven’t the remotest idea how to manage their coming back down to earth. And that’s what I’ve got to do… They can’t all arrive at catching height at the very same second because I’ve only got two hands and after all I have to hold out on the reader. Some of the issues have to be resolved later than others but all the subplots are tied up within the central story…

…so how to do it?

*Sigh*

Happy Birthday Tea Stains

Today is my 2nd blog birthday.

Before I started tea stains I’d been lurking on Kate Harrison’s blog for several months but I didn’t dare to comment; I’m not sure why. I kept looking at blogger’s front page and wondering about it. Sometimes I’d click on their info to find out how to do it. It all seemed so easy – too easy. What was my name? What did I want to call it? I didn’t know and I’d press back, back, back.

Of course I was reading Kate’s blog because it was about writing. I didn’t want to blog to blog; I wanted to blog to write.

I wanted to write. I couldn’t say that out loud back then.

My first post, Cyberspace-Penpal, was a bit ‘Dear Diary’ self conscious. My fourth, Uncle Paper and Oesophageal Reflux is less embarrassing and I’m beginning to find the voice I recognise.

Then Kate Harrison and Lucy Diamond started the idea of a novel race: that turned out to be the Novel Racers. I lurked some more and then at the beginning of February, I wrote Dithering. I continued to dither for many months but you know what? I did get there eventually.

I’ve tried to write diaries all my life; and failed. Eventually, I learned I was a letter writer. I think it’s because I received feedback. So now I’m a blogger for the same reason - and not to forget – I’m also a writer.

Thank you to everyone who comes by: commentators and lurkers.

Update:

Daughter has made some cakes.

These are the blogbirthday cakes. Please join me in a cup of tea and a cake to celebrate.

Update

I’ve just finished reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. I really enjoyed it. You’ll all have seen it on the shelves, but it’s a biggie at nearly 700 pages. I’ve read much more widely since I’ve been a member of a book club so I probably wouldn’t describe Labyrinth as being my first choice genre, but I read it because she’s a tutor on the Literary Consultancy’s Literary Adventures writing course that I’m going on next month. The minute I finished it I had that lovely/horribly reaction of feeling bereft of the new friends I’d made.

My children flew home to Bangkok on Saturday and I went to meet them at Suvarnabhumi airport (pronounced Soo-van-a-bhum). Son got to me first, gave me a big hug and whispered ‘We flew business. We got upgraded.’ His ‘Na-na-na-na-nah’ patent in the warm breath in my ear … I wasn’t at all envious …

There seems to be a correlation (for me, anyway) between writing and blogging: the more I write, the less I blog. I’ve got stuff to blog about, but I appear not to need to say it quite so desperately when I’m writing elsewhere. My word count isn’t escalating dramatically, but I’m reworking Chapter One. I know I should just get the story down, but there are several reasons for what I’m doing. If there is any chance to show any part of my embryonic novel to anyone on the writing course, then I don’t want it to be just plonked down without any further thought. Secondly after the wonderful conversation with the vicar about funerals I can now add stuff in and change errors I’ve made.

No surprises here

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