Leonard

The Serious Writing Course (TSWC) is over. Now that I don't have to beg for Tuesday night soup and sourdough from the cafe with no food or convene with the lovely group of similarly conflicted-when -it-comes-to-writing souls, I have to make do with my man. I shove his greatest hits into the CD socket, place the headset over the ears and turn up the volume. It will be Him who gets me to the end of this book from now on, not Tuesday nights at TSWC. Anthem, Dance Me to the End of Love, Show Me the Place...

But first, let me recall for a moment, the best concert ever:-

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Blog

Someone should have told me never to mess with the settings of a blog late at night, when tired and fraught after The Serious Writing Course (TSWC). When my head is filled with the possibilities of writing, but the pages remain blank as the pause continues. And so I find myself writing on a blog which, at the moment, is visible only to myself. I don't know whether I'll see this little piece when I post. So, here goes...I will test the internet waters and see if my toes freeze and fall off. Back in a tic...

Tomato Sauce

The perfect tomato sauce is like the perfect novel. Ask readers and writers about their favourite book and they might say it is all about form and content. The perfect combination of ingredients, structured and balanced with enough flavour to make you wail for more and experience a kind of sadness when it’s finished. Like the offspring who took the latest Harry Potter doorstopper to bed for the entire weekend and after she'd finished, refused to get out of bed because of the sadness she felt, so too for penne coated in the perfect tomato sauce with a light dust of shaved parmesan casting a textured golden hue. Devoured quickly, the bowl wiped clean with a crispy crust of ciabatta; it's a beautiful story, not just dinner. You’ve loved it and you feel kind of sad when it's over.

No Magic in Procrastination

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Joan Didion

I am not twenty eight and I’m not Joan Didion, but yes, I evade and procrastinate. I am the master. Apparently this can happen when you start the serious writing course (TSWC); when you have but a few short months to produce a manuscript; when the course you have thought about for two years hasn’t unleashed the creative monster as you’d expected. The beast continues to enjoy an extended hibernation deep within your soul. It crawls out every now and then, takes a look around, but decides not to gallop down your arms the way it did for Salley Vickers when she sat down to write Miss Garnet’s Angel. I sat not five metres from the elegant and erudite Ms Vickers a few years ago when she demonstrated what happened when her beast stirred. It stretched, opened its eyes to Vickers's creative possibilities and took off. It scampered down her writing arm, burrowed through her pen hand and emerged onto the pages. Lordie, it was literary magic, the thing that happened to Ms Vickers when she penned Miss Garnet’s Angel.

Rainy Days, Never Mondays

Too many tedious, rainy weekends: it's messing with my head. I’ve seen a few films. I’ve drunk too much coffee. I’ve caught up with all the news and read a few novels. But mostly I’ve cleaned. The linen cupboard is pristine. Even the pillow cases have been bleached. The car is spotless and the garage has been swept clean of mud and leaves. I've composted tired summer plants and potted some sweet scented winter bulbs.

With potting mix still under the finger nails, I looked around last Sunday evening and felt a tiny jolt of pride in my newly ordered, sparkling house. But anxious thoughts intruded. Perhaps the big wet had triggered an obsessive compulsive disorder. Perhaps nonstop cleaning indicated I needed to get out more, even if it meant getting soaked.