I will sing you a song

'I will sing you a song no one sang to me; may it keep you good company ...'

Today's blog comes from a song - Everything Possible - by a folk singer called Roy Bailey (the album is What you Do With What You've Got, as you rush to Google it) and I have thought about why that line caught at me, snagged my thoughts as I listened. The song is a lullaby, sung to a child to tell them that they can be anything they want, grow up to live any way they wish, and that you will always love them whatever choices they make. It is witty and warm-hearted and very much a real-life alternative to the songs Written to Inspire - the sort which all too often are played in school assemblies and at which my daughter pulls faces when she's made to sing them.
That line 'I will sing you a song no one sang to me ...' In it, I see a parent full of dreams for their child, but equally full of their own uncertainties, aware of their shaky foundations but determined that their child will have self-assurance. So often I meet women - like me - who admit that they can't drive on motorways, can't speak in public, are scared of heights or planes or water or spiders or large black beetles, who hate leaving answerphone messages and reversing down country lanes. I know them all and some of those fears are mine. We all have children and we all want our children to be more than we are, to go forward with the self-assurance we lack. We give our children terrific messages that we can't seem to take on ourselves.
Some of us want to be writers. Some of us have children who want to be writers. One of the reasons I take my own children to see authors speak in public is to prove to them that everything IS possible. Look, authors are people. They sign books, they make jokes, they talk, they sometimes fluff their words. They don't drop into the world fully-formed; they are all different. They come to writing by different routes but it is a real job held by real people and it is as possible as being a nurse or a computer technician.
When I was a child, authors were a few words on the back of a Puffin paperback. Once I wrote to one, Monica Edwards, and got an answer - I was utterly amazed. I can no longer find that precious letter but I can still remember the beautiful handwriting. I named my son after a children's book, such was the power of the words I read as a child. I always wrote but had no idea how to start turning myself into a writer.
Now my children have websites, blogs, author tours and signings. As I continue to make reality of my own childhood dreams, I make sure my children know it's possible for them too. It's a job, it's a business like any other. If you work, you can get better at it; if you try hard and learn, you have more chance of success.
I am singing them the song no one sang to me; may it keep us all good company.

Poke! Or how I didn't learn to love Facebook.

Poke is the name of a very silly game that my daughter and I played when she was small. She would hide under the soap bubbles in the bath and stick little bits of her up - a tiny finger or toe - and I had to spot them and poke them before they vanished back underneath. She would play this for hours so we had to institute rules - scores of 10, for example - or we'd be there till the water was cold and her skin, so soft that you could hardly feel it when you stroked it, was all crinkly.
Now poke is apparently something you do on Facebook. I found this yesterday and asked my son what it meant. He is on Facebook every day - of course he won't allow me to be his Facebook friend which is a relief, though I wouldn't tell him that. I don't think I could cope with my inbox being cluttered with the ceaseless white noise chatter. Though I do find it very useful to peer over his shoulder and pick up some teen-speak and teen-thoughts for my WIP.
So poke represents facebook to me - it is apparently something you do for no reason. You poke someone to say hi, I'm here. I can poke my son, even though we're not 'friends'.
I am not a Facebook person. I have myself a page, because I felt that I have to understand this - to stay in my children's world, to stay in the world of 2011. I have tried but I don't seem to enter its world.
For my son, the aim is to have as many friends as possible - he and his friends count their score, try to surpass each other, sign up almost anyone who offers, just to up their score. For me and several of my contemporaries, our scores are in single figures!
It's all about what you understand by privacy or by friendship. Even among my close friends, I will talk to one about some issue and another about something different. They are interested in different things which is they are varied and individual people. For me to put out a message which could apply to all my close friends, plus to all the people I vaguely know, or my children's friends' parents - I would have to come down to the lowest common denominator to find something to say that would be interesting to all and offensive to no one and I don't want to do that. For me, changing the conversation is what makes each friendship personal and special. Facebook friendship is a different thing altogether - all friends, of all levels, the ones you share your soul with and the ones you chat to at the school gates, are all levelled out together.
And privacy - now again, I discovered that my son's privacy settings mean that if one of his friends comments on a post on his wall, their friends can see both the comment and the original post. So complete strangers and people that he doesn't even like can see his comments. Nothing he puts out there is private.
When I learned this, I realised that teenagers now have a completely different concept of privacy. He finds it odd that I should think that strange. Their life with social networking is lived so publicly. Looking over my son's shoulder has told me some surprising things about other teenagers I know only slightly. One posted a list of 'things you don't know about me' - some really quite personal things, of the type I would have shared at her age with my closest friends only, or my diary. All teenagers are in the stage where they value their peer group, they want to belong, they turn outwards from their nuclear family to their contemporaries - that's normal. But now they must surely live their lives as a reflection of everyone else's views, when their thoughts are out there, their activities held up for open approval or comment.
I am fascinated by how they handle their lives with this new element. I envy them the way they can keep in touch - I think of university friends I have lost touch with and how we could have stayed in contact. But then again, how do you lose the people you no longer want to know?! Watching my son handle his social networking life is teaching me a whole new world. It intrigues me but I don't think I can really go there.

We like it but ...

'We like your story but ...'
The 'but' is actually the good bit. If the editor goes on to say, 'we're not sure about ... could you edit ... if you make these changes ...' you've got a potential sale on your hands. More than that, you have the chance to prove you're a professional, writing for a market you understand, and not just a wild creative soul locked in a garret of idealism somewhere. As womag writers, you write to a brief and although you play with those boundaries, you have to recognise them. There is no shame in writing by rules as long as you empathise with them and allow your story to live and breathe within them.
So editing a story is a terrific opportunity and one of the magazines I work for is very good at nurturing its authors with such suggestions and I have always responded successfully. Last time, however, I had a problem.
The story contained an element of divorce - near-divorce. For some magazines, that's still an issue and has to be handled very carefully. Off-stage, past tense, no-blame divorce can be managed, but reconciliation is always a better option. My couple were on course for that reconciliation but the editor wasn't certain that their readers would like the course I had taken and suggested some adaptations.
I went back to my computer. I worked on it, I adapted it, I juggled it. It didn't work. To make the changes necessary the central premise and the implicit humour of the story had to change too much. It would become a different story. I knew as I tried that the story and I were fighting each other; and the story had to win.
I emailed back to the editor, explaining my clear sensation that the story wasn't convincing me and wouldn't convince their readers either. I apologised if I had wasted her time in the discussion we had had about the changes. I hit 'send' and was certain I would never work for them again! How would a fiction editor like an author rejecting their suggestions and telling them, in effect, that they knew better? Would this suggest I couldn't write well enough?
But five days later I had a reply - the editor thanked me, understood my reasoning entirely and suggested that I should try the story elsewhere because she still felt it was a good one, even though not right for them as it stood.
And that's why I work for this particular magazine!

Escape to M&S

My latest trick to allow myself to write is to leave the house.
Never had a problem with this one before. People have always said to me, as they do to any home-worker - 'how do you do it without getting distracted?' - and I didn't know how to answer. I loved my writing and genuinely wanted to do it. But that was in the far off days Before Children.
It's not just time. Writers are experts at procrastination, but after deep discussion with a friend of mine over the Per Una rails in M&S in York recently, I came to the conclusion it's all about the roles you play in your life - and this is the reason I could write at home easily before I had children and I can't now.
My friend needed to shop. She had a holiday coming up and nothing suitable to wear; her wardrobe at the moment is made up of work clothes and riding clothes, her twin daily lives.
There is nothing more fun than shopping for a friend - even better if you choose one of a different colouring and size. There is no temptation to join them with your own credit card and you can have huge fun picking out clothes for your reluctant shopper and indulging the experimental side you'd like for yourself. We left M&S with three or four new outfits for her - tops, trousers, a cardigan ... bright colours and patterns!
She told me how she had tried to shop in her own M&S at home. She would rush in after a day at work, still in teacher mode, look vaguely, pick up, put down, and give up. Go and buy some new school socks for her son and some food for supper and go home to parent mode, probably thinking about the horses on the way. But in York, far away from both our homes, on a weekend away, we were ourselves for once, as we'd been when we met there, thirty years ago as students.
So back to the beginning. Pre-children, I was always in work mode because that was all of who I was then. Now, when I'm at home, I am in work mode but only for those things that sell. So I can write my womag fiction, because that's acceptable in my role of parent and part-time worker who Contributes to the House. But fiction that is taking a wild stab in the dark, an optimistic, long-term attempt at success - that doesn't fit my role. I see myself as a short story writer, but not yet as a children's author.
So I leave the house, my desk, my washing machine (critical, that one) and all other things that tie me down to my small view of myself and I head out. At the moment, I go to a National Trust carpark which has a glorious open view and a cafe. There is space and light and huge skies and gazing out over half of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, I can work much more freely. Maybe one day, I can bring that home and work here again when I've convinced myself of who I am.
Writers don't need creativity in their souls - they need ruthlessness and single-mindedness and conviction that they are worth it, enough to push aside the washing and the dishes and write.