So what happened? It is now August 13th, technically nearly half way through my precious month of words, and so far my novel notebook is empty, though two or three non fiction books about the Restoration are bulging with post it notes, and my husband has had a couple of quite boring nights in the pub during which I told him how great my unwritten characters will be, and how brilliantly they will integrate with my themes. (This is probably the only subject more tedious than other people's dreams.)
The trouble is that because I am a busy person, a mother of teenagers, partner of a commuter, owner of a recalcitrant Victorian terrace etc etc, once the busyness recedes slightly I start to panic and fill up my potential writing time with anxiety and paranoia about stuff that isn't Work, but is Life. Writing is like the neglected middle child, overlooked in favour of the more pressing needs of its demanding siblings.
I have done some work, yes, but I am nowhere near the Zone, that wonderful experience of living the life of your book so intensely that what other people mistakenly call Reality has faded into the distance. Not only is my every day notebook brimming with 'to do' lists, I am not even doing the things that should be done, rendered immobile by a sense of injustice that they are there at all, cluttering up My Month.
Example: Monday 11th August:
1. Filing and sorting office
2. Clean shed (this is where I should be working on novel, in serene cardigan)
3. Bank stuff
4. Emails (long list of people whose book launches, parties, country walks etc I have missed due to being ill/busy/mad, who I can now catch up with)
5. Update Lovefilm (This is now something to do with Amazon which I neither fully understand nor entirely approve of)
6. Set up subscription to Writing Magazine
7. Song feedback. (Yay! This is a writing thing - a brilliant friend has written a song inspired by my novel. More on this later.)
7. Deal with painter (this has actually now happened - the hall was painted on Tuesday. This is the power of delegation.)
6. Sort rubbish (This is related to student neighbours leaving their mouldy rubbish bags outside so the seagulls can slash the bin bags and led to my husband and me cleaning the street with detergent two days ago)
7. Clean blinds with sock (online tip, yet to be tried out); clean kitchen cupboard and paint back wall (this is never going to happen); clean window (not sure which one, they are all filthy), clean mirrors (bathroom and sitting room). (This is all one number?)
8. Declan - Bestival?
9. Declan - Other? (This is an oblique reference to A level related issues)
10. Get hoover fixed
11. Apply to teach on Arvon
12. Washing, two loads
So there you go. The world doesn't go away during a summer of words, it takes up residence in all its horrible little bits and pieces. My summer of words is under threat! There is so much bittiness to contend with, how can an entire novel get done?
It's a bit like deciding to stop being a lardy couch potato - it has to happen in small steps. So although a novel might end up being 120,000 words long - or even quite a bit longer if you are Karl Ove Knausgaard - it is the Right Here, Right Now scenario, and you need write what you can today. And the pressure isn't off when you have set time aside to write, it is On.
The trick to binge writing or binge thinking, is to start as early as possible in the day. My pledge to myself for the remaining 18 days of August is to write first, and keep my lists at bay. Future lists will doubtless feature most of the above items, but 'Write Novel' will be at the top, every day.
Off to a cafe now to do my J. K. Rowling thing.
