One Woman Walks Wales - 3700 miles
One Woman Walks Wales
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Photos
  • The Route
  • About me
  • Postcards - receive a postcard in return for your donation
  • How to donate
  • About ovarian cancer
  • Articles and press coverage

where i am

8/22/2017

4 Comments

 
I am sitting in a barn that has a kitchen in it.  I have made a pot of tea on the camping stove and now I sit at a table covered in plastic gingham, red and white.  When I look up I see the wrinkly tin roof above me, with gleams of daylight at the apex.  Two flies buzz around the teapot.  It is a beautiful smallholding, gently sloping down towards the Severn river, still young in width and volume.  Every part of this land is well used, bursting with potatoes, fruit bushes, courgettes, flower gardens and livestock.  I have six days to live here and admire it, pacing down the field to feed the pigs twice a day, pushing a wheelbarrow of soaked oats and peas, essentially savoury muesli.

There is a peace and calmness here, I am settling into my second week of no writing, of absorbing the fact that I have written a book, of getting used to free time.

Last week I lived in the forest, in a small cottage surrounded by pine trees.  There was wetness everywhere, in the water running over the ground, in the moss that clumped and straggled from tree branches, in the misty rain itself that appeared as a silver grey shimmer against the close crowding trees.  The hens were free here, I took their eggs from a cluster in a rotting tree stump, wiping them clean on a clinging patch of moss.

I was alone in the forest, just me and the birds and a small black cat with a bad eye.  He snuggled against me in the evenings, tight up under my chin, a paw on my shoulder and my arms around him to keep him from drooping down my body as he slept.

It was my first week after handing the book over for editing and I slumped in the lack of intensity, didn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t writing The Book.  I moped a little, felt melancholic and alone.  The fairyland forest was a perfect place to do that.  I lolled on my bed and watched the ceiling.  I made strange, almost meals of boiled vegetables.  Potatoes and green beans, red cabbage and carrots, just piling them in a heap, burying a lump of butter and sifting down salt and pepper.  I read books, wrote letters, all things I have not had time for when all literary and creative brain power had been consumed by my single project – the story of the walk.

For the final month of writing I lived in a medieval longhouse at the end of a track in a valley where the steep, rocky sides reared tall around the flat fields.  The track led across the green where sheep grazed to a barn-sheltered enclosure where a house squatted, growing out of the hill, timbered walls and huge ancient flagstones underfoot.  It was a glamorous house and I became glamorous just by living in it.  I wafted around barefoot and made delicious food, serving it to myself in beautiful pottery with drizzles of olive oil.  Two brown spaniels pattered around my feet, competing for the place to sit at my side and stare at me lovingly, their replacement mistress.

The luxurious house is where I finished my book, took as much time off work as I could, ten days to sit at a computer and finish the accumulation of months of work.  It was a writing retreat that came to me at just the right time, far enough along for me to have the confidence to fully focus.

Here I am, two years after finishing the walk and I’ve done it!  I’ve got far enough along in my writing to have a draft with an editor.  I have a publication date, a publicist, a listing in a book catalogue, a front cover.  It still needs a lot of work and later this week I will receive back the first set of amendments.  I will be in another house by then, looking after another cat.  I will have two weeks to absorb the suggested changes, assimilate ideas and reflect them in new wordings.  I do not feel ready, I do not know how I could make myself ready for this.

Tomorrow I will bake bread.  This is what I do for money.  I am a yeast farmer.  I mix together fermented flour with more flour and water, then add varying portions of oil, salt and seeds.  I keep time and temperature controlled until the yeast has eaten enough to make the perfectly risen consistency and then I slam trays of loaves into a hot oven to kill everything and capture it there; a loaf of bread, browned to the point of burning, crisply mottled crust and spongy moist inside.  Flour and water transformed by yeast, under my shepherding.

Sourdough, yeasted loaves.  Rye, spelt, white, wholemeal, buckwheat.  Ciabatta, tin loaves, burger buns.  Croissants, pain aux raisin, baguettes.

This is how I have lived my life to make a book possible.  I work part time as a baker and I live in a van.  I make myself available for housesitting and animal care to avoid the discomfort and accumulating dirt of what is essentially a home in a tin box.  It is not a luxurious lifestyle but it is how I have afforded time to create.  It has worked.  I have done it.  I have written a book.  This is where I am now.
Picture
Picture
4 Comments

where I've been

8/20/2017

3 Comments

 
I got the publishing contract 14 months ago, gave them a date.  I’ll have you a book in seven months, I said.  “How hard can it be?” I thought to myself.  I know it seems that most books take years but I just have to set my mind to it.  That’s what I do isn’t it, overcome unlikely obstacles through perseverance and determination.

So where have I been?  How can something take a year longer than you think?  A whole year!  How can 12 months disappear as you turn around, wipe sides, tidy up, drink coffee in cafes and go swimming.  Leaves grow, leaves fall.

Although I have been nominally writing a book ever since I finished the walk, a period of almost two years, I realise now that I have had to become ready to write.  I have had to show myself exactly how much I want this by continuing to return to the project, by never truly letting it drop.

I am a writer now, I wasn’t two years ago, I was a woman who blogged, who read, who dreamed, who scratched sparks of inspiration into notebooks and if she didn’t catch her ideas they disappeared forever, fragmentary sentences melting like mist.

I have had to learn how to be a writer, how to have periods of inspiration and periods of collation.  How to cluck over repeated words, how to move my hands in the imitation of feelings, to draw words from the air in condensations of elusive memory.
I have had to learn how not to give up.

It turns out that writing is turning up.  It is repeated application.  It is practice.  I may have had talent but I have had to learn how to turn it into skill.

Writing a book is incredibly intimidating.  It is scraps of story that have to be expanded to fill pages.  It is a blinking cursor that remains mute.  It is the chance to be a thing that you have always dreamed about, whether you are ready for it or not.  I have procrastinated my whole life and I have had to take time to learn how to overcome this.  Procrastination is scheduling other things so that you cannot write, such as holidays or festivals or work.  Procrastination is an addiction to scrolling through Facebook, keeping the mind deadened.  Procrastination is feeling like you really should eat something.  Procrastination is picking up the thread of story and feeling utterly incapable of the necessary concentration.  It is your brain pulling away from the effort required, shutting down, seeking to do anything but take up the yoke of creation.  I have had to tape my change jar shut to stop myself from counting it.

I have learnt to keep going, to know that each day belongs to itself, has a feeling of its own and that if I stare into space and the story only increases by 200 words then that is ok.  It’s just a day like that, I don’t have to give up, I am not a failure.

Although I have made the focus of my life the writing of this book, sometimes it has been hard to believe that I am capable of the feat of production.  I have felt lost and overwhelmed, stumbling and mute.  Sometimes the things I have had to do in order to make time to write have made the act of creation difficult.  The summer I spent without electricity in a remote, secluded caravan.  The way I jump from house to house, always taking care of other peoples animals, never a place to call my own; always having to pack everything together, move on.  Every new place necessitated the search for the right writing spot, the place that feels comfortable, where the light falls gently, where I am not cramped.

Steadily, over the course of a year, this book has become a priority, an obsession.  I didn’t know, when I want to be a writer, what writing required of me.
I drove to Pembrokeshire in March and looked at the sea, scribbling notes.  I walked 100 miles of the Glyndwr’s Way again, scribbling notes.  I read books by other travel writers and analysts, the best ones were by Robert Macfarlane; they gave me vivid flashes of memory, a bird hanging in the air above a cliff, sunlight diffused in storm clouds and I scribbled them as they came to mind.
At Christmas I had 25,000 words.  On the 15th of June, when I printed it out, I had 90,000; after typing in the scribbled changes, I had 95,000.  When I sent the first draft to my editor on the 4th of August, I had a 147,000 word manuscript.  And breathe. 

​That is where I have been, I’ve been hiding away, doing some of the most concentrated creativity I’ve ever done in my life.  And I’ve created a book out of the story you all followed.  It’s the same but different, more poetic, I think, less flippant.  I’ve realised I was always trying to put a brave face on when I blogged, when I shared Facebook updates.  Too many exclamation marks, too many upbeat endings.  I’ve written a real book, or at least the first draft and now I have sent it to my editor.  It’s left me and I am sitting in the space this concentrated effort has left behind in my life, wondering what I do now.
Picture
Picture
3 Comments

    Author

    Walking round Wales, for charity....have I mentioned that anywhere else?

    JOURNALISTS - Please do not use quotes from this blog in print or online media without contacting me first. Email is in the top right hand corner.

    Archives

    February 2018
    August 2017
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013

    Categories

    All
    Clicking Knees
    Coastal Path
    Endurance Exercise
    Glyndwr's Way
    Kit-list
    Knee Strain
    Long Distance
    Long Distance Walking
    Offa's Dyke Path
    One Woman Walks Wales
    Plantar Faciitis
    Plantar Strain
    Sports Injury
    Tiredness After Exercise
    Walking
    What To Pack For A Long Distance Walk
    What To Take On A Long Walk

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.