Month: December 2019

Categories
Non-fiction Special moments Writing

My Publishing Journey: the decision

Shortly after receiving my publishing contract I returned to reality. I put a serious head on and I realised I needed to make a very important decision.

I researched my publishers online, I read about the different forms of publishing, I read and re-read the contract and then passed it onto my brother for advice.

I soon realised that this was a big decision to make. Nowadays there are so many options within the publishing industry and so many success stories within each route taken that it opens up so many opportunities to consider.

Reading through the industry jargon hurt my head which is why it was also great to get people who know about contracts to translate to me in layman’s terms.

I contacted people who have worked in publishing for years. I considered advice from the society of authors. I emailed my long list of questions to the publishers directly. I weighed up the pros and cons.

I had more sleepless nights worrying, fretting, wondering, learning. I discovered how clueless I am and how everything will be a valuable lesson. I asked for the opinions of those closest to me.

I SIGNED.

Categories
Non-fiction Special moments Writing

My Publishing Journey: the initial reaction

Some time earlier this year amid the mass of submissions I sent out, I sent off a submission to my (now) publishers, never thinking for a minute but forever hopeful that they would accept my work. One of the few publishers who accept unsolicited material.

I had undertaken a lot of research regarding the publishing process and sent most of my submissions out to agents hoping for the best. My most useful resources during this time was my writing course which I do from home and the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2019.

My writing course helped me construct my submission to a professional level as well as aiding my writing process while the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2019 gave me all the information about agents, publishers and what to do to become a published novelist.

Some time in July I heard that my manuscript was being passed to the board of Editors who were to review it and get back to me.

Some weeks passed.

On Tuesday 17th September 2019 I recieved a publishing contract in the post. I was beside myself.

Excitedly I text family and friends delighted to tell them my news. I shared champagne celebrations that evening with some friends. I couldn’t sleep that night because I was sleeping on clouds. I couldn’t quite believe it.

MY FIRST NOVEL WAS GOING TO BE PUBLISHED!!!!

I dreamed of the book signings, the interviews, the launch party. I kept holding my contract to certify its reality.

I was telling people at work and each time it felt surreal to be talking about me and my novel. I received gifts and cards in the post. I was eligible to sign up to the society of authors. It all felt pretty darn cool.

Categories
Non-fiction Observations Writing

My Writing Season

I could say that my favourite writing season is in the spring with the dawn of a new year and the happiness of new life everywhere. Springlike scenes of snowdrops and lambs, the sound of young birds chirping at their mothers, asking to be fed.

I could say that my favourite writing season is the summer time bringing the warm outdoors and one of my preferred places in which to write. Content in my outside setup feeling the sun on my face and having lots of energy throughout the day. Longer days so I don’t feel so tired but rather inspired to write more with more ideas and a greater flow.

I could say that my favourite writing season is autumn, the colours on the trees bringing beautiful scenes to write about and describe. The darkening days and much more rain so there is plenty of time to sit inside and write.

I could say that my favourite writing season is winter with darkness filling the space so there is nothing to do but write. Though tiredness presents itself, when better to think up ideas but while falling asleep at night or waking up in the morning? Especially when outside is so black and the days aren’t very welcoming, encouraging you to stay in bed rather than get out of it.

Instead though, I’ll say that I have no favourite writing season but I certainly have times when I write best. The morning. The sunshine. High energy days. Low energy days. Days when I need to escape. Days when I must tell the world everything.

During the process of writing my first novel I initially planned to write a few chapters a week. Of course I did, I started in the spring! A month down the line and that plan had changed. Sometimes a chapter, occasionally two and sometimes not even half.

Writing inspiration appears in the most random ways, there is no structure at all. That is being a creative I suppose!

You never know when it’ll happen but when it does embrace it and write and write and write!

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 3)

One more visit to the hospice before my flight and I know this will be the hardest visit yet. I am borrowing our neighbour’s car because mine is back in England and we sold Mammy’s once she got too poorly to drive. It was an impulse decision which we clearly hadn’t thought about properly because it would have been very useful to have over the past month, a lot more useful than the two thousand euros that we got for it.

I load my gigantic backpack into the boot ready for Mary to take me to the airport after my visit and mentally prepare myself for one of the hardest goodbyes to date. Not one bit of me is feeling excited in this current moment. In fact, every bit of me is questioning whether this is the correct thing to be doing at such a helpless time. Then I hear Mammy in my ear telling me to go, spread my wings, find whatever it is I need in life and come back with lots of stories. I stop everything and smile for a minute.

I have done the journey to the hospice so many times that I don’t have to concentrate on the directions because I know the route off by heart. In fact, it scares me once I arrive in the car park and turn off the engine that I can’t remember half the journey as I was totally spaced out and unaware of my surroundings – my mind was elsewhere.

I carefully place my chip in my pocket and choke at the two-euro charge to park in a place where everybody is visiting somebody who is dying. It’s a lot better than the extortionate rates that they charge on the hospital side. I suppose you’re unaware in that case how long your relative will live so they may as well rinse you for as much as they possible can. It makes sense.

Mammy’s room is on the ground floor with a beautiful view of the bright yellow Wicklow gorse all in bloom outside in the courtyard. When she has fallen asleep during visits I have taking every pleasure in watching people walking around this space, savouring the last precious moments with one another. Be it husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, they all look content in a beautiful final scene.

I walk down the long corridor to room seven where Mammy is. A nurse squeezes out of the door quickly before I can get in. She must be new because otherwise she would have greeted me. We all know each other now because I have spent so many hours in here lately.

I look over to Mammy’s bed and see a sight I have been imagining but hoping would never actually happen. The whole room stops for a moment and all goes quiet inside my head. Perhaps Mammy has been moved to a different room.

I gasp in shock though it is the inevitable. It is real. A nurse runs to me in attempt to comfort me with a hug, but I want to go over to her. To touch her. To give her one last kiss and say my final goodbyes. Real goodbyes not temporary.

The staff respect my privacy and leave the room telling me to take my time and call them if there is anything that I need. I sit on the bed next to Mammy in a space that is as if she had planned my visit and left for me. I lean over to kiss her cheek and see Jenna’s body out cold on the floor, a needle in her wrist and marks on her neck – dead.  

Categories
Adulthood Non-fiction Observations

To anybody struggling…

To anybody struggling – you’ll have a lovely Christmas

To anybody finding things difficult – there are good days to come

To anybody wanting more – the best day of your life may not have happened yet

To anybody feeling anxious – one day your confidence will overrule

To anybody suffering – the rain will pass you by

To anybody worrying – it may not matter in the future of yours

To anybody fighting – you are stronger than you think

To anybody comparing – you don’t see the bad parts

To anybody not smiling – you have so much in life to smile about

To anybody hurting – it will get better

To anybody over doing it – take some time for you

To anybody fretting – weigh up what’s important

To anybody feeling empty – notice everything around you, appreciate

To anybody struggling – you have got this.

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 2)

That was the great thing about this happening to a person like my Mam. She is such a strong lady that she made her cancer some sort of joke. A joke for her anyway. She’d constantly go on about how much we’d all miss her because she is possibly the greatest person to walk this earth.

Of course, she was exaggerating, she didn’t love herself like most politicians out there or celebrities who have been born into fame and constantly told by people around them how perfect they are. The hilarious thing about these situations was how everyone around her would be hysterically crying, genuinely sad tears and she would just laugh it off and tell everyone to man up. That was easy for her to say. She was the one that was going to die.

My mother’s dealing with her stage four diagnosis was what made the horrific scenes at the hospital easier. The tubes going in and out of each and every vein. The photos Daddy sent me after her first few rounds of chemo and the news that it wasn’t working. The more upbeat photos of her sat with a large gin and tonic in the hospice more recently. It was all of this that encouraged me to book my flight to Paris on September 4th. Today.

However, today is different. I’m not feeling as cocky in my ability to handle the loss of my mother which will inevitably happen. Initially I thought that exploring Europe would set me free from the pain that is about to come but then I feel the pain will creep up on me sooner and I’m not ready to handle it alone.

I have had such an intensely beautiful month spent in Dublin with my family, visiting Mammy every day and making memories that I am going to hold on so tightly. The same way a toddler would squeeze onto their Mum out of jealousy while she was breastfeeding their new born brother. So many memories yet not enough. I am not ready to go.

As I sit and pack the last of my survival kit into a bag that already looks too big to lug around station after station and up numerous sets of hostel steps, I stare at the photo of Mammy and I from graduation. The proudest moment of my life so far and one of hers. I look to the right of me at Jenna and consider where it all went wrong. I wonder what she is doing right this minute and a part of me wants to speak to her. Though it was her decision to leave, to allow her life to go off track, she still may silently need her older sister.

Categories
Adulthood Non-fiction Writing

10 Things that help me distract my creative brain

As a creative with an overactive imagination, sometimes I find it getting the better of me. I feel overwhelmed by thoughts and sometimes even scared, especially when I dream.

I find certain things in life distract this chaos and help me masses when trying to relax without thinking up a new plot line for a novel or a horrific scene in my head for the next short story competition. Here are a few things that help me distract my creative brain:

Reading

Something I don’t do enough and miss it when I haven’t made time to read, but it is something that helps me lose myself in this busy world and escape into another one.

The radio

Even if I’m not actually listening to it, I find that simply by having the radio on in the background soothes me. I also have a theory that the wisdom from shows on radio 4 subconsciously sinks in, thus upping my intelligence, but that’s just a theory!

Podcasts

Much like the radio, I find listening to podcasts very relaxing and a way to gain an insight into various topical discussions and learn new things away from my writing. I am also more likely to be consciously listening to a podcast which is always a good sign!

Music

Whether it’s on my walk to work, whilst getting ready for work or on a car journey in between, music is essential to my life. I struggle to go a whole day without it. It is my saviour.

Walking

Walking is another essential to the structure of my days and a nice break from my writing. Sometimes if writers block is looming, a nice stroll will soon sort it out.

Socialising

Being with those closest to me is an obvious candidate for distracting my creative brain and exchanging scary story lines for happy thoughts. If simply being doesn’t work instantly which it usually does, then I find talking about ideas I’ve had or dreams that are bothering me helps.

Being by the sea

The sea is amazing in both chilling me out down to the core and springing up new ideas within my creative side. I wrote a lot of my first novel by the sea and loved what I wrote.

Travelling and car journeys

With company or alone, I find car journeys (train or any other method of transport) a happy space in which to stop, to contemplate and to live in the moment. All of the activities in this list are about living in the moment and focusing on that to take a breath away from the chaos that is life, especially that of a creative, and travelling certainly does that.

Meditation

I tend to dip in and out of mediation and yoga but I find them both very useful. If I have had a particularly busy or mind boggling shift at the stores, when I come home to write, I meditate for five minutes before doing any work. This helps me to make the shift between different types of work and puts me in the correct zone to write.

Puzzles

Sudoku or jigsaws, without sounding like a grandma, are great in losing myself in the moment. They require focus so my brain can’t be bombarded with other stuff but not too much that they put stress on it.

Categories
Adulthood Non-fiction

My perfect writing day

My perfect writing day would begin with a wake up time of something later than 7AM! It would probably be a Sunday (no work – yay!) and so I won’t feel guilty for lying in until around 8 o’clock.

I will get up and boil the kettle to make myself a first cup of tea which I will enjoy with a tasty lemon yum yum and my book. I love having time to read other people’s work and I love taking the time to read without constantly staring at the clock thinking about how long I have until I have to get to leave the house.

Having read and drank and gained inspiration for my own writing, I will get up and boil the kettle for a second cup of tea which I will enjoy in silence, just thinking. I may be writing inside my head or simply allowing the ideas to bounce around my mind before I begin the serious business of getting them down onto paper.

Next I will mediate. Just for five minutes but a meditation settles my mind and puts me in the correct mental space in which I write best.

Then it’s all about my setup. In the summer months this will be more commonly in the garden, in the winter it’s usually at my desk, but ALWAYS it consists of coffee, water, maybe snacks, an incense burning, my diary and my laptop.

Then I will write. And write. And write.

No time restraints, no noise, just me, myself and my imagination…

Wine comes later after a successful amount of work has been done. That’s the perfect writing day for me!

Categories
fiction Stories Writing

Flight (part 1)

It is the big day I have been looking forward to for so many years. For so long have I wanted to spread my horizons further than London’s south bank and the memories that I have of Dublin as a child. A place that I recently felt urged to return to yet I didn’t really know why so I booked a cheap Ryan Air flight number FR115 a month ago and headed home for the first time in thirty years.

It wasn’t only to visit Mam in the hospice because that didn’t need to be done for a month continuously. I have been preparing for the outcome since her diagnosis and realistically could get there when needed to say my final farewells. There was something pulling me to my home town, like a gust of gravity that whooshed like a tornado over London grabbing only me and taking me over the Irish Sea to my place of birth.

I am off to Paris tomorrow on an adventure around Europe. I booked my interrail pass the day after I found out about Mam’s cancer as if to stick my two fingers up to the world for cutting another life short to that awful disease. Though travelling had always been at the back of my mind, at the bottom of my to-do list, I had always been waiting and making excuses about why not to go. Not having anybody to go with was usually the main one but for some reason also the world seemed a bit scary, scarier still each time I started browsing flights and hostels.

Receiving the painful news about Mammy removed this fear because nothing is worse to fear than death, the fear she had been instantly faced with, which could crop up at any time. On that day I headed straight to the nearest travel agents and paid one hundred and eighty pounds for my ten stop Euro rail pass inside three months.

‘Don’t you think you should wait until…’ Uncle Jimmy had remarked on the phone once Mam had told him my exciting news.

‘Wait for what?’ I replied. ‘My mother to die?’

I felt harsh saying this and even more so when Jimmy began to sob on the other end of the line, but I knew that Mammy wouldn’t have wanted me to wait. She’d have wanted me to go out and explore knowing that I could return at any time when things got really bad. She never wanted me to put my life on hold for anybody not even her and she was even more persistent about this after her diagnosis.

‘You’re twenty-two.’ She’d say. ‘Don’t hold out for me to die. It won’t be easy and no time waiting in expectation is going to make it easier.’