Trembling Madness

Notes from the Writer's Diary: Part Twelve

I am blocked.

Not completely, but enough to shake awake the thing inside me that keeps telling me I’m shit at all this. ‘All this’ being the career I’ve been picking my way towards for the last eighteen years.

If I was mentoring a client I’d say that what is actually happening is that, like every other writer that ever lived, I am going through a patch of hard writing, because writing is hard, especially so if you have other stuff going on in the background.

I try all the tricks – I walk away from it, I set timers and make myself work within the allotted time, I work on other projects, I return and return but still the world I was working on, working in, won’t be brought back to life. To be honest, I feel a bit mad with it all - caring for mum, managing paid work, trying to write the book, living in a timeline of such anger and violence. All this and all the time my body is attempting to get me to the other side of menopause. I feel a bit mad with it all.

One day I update my laptop. It takes very little time, and afterwards all is fine, except the MacBook goes a bit glitchy connecting to the internet and asks me to sign into a couple of things I’m already signed into.

The next morning I creep to my desk with my coffee at 6am as usual and switch the laptop on. There is the usual Bing Bong of it coming to life, and the apple logo appears and then…nothing. It stays a black screen with the logo on it. I switch it off and then back on and there it is again – the white logo, the black screen, then nothing. I sip my coffee. I call to my husband that the mac isn’t switching on. I chase around the internet on my phone to find an answer. I am not yet really panicking. The novel is saved in three different places. I have an external hard drive on which I backed everything up a few months ago. I’m not entirely sure if everything I’ve worked on between the big back up and now is on the cloud. I’m not entirely sure what the cloud is; one of those magic, possibly bad, internet things. I’m vaguely aware that my other work stuff might not be backed up.

My husband takes the laptop to his IT department at work and, mid-morning, as I’m getting ready to catch a train to York St John Uni for an author, editors and agents event, I get the message that the mac is dead. I think it is a joke. It is not. A panic rises in me. The course I have been working on, the notes for my Substack, my spreadsheet of opportunities and submissions are all on the mac and yes, I have saved the precious ongoing creative work, but my bread and butter writer life, my portfolio career, may well be gone. I feel panic, terror even, I cry a little bit, but also somewhere deep down, I feel a sense of relief.

I examine the feeling, like running my tongue around my teeth to find one that is giving me pain. I follow the feeling and find it is attached to one particular low paid job that always takes many more hours than is budgeted for. It is work I I have been doing for years, work I took on out of a sense of obligation, which has become nestled in resentment and padded out with frustration - frustration that I am doing this job rather than having time to work on the novel. The novel is slow work - a lot of necessary thinking, redrafting, adjusting. Slow, slow writing towards the end point. This slow work time is the time that is always swallowed up by caring responsibilities. It is never the low paid and long hours work time that is sacrificed. I could dig further, because this is a pattern I recognise in myself. It is attached to low self esteem. But I don’t dig further, not today. It’s enough to have the painful tooth identified. Now I need to pull it.

The author event is good, as it is every year. It’s one of those jobs that I look forward to. I take 1-2-1s with PhD and MA students, helping them in their publication journeys, boosting confidences. In between events I take some time to wander into York looking for a building I’ve heard about but never seen. I walk up and down the street several times until I finally find it – the oldest house in York, tucked down an alley way called Trembling Madness Apartments.

The passageway leads to a courtyard. Within the courtyard are the ruins. An ancient window looks out into the brickwork of the wall behind it, floor joists jut from the wall, holding up air. This is the sort of ruin I like – the juxtaposition of it; the bins against the masonry, the fag ends next to the romance of a 12^th century window trailing ivy like a fairytale. I stand for a while undoing the modern to reach the past, reducing the surrounding buildings to nothing, the minster back to its original wooden structure, the window back to a view of the river, the fields. The woman in my novel would have known this place as a ruin too. It’s possible she walked here. I feel her feet in my feet, as if the building is a pin that sticks us together, holding us in one space.

As I leave, an American couple is talking a photo of the alleyway with its comical name. I apologise for spoiling the picture, and the lady tells me I suit the name perfectly and I laugh and embrace it: I am trembling madness, I am swirling between jobs, I am writer, I am carer, I am menopause, I am slipping between worlds and finding a way back to myself, and I’ve been doing that forever.

The evening panel event goes well. Good questions, lots about interpreting the market, finding the balance between what you want to write and what you feel you should write. Artistic and commercial.

Be authentic, I hear myself saying to the students, write what you are passionate about, work with yourself and not against yourself.

On the train back, I feel for that tiny moment of relief that was in me when I knew the laptop died. I listen to it. I watch the ghost lake passing, the mound of seamer beacon guiding me home and remind myself that I got stuck at the exact same point when writing the last book. I make an appointment to chat to my agent, they are used to neurotic writers and their waining confidence, and my agent’s straightforward direction and encouragement always help when I’m like this.

I order a new computer, a desktop. It is an expense that I cannot really afford but I cancel some subscriptions and luxuries that will make the monthly payments possible. It is my main work tool, after all. I invest in myself.

I cancel the job with the long hours and low pay. It feels like madness to cancel paid work. But I feel refreshed, blown clean. I feel unblocked.

The next day I creep to my desk at 6am, coffee in hand. I listen for a minute to swallows on the phone lines outside. Then I open the manuscript, and write.

Until next time

x

PS

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