Juggling all the Hats by Sheena Wilkinson

I often use the metaphor of hats when I’m talking about writing – how I have to take off my writing hat and put on my editing hat. It’s not a startlingly original metaphor – I’m a novelist, not a poet. 

Today, as I was planning what to write for the blog, it struck me that those are only two of very many hats I have to wear as a writer, and I thought it might be fun to count up how many different ones I’ve donned in the last two weeks alone. Because it’s been one of those seasons when, in order both to promote my most recent book and to earn a living, I have, like so many writers, been doing a lot of very different things, all writing-adjacent, but few of them involving actually writing the next book. 

signing books -- one of my favourite things!

And it’s safe to say that when I started ‘writing fulltime’ I wouldn’t have had a notion how much juggling I would have to do, or how many different kinds of writing I would be helping other people with. 

some hats

Monday

Afternoon – running a writing for self-expression workshop for people with lived experience of mental illness.

Evening – launching First Term at Fernside – organising the event, baking the biscuits, wearing my best frock, schmoozing, signing books, and talking intelligently (I hope) on stage with fellow writer Shirley-Anne McMillan.

onstage with Shirley-Anne McMillan

Tuesday

Actual writing of my actual book!

Wednesday

Morning – teaching writing for children to Masters students on the Children’s Literature MPhil at Trinity College Dublin (online).

Evening – flying to London for tomorrow’s workshop.

Thursday – London

All day – teaching academic writing skills to PhD students at King's College, London, including one-to-one tutorials in the afternoon. 

the chapel at King's College London, where I popped in for much-needed respite 

Friday – London

Writing at my friend’s house; flying home. 

Saturday and Sunday – home!

Actual writing of my actual book!

But also – Sunday evening, driving to County Donegal, ready for two days of library visits.

the beach at Buncrana, in between visits 

Monday – Donegal 

Two library visits in two different towns, trying to convince children between eight and twelve that historical fiction is great fun. One child assumes my knowledge of World War One is first-hand, so this is a challenge. 

all ready to talk in Donegal 

Tuesday 

Same as Monday but also – driving home and packing for Wednesday.

Wednesday – home and Dublin

Morning – Train to Dublin (have to drive 50 miles first) to teach MPhil students in person.

Trinity College Dublin

Afternoon – bookshop visits around Dublin, signing books, having my photo taken, chatting to lovely booksellers and being look after by my publisher’s sales manager (which involves driving me around and buying me cups of tea). 

Ready for action at Dubray Books

Thursday – Dublin 

Morning – Two visits to two branches of the wonderful Dubray Books in different parts of Dublin, talking – for the first time apart from the launch – about First Term at Fernside. Signing books for young readers, talking to lovely booksellers. 

Evening – home again

Friday – home and Belfast

Morning – actual writing of my actual book

Afternoon – going to Belfast to talk about my book on The Ticket on BBC Radio Ulster

Kathy Clugston, who interviewed me about First Term at Fernside

Saturday – home 

Booking flights for Royal Literary Fund training in London next month

Writing this blog before actual writing of my actual book.

Of course, these are only the writing or writing-adjacent activities. There has also been reading, walking, running, eating, sleeping – a lot of sleeping; I tend to go to bed about nine when I’m on the road – and I was going to say housework but looking round my study right now, I would have to admit that would be a lie. And of course all the admin associated with self-employment. (Accountant, if you are reading this: my accounts really are on their way. Slowly.)

Life isn’t always so busy; I couldn’t cope if it were, and I’m happy to say that although my diary for next week says ‘BLOG TOUR’ I am not actually going on a blog tour, and I don’t have to write any blog posts. Instead, the lovely people at O’Brien Press have organised a tour for First Term at Fernside, and all I have to do is read the reviews and hope the bloggers liked the book. 

I shall be reading them from my sunbed – because I’m heading off on holiday, and not before time!

where I hope to be next week

 

 

 

 

Singed Around The Edges by Sheena Wilkinson

I’m writing this from Carrickmacross, a small and attractive town in County Monaghan. I’m in the middle of two days of school and library visits in the county. Next week it’s Kilkenny and Dublin, and then begins a month of weekly travel to England and Scotland – Manchester, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Edinburgh… And I have a book to write by the end of March. 

Yes, I know.  I’ve done what I advise everyone else not to do – I have burnt myself out. 

I have been too busy, too over-committed, for too long. I have spent too much time queuing in airports and yawning in trains and dashing round in the car. A few weeks ago – probably not unrelated – I ended up with the kind of horrible virus I haven’t had since I was a child. Too sick to read? That’s not on! For the first time in my writing career I had to cancel events.  

I panic when I look at my diary for the next two months. I have written JUST SAY NO on the wall above my desk (on a post-it, not the actual wall; I haven’t lost the run of myself that much). I have scrawled WRITE AT HOME on all the days in my diary when I am not physically somewhere else – these are few and far between. I didn’t use to have to tell myself to do that. Especially as most of those days are weekends. 

I know other writers often feel like this. Recently, Claire Hennessy wrote a great article on the subject of writers with day jobs for The Irish Times and it was contributing to this article that made me think I needed to write about this honestly here on Awfully Big Blog Adventure. (here)

Tired and overburdened is how I felt when I had a day job. It wasn’t supposed to be like this now. I’ve had seven books published, won some awards, had some lovely gigs – RLF Writing Fellow, Arvon tutor, teaching creative writing in settings ranging from prisons to universities. I enjoy all those things, which is just as well as I need the gigs to pay the bills. I just thought I’d be living the dream a bit more. Because let me assure you – 90% of this travelling isn’t to meet readers who have bought or love my books; mostly I begin events by saying who I am. 

I’ll keep on doing these gigs, and I am grateful for every invitation. But I haven’t got the balance right. I have said yes too often, squeezed out my writing time, squeezed out time to just BE. 

I have just bought my 2019 diary and it’s started to fill up. But I’m making a before-the-new-year resolution: take more time to write. More time to think. More time to read. More time to be. 

Back to Carrickmacross. It’s lovely. I’m happy to be here and the library have put me up in a gorgeous hotel. The children I met today were delightful, engaged and polite, with some great questions. Of course, one was the inevitable Where do you get your ideas from? and as I answered I thought – though didn’t say aloud – Gosh, I might never have another idea again. I’m too tired for ideas. But then I drove to this little town and took a walk down the main street. And this post is illustrated with some of the quirky, intriguing things I saw. You might see the same on any street if you look.  Any one of these photos might spark an idea for a story.

look closely for the layers of history 

Maybe I’m not that burnt out. Just a bit singed around the edges. 

A reminder from the streets of Carrickmacross about what it's all about -- sharing stories 

Snapshot of my Year by Jess Butterworth

This has been my first year as a writer under contract, and also my first year as a newlywed.

Today I’m excited that my second novel is almost ready to send off to my lovely agent.

I’m also upset because I had to wave goodbye to my husband at the airport for another stint of heart-breaking long distance.                                                

My husband is from outside the EU and with neither of us able to live or work in each other’s country yet, we’ve had to be creative in how we manage to be in the same place at the same time. So far we’ve lived in England, Australia, India and the US together.

In March we flew to the beaches of South India for our honeymoon. I spent much of my childhood in India and my second book is set there. Before we arrived, I was just beginning to have an idea of the story I wanted to write. Travelling was the perfect accompaniment to filling notebooks, reading, and doing all the research and nurturing a story seed requires.

But then my editor emailed me with the main round of edits for my first novel, Running on the Roof of the World, and I knew I needed a desk, some sort of regular internet connection and a base for a while. So we boarded a 36-hour train and headed into the foothills of the Himalayas, to stay near my father. This had its own challenges. There were frequent electricity blackouts and internet cuts. I remember preparing to speak to my editor by gathering every phone and placing them in a corner of a bedroom (the only place that received signal apart from a big boulder halfway down a slope). We made contact before a storm blew in and cut us off several times.  

The foothills are full of wonderful distractions. I spent many days watching Himalayan grey langurs bounce from branch to branch and sneak into our garden to the eat the flowers.  

We stayed through monsoon which meant that we lived in a cloud for two months. If I opened a window, the cloud drifted inside. Everything was damp, even our pillowcases. The cover of my notebook went mouldy.

Now as I sit back at my desk in Frome, Somerset, putting the last touches to my book, I pull from my memories to fill the pages with the sounds and smells of the mountains, and in the process remind myself of the wonderful times I had there with my partner.

Jess Butterworth

Of Bells, Poets And Motorways

I was to my Patron of Reading School, ninety miles away, in Ballymun, North Dublin.  I’d left in plenty of time, and looked forward to stopping for a cup of tea soon. The motorway was long and dull, but fast and straight. I was thinking about all the STUFF I had to do before heading off to Arvon to teach on Monday. ABBA post (about what? I was singularly devoid of inspiration), packing, emails – and of course, The Story.

Two posts ago, I told you my plan – six short stories in six months. It had all been going so well. Four stories written, sent off to their fate in four competitions. Fifth story ready to be edited, post-Arvon. All I needed was to bash out some sort of first draft of story 6.

Story 6 should have been easy. I’d had the idea for ages. I’d written lots of notes about the characters and plot in an exceptionally pleasing notebook. It involved several of my favourite things – 1920s boarding schools and war poets. It should have been racing along without a bother on it.

But it wasn’t. Doing the research was fine – for this story, I’m using an actual historical person, the Irish WW1 poet Francis Ledwige. (He doesn’t appear in the story – I don’t think I could write about a real person like that – but the story revolves round a photo of him.) But when I sat down to actually write, I just wasn’t feeling it. And it worried me.

I’d run out of steam. I wasn’t capable of writing six stories in a row. Probably all these stories would just sink without trace anyway. What was the actual point?

I was glooming along like this when I saw the flashing sign: ACCIDENT: MOTORWAY CLOSED. Great. Goodbye straight fast road and restorative cuppa at service station; hello miles-long tailback through narrow villages, surrounded by the equally aggrieved. (And yes, of course I spared a thought for the poor people in the accident: I was frazzled, not heartless.)

There were no diversion signs, and few direction signs.  For several miles I simply followed the queue, assuming we were vaguely still heading south. Just before twelve I turned on RTE radio just in case there was some information about the accident. It wouldn’t get me there any faster, but there’s often a comfort in knowing that you’ve been inconvenienced by something newsworthy.

There was nothing about the accident. Instead the presenter said, ‘And let us now pause for the Angelus.’ I’d forgotten they did that on RTE -- a twice-daily tolling of the Angelus bell, a call to prayer and reflection. In certain moods I can be inclined to think it quaint, but today it was just an irritation. 

I was about to switch over to something useful when the regular tolling of the bell made me pause. OK, I said to myself. Slow down – well, actually, you’re at a standstill, but slow down mentally. Just listen to the bells – bells are lovely! And I looked ahead at all the traffic: finally we had arrived at a signpost directing us back to the motorway. And everyone was queued up to turn right, hundreds of cars, going through the lights maybe ten at a time. If I hadn’t been summoned by those bells, I mightn’t have noticed, might have just gone with the – it would be wrong to call it a flow. Bad-tempered trickle.

I didn’t join that queue. The motorway could wait. On I went through undisturbed villages and along quiet roads past rivers and hills. I was still going vaguely in the right direction, but I had struck out alone. The motorway could wait. There would be another junction further on. There always is.

 

And this was Francis Ledwige country. These were the Meath valleys and rivers and fields which inspired his work before he joined the army and fought and died. I’d been here before, but never while Ledwige himself had been so much in my mind.

I’d love to say I stopped along the wayside and wrote the end of the story. I didn’t. I still had to get to the school in time for the second session. But when I did go back to the manuscript, I felt readier for it. It’s not finished yet, and I suspect it won’t go quite as planned. But that’s OK.