London Calling

Grubby old London is neither so grubby nor so ill-tempered as I remember. The crowds are worse - but a few blocks back from the Monopoly board streets you can find leafy little parks and quirkily meandering streets. Step off the footsore tourist trail and there are treasures lying in wait: Sir John Soane's extremely quirky Museum, the rooftop garden and woodland of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Ladywell's water meadows. It's often the small and unexpected that delights: scattered sunlight on Victorian facades, the soaring voice of a soprano practicing scales in a church, a late night meeting with a suburban fox.
The Queen was out and about yesterday. I didn't see her; I was busy admiring sycamore trees and a photo of Wilfred Owen.
The AusNZ Festival and subsequent days of meetings have been fun, fast and curious. This weekend I have something altogether trickier in mind: Winston Churchill and Will Shakespeare are on my meeting agenda - wish me luck; I've heard they're elusive. But here somewhere.

Festival tripping

A hectic few months of completing a novel, editing a magazine, catching up with my family, and I'm off again, heading to London for the Australia & NZ Festival of Literature & the Arts.
It has been more than a smidge stressful getting to this stage - the schedule for signing off on Donnel's Promise was punishing (18-21 hour days in edits and proofing: maybe this will be one long-haul where I really will sleep on the flight) and the delays over ticketing for the festival added to the stress. But on track now for a fun and work filled month in the UK. If you're in London at the end of the month, come along and say 'hi'.

Juggling

A month of dedicated writing time disappears more quickly than you can imagine. But not without trace: 50,000 words, thousands of photographs, a host of new friends and memories and ideas and focus. Retaining the last as I squeeze back into life on the opposite side of the world, especially at the frenzied festive season, proves a challenge.
But here I am in the first week of 2014, once again writing, juggling work and family and editing and any number of commitments, wishing it was less hot and that I had fewer interruptions, and that Paris and Ieper and Scotland were only a train ride away. And an email arrives from Vollezele; one of the writers who shared the Villa reminding me of that time and space, and I am once again standing in the narrow kitchen, looking out at lawn and woodland and thinking about artillery fire while I wait for the coffee to brew and the world a hundred years distant to shape itself in my mind.

Day 18

Three cock pheasants fighting at the edge of the woods beyond my door. They leap at one another then wander about quite contentedly, so I assume it's a mock fight. Meanwhile I'm thinking about men being slaughtered by machine guns and torn apart by shrapnel.

There's a poignant memorial at a cemetery, once a trench, near Fricourt: 'The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.'

Half the World

Villa Hellebosch, my home for the next month, is peaceful, comfortable, charming. And - most important - it really does deliver time and space for an undivided focus on writing.

After a week of rushing around the world (not to mention the excess of pre-departure rushing that rushing around the world requires) it comes not a moment too soon.
My journey included three beautiful days at Lake Cavanaugh, Washington State, two brisk nights in Yorkshire, and three glorious, culture-laden days in Paris where I walked my feet to blisters and gobbled up an excess of art and music. Musee d'Orsay is definitely on the list for a return visit, while concerts in the city's lovely old churches, including the tiny and sublime Sainte Chapelle, proved the find of the trip and may be compulsory hereafter.
On Sunday evening Europe's efficient rail system delivered me to Brussels and thence on to Vollezele, and here I sit, dividing my time between the laptop and the view, and discovering that the novel I thought I was coming here to write has been taken over by another. So be it.

Today has been warm (19 degrees), the sun bright, though it now falls in lengthening shadows, the wind busy with twisting drifts of golden leaves. Windfall apples hide in the grass and the fields alternate between corn stubble and flowering mustard and freshly turned earth. TheVilla's woods smell of leafmast and wild mushrooms.
I am privileged to be here, to have this time and this place, to be writing 10 hours a day. I may not want to leave.

In praise of writing residencies

Last week my hard drive died, suddenly and inexplicably, leaving gaping holes in my backed up data. Turns out you don't know what you're missing as soon as you're missing it. It sneaks up on you kind of slow.
But it was a good week too. I was awarded a writing residency in Belgium. Dedicated writing time, no interruptions, no other demands on my time - it's hard to imagine but, I suspect, easy to experience.

Passa Porta International House of Literature is an international organisation based in Brussels. They have an apartment for writers in Brussels and two more in Flanders. October will find me heading for Europe, laptop under my arm, to focus on the new novel. (I'm hoping to have finished the current one first. For which some uninterrupted writing time would be extremely beneficial.)

Because Europe is so far away, because I don't get there very often, I'll be packing as much as I can into the time I'm away. Friends, agents, publishers, festivals, book fairs and research will be squeezed around the edges of the residency. Right now it feels kind of unreal: the first flush of excitement has worn off, the list of jobs that have to be done first is mounting. But still I catch myself, now and then, thinking: Nothing but time to write. No interruptions, no family, no garden, no business, no housework, no teaching, no editing, no magazines, just writing. Can it get any better than that?

And I do know that, somewhere along the way, it'll sneak up on me that I'm missing some of those things. And that, too, might become a part of the novel I write.

Holiday...?

I haven't had a holiday in a year. We finally plan a week away and on Day One two things happen: first, we have a fairly hair-raising trip in a small aeroplane; second, I spend a high proportion of the time planning how to work the experience into a novel - not just in terms of the specific words I might employ, but also in mentally debating the depth of reader skepticism.
Examples: The luggage hit the roof of the plane. Really? Yes, really. 
A plastic ice cream container is not the ideal receptacle for vomit, at least, not unless you get the lid on really fast. And off again, same speed. And on again, and... you get the idea. (Which beats the reality). 
In certain circumstances it's really not a big deal to be suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly covered in someone else's vomit. Who'd have thought it? (Maybe it helps if you're related.)
But a shower and a good night's sleep later, what's really interesting is that a writer is never on holiday. Battered (and spattered) by clear air turbulence, I was writing. In my head, sure, and maybe I'll never find a place to use that material, but I was, nonetheless, busily capturing it in words. Maybe it's a coping mechanism. Maybe it's a compulsion. Maybe writers don't ever get to have holidays because you never get to leave the writing behind.