A Day in the Life, or should it be Paperback Writer?
As an insight into the writer's life (and maybe into how procrastination works) I thought I'd treat you to a day in the life of a part-time writer. Since starting the new day job in mid-April, I've been doing that commuting thing Monday to Thursday, and Fridays have been my writing day. For a variety of reasons, most of them not at all fun, most of my Fridays have in fact been spent on other things but this week I had a genuine all-day chance to sit at a laptop, or with pen poised over a favoured notebook, to write. Let's see what I actually did. I started my day with connections to other people, which seems reasonable enough. I dipped into Twitter for a couple of minutes (it will eat whole hours, if you let it) and spotted a submission opportunity. Then I caught up with the emails I'd been ignoring all week, and identified another couple of submission opportunities from writing newsletters and the like. I also offered my services to an embryonic working class writers' festival which has been sparked by Natasha Carthew, who I think is Cornish. I remember reading an article she wrote in The Guardian about the lack of (particularly positive) representation of working class families in children's books.
Comrades! This is a call to arms - we’ve got to get ourselves a #WorkingClassWriters Lit Fest! I’ve been doing the circuit and we’re a bit underrepresented int we? Let’s get a discussion going & pls spread the word - Cheers! ✊@Kalamene @KitdeWaal @kovesi1 @Sarah_Crown #Diversity pic.twitter.com/SHOaUrfCBf
— Natasha Carthew (@natashacarthew) July 12, 2018
After a lunchbreak I wrote a few hundred words of the semi-rural fantasy but I was stuck on a scene so I figured I'd do something else for a bit. So I sat with a notebook and pen and brainstormed an idea for a new story. Partway through this process it suddenly became imperative to know whether that was a Telecaster or a Rickenbacker I could hear at the end of a Swinging Blue Jeans song I was concurrently listening to for research purposes. A quick Google revealed photos showing them using both, so none the wiser I resumed listening and ploughed on. Of course the question now arises, why was I listening to the Swinging Blue Jeans for research? Well, I'm doing an homage to the three-minute pop song for the Ilkley Literature Festival Fringe this September so I went to Billy Fury on Spotify and hit a random Related Artist. I also worked my way through Freddie and the Dreamers and Wayne Fontana. The things I do for art. Later still, I went to a secondhand and antiquarian book fair (in sweltering heat! Why would I do such an idiotic thing?) and coveted many expensive books on northern industrial history, and dialect. There were half a dozen I would have loved to buy but they ranged in price from £70 to £250; if you've paid that much for a book you'd never dare read it in case of finger smudges and tea drips. Or I wouldn't, anyway. I treat (tret? I never write it down; the dictionary claims the past tense is treated but not in West Yorkshire it isn't) myself to a 19th century history of Bradford, which of course is important research for a number of stories I haven't written yet, not to mention the semi-rural fantasy novel I'm writing now, honest. At least half an hour was lost to me just having a quick flick through the new book when I got it home. Then I rang my dad to tell him about said book, and coincidentally he'd bought me a book on northern industrial history from a charity shop the day before. Way cheaper than anything at the book fair, naturally. Cue conversation about local history and old books. After tea it was getting kind of late to do any serious work and the heavy rain was hypnotic, and the storm light made the valley look like an enhanced photograph. But then I made a cup of tea and sat down at the desk with every intention of concerted effort. And wrote a blog post.