Avoiding the hole in the road

Original Post

My lack of blogging over the past weeks has been due to some extreme focus on writing a paper that has taken my interest. I love being focused and interested; instead of getting caught up in family's and friends' drama I can retreat into my own world of thinking.

Whilst this may sound really boring to some people, it serves me a a kind of gestation time, an incubation of my thinking process where I can be quiet and alone and consider ideas that may, one day, be woven onto the fabric of my external life.

It's been a strange couple of months preceding this, with lots of difficulty and joy, being let down and realising people are not what they seem to be. Lot's of moving around outdated areas of my life to make room for the future, which looks very, very bright. So, instead of constantly going back over old things, reliving learned helplessness and old patterns, I am making my own new patterns. Making these new patterns depends a lot on whether you listen to other people's advice and to yourself.

Years ago someone gave me an anonymous poem (it was passed to me as anonymous, but I now realise it was based on Portia Nelson's 'Autobiography in Five Short Chapters') and it is still relevant today when culling the dead wood.

Edit notes 18th April 2011 Many thanks to the reader who left a comment below. It's interesting because when I wrote this blog I was working from my own memory of this poem, and from notes I took, at a time when I was working very hard to change my life. The comment relates to my not giving credit to the author, which of course I will do immediately. The poem was 'Autobiography in Five Short Chapters' by Portia Nelson. However, my own interpretation of this poem, through the lens of time and personal experience, and maybe even forgetfulness and sadness, has been mistaken for a misquote, and I will remove my own interpretation of this poem on this post, but not from my heart; this was how it filtered through my consciousness when applied to myself, an example of how memory can sometimes distort words to provide personal comfort - and perhaps exactly what the author intended.

Change is good...

It's been a funny couple of weeks with a couple of u-turns. The most significant was my return to fiction writing. I decided on a change of genre and wrote a psychological thriller - they say write what you know! I 'd had a big break from fiction writing because of disillusionment with the publishing world during the recession, but now I've decided that I can do it for fun, it's is fun again!

It was like riding a bike. The familiar rush of excitement at the plotting stage, the waking up in the night with a new idea. Of course, I was doing the novel for National Novel Writing Month, and reached 50000 words just in time. This time, though, it would be different. I'd been reading Scarlett Thomas books for a while, and really resonate with her writing because it has a scientific and philosophical edge to the content. So I decided that I would try to write something along the same lines. I actually felt like my brain was going to the gym, waking up the imagination neurons and the storytelling axons that had been resting for a little too long.

In previous novels I have written a love story, or a story about relationships, and inserted some quirky, sometimes, downright weird, scenes. So I decided to write something weird and just outside the field of normal vision, and insert a relationship! It's going really well and I'm glad I managed to change my mind about fiction writing. It's fun and a big part of my life. Watch this space for more about 23 Acacia Road.

I've also moved offices to a more modern place outside the city centre. One Central Park is a beautiful workspace and a perfect environment to work, a very different place to where I spent the past fifteen years. My office on Piccadilly, Manchester had a prestigious address, and looked good on paper, but was dirty and cold inside. It just didn't live up to expectations once you really got to know it. My new office hasn't such a good address, but just stepping inside gives a sense of serenity and well being. I was dreading leaving the city centre, but after just two weeks I'm very happy to be working in Newton Heath.

Change is good. Finally. Risky, but good. I've always been a safe routine kind of person - even holidays are a stressful break from the day to day, week to week, year to year. Yet now, I've managed to change two major aspects of my life and I'm feeling pretty chilled out about it. Maybe I'm finally emerging from the my caterpillar constraints and learning to fly? So all I need to do now is take a risk and write some fiction in my new office and who knows what might happen!

Identity, Women and Health: a new perspective to be published

I received an email yesterday telling me that my book will be published. It was a defining moment in my life, for deeper reasons that the buzz of 'being published'.

About twelve years ago I wrote a book about the experiences of women who had endured domestic violence. I prepared a proposal and three chapters and sent it off to a publisher. About a week later, I naively rung them to ask if they had a chance to review it. The woman at the end of the phone told me that it would never be published because I didn't have 'a profile'. She explained that I would need to produce an academically referenced text and prove my knowledge on the field before any of my writing would be considered. She wasn't rude or condescending, just matter of fact. It was as if a microscope has been applied to the dysfunctional nature of my life to date, something that I had never taken full responsibility for, and all the gaps highlighted in neon yellow.

I was angry at first, but eventually embarked on a twelve year, sometimes turbulent but often affectionate, relationship with knowledge which reached its pinnacle yesterday. It was such an emotional moment for me, the girl who was told by her parents and teachers at the age of sixteen that she would 'never amount to anything', that I burst into tears. It's been hard work and in the process I have become a different person, now I am on the brink of publishing a major theory in identity construction, I realise the journey adage 'it's not where you get to, it's where you came from' applies to me and my work. The two most important words I have learned during that time are: social construction.

The book is mostly written and is due for delivery to the publisher next year. In the meantime, I will adapt it and hone it and dedicate the work to every person everywhere who has been held down by assumptions about class, gender, sex and social status, and particularly women who suffer the medicalisation of natural transitions in women's health.

I'm so grateful for the chance to do this, and for patience I learned along the way that has helped me to understand just that little more about life and truth.