A Confession

Tags

bigbusiness, truth

I was walking down the road in Weymouth last Saturday evening when I stopped dead in my tracks, causing a collision with my husband who was walking behind me.

‘I know what happened!’ I said, peering into the distance, overwhelmed by sudden understanding.

‘Eh? What?’ said my husband.

‘I see it all. I know what I’ve been doing wrong. It’s all my own fault!’ I was still blocking the footway.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now can we get on?’

You couldn’t blame him for being a bit brusque. I’d rattled on all week about the problem I’d had with my desktop printer, raged about being forced to buy over-priced ink cartridges for the damn thing, complained loudly about being a victim of evil big business.

But it’s a regular feature of modern life, isn’t it? We all rush to assume the role of victimhood when things go awry, and we are all in search of someone – perhaps anyone – to blame for our misfortunes. Big business, capitalism, the government – any of those will do nicely. It’s an emotional reaction rather than a rational one. And, sadly, the truth all too often matters less than finding someone to pin the blame on.

When my printer went on the blink, I searched online for a way to fix it, and in the process read a great deal about the greed of manufacturers in charging high prices for print cartridges and trying to force us to buy them by ensuring that the cheaper compatible cartridges wouldn’t work. I jumped to the conclusion (there’s that emotional reaction!) that this explained the problem with my printer, and said so in a post on this blog. It was all too easy to fall into the role of Victim of Big Business.

Well, I can now tell you that this is not the case. I am not the victim of big business, but only of my own carelessness. I misinterpreted an instruction from the printer software – something I should have spotted if I’d been paying proper attention – and it took me more than a week to realise what I’d done. I had made a mistake, that’s all. Once I understood it, I had the printer working perfectly within a few minutes. There was no conspiracy, no evil plan to part me from my money – indeed, no problem at all apart from the one I had inadvertently created all by myself. And I am more than a little ashamed to have jumped on the victimhood bandwagon quite so eagerly. I shan’t do it again.

Obviously there are times when people really are victims, and we should be ready to defend them. But it would be helpful, wouldn’t it, if we all took the time to admit it when our reactions were emotional rather than rational – to stand up and say ‘Oops, my mistake, I jumped to conclusions’ when we’ve made false accusations? To sort out the fact from the conspiracy theory? So here goes: ‘Sorry, big business, in this instance it wasn’t your fault, it was mine.’ It’s the truth, and that’s more important than being right.

A little more calm rationale and a little less raging emotional response would probably do all of us good in these complicated times, don’t you think? I for one will not be assuming the role of victim without careful thought in the future.

Nostalgia and the Writer

Tags

Memoir, nostalgia, writing

Nostalgia – the bittersweet yearning for a lost time and place: the older you are, the more likely you are to have experienced it. You may be able to return to the place – but it doesn’t always help, since the other essential ingredient, the time in which you knew it, is irrecoverable. As the years pass the people you knew there may be lost, too. That’s why it’s bittersweet, of course.

The temptation to immerse yourself in a long-lost and rosily remembered past can be considerable; but is it altogether healthy? I asked myself this question while I was thinking about publishing a memoir written long ago. How do I approach this? Do I edit it from a modern-day perspective, or even update it? Or leave it be?

It was my first book, and time and experience have polished my ‘writer’s mind’ into a different shape since then. I could easily tighten it up into a better piece of writing, and I thought, too, of rearranging great chunks of it into a better order. But is that a good idea? Apart from the time and effort it would take, it would also require a lot of nostalgic revisiting of the past, that inconsolable ‘homecoming ache’, and I suspect that wouldn’t be good for me.

So here’s what I decided to do. I will edit the book with the lightest possible touch. I will let my own voice from the past tell the story, even if the writing is imperfect. I will add no more than a short explanatory note and a little coda, dated in the present. I will leave the book in its original form, beginning in a jaunty style, moving on to something deeper, and ending with a sense of painful loss. That’s the way it all happened and I prefer not to interfere with it, even if the construction now seems a little clumsy. It’s all too easy to curate the past, to edit out the less appealing events; I’d already done that to some extent in the original book and I don’t want to take it any further. The work will be done fairly quickly and I can publish the book and move on.

The past is a great place to while away an hour or two, and it’s good for us to record it. But life goes on in the present, and this writer will be doing her best to remember that.

 

I hope to publish A Time, a Place and a River in 2020.

My Printer Ink is Costing The Earth

Tags

Desktop Printers, printer ink, Recycling

I don’t usually indulge in rants, but in this case I really feel I need to say something.

Early this year my elderly desktop printer broke down irrevocably. Fair enough, I said – I’ve had good use from this machine for many years. It’s been good value for money and, in general, pretty reliable. For this reason, I decided to buy another printer from the same manufacturer. I had just begun work on a project printing and binding my own books, so I invested in a bigger, better printer that could do useful things like print both sides of a page, and cope with A3 paper. It was quite an expensive purchase, but I was delighted with it. Until the other day.

Out of the blue, in the middle of a print job, the printer announced it was out of black ink. Odd, I thought, since I had noted the black ink cartridge was half full only a day or two earlier and I hadn’t printed anything at all in between. I replaced the cartridge anyway, but the printer stubbornly insisted it was still out of ink. And, of course, the printer won’t work at all if it thinks one of the cartridges is empty.

You can guess what followed: hours of time installing and uninstalling cartridges, and all sorts of other suggestions found online. None of them made a scrap of difference. The printer still insists the black cartridge (and indeed that each of the two brand-new cartridges I also tried) is empty. Unless I can persuade it otherwise, it is now a useless heap of very expensive plastic junk.

Now it’s only fair to admit that I have been using ‘compatible’ cartridges. They worked perfectly with my old printer, and also with the new one until now. But manufacturers are now programming chips in the cartridges to know when they’re not of their own manufacture or have been refilled. So why don’t I use the ‘original’ cartridges sold by the manufacturer, which might solve the problem?  Easy – they are extortionately expensive. A complete set for my printer, at the cheapest price I can find from a reputable source, represents nearly 75% of the cost of the printer itself. And any I find that are significantly cheaper, I am suspicious of – they may not be the genuine thing, or may have been refilled, and thus probably still won’t work. Imagine buying a new car and finding that a tankful of fuel costs 75% of the purchase price! You wouldn’t be able to afford to run it, and if my printer will only use the ‘original’ cartridges, I can’t afford to run that either. My fledgling bookbinding project will come to an abrupt halt. The increase in the price of ink, as best I can calculate it, would be approximately £2 per book. Just for ink? That’s outrageous, and I can’t afford it.

It would probably be cheaper to buy an inexpensive printer and throw it away when the cartridges run out – and I have indeed heard of people doing this. But this situation is completely unacceptable in an age when the ‘throwaway society’ is being questioned, and we are being asked to keep the things we buy long-term – especially items largely made of plastic – for the good of Mother Earth. We are being asked to recycle and re-use – but printer manufacturers are making it increasingly difficult to use recycled printer cartridges. They should be leading the way in encouraging recycling. It’s the least they can do.

So where does this leave me and my printer? Well, I can buy a single black cartridge from the manufacturer and see if that works. It might, and provided the same thing doesn’t happen to all the other cartridges, it may just be a workable solution for me. Or I can call in a computing professional and see if there is some way to bypass the problem. Perhaps there is. But in both cases I fear it might be no more than a temporary fix, and in both cases it’s going to cost me money to find out. Or, in extremis, I can consign my shiny new printer to landfill and buy another. But will I simply find myself in the same situation in a few months’ time?

As a writer I need a printer – as a binder of my own books I need it even more, and I need it at a reasonable price. As a responsible citizen of planet Earth, I want to make the best use of it for as long as possible, and I want to use recycled cartridges. I don’t want it to cost the Earth, or cost me the Earth. Is that really too much to ask?

Every Writer Needs Time Out – Even Me

Tags

Artwork, creativity, Happiness, holiday, illustration, publishing, summer, workoholic, writing

Back at the beginning of the year a friend told me I was a workaholic. You are, you know, she said. Who, me? Nonsense, I spluttered – lazy lump – queen of procrastination. But when I looked back this summer at the work I’d got through in the previous twelve months, I began to think she might have a point.

I’d written a 10,000 word story, The Herbarium, illustrated it with my own drawings (that took all winter), then learned bookbinding and created copies of the book. It was a very time-consuming project, much as I loved it. In the meantime, I had written the first draft of a second book, The Chesil Apothecary, as a follow-up, and done some work on its illustrations too. As if that wasn’t enough I had also re-edited, and created hand-drawn covers for, my three Larus novels in preparation for republishing them next year. Throw in weekly blog-posts to write and it was really no surprise to find I was hopelessly burned out by the end of July.

I needed a breathing space. So I decided to take time out through August. This is not something I normally do, but my writing was becoming stale and repetitive, and my eyes were suffering from the constant precise close-work of bookbinding and drawing. So I gave myself a break. I read, I walked, I went out and stared at the sea or the green of the garden. I let my mind wander where it liked. Yes, I admit I did a little writing and editing – but not very much. There was no bookbinding, no drawing, no blogging.

By the end of the month fresh ideas were bubbling up and my eyes no longer ached. Magic! So I set to, and made myself a list of all the things I want to accomplish in the next year or so. It included a lot of bookbinding in preparation for a talk I’m giving on the subject at the Blandford Literary Festival in November (marked ‘urgent’), the completion of the text and drawings for The Chesil Apothecary (marked ‘quite urgent’), the final preparations for republishing the Larus series (marked ‘early 2020’), the re-editing for publication of an unpublished 90,000 word work – working title A Time, A Place and a River (marked ‘later 2020’), and the completion of an unfinished novel, Long Reach and Merrythought (marked ‘um, sometime but preferably before spring 2021’). There’s more, but you get an idea of the workload I’m setting myself.

It all feels urgent – I’m not getting any younger, you know – but I really need to build in some proper breathing spaces to the schedule this time, or I’ll be burning out again.

For a start, I will be pencilling in my August break again for next year and making it an annual event. It’ll be something to look forward to when I’m up to my neck in scribbled edits and PVA glue. Taking time out, I discovered, isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity.

On Reflection

Tags

boats, flowers, Memoir, riverbank, writing

It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it, when you feel something is missing in your life but can’t quite work out what it is? This unsettling sensation had crept up on me in recent months and left me puzzled.

It seemed to stem from a point earlier in the year when I re-read and edited three of my novels in preparation for republishing in 2020. While I was about it, I reviewed various pieces of unpublished work to see if there was anything that might be worth turning into an e-book. So far, so good – but with these reflections came that odd feeling of something missing. Very strange, and slightly disturbing, too.

Had I not known better, I would have thought it was the sea I longed for. It features heavily in the three novels I was revising. But I can see the sea every day. I can see it now as I write. I can walk down to it, watch it, listen to it, catch the scent of it, walk into its depths if I so wish, at any time. But much as I love it, it doesn’t satisfy the curious yearning, the Something Missing.

It remained an unfathomable mystery until the other day. My husband had booked us a trip on a horse-drawn barge. He knows he can’t go far wrong in keeping me happy with anything involving a boat and a river.

So off we set at the most sedate walking pace a horse can manage, sometimes unhitched and gliding alone, the beautiful disorder of marsh plants on the river bank drifting slowly past. Willowherb and woundwort, loosestrife and watergrass, and the exquisite jewel-weed. Sheer bliss. No-one got a word out of me the whole way. I was so quiet the tour guide thought I was unhappy with it. Quite the reverse, of course. I was in waterplant-covered, dragonfly-whirring, horse-drawn heaven. There were forty other people on the boat, but for me it was my own private, familiar world. What more could anyone ask but a slow, silent boat drifting on a warm, still day? I certainly couldn’t have asked for more.

The final confirmation that this was my missing link came at the end of our little voyage when the barge swung broadside, heading leisurely across to its moorings, and the whole width of the river was revealed – still, slow, green and filled with the dancing reflections of trees. Oh, those reflected trees! Exactly what I had longed for. And I mean exactly.

It was, of course, my re-reading of my unpublished book, a long memoir of boats on a river that had stirred all this up. Obvious really – though I had so struggled to pin it down. It took the real thing to make it clear. Perhaps I should take it as a nudge from the fates, telling me I should publish in full this book written forty years ago. I think perhaps I might just do that. Who knows, I might even rename it On Reflection.