Marginalia

The other day I picked up an old book of mine and found a whole range of notes I'd written in the margins. Thoughts wound up in little scribbles and scratches across the pages. Collections of penciled-in question marks and lines. Marginalia. The printed text the sturdy frame around which were wound tendrils of thoughts and reflections. 

My rediscovery of this marginalia got me thinking about recording my thoughts and reflections in life's margins, underlining the day's significant phrases, the key points that carry meaning. My writing has always happened in the margins of the day; the early mornings that belong to just me because the rest of the house is still sleeping or in between tasks where a gap opens up like the space between paragraphs. 

From this formed the idea of a newsletter; a kind of intersection between my own accountability to keep writing, a desire to grow and nurture a community and to (hopefully) provide a little spontaneous inspiration or joy to others in the same way that discovering marginalia in a library book might suddenly provide a new perspective or insight. 

So, please sign up if you would like to join my exploration of life's marginalia, writing, books and general updates (there are a few exciting things coming in the hopefully not too distant future). Let's see where this goes!

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The world has changed so much in such a short space of time.

Lockdown has been tough - everything has paused, plans have dissipated, the everyday rhythms have been disrupted, and above it all hangs a sense of disaster - the toll this virus is taking on health and people and economies and basic survival.

I'm sure many of you are in the same position that I find myself in: balancing work with entertaining and schooling children. Libraries have closed, books are not considered essential items and therefore cannot be purchased during lockdown, resulting in a dwindling reading supply for story-hungry kids.

So, in light of that, I would like to make my first book, Witchfield (an adventure story with a magical twist aimed at 8-12 year-olds) available for free. I hope it brings a few carefree hours of being lost in a book.

You can download it in ebook format from Amazon for free from 27 April - 1 May. If you have a moment, a review on Amazon would be much appreciated! And if you'd like to know a little more about it, you can watch me read an excerpt here.

Stay safe, stay home, read!

"Tilly & Thandeka" is here

Sometimes it really feels like I'm just winging it, running on caffeine (and a glass or two of wine) trying to hold on to dreams and reality at the same time, desperately trying to not let anything else drop. It's been exhausting, it's been exhilarating, and yet finally, here it is: Tilly & Thandeka: The Crown of Ancient Ghana.

This is the first in a series of adventure stories about these two brave girls, set in South Africa and is aimed at 7-9 year-olds. There's a lot more I want to say about them, so I think I will reserve that for another post. At the moment it's only available in South Africa. You can buy it here.

Witchfield

Katie Peridot quite likes being ordinary. Unfortunately, some very out-of-the-ordinary things have been happening. On top of that her best friend, Mayuri, isn’t her best friend anymore, a sinister sponsorship programme is taking over her school, her mother is acting more crazy than usual and the only person who really seems to understand her is a peculiar cleaning lady. Then she teams up with Themba, the cleverest (and most unpopular) boy at school, and together their investigation takes them deep into the town’s abandoned mine.

What they find there is more terrible than they could have imagined. Can they save Witchfield before it’s too late?

The title definitely formed first: a town that seemed ordinary and boring, but was not. Then the characters came, rushing, filling that space. A sensible girl who liked rationality and just wanted to fit in. A mother who stood out. The ups and downs of their relationship. The friends around the girl. A lonely boy with big glasses who had his sights set high above the limitations of the everyday. A mysterious mountain. Unwanted magic. A villain with a nefarious plot (of course). And a cat (there had to be a cat).

And so the ideas swirled around me, finally settling into a coherent plot that I could then work on. Which I did. A lot. Deleting and cutting and rewriting. And giving-up and starting again. And giving-up and... Let's just summarise and say it took a long time.

I've always been fascinated by unconventional parent-child relationships and Katie and her mother gave me the opportunity to play around with this idea through their delightful, frustrating, bohemian ways. What I also really longed for in the story were the familiar contours of the South African landscape; a setting that reaffirmed that South African children's lives existed in books too. Having said that though, this was not the point of the story. It was never created to fill a literary gap. I  wrote it because these characters arrived insistently in my mind and had to be brave and go on an adventure. That's what drove the writing process, and if South African children smile because they recognise a little bit of themselves and their lives in Katie and Themba and Mayuri,  I certainly will be delighted too.

I wrote a book

I wrote a book.

(I may or may not have also written a whole heap of other things regardless of the fact that nothing is ever published. In this regard, writing is like a bad, slightly embarrassing habit that I can't seem to stop. I write quietly, perhaps a little secretively, in the extreme margins of my days. There's not much space, not much time, but somehow, it's been enough.)

But this book.

I knew there was something special about it when I started writing it ten years ago. The name. The characters that rushed at me so eagerly that I felt swamped. I haven't actually been writing it for ten whole years; for much of that time it was pushed aside, abandoned, banished, forgotten, rejected, hidden. Life happened. But it wouldn't go away; eventually, I pulled it out and faced it again. And again. And again.

So, here it is.

My book in my hands. It's been a long, long journey and the feel of its pages beneath my fingers is a kind of homecoming for me.

That seems all I'm capable of for now. I shall write something more useful soon, like what it's about, how I did it, what happens next and what I plan to do with it.

xx

(And by the way, if anyone is wondering whose magic created this beautiful cover, I was very lucky to find the amazing, extraordinary Cristy Zinn. Find more of her work here.)

It's February

It's February. Days clamoring hot, sitting too close and intimate in the week; one day melting into the next. The whirring of aircons is a constant, like some mechanical breath. A temporary coolness. Beyond its reach the air, moist and soupy, condenses on your skin. Slippery. Damp. It's the month of moisture, where nothing ever feels really dry. We prevail, as everyone must, with daily tasks, punctuating them by dipping in and out the cool circle of our plastic pool:  after breakfast, before school, after grocery shopping, before work, after cooking, before sleep. On hot afternoons, we watch from the veranda the air thickening with the promise of a storm. All too frequently clouds of clenched fists hold spitefully onto the rain. Thunder grumbles, no relief comes. We wait...

Over the last couple of weeks, I've had to acknowledge a dip in my productivity. This blog has become a somewhat silent place. I'd like to blame February (my accusation is that it's too hot to think). Writing, like most end-of-the-day tasks, gets neglected, and finally ignored.

But of course it's not really February. It's not the heat or the sapped energy.

It's the reality of living and working and mothering. It's a finite amount of time sliced thin. It's the lived modality of the "musts" before the "would like to's". So, instead of feeling constantly defeated by it, I have decided to post less often here. I'm sure I will get to the "would like to's" again soon, but for now there'll have to be a pause.

Dear readers, thank you for your support and kind words so far. I hope that you do stick around for posts that emerge sporadically, spontaneously, as and when there's a moment to spare!

The raw material out of which literature is crafted...

Recently, I've had my nose in The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker and so far I've found it to be a sensible, entertaining and practical writing guide, but then I'm a fan. It's a reminder (for me anyway) to trim back on adjectives and adverbs but not so much as to prevent anything interesting from growing. I think one of my favourite parts has to be Pinker's advice on using a thesaurus, "I write with a thesaurus, mindful of the advice I once read in a bicycle repair manual on how to squeeze a dent out of a rim with Vise-Grip pliers:'Do not get carried away with the destructive potential of this tool'."  That made me giggle.

I love the way style guides try to capture that elusive quality of language, that something, almost like a taste that the reader can savour and return to for more. It's such a difficult thing to put your finger on. In the seminal The Elements of Style, Strunk and White in 1959 remind us of the intangible yet very present nature of writing style, “here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind?... There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course.”

This has also made me reflect on writing as a craft, as something that can be shaped and influenced to take on a particular form or tone. Where does that come from? Does it come from hours of rearranging words on a page until it matches some internal echo of what we've read before? Writers are readers first of all, absorbing the language of others, internalising ideas and words like avid, obsessive collectors and creating inventories to draw on in the future. Surely writing has to be built on that and cannot just materialise out of nothing?

And where do style guides fit into this? Books and advice on writing? They prod and poke at prose, nudging it into a particular form. But can good writing really be taught? I have no consistent answer to that question (it often depends on the day). Sometimes yes, it seems that writing is a process like any other that needs to be trained and mastered, that it becomes more refined with practice and with reading. But on other days, it feels like the opposite, that it's either there or not, black or white, like some sudden, romantic gift.

While thinking about all this, I came across Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose via an article on Brainpickings, which affirms that intimate link between reading and writing. Francine Prose's advice to readers is to slow down and pay attention to the craft of writing by examining "the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel...the brilliant characterisation in Geore Eliot's Middlemarch...and to look to John Le Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue."

Francine Prose writes beautifully,

"With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. . . . it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices."

Whether it can be learned or not, I don't completely know, but good writing does just what Prose deems necessary: it encourages slowing down and savouring the language out of which it is built.