Dream

Getting Unstuck?

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

It’s been three months since I last posted a blog post. I’m very sorry. Life has been unexpectedly sticky.

Nothing major, you understand.

The last book in the Margaret Demeray series came out in September, and I’m still suffering book bereavement. On the other hand, since then several readers have written to ask me to continue the series, so I’m thinking about that and Margaret and Fox may have to put up with the inside of my brain again sooner than they’d thought.

Then, I retired from my long career in October.

The plan, such as it was, was that once I had my involvement in a local literary festival was over I would concentrate on writing, scheduling more talks and working more effectively on the business side of both. I had a novel to finish which I’d started in early 2025 and which had been interrupted on and off for months. But I’d plenty of time now didn’t I?

Best laid plans, as Robert Burns would say, gang aft agley. My involvement took a lot more out of my time (and me) than I’d anticipated, and then, of course, came Christmas.

Christmas meant the arrival for several days of children plus one of their friends, my in-laws and my mother (although my mother doesn’t have to stay overnight). Complicating matters in terms of space, sometime in the summer, my husband started to redecorate the hall, which meant moving the piano, shoe racks, bureau, wine rack into another room where they are blocking a bookcase and various things I periodically want. He promised the decorating would be done by Christmas. I probably should have specified which Christmas he meant. It clearly wasn’t 2025.

Around about mid-December, there’s always a part of me that wonders why on earth I’m cooking yet another Christmas dinner for lots of people, having done it most years since about 1981. This feeling usually wears off by Boxing Day when we’re happily eating cold cuts and contemplating a Turkey Curry for the 27th. Next year, perhaps I will hand the whole lot over to my children and hope they clear up after themselves. (Flying pigs may assist them.)

Through all this, the work in progress stopped and started until the whole thing got stuck. It feels as if the book doesn’t quite know what it wants to be – a murder mystery? A straight historical novel? This is the most muddled ‘first draft’ I think I’ve ever created, and that’s saying something.

The third book in the Lulmouth Bay series will hopefully be out this Spring. I also want to start the sequel to The Incomer soon if not Margaret 7. But somehow despite the fact that I now have more days to write in, all this seems overwhelming.

I feel mentally stuck. Part of this is possibly Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s been dark and miserable in my part of the world for what seems like years rather than on and off for months, but could part of it being to do with no longer working in the ‘day job’ and finding a new rhythm for my life in which writing isn’t ‘as well as’ but the main focus?

I never thought that I would miss my job, and truthfully, I don’t.  I don’t think there’s been a moment that I’ve regretted retiring, but there have been several days when at nine a.m, I half want to join a daily team catch up to talk about goals and challenges for the day and have a general chat about what everyone’s watching on TV or their family dramas.

I even dream about my former job and colleagues and supposedly, that means I’m yearning for something about who I was when I was working. Is this true? If so, what is it I’m missing?

I never felt defined by my job, and I am up to my ears with things to fill my time now. But maybe I’m missing the validation which a paid job with an employer gave me.

It’s hard to explain that what I’m doing now is work and takes up as much if not more of my time as my job did. People tend to think that writers divide their time between talking intellectual nonsense in cafés with other authors, wandering with the Muse in meadows and pouring deathless prose onto paper. But for myself I spend very little time in cafés, and conversation with authors is most likely to be despairing over deadlines and edits. As for the Muse, she’s frequently AWOL or providing too many contradictory and/or nonsensical ideas at once.  ‘But you enjoy writing!’ people say. Not always. Sometimes even housework seems more appealing.

As I once wrote in ‘Feeling Failure’ the most useful course I ever took was on the change curve. I knew retiring would be a change, but it was a change I’d been looking forward to for a long time and I didn’t expect to feel much in the way of loss, and I’m not sure I do. But I do feel a little discombobulated and a little stuck, which is, in fact the bottom part of the change curve. I know from experience this needn’t be where I stay. Even writing this down and admitting to it helps me remember that maybe I just need to let my mind process things in its own sweet, peculiar way until I climb out.

I have to remind myself that while I don’t have a daily team meeting, I have people to talk to about the little things, and I have at least one good writer friend to whinge at regularly about writing (poor woman – you know who you are and thank you) and others less regularly.

And I think my characters will forgive me eventually. They too are navigating change. And, if they don’t change the plot too much in edits, they’ve a murder to solve too. So all three of us had better get a move on.

Words Copyright (c) 2026 Paula Harmon. All rights reserved. Not to be used without the author’s permission. Not to be used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI). Image credit: ID 330921518 © Antonio Solano | Dreamstime.com

Connectedness

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned it before, but once I had a vivid dream in which every single person I’d ever known was taking part in a football match while riding bicycles.

My overriding (pardon the pun) subconscious thought was not ‘How can you play football while riding a bicycle?’ but ‘Oh no! How can I have all those people together? They have nothing in common! Some of them wouldn’t agree on anything!’ Then I realised: ‘Oh. They have me in common. How dull.’

Since team sports fill me with overwhelming dread, I assume dreaming about a field of crazed cyclists was probably stress related and the people were incidentals, but maybe there was something else about my connectedness with others which was relevant at the time.

It’s highly unlikely that those people will ever all be in the same room, though I’d like to think that they’d find something other than me in common if they did.

Maybe I would be in the centre of one group (not my favourite place to be) but equally, each of those people would be in the centre of their own, with a  set of connections. Some would include me and others wouldn’t. Ultimately, there’d be a massive network of people all of whose connections would probably cross and interlink and double-back.

Family trees are even more of a tangle. I’m in the process of working out mine. As I’m half Scottish, I’ve got two databases to research in (and I haven’t even attempted the Irish side), so this is quite slow, but things are becoming clearer.

I’ve got clerks, shoemakers, farmers, servants, launderers, laundry owners, hoteliers (small), accountants and even a writer or two in the mix. But no one gets excited about being descended  from ordinary people so it’s fun to relate that my mother’s great-aunt stated with absolute certainty they were directly descended from the Scottish royal family (albeit ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’).

On my father’s side, one of my great-grandfathers was a genealogist whose book is still used as source material, and I can’t remember if there’s allegedly royal blood in my smaller pool of English genes in my branch (though I recall someone allegedly knighted for fishing a whale off London Bridge).

Possibly I need to look again since around 25% of British people can trace ancestry back to the Plantagenets and maybe that includes me. As an even higher proportion of Scots can allegedly trace their ancestry back to the Stuarts, if Great-great Aunt Annie was right, could I be sort of royal?

Lineage (unlikely or otherwise) aside, working out what connects you to someone else or to a group is part of being human. However knowing how to do it is something that some – including me – find difficult. I’ve learned some skills over the years, but I still fear that when meeting new people I exude either an air of desperation or of disinterest. It’s actually panic. Will I be able to think of anything interesting to say? Will they ask me something impossible to answer? Will I come across as weird and/or boring and/or needy? I can’t remember a time when that wasn’t my starting point.

Networks can be a blessing or a curse or downright manipulated. In the latter camp, there’s ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’ and the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ for getting on in life. I’ve even heard people who’ve sent children to private schools admit that the child might get a better education in a good state school, but they wouldn’t make the connections which will help them get on in life. The tragedy is that they’re sometimes right.

Then there’s finding out you have something in common with someone and joining a group where you feel safe, comfortable, certain, protected. So far so good.

But what if the group can’t be challenged? What if by disagreeing  with other members, or behaving in a way which breaks ‘the rules’ you risk breaking your connection and ultimately finding yourself suddenly on the outside.

It happened to me. Knowing tethering lines had snapped and wondering if I’d ever find anywhere to retie them was necessary to my growth as a human being and becoming my authentic self, but it was terrifying, upsetting and difficult at the time.

We don’t need connections which stop us from being honest about what we really feel or believe for fear of rejection, which ultimately create cliques and divisions in society.

We do need connections which challenge as well as comfort, which enlighten, which let us be ourselves, and which ultimately create bridges and healing in society.

There is a word Ubuntu in, I believe, the Nguni language which is extremely difficult to translate into English but relates to a positive concept of what human connectedness should mean. Broadly, if you behave in a way in which the whole community benefits, then you are exhibiting what human behaviour should be and thereby become whole. If you want to know more, here’s an article.

Inasmuch as I understand it, the concept seems a much better connectedness than the Old Boys’ Network or the smothering safety of a clique.

If we spent more time recognising the needs we hold in common for safety, love, shelter, justice, freedom, rather than fearing the things we don’t have in common, the stronger the human network would be and the easier it would be to improve things for all humanity. I know it’s not that simple, but it’s surely a starting point.

It’s certainly a good deal more useful than working out whether you’re royal or not.

Apart from the fact that the ‘real’ heir to the throne may actually be an Australian, I’m not sure any supposed royal DNA in my blood counts for much.

After all, humans are supposed to share 50% of DNA with bananas and daffodils, and some may say I, personally, share even more.

 No one is going to crown me anytime soon.

Thank heavens for that.

[UPDATE: did some more family research with my mother and discovered some bigwigs back in the 17th C. Haven’t got back as far as royalty though, and it clearly all went horribly wrong somewhere around then! Or right of course – I expect the clerks, shoemakers and servants were more interesting really.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Technical Network Abstract Background Stock Vector – Illustration of design, overlapping: 63068618