What do you do when you have unexpected free time?
As a child, I wandered about in nature. I daydreamed and I wrote stories and poems. I read and read and read. I crafted things of little use and nil longevity.
I’m not sure when this changed, but motherhood didn’t help. All of a sudden my days involved keeping someone else alive and maintaining shreds of my sanity. Later there were school deadlines, afterschool clubs, sports events – an endless set of things to remember, to chivvy about, to attend, to plan.
Then the children left home, and all of a sudden, for the first time in twenty years, I was sometimes free.
For a while, I found I’d lost the knack to do nothing, but now I’m finally getting the hang of it again.
Option One: Do Nothing while Doing Something
I used to work with someone who couldn’t see the point of reading. In our one hour lunchbreak, I would buy my lunch, have a potter round town, then come back and read. My colleague ate her packed lunch and then sit in silence until 2pm. I know people who can’t see the point of reading unless it’s ‘improving’ or religious books. Me, I’d read a bus ticket if it was all that was available. While I read plenty of non-fiction, my favourite ‘waste of time’ is fiction including children’s fiction. Do I always learn something? Who cares.
Art doesn’t normally count, but in 2023, Liz Hedgecock and I did a Louise Fletcher ‘Find Your Joy’ taster course. Its aim (broadly) was to free your mind from all its preconceptions as you played with abstract.
The first exercise was to dissect a large piece of paper with masking tape, select five colours, paint at random then removed the masking tape to reveal the result. This was my effort:
But I hadn’t played by the rules. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to waste paint on something pointless, and wanted it to represent something. (Can you tell what I was aiming for?)
Then I read some of the heartbreaking comments people posted in the accompanying social media group, struggling because all they could hear in their heads was someone (often a mother or mother-in-law) saying they shouldn’t be wasting time when they had homes and husbands to look after. At first, I felt a combination of sorrow and anger, then I realised that I myself had decided to give that the first exercise meaning because I was obviously listening to some internal voice (probably my own). After that, I did the exercises without planning and if I learned nothing else, it was to mute that inner critic.
(Today, in the interests of experiment, I did that first exercise again without any plan. This is the result, which has no meaning whatsoever but I somehow prefer).
Option Two: Really Do Nothing
Are you good at being still, maybe sitting/lying in nature watching trees or looking for shapes in clouds or staring into an open fire watching the flames flicker?
As a fidget with a butterfly brain I am terrible at it, unless I’m staring at the sea or a river. My mind wanders or I’ll amble off to do something else. But a couple of Christmases ago, exhausted, I had the chance to try out a Virtual Reality headset where I could ‘stare at the stars’. I put on some ambient music, lay back on the sofa and inhabited that non-existent space for half an hour, emerging unbelievably refreshed.
Is Idleness Wrong?
Some feel that spare time should be filled with learning if nothing else, because doing something without a purpose is a waste of time. It’s perhaps a throw back to a fear that ‘the devil will find work for idle hands’ and that a bored unoccupied person is at best of no use and at worst potentially evil.
Personally I never feel like I have to educate myself if I don’t want to. While on holiday for example, I’m happy soaking up the atmosphere and people-watching. To me, this ‘doing nothing’ is highly valuable, not just as a writer, but as a human. To observe people makes them real and not abstract.
And think of all those ‘idlers’ who changed the world for the better. Admittedly a lot of them were wealthy and someone else was doing the laundry, childcare and dinner prep, but all the same – they sat and observed, they experimented, they wrote down ideas and we ended up with novels, art, steam engines, radio etc etc.
In her novel ‘Early in Orcadia’, Naomi Mitchison imagines the discovery of the Orkney Islands by a group of pre-historic people. It starts with an old (by their reckoning) man who has survived so many challenges that he is honoured with the right to do nothing. Because he has the time to sit and think as he watches the sea, he realises there is something out there to investigate. In the same group is a woman who is so constantly busy with keeping her family alive that she never ‘does nothing’. Once in a blue moon she looks at wads of wool picked off thorn bushes, convinced that there must be something useful to do with it, but has no time to figure it out.
One discovers something by ‘doing nothing’. The other will only discover how to weave if one day she able to ‘do nothing’.
Yes, evil can come from idle hands, but so can creativity. Our world is absurdly busy and increasingly stressful and we need to rest to cope with it.
So don’t listen to a voice that tells you something joyful or restful is pointless. Don’t be afraid to do nothing. It will always be ‘something’ really and your mind and spirit will thank you for it.
(PS – if you want to see Liz’s art website, click here)
(PPS – don’t panic, the people in the sketch below are alive and well – they were doing yoga!)
Words and images 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).
I’ve often said that messing with art helps me de-stress and since perhaps you can tell from my previous blog post that the last few months have been stressful, you might wonder if I’ve been following my own advice?
The answer is: ish.
Every year Liz Hedgecock and I do a challenge for Lent, and this year we decided to try mixed media art. Unlike Liz who is a much better artist, and more disciplined, I apply the same approach to learning art as to learning most things: that is, I fiddle until I’ve figured it out, or something’s exploded.
This year, I wanted to experiment with a combination of watercolour, acrylic, fine liners, markers, and modelling paste. As I didn’t have modelling paste, I wondered if I could make some using stuff from home. Thanks to an internet ‘recipe’ I produced a sort of gloop using cornflour (cornstarch) and PVA glue. Did it work? Nope. So I bought some and started again.
It was well into Lent before I got going, and then I worked on it for thirty minutes a day until it was as finished as it was going to be.
Even though it’s not quite what’s in my head, and only one of the hares (yes, they’re supposed to be hares) looks like a hare (ish), the process was happy and positive, largely because I was enjoying messing with the colours, and experimenting without overthinking what I was doing. I think I might do it again to see if I can get closer to what I envisioned.
So that was April.
Some time in May I saw some prompts for a sketching challenge based on finding positivity in nature.
As a lonely, bullied child, I would find my peace, reassurance and grounding in the local woods or by the local river. There I discovered comfort in being part of something so big, that my problems seemed small, hidden in a beauty which made the ugliness of school life recede. Although I don’t do that sort of wandering as much as I should now, I do have a lovely garden in which the writing shed hides surrounded by greenery.
So with that in mind, I decided to create something from the first prompt, which was ‘Sanctuary’.
Time went by and I couldn’t even find half hour an to do anything, but after work on a particularly stressful day, I took some art stuff and a glass of wine down to the writing shed aiming to start a small simple watercolour painting.
However when I arrived at the shed, I set out my small selection of brushes, a little bottle of water and my glass of wine, but couldn’t find the little pallet of watercolour paints that I could’ve sworn I’d put in my bag. I went back to the house but couldn’t find them anywhere, so gave up, and using watercolour pencils instead, did what I could, periodically dipping brushes and pencils in my wine instead of the water (which doesn’t improve the flavour). By now, however, I was mentally in the wrong zone and don’t really know what I’m doing with watercolour pencils.
I was aiming for an image of myself in the writing shed being creative and happy as seen through the branches of our rather overgrown cherry tree.
This is what I ended up with.
Me, stuck in a birdcage in the middle of a jungle.
(Naturally as soon as I got back in the house, I found the little watercolour palette disguising itself against the black background of the basket which I called sac magique, in which I cart things around sometimes.)
I gave up trying for a bit.
Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I spent a few days in the Languedoc. I needed a break from writing and editing, but not creativity. So I took my travelling sketching kit.
My husband and I, despite both being city born, are country mice by nature, and usually rent places in the countryside. But this time, we stayed in a place with a balcony overlooking Place Carnot in Carcassonne. We enjoyed people watching and listening to the buzz of conversation from below, and wandering the area. Wherever we went I sketched little scenes from what I saw in front of me.
It was so freeing making myself capture something as best as I could quickly without working out composition or what the picture was trying to say. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story – or couldn’t be a story – behind each one, but I was simply having fun and resting my mind.
Last week turned out a good deal more intense than I anticipated when I wrote the previous blog, however everything on my rationalised to-do list got done, albeit a day behind schedule.
So afterwards, I thought, ‘Now I’m feeling calm, if tired, I’m going to the shed to try my sanctuary painting again’ and I did.
The result is below.
You can make of it what you will.
I showed photos of both ‘Sanctuary’ paintings to my oldest child’s partner, without any context.
He said ‘Pretty colours and shapes’ about the first until he spotted someone inside at which point he said ‘Ah – a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage all the same.’ He then looked at the other one, still no context. He said ‘The water droplet makes me think of freedom, free flowing. It seems peaceful. It’s a place of rest and safety not a cage.’
Now, it’s true that he has a psychology degree, but at this particular moment, he was squinting at my small phone in bright sun while drinking cocktails, and despite being very short-sighted, hadn’t brought his glasses. So his assessment possibly has the psychological robustness of a ‘What sort of boy will make my ideal partner’ quiz in a teenage girl’s magazine.
But I like it and I’m sticking with it.
What do you think?
All words and pictures copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. None must be reproduced without express permission or credit. No permission is given for any to be used to train artificial intelligence.
This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.
Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.
They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.
Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)
One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.
As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.
We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.
No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.
During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.
A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.
I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.
When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.
We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.
Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.
I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.
Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.
I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.
Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.
But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.
Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.
(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.
If you want to see what else I draw for Inktober – please follow me on Instagram
‘The girl stared at Jenny with cold blue eyes and…’ ‘Dear Karen, I don’t like…’ ‘a shape so dark and stealthy…’ ‘somethingmoves in the still …’ ‘tympanist hits his drums with two sticks so…’ ‘Leçon onze – un lapin = …’ ‘Heat of room 20°, heat of ice 0°’
These are on the back pages of a notebook I had when I was twelve. In the front is a novel I wrote around the same time. In the back, as you can see – all sorts of stuff.
The cover has long gone, but I suspect this was a school notebook hence the little bits about Music, French and Science. I doubt the school intended me to write stories in it. But there you go – it was paper, I had ideas, what’s an aspiring novelist to do?
Apart from the finished novel (a searing tale of a quest against dangerous odds, magic, romance), there are scraps of sentimental poetic drivel, and the start of another novel, including blurb and chapter headings. There are also various drawings of characters and animals.
But I was twelve. So I confess that one page is entirely dedicated to the fact that X loves Y next to a drawing of two stick figures under a love heart with the word ‘censorded’ across them, and a variation in X’s handwriting of ‘Paula loves Z’. X was my best friend and definitely wasn’t in love with Y, and though I was in love with Z, the closest he’d ever got to realising I existed was to pick up and hand over stuff that I’d knocked off my desk in clumsy agitation at his proximity as he passed.
Both the finished novel and the planned one sum up me aged twelve. I was naïve and immature. My stories were an amalgam of the sorts of supernatural/paranormal older children’s books I was still reading and themes of adolescent angst, bereavement, threat, and of course a bit of romance. (In my books the hero wouldn’t just hand over the stuff and go back to his desk, but gaze into the heroine’s eyes and fall in love.)
But whatever my lack of maturity and sophistication, and despite being generally shy and lacking in confidence, I clearly wasn’t shy about being seen writing stories at the back of notebooks when the lesson got boring and the teacher wasn’t looking. At that point in my life, if you’d asked me what I intended to be when I grew up, I’d have said ‘writer’ and no one would have questioned it.
I admit that even into adult life, while probably not so upfront about it, I’d still find moments of boredom in the office to scribble ideas and scenes on bits of paper now and again.
Properly writing in public though? When I started up in earnest again in 2015, I was still travelling a lot with work and consequently wrote large amounts of stuff on trains, oblivious to who was nearby. Once I thought I was alone in an empty carriage, writing a murderous scene and suddenly a voice from behind said ‘ooh!’ and made me jump out of my skin as I turned to find someone reading from between the headrests behind me.
Nowadays I find it a lot harder. I’m not sure whether that’s because the trains are busier, I’m more tired, or older, or what. But it’s rare that I write anywhere other than indoors in private. I struggle to write with certain noises in the background: songs (I start singing along in my head which interrupts my flow), chatter (I find myself listening in), teenagers playing video games (I mean…). My son (to stop me shouting at him for loudly playing the video games) put me onto https://mynoise.net/. Now, if there’s too much extraneous noise when I’m writing, I listen to Rain on a Tent, Irish Sea or – believe it or not – Train and Railroad Sound. It helps me disappear into my own world where I find it easier to focus on writing.
But the other week, for long complicated reasons largely involving an inadequate bus service, I went with my husband to a nearby town where he was meeting a friend, and went somewhere else with my laptop to work while they caught up.
I thought the library would be a good place to write. But the only free table was by an automatic door which opened every two minutes with a sound like Ivor the Engine’s ‘pssht-coom’. It was also full of surprisingly noisy pensioners and I didn’t feel like putting the headphones on when I was sitting by a door in case one of them came up behind me with evil intent when I couldn’t hear them.
I next went to a chain coffee shop and tried that. But pop music was blaring and it too was full of noisy pensioners. This time I did put the headphones on, but even with the volume ramped up I could still hear the two pensioners who sat down next to me and started a loud conversation.
Finally, I went to an old coaching inn. It’s very nice. A lovely setting to write historical fiction plus they served cream teas.
Two ladies had a laden cake stand and sat by the fire talking quietly. On another table, three ladies were drinking wine, one talking incessantly at the top of her voice. Music was playing, but it was fairly innocuous (and was turned off after the loud lady left.)
I gave my order then put my headphones on and drowned out Ms Noisy with train sounds. No one paid me any attention except to bring tea and scones with jam and clotted cream. I typed away happily for over an hour. Will I do the same again? Maybe. I might pick somewhere else though.
When it was time to go, the young waiter overcharged me. He’d seemed rather vague the whole time – admittedly it probably isn’t the most exciting job but even so. It took a lot of explanation to get him to understand how he’d done it (a simple enough mistake but a mistake none the less). Eventually he went for a manager who agreed that I was right. Throughout this, the young man kept calling me ‘my love’. I’m sure he was trying to be friendly, but I doubt he’d have done this to someone his own age and it made me feel like I was his granny. (All right, so I’m old enough to be his granny, but I don’t yet feel old enough to admit it.)
It was annoying to the point where I felt like picking up the carrot cake and squashing it in his face. In fact, the last time I was at that coaching inn, it was with my own gran, and she might have done that if he’d tried it on her.
But I’m a writer, so I have my own type of revenge.
I included him as a very minor character in a scene I was writing. A lot less messy, and somehow more satisfying. I doubt he’ll ever realise, but if he does he ought to be glad. I write murder mysteries. The character based on him might not have made it out of that scene alive.
So if you see any writers writing in the wild – be nice to them. You don’t know what they’ll do if they put you in their book.
Mwahahaha.
Copyright (c) 2024 Words and Picture Paula Harmon – not to be used without the author’s express permission.
When I was young, when my maternal grandmother addressed me, she would often go through my sister’s name, our cousin’s, her own sisters’, her nephew’s and my mother’s, until she got to Paula.
These days I do the same, swapping my son’s name for my husband’s (my excuse is that they start with the same letter), my daughter’s for my sister’s (my excuse is that they have similar personalities) and recently my brother-in-law’s for that of the mutual male friend’s who was hosting us all for dinner (my excuse is that they both have Scottish names… OK that’s no excuse).
Very occasionally I suffer from face-blindness. E.g. once in a blue moon, I don’t recognise someone even if I know them very well. This usually happens when I’m deep in thought and/or daydreaming.
I regularly suffer from name-blindness, which is possibly linked. This means I can look at someone I know very well, recognise them, know who they are, but absolutely blank their name. Completely. It’s just gone.
This particularly traumatic when I have to introduce people to each other and can only recall some random irrelevant fact in lieu of a name (‘This is M’s mum’ or ‘This is my friend who makes great cupcakes’ or ‘This is my friend, the wife of another friend who cycles with my husband’).
Perhaps it happens in social situations or introduction scenarios, because I find both very stressful and they take up most of my ‘pretending I’m confident and sociable’ resources. An article called Is This Normal? “I Can’t Remember Names or Faces.” | The Swaddle, give reasons for this phenomenon that make sense to me at least. But it doesn’t stop it from being mortifying.
What about my book characters’ names? After all, I invented the characters (shh – don’t tell them). I waded through lists of potential forenames for the right era, or unusual British surnames (I’ve managed to get five of these into my books so far), and even researched how common certain surnames were in certain parts of London in the 1881 census.
So are their names easier to recall? Nope. Apart from main characters, I quite often can’t remember what I’ve called some people after writing a book at all. Sometimes I can’t remember what they’re called while I’m writing it, because I’ve changed their name halfway through.
For example, in one of my more recent books I realised that I had five female characters with names starting M and about four with surnames starting T. One of the female characters was called Mary (which was the number one name for girls in England and Wales for decades if not centuries). I decided to change it to Lois and did a search and replace for Mary throughout the document, happily ‘accepting all’ without thinking. This resulted in a lot of action taking place in Loislebone, and someone providing a sumlois of information etc. One of the T surnames had to change but in my head, the character still has the original name, which means nine times out of ten, I have to dig about for what I changed it to when thinking of them.
To avoid this sort of thing, also avoid duplicating names within the same series, and to keep a series bible of background info on characters whether or not it would ever be used (birthdays, details of parents and children and pets etc), I called upon my clerical career and started a card index system.
Fortunately I didn’t need to buy anything. When my daughter was studying for her GCSEs, she asked me to get her some cards to help with revision and a storage box to put them in. She obviously inherited my tendency to create revision schemes but lose interest before actually doing anything, because there were plenty of blank cards for me to use.
Then I found another set of index cards in a drawer.
Only they weren’t blank, and they didn’t have random facts about English Literature or The Cold War or Spanish verbs or whatever else my daughter had been studying on them. They were written in my father’s writing and furthermore, they were the details of characters he’d written stories about!
I still have boxes of Dad’s writing – typed, handwritten in notebooks large and small and on floppy disk. I have one ready to edit, and others I remember him reading aloud to me when I was a child (including a science fiction novel which if he’d published at the time, would now be reality). I have no idea what I’m going to do with them all. But seeing those index cards so unexpectedly brought a moment of serendipity, surprise that I could read his writing for once and of course a pang of what’s called in Welsh hiraeth and in Portuguese saudade – missingness, nostalgia, loving reminiscence.
I wish I could show Dad what I’ve written and help him do something with what he wrote. I can’t and he wouldn’t want me to fret that I can’t. But his characters’ index cards are now stored with mine as a reminder of the things he and I had in common: a love of storytelling, words, names, random facts and near illegible handwriting. And while I have no idea who Dad’s Janine Bex (below right) is, I do know that Roderick Demeray (below left) is based, with love, on Dad.
Maybe in some alternative universe, our characters hang out together and complain about us. ‘Look what she made me do!’ ‘Why would he call me that?’ ‘What’s going to happen to me next?’ ‘Why can’t she ever remember my name?’
After all, who’d blame them?
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2023, not to be used without the author’s express permission.
Am I alone in seeing stories everywhere? I can’t remember when I didn’t think ‘what’s their story?’, ‘what if X happened next?’, ‘why are they/is this/am I like this? What led them/it/me here?’
I dealt with long boring journeys by imagining the lives of the people we passed in the car, or what might be behind a high wall/hedge (lots of Cornish trips), or why a castle was in ruins. I coped with bullying by imagining situations in which I managed to express my feelings and the bullies changed their ways (biggest fiction exercise of my life). I enjoyed subjects where there was a story (English, History, RE), or patterns (Maths, Physics) or a challenge deciphering a pattern (Maths, Languages). If I’d spotted the stories in Geography and patterns in Chemistry, I might have enjoyed much them more than I did. If I’d been taught art differently, perhaps I’d have got to grips with that at school too. I stopped taking art at fourteen, in what was then called the Third Year, and is now called Year Nine, and in both eras called ‘Options Year’. This was when you study a million subjects at exactly the point of adolescence when you have become really truculent and know all adults are idiots, yet have to decide what you’re going to do for your first set of public exams (in my case, O levels). Long story short, I dropped art at fourteen.
Ever since I could create a word, I have been by nature a writer. But Liz Hedgecock has been encouraging me for some months to do art challenges with her giving me the chance to play catch-up on those art lessons I put to one side. I’ve found it really freeing, tapping into the part of me that writes short stories rather than novels. It’s a chance to try a narrative in a few lines rather than huge number of words. When she suggested we try Inktober, I was happy to give it a go. But when I looked at the prompts, I knew almost immediately that at my skill level I was definitely going to look for a ‘story’ for each one, not only to cover up my inadequate skills but to keep me motivated.
I think that largely Liz did the same, although with a different approach. You can see what Liz did here. But if you don’t follow me on Instagram – here is what I came up with and a summary of the background behind the stories that came into my head. to help me make sense of the prompts.
Dream, Spiders, Path, Dodge, Map
To start with I dug out a bottle of ink I’ve had forever and a lovely fancy glass ink dipping pen and did what I could with them.
I used the ink and pen for the first three and found myself sketching in a fluid, free-form way which tapped into my subconscious quite nicely.
As a vivid dreamer, it was hard to know where to stop for Dream. I included all my recurring dreams and nightmares but tried to make sure my bed was heading into happiness, even though I remembered too late that pictures should read left to right, not right to left. Ho hum.
I don’t like hurting Spiders, but prefer them at a distance, so looking at photos of them to draw from made me feel queasy. I decided to turn our treatment of them on its head which sort of coincided with our daughter (home for a break during peak house-spider season) talking to us through the Ring doorbell in a husky voice ‘Hello! I’m Simon the Spider. I just want to be friends. Please let me in.’
Path – the last I drew with ink and dipping pen for a bit, depicts me at some point in my life in my early twenties, deciding between the risky route of chasing my creative dreams where the dragons were (left) and the sensible career route (right). I picked the latter but am now in a position to go back to that fork in the path and change direction.
However, that’s not to say it’s all easy running and Dodge, the first one I drew with a fineliner (can’t remember why I changed, but it changed how the drawings turned out) has me trying to get to my happy place while being attacked by household duties, work/writing deadlines and to-do lists.
By the time I was drawing Map, I was away from home and had a mini art kit, so it was drawn with a fineliner and is perhaps the last one digging into my subconscious for all the things that prompt or hinder creativity. I wasn’t terribly happy with Map, but that’s how it goes. On the other hand I was an avid map drawer as a child, so it was good fun and I just wish I’d had a bigger piece of paper and fewer distractions.
Golden, Drop, Toad, Bounce, Fortune, Wander
A dragon was the first thing that sprung to mind for the prompt Golden. I went straight back to being six and the teacher reading from the Hobbit about Smaug the dragon in class, though my dragon of course is less murderous and mostly understood. I’ve always wanted to draw a dragon but thought I couldn’t, but I decided to give it a go anyway and found all those scales rather therapeutic to draw.
Drop – I regret to say that the word ‘drop’ just made me think of a running nose, so I had to do a bit of lateral thinking. I knew what I wanted to draw for Toad, so it seemed logical to draw what happened before… It nearly ended up with being a potion to turn a man back INTO a toad after a regretable spell. You’ll just have to decide whether it’s his fault for dabbling or the soup-maker has a naughty intent.
As for Bounce – I thought of the bounciest thing I could think of and tried not to remember the Spacehopper my father ran over when I was seven. I was very fond of it, and it never recovered. It gave my Dad a fright though.
Fortune was difficult for a number of reasons. I couldn’t think what to draw at all – or rather I could, but it was too complicated. It was difficult day at work and I wasn’t really in the mood that evening. I decided to go back to the ink and dipping pen and then regretted it. Everything went wrong! But what I was aiming for was the idea that there’s definitely a rich man in the seeker’s life but it’s at her expense. No idea if that comes across.
Wander was easier and is based on two photos of my daughter in different forests in different years, wondering which way to go next. (Bless her, my daughter ended up as an unwitting model and doesn’t look anything like the way I’ve portrayed her but I’m pleased that she’s braver at trying different routes than I was at the same age.)
Spicy, Rise, Castle, Dagger, Angel, Demon.
I could have drawn my husband’s numerous chilli plants for Spicy, or the contents of our spice cupboard, but of course ‘spicy’ has another meaning and I decided to have fun and go down that route as well! It took me four attempts to write ‘chipotle’. I could type it, but I couldn’t write it with a pen. This is one that I’m planning to do again and/or colour.
Likewise Rise – I suppose I could have saved this idea for Fire, but a phoenix rising with hope from disappointment and fear of failure seemed apt that particular day.
By the time I was drawing Castle, I was away from home again, and trying to deal with the intricacies of a real castle didn’t appeal. A sandcastle while more manageable felt a bit dull, so guess what – a story came to mind. My daughter loves octopuses and in a story world, one would come to her rescue if she needed it. (in reality she’d probably just biff anyone stomped on her sandcastle).
Despite writing murder mysteries which occasionally involve daggers etc, and despite thinking that daggers can be very beautiful and nearly drawing the one from Murder Dunovaria, the news being what it is, I didn’t fancy drawing a Dagger. The phrase ‘beating swords into ploughshares’ came to mind so I decided to draw (not very well as you can tell from my having to redraw the hammer) daggers being turned into doves.
The Angels in the nativity play come from the disappointment of never having been one as I described in Advent Calendar and also from remembering when my son was a shepherd in a nativity play aged five. He had his crook confiscated after rehearsals because he kept tripping up the primmest angel. When the day of the public performance came however, somehow he’d managed to get hold of a crook again and guess what he did? The primmest angel flat on her face as she walked down the aisle. He swore it was curiosity not malice but… I was the one dealing with her cross mum.
I didn’t want to draw a Demon for a number of reasons, so decided to do the sort of thing I’d have done at school and re-interpret the brief. So instead of demon, we have demonise. It was close to National Black Cat Day apparently, so that’s what I went for. Poor black cats. They don’t deserve the bad press. It’s time for them to fight back.
Away from home again with a simple art kit, I was wondering what on earth to do for Saddle, then remembered a story I had in Weird & Peculiar Tales, itself prompted by a dream, in which a hapless goblin cross breeds a werewolf with a chihuahua and went from there. (Admittedly my husband asked why I’d drawn a chicken being put on a dog, but hey.)
Plump coincided with the launch of Booker & Fitch omnibus of books 1-3 so here I am being plump (I’m plumper in real life) plumped down on plump cushions in Hazeby-on-Wyvern reading the book.
Frost was easy in theory, although I was in a very hot place at the time, so it was hard to imagine, and I found it hard to draw with black on white and wished I were home with black paper and white or silver pen, but I wasn’t. So here I am as a child, when I didn’t have a radiator in my bedroom with the view of mountains from my window obscured by frost as happened quite often.
Chains was a horse who was waiting, poor thing, to cart tourists around in a sort of cab in 30+ degrees Centigrade (86+ Fahrenheit). It didn’t seem too bothered, but it was happily chewing on the chain attaching it to a railing. I don’t think it was trying to get away, but it was hard not to imagine it (I would have been).
Scratchy – this is the cat we had when I was a little girl, scratching on a piece of wood which we’d brought back from the New Forest after a camping trip. Why? Because I’d spent several days pretending it was my motorbike (give me a break, I was about four or five years old) and I talked my dad round into bringing it home (Mum was not so keen). At home, the magic dispersed and it became the cat’s scratching post. But I like to think she was clever enough to know it was a motorbike really.
Shallow – again, I had something quite ‘deep’ in mind, but didn’t have the skills (or time) to draw it, so instead, here is a nod to all those summers when I (or later my children) thought they’d actually catch something in a rock pool but never did because the creatures were too clever to be caught.
And Celestial (by now I was back at home with black paper and silver pen) speaks for itself – or does it? All astronomists should look away, but there are the Pegasus and Draco constellations together (possibly unlikely) waiting for me to fly amongst them.
Dangerous, Remove, Beast, Sparkle, Massive, Rush, Fire
Finally we’re into the last week of October/Inktober. By now I was getting tired of working out what to draw, and was, once more, away for a couple of days (it really was that sort of month). By now, the prompts seems even harder to draw. Even though I’d taken photos to help me, it turned out they didn’t. So I had to dig down a bit.
For Dangerous, I remembered when my husband bought a Shun knife and kept telling me (the person who does most of the cooking), every time I cooked (e.g. generally) how sharp it was. One evening, while considering that he should be glad I wasn’t seeing how sharp it was on something other than onions, I rolled my eyes… and sliced into the end of my finger. Glad to say that it healed up fine. Sorry to say that onions aren’t improved by being pink. Will honestly say that my husband and I do not look this young although the expressions are broadly accurate.
Remove was tricky. I had a few ideas including someone removing hate from their heart and being ready to replace it with love, and someone pinching a piece of someone’s jigsaw just as they were about to finish it (sorry – that’s my brain – goes from sentimental to mischievous in the blink of an eye) and then remembered I was going to be drawing while on a train and I couldn’t face trying to draw a jigsaw. Something someone said made me think of masks or make-up and that’s what I decided to draw. I don’t wear much make-up and certainly haven’t worn this much for years, but am really fascinated by make-up artists’ skills and occasionally wonder if they could improve me. Sadly though, at the end of the day it would come off and the real me would be there underneath. The train-ride wasn’t exactly smooth and that’s my excuse for any errors (cough).
Beast was potentially as hard to draw as Demon, but by this point in the challenge, both Liz and I had decided that hands were ‘a beast’ to draw and so I went for the image above. In the pencil sketch I have the right number of finger joints. Somehow when drawing in fine liner, I added one in. This proves the point about drawing hands.
I knew from the outset that I wanted to draw my lovely daughter’s lovely eyes for Sparkle. I categorically didn’t do either the exercise or my daughter justice, but will definitely try it again. I was, by this point, really missing the opportunity to use watercolours or acrylics to add colour, or just use various pencils, but there you go. It’s all a learning curve and I’m glad I can do it without a teacher marking my efforts.
Massive was another where I didn’t quite know what to draw, then we passed a group of tourists queuing to have a birds of prey experience. The birds of prey looked as bored as the horse waiting to cart tourists around (though the temperature was more manageable where I was then). I wondered if they were thinking ‘why do the tourists get all the fun? What if we were big enough to carry them instead of the other way around?’
I had some photos of people on the underground to use as inspiration for Rush, but then thought back to when I was a child and spent time watching nature – the driven clouds, the busy insects, the running river, the the little creatures in the river marching about, oblivious (thankfully) to the adult world of being so head down rushing from A to B. Somewhen I stopped doing that, and am only just starting again.
Finally, for Fire, this is another from Weird & Peculiar Tales – or rather it’s what might happen one day. I have a sort of myth-story in there about when dragons and humans were friends – the humans providing friendship, the dragon providing warmth and protection. Then, because humans are involved, it all goes wrong. This is imagining a future which I think we’d all love – -when we stop fighting and pointing fingers and just sit down together and enjoy friendship and warmth.
So there you have it – a bit of my soul laid bare. As I said before, I’m proud of some of my drawings, not proud of others at all, may retry some, may not with others. But I had a go. It’s back to the writing now, but I’m not going to stop the art. I’m going to keep doing it. Tapping into that part of my brain that likes to tell a quick story and isn’t worrying about judgment feels like going back to a freer, less disciplined me. And that’s not a bad place to visit now and again.
Words and Images (c) Paula Harmon 2023 – not to be used without the author’s express consent.
At the moment, after finishing work (for the moment) on two books simultaneously (listed at the end), my Muse is tempting me from what I’d been planning to write next, towards writing a ‘contemporary’ novel set in an alternative world where there’s also magic and might just include A Novelty, in a slightly different format. Is this something I should do next? Tempting.
It’s also tempting to have some time off. Or at least, to ease up on the drive for creative perfection (or as close to perfection as it’s possible for me to get).
For me, this is where what I shall loosely describe as ‘art’ comes in, because with ‘art’ – I just let my imagination do whatever it fancies without worrying about the end result, even more than I do with cooking (because after all, no one is going to die if I get the art wrong).
We’re obsessed with perfection these days. People compete on television in virtually every field from sport to dressmaking to Lego modelling. Doing something just for itself without anyone getting first prize would not make good TV perhaps, but it’s good for the spirit, and something we seem to have lost the knack for as a culture. I think we should bring it back.
I stopped studying art at school aged fourteen. Years later I tried to learn water-colouring from a book and a few years after that dabbled with acrylics. I sort of stopped again until this year, when Liz Hedgecock suggested we do some art challenges, starting with ones we made up ourselves before moving to ones found online.
I’ll be honest: I’ve enjoyed some challenges/prompts more than others; I’ve been pleased with some results more than other results; I’ve sometimes been more in the mood than other times; other people have liked some things more than other things. But none of those have really been the point. Not for me anyway.
The point for me has been simply having fun in a task where I just enjoy the process, sometimes more than the end result.
There’s always a mental fork in the road as I read the prompt and decide whether I’m going to try and reproduce accurately or make something a little more of an impression; whether it’s going to be serious or quirky. This may depend on subject or time. It may also be something to do with mood as much as subject. But each technique seems to bring out something different.
The soft sounds of a pencil when I’m sketching are calming, and there’s a relief in being able to erase a line that’s gone very wrong.
Watercolours sink into the paper, they build in hue, they’re delicate, dreamlike. The very act of applying them is relaxing. If they go wrong, maybe I can add some ink or other media, or just live with it or decide to try again sometime. Or not.
Acrylics are fun, bold, risky (also hard to get out of a carpet).
Ink is a commitment. It also seems to bring out a slightly surreal side of me which reminds me of my father’s sketching and cartooning.
It’s the process that does me good. My brain switches from all the things that are bothering me, the plot ideas that are fighting for the surface, a desire for perfection. Not all the ones in the image below are that I like or that I think are the best of what I’ve done, or the best I could do.
One – the dark picture with the woman in a long dress – was created to a prompt ‘paint out of your comfort zone’. I had no preliminary sketch as I would do normally, I just painted. I wanted to conjure up some of the contrasts of Edwardian London in the Margaret Demeray books but couldn’t really get across what I was aiming for due to lack of knowledge/skill/time. Do I think it’s good? Nope. Did I find some release in being less disciplined? Yes.
Likewise, the picture of the inside of my writing shed is not even close to what it looks like or how I wanted it to turn out. Everything from perspective to accuracy is wrong, but you know… it captures a moment I guess, and it was fun to bung all those colours down.
The one with the four quadrants is supposed to be an acrylic abstract. I do like that. In my head it represents the four seasons without me really planning it at all. For a control freak, that’s not bad going.
In one stressful week in June, when it was impossible to do any of the writing work I’d planned, the best way I found to centre myself was the ten minutes I spent each day messing about with pencils and/or paints. For a while I just switched off. The street scene with the bunting is one of those paintings.
Last week was even more stressful than that with no art time at all. It was nice yesterday to dig out an ink pen, switch off, tune out of the world and start messing about for the Inktober challenge. So far, it’s tapped straight into perhaps the more surreal side of my subconscious.
If you’re feeling stressed, why not have a go at some art yourself? The back of an envelope and a ballpoint will do if you’ve nothing else to hand.
Or do it in the sand or the mud or some flour on a work top. You don’t need to show anyone. You can destroy it if you want. The important thing is not to judge yourself or let anyone judge what you’ve done.
It’ll just be for you. I promise you, if you turn off your inner critic, that it’ll do you the world of good.
If you want to know where Inktober takes me next, feel free to follow me on Instagram. Just watch out for spiders!
The two books ready for pre-order are Death On The Towpath – book 4 in the Booker & Fitch series written with Liz Hedgecock (releasing on 30/11/23) and Dying To Be Heard – book 4 in the Margaret Demeray series (releasing 14/12/23)
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2023, not to be used without the author’s express permission.
It may be no surprise to some, that at school I was considered a bit of a weirdo. This was partly because I was good at the ‘wrong’ things.
If I’d been good at sport, I might have been OK.
I tried, I really did. But my first memory of doing anything competitive was the school sports day when I was five and the littlest child in the school. (So little that the smallest school uniform skirt came half way down my shins making me look like an Edwardian.) As I scurried along in last place in the egg and spoon race, I overheard a couple of old people (probably in their forties or possibly even thirties) laughing at my earnestness and tiny legs. I carried on trying in the next school where I became briefly proficient (to my own surprise as anyone else’s) at high jump and long jump. But then I moved schools again (to Wales, where I wasn’t the shortest, or at least, I was on a par with many), and became the target of a bully.
She applied one of the classic bullying techniques to isolate me: no matter how good I was, she made sure I was picked last for a team. Even if I was actually helping beat the other team, I was still shouted at for being not good enough. I sort of lost interest then. Rounders matches were going to be hell no matter what I did, so I’d wait until our team was fielding and I could slope off as far away from the action as possible, lie down in the grass and daydream. (When someone at work once suggested a massive interteam rounders match in St James’s Park a few years ago, my whole being reverted to a miserable nine year old. I have never been so glad to see rain in summertime as I was that week so I didn’t have to make an excuse not to take part.)
I was all right at cycling and quite fearless (my husband refuses to believe this now), I did a lot of hiking, I even went climbing once, up an actual rock face in Three Cliffs Bay. But none of these counted. Those things were weird too. The things I liked doing were almost entirely uncool.
I could draw, just about, and that was grudgingly approved of, but that was it. Otherwise, I was unnatural in that I was all right at Maths and positively liked things like History, learning languages and, of course English.
The thing I loved most was creative writing. I think I was doing this at its heyday in British education. No one cared about dangling adjectives and co-ordinating subjunctives and for all I know, auto-exploding participles etc which must take all the fun out of the process nowadays. In my day (when I shared a desk with a dinosaur obviously), when the exercise was Creative Writing, even spelling and punctuation took a back seat while we were encouraged to express our imagination on paper. I do realise that for some children, this would have been as daunting to them as rounders was to me, but this was my turn to shine (even if I veered towards hyperbole) and I lapped it up. It’s just a shame that hardly anyone appreciated it.
I had one good friend at primary school who was from my village, and on the same wavelength creatively as me. The character of Ffion in ‘The Cluttering Discombobulator‘, ‘Kindling‘ and ‘The Advent Calendar‘ is based on her. Neither of us knew a thing about pop groups or fashion. Instead, whenever we could, we acted out stories or plays we improvised as we went along. This was often re-enacting Planet of the Apes, or Star Trek (with a greater emphasis on girls actually doing something) but sometimes it was completely made up.
We lost touch with each other for over twenty years. But one of the first things she asked in an email after we reconnected was ‘Do you remember the jelly wall?’ This was one of the science fiction ‘plays’ we improvised in the school playing fields in which our characters were desperately trying to get through a sort of force-field and kept rebounding. Of course, all this was in our heads, so what we looked like to everyone else is anyone’s guess – well OK I can imagine it quite well. We realise now, why we were both considered a right pair of weirdos and were bullied accordingly, even if that doesn’t make it all right. But at least we can’t be accused of following the herd.
When I was about fifteen, my father, who was always a keen writer, joined Swansea and District Writers’ Group and asked me to go to. I daresay, that much like when I joined the SF group with him, I vaguely hoped there might be an interesting, intelligent and attractive boy of my age there, and perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that I was disappointed. The next youngest person was probably ten years older than I was and female and even shyer than I was.
There was an established novelist, several poets (one very angry and sweary), a man who wrote steamy fiction for women’s magazines under a female pseudonym (excerpts of this sort of thing is NOT what you want to hear being read aloud when you’re sitting next to your father) and lots of short-story writers. I decided within a few weeks, that a few of them were even weirder than me and Dad, and even I knew that that really took some doing. (NB – if you were then or are now in Swansea and District Writers’ Group – I apologise, this was just my perception at the time as an out-of-the-loop adolescent and with no right to judge anything!)
Perhaps this explains why I didn’t join anything similar at university. (But it didn’t stop me from writing a good deal of angst-ridden poetry and sitting up late with fellow students talking pretentious nonsense about literature, because young adult students of a certain type can do that sort of thing naturally.)
After graduating, I started working, then married, then had children. I didn’t try to find a writers’ group, partly because of lack of time, and partly because other people had put me off using my wild imagination in what was meant to be kindness, but wasn’t.
Then, we moved to Dorset, and I reconnected with ‘Ffion’ who encouraged me to enter a local writing competition and from that, I joined the local writers’ group. By this time I was in my forties and had stopped caring what anyone thought. The other writers’ turned out to be lovely – all quite unique, full of imagination, with differing ideas of why and for whom they write. Some, like me, want to publish books, some just want to read things for others to enjoy. Are we weird? Absolutely not! Would someone of fifteen think we are? Meh.
Rather late in life, but not too late, my love of creative writing led me to my tribe – wonderful, valuable, treasured writers and readers, including you who are reading this now. Encouraging, supportive, kind.
I have made so many friends, including really close ones who have become co-authors. Is it weird for me and one of them to be recording ourselves barking so we could spell the sound of a woof? Or for me and the other one to compare the relative merits of unicorns and dragons over a curry? (You know who you are, you two.) Maybe it sounds a bit weird, but we look on it as research, honest.
And if not, then while I can’t speak for the others, personally, after all this time I’m happy to be myself, and if someone thinks that makes me weird, then weirdness is something I happily own nowadays. I never really wanted to be in the loop anyway!
Several years ago, my then line manager sent me on an assertiveness course for female managers.
I’d recently just taken on a role which involved liaising with outside agencies. I actually very much enjoyed that part of the job but my need for assertiveness was/is perhaps in other areas. Moreover, I appreciated the intent, as the line manager who’d preceded her had told me I’d never get anywhere because I did everything by conciliation and collaboration.
(For the record, I was/am quite happy with being conciliatory and collaborative and, to cut a long story short, I proved that particular person wrong a long time ago.)
But anyway, going back to the assertiveness course.
I was nervous and sceptical. I’d be meeting women who worked in the same sort of field as me, though not the same organisation. Some of them had quite scary roles. I anticipated sitting in the corner unable to get a word in (yes it does happen) and coming across as a mousy wallflower.
But… I met a room full of women who like me, could put on a face of confidence, but for various reasons, didn’t feel confident. It was a week of discovering what made us who we were and learning how to counter the things blocking us.
The many exercises included visualisations.
I’m a little dubious about visualisation as a means to manifesting change, and the first one on the assertiveness course reinforced this:
‘Imagine you’re behind a closed door.’
Er…
‘You’re in your best dress.’
[Mentally panic as I try to decide what to wear in this imaginary scenario.]
‘Your prettiest party dress.’
Party? Hang on…
‘The door opens… and every single person you know is there…’
Er…
‘And they’re looking up at you, because YOU are the centre of attention. YOU are the belle of the ball. EVERYONE is waiting to see what you’ll say or do next!’
What? Yell ‘Lemme outta here’ while running off like Cinderella? That’s an absolute nightmare scenario.
You can see why I was wary when another visualisation was mooted towards the end of the course.
By this point we’d blue-sky-thought our way through what our personal work aims and objectives were and what we needed to achieve. But we’d also talked about where we got our energy from, what made us happy in our inner selves and touched on what we wanted to achieve outside work. It was at this point that I realised that what I was learning from the course, was not just about assertiveness. It was also that due to work and motherhood etc etc, I had completely neglected my creative side to the detriment of my own joy.
The visualisation started:
‘Imagine something achievable which has your stamp on it.’
I was supposed to be thinking of the successful conclusion of my project, but the first thing that popped into my head was not work related. It was I want a room of my own.
‘Imagine it as a colour,’ said the facilitator, ‘what would it be?’
Teal, I thought, or aqua and silver. It would be like being under the sea.
‘If it had a mood, what would it be?’
Dreamy, creative, calm.
‘What will you be doing?’
Writing, sewing, painting…
‘How will success make you feel?’
Content…
‘What’s the first step you need to take?’
Tell my husband that I want the cold, neglected front room redecorated just for me. That’s not expensive – just paint and wallpaper.
‘And the next?’
Move the old desk from upstairs in there. Move a lamp.
‘And the next?’
Save up for a little sofa, but that can wait. It’s doable. It really is doable.
Out of everything I learned on the course, that’s the one thing I never forgot.
My family is lucky to have two sitting rooms (created by splitting a bigger room in half). I claimed the front one. My husband, very doubtful about the colours (though he loved them afterwards), redecorated and we eventually purchased a sofa in the right shade of blue. For a while, it was my space, even if, at the time I did little actual creating in it.
Then almost immediately the children got older and sort of annexed it as a music room/games room. I learned over the next couple of years to do my writing anywhere and because the space was handy for teenagers to go and chill and get out of my hair, I didn’t really mind.
Things were looking hopeful for a reconquest when my daughter (the youngest child) went to university. Then courtesy of Covid 19, my graduate son returned to live with us and needed the front room as his own office/studio/sitting room. But finally, he’s moved into his own place, taking desks, game consoles, random bits of audio editing equipment etc away with him and my room is now mine again.
It’s a re-work in progress, but it’s nearly my calm, under the sea creative place once more and as I was starting the process of getting that room back in order this weekend, I was reminded of that course from all those years ago.
Did I come out of it more assertive? Probably not much. But possibly I came out more self aware, more able to recognise blockers and be brave enough to move them and more conscious that I had a right to be heard. And I definitely came out determined that I had a right to express my creative self.
I don’t really think that visualising something will necessarily make it come true, but I think it can help focus the mind. And the other thing that helps is to break the path to the goal into manageable chunks.
Or, as someone in a meeting I was at once said ‘You can do it. But just don’t try to eat the elephant in the room all at once.’
Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.
The sparrows have returned to our garden from wherever they shelter over the winter.
From what started as four sweet little birdies a few years ago, a small army of spadgers now congregates each morning on one of the trees to eye up our house. They’re clearly ready to start roosting again which involves a lot of lewd or violent behaviour right in front of us on the fences and decking; a fresh brood of chicks yelling for food from dawn to dusk every few weeks; general clattering and bickering. What’s not happening on the decking, happens in the eaves of our house, where they periodically pull out the nails which hold the tiles in place (presumably they don’t go with their desired decor) and from which they occasionally get into the loft.
Tomorrow is the start of the Chinese Year of The Water Tiger, and the day after is Candlemas. In some countries, they don’t take their Christmas decorations down till Candlemas Eve, after which the new year really starts and in others (in a throw-back to pre-Christian traditions perhaps), Candlemas involves pancakes (or more accurately crêpes) whose round, golden shape symbolises the return of the sun as spring approaches. (I like this idea – one can never have enough pancakes, crêpes or galettes and I was wondering what to cook for dinner on Wednesday.)
So even though January is ending, there’s always a chance for a new beginning.
Have you ever made a fresh start that started out draining but in the end worked out empowering? Or do you need to make one and it scares you?
As a teenager/young person, I’d expected that writing would be my career, but life didn’t work out that way. Was I disappointed? Yes. Did I ever think I’d pick up that abandoned ambition? No. For a long period, it seemed impossible, and every time my dreams were nearly in my grasp again, something would take them away.
Back in 2005, my youngest child was due to start school. I was working three days per week and despite being a team-leader, had almost secured an agreement to continue that working pattern after September. Finally, I was going to have two whole days to myself to start writing! I didn’t really know what I’d write – I had a few ideas, but nothing concrete. Then… my husband became seriously unhappy at work and the chance to move into another role in Dorset rather than travel back and forth to London from Gloucestershire presented itself. He’d always wanted to go back to the south coast where he’d been a student and the job was right up his street. I quite fancied an adventure. I said ‘yes, let’s go’.
Initially however, I found the transition much harder than I’d expected. I hadn’t realised how much I’d miss my support network and how hard it would be to make a new one. I hadn’t realised quite how hard it would be to establish myself in a new role and gain respect (especially since the one I’d been given – just after a merger of two parts of my organisation – was unpopular) while still working part-time and not knowing anyone at all. And to make things worse, I couldn’t keep my proposed working pattern. I had to rush between school and work, being at work, and then as chief child carer rush the children to and from various after school activities. Any hopes of time to myself were knocked firmly on the head.
This was a very low point in my personal plot. I wrote something about trying to explain to the post office about forwarding mail while we were selling one house, buying another, and renting an interim one. It was read aloud on Terry Wogan’s breakfast show. But that was it. Otherwise, I kept writing ‘humorous’ emails to old friends, one of whom got in touch as she thought I was losing what few marbles I had. At some point, I wrote down in the third person a story encompassing what I was going through and how it made me feel. It was cathartic, but only a few people have ever read it.
But… it was a while before I realised that from a creative point of view some things had changed for the better and that this had given me a new starting point.
With the move, I’d also left behind some of the things that were hindering me – other people’s views on what I should write in particular. And I’d learned a lot about the world and myself since I was a teenager/young adult. A kind of freedom from what other people thought made me begin again.
Around 2010, I started some stories, planned out some novels. One lunch break, I wrote down a paragraph from a possible Roman murder mystery. My dad (still living in Wales) and I started a little contest between ourselves writing silly stories. When he died in 2012, an old school friend with whom I’d lost touch turned up at his funeral. She was the kindred spirit from the school year below, with whom I made up stories and acted them out, who had the same mad imagination, who had also been a little ‘odd’.
‘Are you still writing?’ she said.
‘Not really,’ I said.
It turned out she hadn’t stopped. As we rekindled our friendship, she encouraged me to start again and ultimately enter a local writing competition in 2015 in which I was short listed. After that, I joined a local writers’ group.
And one evening on the way home from work, I heard someone talking about self-publishing on the radio, and I bought his book and thought ‘I could do this’.
Then I discovered a Facebook writing group. I had no idea these existed but and after a while I worked up the courage to join and share little bits of writing.
This was now 2015, ten years after that traumatic move. What happened next was a like popping the cork on a bottle. All that pent up, frustrated creativity came pouring out. I pretty much wrote Kindling and The Advent Calendar in the space of two months while also doing Nanowrimo. Now I admit, that that particular Nanowrimo novel is still in a cyber drawer, but the following year, I published the two collections of short stories and the year after that The Cluttering Discombobulator and the year after that the Roman murder mystery paragraph I’d written in my lunch hour came out as Murder Britannica.
And it wasn’t only having the courage to write which made the difference, it was also making writer friends through the writing group and online. Friends who encouraged me, and in many cases became more than ‘virtual’ and in the case of two of them, became co-writers and very close friends indeed. Liz Hedgecock asked me to co-write The Caster & Fleet Series and Val Portelli suggested we pull some of our short stories together into an Weird & Peculiar Tales.
What does the future hold? In the immediate sense, the publication of the third Margaret Demeray book later this year I hope and maybe a longer sequel to The Good Wife. And after that on maybe not too distant a date, I’m hoping the writing shed will come into its own and I won’t be distracted by a demanding day job, but who knows…
After all – since it’s National Story Telling Week, if you click on the link below, you’ll hear me on YouTube, somewhat hesitantly reading ‘The Familiar’, one of the first stories I wrote for ‘Kindling’. It may be a little sad as a story, but it too is ultimately about a new start. Would I have believed I’d do anything like this in 2005? Not in a million years.
So I’d like to encourage you at this new time of new beginnings, whether you’re a writer or not. If you’re stuck, or don’t think ‘it’ will ever happen (whatever ‘it’ is) please don’t give up. The time might not be ‘now’ but when it comes, it’ll be the right time somehow and ‘it’ will be the richer for it. And also, whether you think of yourself as a writer or not and things are bogging you down – consider finding a creative outlet. You don’t need to share the outcome, but writing, drawing, sewing, crafting, photography cooking… all of them are massive boosts to mental health – a way of expressing things it’s hard to say out loud.
Go for it – it’s never too late for a new beginning.
Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.Credit for image of cats.
