Discombobulated

Arrived back in baking hot London from my very long journey through the Canadian wilderness and made a beeline for the garden. To my delight, my Home Exchangers had cared for it brilliantly and everything was still alive – in fact some things were bursting with life to a ridiculous extent...

Nesting. Unpacking, distributing maple syrup to upstairs neighbours (as thanks for front garden care) and a flying visit to son and family who are about to leave for Summer hols...wanted to say bon voyage.

Home again to prepare for my Author’s Wednesday on We Love Memoirs (a Facebook group where where memoir readers and authors chat together.) Author’s Wednesday offers one author 24 hours to connect with other members and talk about their book or books. I am convinced my big day is tomorrow. Spend some hours preparing text for it, before being overcome with exhaustion, collapsing on my bed and sleeping for three hours straight. I wake refreshed and go back to my computer to check exactly what time I have to start uploading and discover, to massive relief, that it isn’t until next Wednesday. I realise I am completely out of synch and rather wobbly.

Now I know my We Love Memoirs entry isn’t due until next Wednesday I can work on it a little more gently. The idea is that I can load up to 8 entries about me, my book or books, and it is quite a challenge to figure out what to say and how to say it. (given you a taster below).

Do massive garden watering session – I prefer to water by watering-can rather than hose (even if there isn’t a hose pipe ban) as it means visiting each plant and pot individually taking stock of condition of plant and having a few moments of communion with it. I am convinced it makes them feel loved and they do better for it.

Set off for Hebden Bridge. Daughter moving house and needs help with childcare/decorating decisions. Truthfully a bit discombobulated travelling up the length of England all gentle rolling hills and sheep – it was only four days ago I was travelling through the Kootenays, all imposing mountains and glistening lakes.

Babysit/childcare and even more discombobulated. Six year old babysitting duties include football (me watching him playing) and this discombobulation is due to having watched 7 year old granddaughter’s football the previous week – just 5,000 miles apart. After football, and feeling faintly guilty, we do 12:30 screening of Toy Story 5.

‘Feeling guilty’ as I had already done the film with grandchildren in Canada and also because a 12:30 screening seemed decadent, but loads of people obviously thought escaping the 34° heat with Woody and Buzz at 12:30 was a great idea. It was packed. The film is great fun and has some great ideas in it, the characters are as fresh and loveable as ever, but honestly the plot is super complicated and I secretly googled the synopsis when I got home to explain some bits because I was still confused after two screenings!

After the film grandson suggested his favourite hike up through the woods to Heptonstall – to finish at the ice cream shop.

I was delighted as have recently finished When We Were Divided by Liz Flanagan - about the Civil War, firmly based in Heptonstall. Very moving to climb through these woods and walk the pretty, sun drenched cobbled streets of the village, with vivid images of the realities and horrors of the 1600’s so fresh in my mind. Also very discombobulating.

Just back from a very long, but very lovely day out in Whitby. 10 year old granddaughter playing the cornet in the Hebden Bridge Junior Brass Band on the Bandstand at the end of the pier. What a joy! An Ode to Joy in fact.

I thought I would give you the first three posts from my

WE LOVE MEMOIRS - AUTHOR’S DAY ENTRIES

Post 1 – 6:00am

Hello everyone, Thank you for having me!

I’m going to use my Author’s Wednesday to tell you how I came to write The Rule of Three: a Memoir (with benefits).

I’m a relative newbie to WLM so let me introduce myself. I am 72 and have been an actress (before actresses were actors), producer, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and academic and, when I retired from university life, all I wanted was to sit alone and write, with no collaborators, no deadlines, no grant proposal needed, no development executive demanding soul crushing changes. I wanted to write a novel and I had a lot of ideas but – no actual idea of where to start....

Post 2 - 8:00 am

Where to start? I considered embarking on an MA or MFA. But when I investigated it seemed they all required a lot of reading and critiquing other students’ work. Call me self centred, but I had just spent the previous 15 years doing that as a job, plus I didn’t feel I had time. Alongside the writing I had my garden, three children and six grandchildren distributed around the world, needing quite a lot of grandparenting (read childcare). But I still knew I needed help. At that time I had no idea that there was a world positively teeming with ‘book coaches’ and ‘editors’ and ‘mentors’...what I did know was that I had a brilliantly talented poet/novelist PhD in Creative Writing niece. So I asked her to mentor me. One of my better life decisions. Nell is a very, very different writer to me – a poet brimming with metaphor and dark imagery but, somehow, I instinctively knew she was who I needed.

Post 3 - 11:00am

I started work with Nell by telling her my ideas – she suggested I choose the one I thought would be the easiest, the one I had most fleshed out. That was easy. I would adapt my one-woman play. The play I had written and performed 15 years previously. The play that was based on the break-up of my marriage. After I discovered my husband of 25 years was having an affair.

So far so cliché.

The angle, what pulled it out of cliché, was that a few weeks after my discovery I was unloading onto my screenwriting partner (15 years younger than me and a super cool LA player), telling her I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to fight to get him back, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted – her response was that I should do the Rule of Three - I should sleep with three different men, and after that I would have a pretty good idea of if I wanted my husband back.

I told her I didn’t think it was quite ‘me’ but I did think it was a great idea for a screenplay. We were deep into another project, with no time to develop this idea, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind and, in the spirit of just wanting to get on with it, I wrote it as a one-woman play. I was living and working in the US at the time and I toured it around festivals where it was really positively received.