I'm dreaming of........

When I was a horse-mad child, all I ever wanted was a pony.  I put it on my Christmas list every year and even though I knew deep down there was no way on earth my parents would ever afford to buy and keep a pony, I woke on Christmas morning hoping that a miracle would occur and my dream pony would be waiting for me in our tiny garden.

This was a dream that was never fulfilled.  As my dear late mum would say, it wasn't meant to be.
(And in the words of Joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got til its gone." I would give anything to have both my parents back, so I treasure every memory I have of a happy childhood).

So I started writing about pony-mad girls just like me - and in my stories, their wishes came true.

When I was a teenager, all I ever wanted was to be a full time writer.  In my head, it would be a glamorous lifestyle and I would be incredibly successful and probably famous. 

Half of my dream has come true - I am a full time writer, after 40 years of dreaming. 

Be careful what you wish for........

Related posts:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/different-chapter-same-book-power-of.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/reflections-on-being-full-time-writer.html


I have also read a simply wonderful post by from Mariellen Ward on her blog Breathe, Dream, Go reflecting on dreams and ambitions.  Read it here: http://breathedreamgo.com/2014/12/stumbling-road-dreams/

Writing Dreams

Recently I’ve been having a recurring dream about clearing out cupboards, in which I have a selection of cupboards full of stuff to sort out and organise.  I think this is about not doing the things I should be doing  - like formatting the 4 books for Kindle which have been on my to-do list for months now.  It’s preying on my mind but life seems to conspire against me so that whenever it seems I will get the time to do it, something happens.  Sigh.  Cupboards and drawers (not the knickers variety!) appear often in my dreams – usually, in the dream, I am about to move house and have left everything until the last minute and realise that I haven’t even made a start on the cupboards and it is the day of the move!  Arrgggh! 

And on the subject of dreams, I realise that I have, finally and by default (redundancy) realised my childhood ambition  – I am now, officially, a full time writer.  It’s taken nearly 40 years and I think I’m so busy trying to keep on top of everything that I haven’t actually celebrated. 

So if you always wanted to be a full time writer, don’t be discouraged if it hasn’t happened yet.  Because, one day, it will. However long it takes.  

Related post:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/writing-in-cupboard.html

That other place

I’ve just been reading a perceptive and illuminating travel blog.  

It's called http://travelswithmyipad2.com/2012/09/21/another-place-re-visited/ and one of the posts really resonated with me.  We often think that “the grass is always greener on the other side.”  In fact, sometimes we spend our lives pursuing a dream of moving away, somewhere different, somewhere exotic, somewhere better.  We tell ourselves stories of this other place.

But this can be a fallacious trap.  

There is a reference to the British sculptor Antony Gormley, creator of the Angel of the North.  The blogger comments:

“That’s what Anthony Gormley meant. We’d all be happier if we accepted that ‘the other place’ that we sometimes escape to, is in our imagination rather than an actual country.”

Reality and fantasy.  Two worlds colliding.       

Related posts:
http://www.janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/art-of-storytelling.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/once-upon-time.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/models-playing-god-and-storytelling.html

Time to write

When I was a child, writing and reading was a form of escapism for me.  I was quite shy and insular and lacked confidence in social situations.  I enjoyed making up stories and writing them down.  Aside from school work, I also wrote poems and prose for my own pleasure, entered a few competitions and won a few prizes.  So I decided from an early age I wanted to be a writer - probably a journalist.  In my teens, I sent stories to magazines and got published .  I expanded stories into serials and attempted to write a short novel, which I never finished.  I discovered that I could earn bit of extra money from my stories, which, when I left home, was needed to pay bills.  In parallel with this, I have always worked for an employer.  From the age of 13, I had a variety of part time jobs and as life went on, and relationships and mortgages followed, I continued to work full time and my dreams of being a full time writer remained dreams.

When I reached my twenties, I got an agent and produced 2 pony novels a year whilst continuing in salaried employment. To meet the publishers deadlines, weekends and holidays were spent writing.  I worked very hard for very many years and was probably more productive than at any time since.  I continued to envy those who could afford to write full time, who maybe had the luxury of a partner who supported them to pursue their ambitions.


As I reached my thirties and forties I found ways to reorganise my working hours to build in more time to write.  This involved some very early mornings, and, for a year, I managed to persuade one employer that I could squeeze my 37 hours a week into 4 longer days and do the job just as well.  Eventually, I came to a point some years ago when I juggled several part time jobs to create more time to write but even then it was a struggle.  The self discipline that had been a major part of my twenties was now lacking, and writing seemed to come harder to me. I moaned and whinged to anyone who would listen that there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

When, for a brief period of time, I did actually have some free time, how ironic that I was unable to motivate myself to produce anything worthwhile.

Next month I will be fifty and over the years I have realised that I no longer want to be a full time writer.  The dream that sustained me throughout years of commuting and jobs that I usually got bored with, had gradually faded.  I need to interact with people, to learn new things and share experiences.  All of this feeds my writing and makes life richer.  What works best for me is to have some flexibility, some control, even if this is only 1 or 2 days a week, to organise how I use that time.  I write in blocks, intense bursts of activity that can take me weeks or longer to gear up to.  I really admire writers who have the discipline to write something every day.  I remember once reading about a successful author who still retained her 9-5 office job, writing in the evenings and weekends.  I felt resentful when I had to do this for years, but she actively chooses to structure her life in this way.  That’s the key element in all this - choice.  If you feel trapped and constrained, you end up being frustrated and constantly telling yourself, “If only I had more time to write I could achieve X, Y and Z.”    “If” can be a very damaging word.

I have learned that on the rare occasions I have an unexpected expanse of “free” time I am very good at wasting it.  (Although John Lennon apparently said, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.”  I like this.)

What I enjoy most about writing is playing with ideas.  Writing is about ideas and language.  Whether you are chained to a desk in a boring office job or stuck on a packed commuter train, your mind is still free to play and explore and for me that is the real fun.  The physical act of translating those ideas onto a computer screen or notebook - that’s the graft.  That’s the hardest bit.                                                                                                            

More on journeys

I said in a previous blog that life is a journey.  I do believe this.  I feel it.  Not long after I had written it I started to read Super Sad True Love Story, a novel set in the future by Gary Shteyngart.  He was interviewed in the BBC documentary called Books - The Last Chapter (referred to in a previous blog) and this inspired me to seek out his novel.

The second paragraph reads, “Don’t let them tell you life is a journey.  A journey is when you end up somewhere.  When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey.”

That made me think about my journey.  Where do I want to end up?  I don’t know the answer yet, although we all end up in the same place ultimately.  Journey and destination.  Both matter.

Train journeys and car journeys both provide great creative space, I find, whether I am driver or passenger.  Ideas fire off unprompted in a way that rarely happens if I am staring at my computer screen.

I’ve just read Rumblestrip by Woodrow Phoenix, a monochrome graphic book all about what happens when we get behind a steering wheel.  The layout cleverly simulates a car journey and as you read, you feel as if you are in fact on a virtual car journey.  I came across this book in a store in London at http://www.theschooloflife.com/

I keep promising myself I will go on one of their day schools some time.  Anyway, the book provides alarming statistics about deaths caused by driving and is thought-provoking.  I sometimes dream about driving a car, and when I drive at night, I sometimes wonder if I am dreaming.  Woodrow Phoenix describes it perfectly:

“There is a dreamlike quality built into the experience of driving.  A car windshield is a big window.  And also a screen….locations unwind on the other side of this rectangular glass almost as they do on a movie screen….you sit cocooned in your cabin….everything outside your windows is contained, the rest of the world an arm’s length away…..you glide through location after location as if they were erected just for you to drive past.  Every journey is a narrative with you at the centre.”  

I love that last line.

Related posts:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/for-journey.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/footsteps-in-sand-guest-blog-from-jan.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/journeys-and-shapes.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/wheels.html