THE BOOKWORMERY

Reading mojo, drugs, alcohol, no sex

Hello! And first of all an apology - I gather that there can and should be a ‘Welcome!’ email to go out to the lovely, lovely people who subscribe to this newsletter but I knew nothing about such a thing so currently they are going - and you have all gone - unwelcomed even though I am so glad to have you and so grateful that you are giving this endeavour a chance. So thank you, so much, and welcome. I am seeing a young person whom my publisher has found for me who is going to teach me more about this stuff in the next week or so, so I hope to be a better host soon. I just need one for real life now. God, wouldn’t that be great?

Second of all, a follow-up to last week’s post. I mentioned that I’d bought the world’s greatest pen and a lot of you have asked for further details. It is The Wren pen from Tom's Studio and I love it. It was not cheap (£35) but I had been looking for a refillable, non-disposable but non-fountain-pen-pen for AGES and I’m calling it an early birthday present to myself. I got it in Ivy and it looks like this:

And we will talk about the very important matter of stationery properly soon.

Meanwhile, to this week’s thoughts.

So - I handed in 20,500 words of the first draft of my new book (20,559 actually – but who’s counting?) to my agents just before the Easter weekend and, as I am now experienced enough to expect and anticipate with joy, my reading mojo came back with a vengeance.

By reading mojo, I mean the full measure of love I have for and joy I take in reading. I (almost) always have some – even in the depths of despair or grief, because reading is a solace – but it took me a long time to realise that it becomes eroded while I am writing a book.

(Maybe it also does while I am writing columns or book reviews but because I have done that daily for so long I no longer notice, and it should now just be counted as my baseline mojo? If I ever take two weeks off and can determine anything through the panicked haze brought about by not working – will everyone sack me while I’m gone? Will I ever work again? Will I have lost the ability to write at all? – then I will be interested to find out.)

Some of the reasons for this erosion are relatively obvious. You need to get away from the printed word for a bit, just as you need to get away from your desk or, if you are a teacher, children, an accountant Excel spreadsheets, or an Evri customer complaints handler the whole world.

Then of course there is the problem of the unstoppable running comparison and commentary your stupid, treacherous, self-sabotaging brain makes between any book you settle down with in the evening and the abysmal words THE DRIVELLINGS OF AN IDIOT you have just put down on paper LIKE THE ARROGANT MISGUIDED FOOL YOU ARE or typed onto a screen AS IF YOU’RE SOMETHING SPECIAL during the day THE WASTED WASTED DAY WHEN YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING A PROPER JOB INSTEAD OF DRIVELLING.

I mean, that’s a given.

But generally, after a bit, you can switch that inner voice off. You can tell it that you are not comparing like with like – a published book has generally moved miles from its first draft form NOT ALWAYS SOME PEOPLE MANAGE TO GET IT RIGHT FIRST TIME WE CALL THEM PROPER WRITERS? and been shaped by many helping hands along the way, from beta readers to agents to editors NOT THAT THEY’LL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING WITH THE PAGES YOU HAVE WHICH YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE WIPED YOUR BUM ON and what you hold in your hands is the product of much more time and work than you have yet spent on your creation OH CREATION IS IT? GET YOU. UP YOUR FUNDAMENT MUCH, ARE YOU?

Or you can drink wine and pop a pregabalin filched from your late father’s collection after he died and quiet things down that way. I imagine.

Slightly less obvious but more interesting – and a little less soul-destroying – I think is the connection it suggests between reading and writing as both creative acts.

(OH CREATION AGAIN IS IT – Shh. Shush now)

Because as some clever and succinct internet person once put it – reading is staring at slices of marked tree and hallucinating vividly for hours. But those hallucinations are not effortless. We induce them. We read, interpret, understand and then – imagine. And all differently. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy (at least until the 1995 adaptation of P&P arrived), Heathcliff (at least until you see Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights, because lemme tell you – Jacob Elordi could never) and any other character, or place, or landscape or bed or chair or cat or dog we ever meet in our minds courtesy of another person’s evocation will never be the same as your neighbour’s interpretation. Unless he or she has also seen the right P&P and WH on screen, but this is a needless complication and we shall move swiftly on.)

The point is, you use a lot of your brain to read. I think we sometimes forget that when we feel bad about not doing it more, or worry about the status of reading as a pastime in the modern world. Modern life is demanding. Too demanding. I am no fan of modern life, outside its medical benefits and Brooklyn Nine Nine. It does not leave anywhere close to as much space or peace as it did for earlier generations and that we need as human beings simply to preserve all our equilibria, let alone forge ahead with art and culture and making more Brooklyn Nine Nine (even that dropped off in season eight).

And so, of course, It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t push back against The Way Things Are and reclaim as much of space, peace and other valuable things as we can, but it does mean that doing so takes energy too - we are not pushing at an open door - and that, regrettably, we have to accept some of it as another inescapable new normal. And not feel bad when we can’t manage as much of the hallucinating at tree slices as we’d like or think we should.

This Week’s Books

So, as discussed, I’ve had a great week.

I read – yomped through, really, in as close to single sittings as it is possible to get these days – the following:

The Housewife by Natalie Barelli - so much fun, so well worked out and with a genuinely off-kilter heroine, which is so hard to do. Now keen to read her others and she seems pretty prolific, so colour me happy. Love a new discovery with a back catalogue. Takes me back to that heady day when I discovered that Enid Blyton had written slightly more than than the three Secret Sevens my parents’ friend Bunny had passed along from her grown up sons’ collection.

Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza - trad wife thriller. Terrific. Now eager to read Techbitch

Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskeses - another trad wife thriller, not quite as terrific but I still really enjoyed.

And then polished off:

Holly Seddon's Try Not to BreatheHolly Seddon’s Try Not to Breathe (I’m now halfway through her Don't Close Your Eyes)

I’ve started Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash because everyone’s been telling me to for ages and I now find myself in the right mood (maybe it’s just the Easter connection in the title and I’m about to come a cropper – we’ll see)

And I’ve started No Body No Crime (no comma either, apparently, which is paining me but maybe I will mentally swap it with the extraneous one in Harry Styles’ Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally album and be able to sleep at night once again) by Tess Sharpe and am enjoying that hugely.

As for buying – well, here’s what I have acquired since the start of the Easter holidays, also known as Why I Need to Move to a Bigger House Again.

The Bourne, Sharpe and Blake were from a new discovery - Norfolk’s only mobile bookshop, The Heartbound Van, which is a big van lined with new and secondhand books in Billy bookcases and will be at North Creake Farmers’ Market May 2 and doubtless elsewhere before that, what with being mobile ‘n’ everything. New bookshop, basically - hurrah!

Happy Easter, and happy reading!

Love, Lucy