Things you sometimes see from your writing desk VI

I took a photo of the view I had most days from my window in Wales, but I must have accidentally deleted it. It showed the cloud right outside the window and the nearby trees ghostly, which was very nice in a way: I felt cosily shut in with the world of my novel, and I made good progress, although the overall progress is pretty slow, I'm finding. Like Nuala Ni Chonchuir, who visited this blog recently, I seem to be a more contemplative writer these days, and I think it's bearing fruit...

Anyway, before I went away, the view from my Manchester window was filled with shrieking swifts teaching their young to fly. They kept swooping past in gangs inches from the glass, but they were impossible to catch with the camera, I found: by the time I'd clicked, the window was empty again. This was my best shot: the very last swift about to fly out of view.


And now I'm back and the swifts have gone. They come for such a short time: they don't arrive until the first week in May and they've already gone by the end of the first week of August, and in that time they've nested and their young are fit to fly south. And their departure is so striking: right up until they go the neighbourhood rings with their screaming, and then you wake up one morning and there's silence, they've gone, and you can't help thinking of the end of summer, even though the school holidays have not long begun and the corn's not yet ripe, as we could see at close quarters when the footpath we were following one afternoon in Wales suddenly went right through a cornfield:


On the other hand, the blackbirds are still busy with their belated nest outside my Manchester window, I'm glad to say.

And here's the latest ambitious window display in Palas Print, the Caernarfon bookshop: a display of camping and travel books:

Things you sometimes see from your writing desk V

Bit quiet on here, I know. I've been in Wales for a week with pretty dodgy internet and with my head deep in my novel every morning, and we've had another family member staying so have been off on long family walks for the rest of each day. Tonight, though, it's just John and me again and the rain is just bucketing out of the sky, and surprisingly, in spite of that, I have some decent internet connection for once!

As for the novel, well, maybe it'll go down in history as the most reworked novel ever - or maybe not, but then I guess it's some consolation that James Joyce will probably beat most, apparently. Having finished the next section, I ended up reworking the beginning once again - yet again! All good, though: it's just lovely, that feeling you get when the more you write the more of what you've already written comes in to focus, and then what you haven't yet written comes into brighter relief, too, and the whole thing starts drawing together...

Before we left Manchester I took this pic of the tree I look down on from my writing room. The clematis has long finished flowering, of course, and the significance now is that inside it, beyond the darker depression you can see in the middle near the top, there's a blackbirds' nest. And it's the third nest our resident blackbird pair have built this summer! The first two nests they built much lower down, and magpies got the eggs of the first one. The second brood hatched, but there was a tremendous drama concerning the neighbourhood cats. Every time a cat came into the garden the blackbirds would set up the most tremendous row, sometimes to the extent that I couldn't work, and divebomb the cats who at first seemed quite bewildered. Quite frankly I think they alerted the cats to the presence of their nest, and in the end we kept finding dying fledglings on the lawn..

I could hardly believe it when I looked up from my desk one morning, well into July, to see the cock bird emerging from that gap in the tree, and later the hen alighting on a branch lower down and looking around very carefully before shooting in.

Talk about perseverance. Bit like me and my novel...

Oh, and in one of my brief and interrupted forays onto the net last week I discovered that I had beaten Jenn Ashworth, author of the clever and engrossing A Kind of Intimacy, in Benjamin Judge's World Literary Cup - for entirely spurious and non-literary reasons! And I can't give you a link because while I have been writing this the connection has become dodgy again, and I don't even know if I'll manage to publish...

Immersion - and things you sometimes see from your writing desk IV

I wanted to show you the view from my writing desk in Wales, as it's a view which this week has been central to my psyche, apart of course from the scenarios of the novel. However, the mobile broadband signal isn't good enough for pics this morning (I think it must the wind, and not the clouds, as I've thought previously: there's no cloud down on the mountain), so I'll describe it instead: there are ash trees, and beyond them the blue-and-purple of Nantlle Ridge. I've been working really hard - not steadily as I intended, because it's really taken me over, and I need to take advantage of that. I've been writing in the mornings, typing up and editing the morning's writing in the afternoons, sometimes until six or seven o'clock in the evenings, by which time I have been exhausted and badly in need of just getting up from the chair. As a result, I've been out of touch with blogging and the internet generally, although every day I have (unrealistically) intended not to be...

The new typing chair has been great, though: I would never have managed such long hours without a lot more stiffness and RSI with the old Victorian chair...

Yesterday evening I finally got to the end of the first section of the book, and this morning, for the first time since I got here last Sunday, I am able to sit back and take stock and turn my attention for a moment to other things.

The days have been hot, apparently (though not nearly as hot up here on the mountain as I understand it is in England), but it's cool inside the house where I'm working. On one of the warmer days the swallows were teaching their young to fly right past the window, and one baby almost flew into the glass just as I looked up, only to realise its mistake just in time, which felt like some of the moves I was making with my narrative. Often when I look up I see goldfinch and yellowhammers and linnets flitting in the nearest tree. For the whole time a cuckoo has been calling, which puts paid to my long-term idea that cuckoos only call for the month of May, and for some reason I have found that really heartening: I love the idea of having one's longtime assumptions overturned, and I think the sense of that has been especially good for the novel. By the time I have emerged in the evenings it's become fairly nippy, one evening so cold that I wore three tops including a woolly jumper without getting too warm and could have done with gloves, even though John and I had a strenuous walk up the side of a mountain. This is a wonderful time of the year for writing, because it means that you can work for such long hours yet still have long light evenings for walking, which you really need to do, I think, when you've been static all day - and of course, it stays lighter longer here than in Manchester, being further west.

In the evenings too I have been reading Nuala Ni Chonchuir's really lovely novel, You, which she will be touring around the blogosphere from 7th July, stopping by here on the 14th. Usually when I'm writing so hard I find it very difficult to read - it's the disruptive wrench into another psyche and another language - but Nuala's book is so engaging and moving I'm having no trouble at all, and I'm really looking forward to talking to her about it on the tour.

We'll be here until Monday, and on the way back we'll be stopping off in Chester for the launch of Clare Dudman's new novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, which I'm also really looking forward to reading - and speaking of launches, I'm especially sorry to miss Charles Lambert's London launch next weekend for his new book from Picador, Any Human Face.

And by the time we leave I hope to be well into the second section of my novel...

Things you sometimes see from your writing desk III

Here's another image from the time, a couple of weeks ago, when I was getting going on the WIP, and which will now always be associated with it for me. It's a whitebeam tree with clematis growing all over it, and as usual I can't help finding a parallel with the novel: the new draft is taking over from the old one, but the old one is still sturdy and flowering away underneath, so (I hope) I'm getting the best of two worlds!

The things you sometimes see from your writing desk II

They're filming Debbie Horsfield's Choir Project next door again. And they're doing night filming this time:

The things you sometimes see from your writing desk...

I dunno, talk about distractions while you're writing. Looked up from my desk yesterday morning and down into next door's garden, and what should I see but a beautiful heron standing on the fence. Well, I was rather lost in my latest story - double-lost: I'm trying to write a story about someone lost in a memory which she isn't even sure of - so it didn't occur to me at that point why the heron was standing there. I happened to have my camera on my desk so I snapped it, then looked away, back to my story. When I looked up again the heron had moved down to the side of the neighbours' pond. Should I run the two flights and outside and chase it away? Before I could move, it bent down and picked out of the water a big lump of soggy weed. What on earth, I thought, would a heron want with a soggy lump of weed? (You see, I really wasn't with it). The heron stepped down onto the lawn and dropped the weed to begin poking it. As soon at it let go, the lump shot away, so the heron snapped it up again, hopped back onto the side of the pond, and methodically dipped it into the water over and over, so the weed was washed away and the shape of a frog emerged, its legs flailing. And when at last all the weed was gone, in the split second after this photo was taken, the heron swallowed it whole.

The worst bit? Watching the heron's neck convulse as the frog fought inside it for at least five minutes, while the heron stood nonchalant and still on the side of the pond.