It’s September, ALREADY. I can feel the summer leaching away through the gaps in the grass on our lawn. My skin tone is starting to fade to its natural pallid state. School (gulp) starts again on Monday. And perhaps that is the biggest wrench.
“Hooray!” One half of me cries, “I get my writing time back! I can actually do some proper work!”
But…
Oh God…
It means my children are that little bit older. One of their summers has been and gone and I want to drag them out of their beds, hold them and tell them to stop right there, at this exact moment, and just be my little ones forever.
The bittersweet start of term.
I wrote a post a while ago on how similar writing is to raising children, but I’ve realised how wrong I was, how very wrong. I want to protect my children, keep them unchanged and out of the way of those who could manipulate, take advantage. I want to keep them, as they are, happy in themselves and the world around them.
But my book is oh so different. I’ve discovered this past week, whilst reflecting on the notes taken during my conversation with my agent (still can’t get used to saying that!) that I’m more than happy for my book to be manipulated and manhandled into something else, something better. I want to take full advantage of its commercial appeal, chop at the freckles or warts that make it unsavoury, to use my ability to delete explicit scenes and make their existence more subconscious. In short, I want to twist it around my little finger and make it work for me, for my agent, for (hopefully) a publisher.
Oh, how very mercenary I must sound.
But the two, I suppose, go hand in hand. I want to make a success of my writing because principally I don’t want to do anything else, I don’t think I can do anything else. But also, I can do this from home (when timing allows) I can create these characters, twist them this way and that, whilst attempting to ensure that no one, EVER, does that to my kiddoes.
Except when they’re at school…
…And I can’t protect them…
…bloody September school panic blues.
Rebecca Tinnelly 