Progress report

Well, yes, there haven't been many entries recently, mostly for personal reasons, but also because I've had a bit of a crisis of faith.

I had planned to start on the next episode of the Conscience saga, but a rather unhelpful comment from an agent, about being unable to sell anything connected with WW1 somewhat took the wind out of my sails, and I was forced to drift to a halt.  I was completely lost - what to do?  I was geared up to research the next book - only lacking the petrol money to take me to the right places.  Should I do it anyway?  I pondered, and, coupled with the depression that a really bad flu/virus/chest infection brings I rather began to despair.

Somewhere around this time two thoughts occurred: firstly I suddenly had two novel plots, one modern, one historical - neither connected with the toxic WW1.   I suggested them to the rejecting agent, and she told me which she thought was more commercial.   This idea is gradually taking shape - it is inspired by Judith Murray's suggestion that I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - which I predictably loathed.   However, I thought if my "good" novels were not getting far in the market, then I should try and write something unutterably middle-brow.  And possibly heart-warming.   I have the idea, but am just warming it up a bit, and hoping that a plot is maturing somewhere.

Competitions
In the meantime I have submitted TAG and TRF to two novel writing competitions, the Dundee International and the new Bath Literary Prize.  The latter only asked for 5,000 words, but I am obviously hoping they will come back for more and to that end I have been re-editing it - and have reduced it by about 6-7,000 words.... which is delightful.  I am astonished that there is so much superfluous bumf - in some cases I have been "showing AND telling" - I hope I'm not writing for the hard of thought.   They will organise a long list - I am praying to be on that at least - something to put in submission letters.

Success
What will I do when I actually get an agent, an editor, a publisher.... will I have to start a new blog full of success and vaunting?  

The Plan
If I get interest in TAG I will move onto Conscience, but in the meantime I am working on GATD and the plan is to write it in 3 months or so.  Mind you, the sight of the great flood yesterday made me think I should revive Islanders

A teenage feminist in the 1970's - for International Women's Day 2014

Lucy and Leo were perfect children of their time: their interest in the environment and her interest in feminism, coincided with the Pill (The cure for the population explosion!  The liberator of women!)  All around the media were proclaiming a great cultural change.  It was on the covers of Time and Newsweek, in colour supplement photographs, whole episodes of Panorama, Man Alive and Horizon.  They had no historic perspective for this: this was their now.  1968, hippies, the Vietnam war, the “Sexual Revolution” had been followed by environmental awareness, the oil crisis, the troubled economy.   The words oil, Nixon and pollution cropped up in every conversation.  Sometimes people mentioned (derisively of course) Women’s Lib. 

Lucy never became a feminist: she was one, probably since birth, but was piqued into consciousness by the unequal treatment of herself and her brother Peter.  It was so obvious.  The feminist emphasis on male oppression was naturally associated in her experience with her father’s traditional views on women and how they should be controlled.  When Lucy used a Christmas book token to buy The Female Eunuch in January 1972 Mike immediately demanded that she should not read it and should hand it over to him “until you are 16.”  She read it anyway: she was fascinated by the arguments about love and altruism – she looked around for a male oppressor, but her chief sources of oppression were women: her mother, her headmistress, her fanatical PE teacher, her dismissive art teacher.  When Leo came along he did not seem to interfere with her freedom (or was she just being complicit in her own oppression there?).  

 Some adolescent girls dream about marriage, but it didn’t seem to fit with the peace, love and freedom doctrine Lucy had acquired as a hippy fellow traveller: she had the loon pants, the scoopneck t-shirts, the ethnic jewellery, but these outer decorative touches meant nothing without the mental furniture, and Lucy had bought the whole shopful.  These ideas weren’t bolt-on goodies, fashionable bells and whistles borrowed from others’ mental processes. They were the product of an interior alchemy which produced surprising intellectual results. Lucy had taken the gospel-based understanding of her Catholic upbringing, combined it with the actions of Che Guevara and the Women’s Liberation Movement and her own personal need for freedom to create a philosophy that embraced Jesus’s promise of life in abundance and transmuted it into peace, love and freedom for everyone and everything, but particularly herself.  

Marriage seemed to conflict with her desire for freedom and self-fulfillment.  Joni Mitchell warbling We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true sounded cool and hip and non-possessive. She knew there were other ways of living – some of the girls in her class had been passing around Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa.  This was a step up from the National Geographical as a way of discovering more about human sexuality.  The book was admired for its exhilarating descriptions of different ways in which adolescents were allowed to discover sexual pleasure.  Lucy wondered about these different modes of sexual relationship: more experimental, non-exclusive, with monogamy a brief pause in a kaleidoscope of other possibilities.  Hippy tribalism and communal living were the closest the West came to Samoa; intellectually these were fascinating, and clearly feminist. Not that she wanted sociable sexuality herself, she just wanted Leo, to be his.  Her romantic yearnings made her more a surrendered wife than a sexual outlaw at that stage.

Leo is less impressed with feminist arguments than Lucy, and Lucy begrudges giving up valuable kissing time to tell him more about it, but one evening as they lie on cushions on the floor, she does her best.

“Don’t you see Leo – women’s liberation is actually everyone’s liberation.  Plenty of men are oppressed by their sex roles, just as much as women are!”

“I don’t feel oppressed by them,” he says, “I’m happy with it.”

“But – some men, I mean, might find it hard to be strong and tough and manly and go out and kill animals.  I would if I were a man.”

“But you’re not a man!”

“Oh, honestly – use your imagination – not all men want to be told they have to be fierce and competitive and aggressive – some of them might want to be caring, co-operative sort of people instead, they must feel uncomfortable being forced into a masculine stereotype.”

She’s looking at him earnestly, he doesn’t really have an answer for her, but he knows a way to end the argument, so he just says

“I suppose so, if you’re that type,” and then his hand wraps her breast, teasing her nipple, until she loses interest in discussion.