Writing Boot Camp.

The writing boot camp over the last three days, organised by the Student Learning Services of the university, was a much needed escape from the endless news cycle on Greece. I wrote over 8,000 words of new material, finished the first draft of a chapter and the beginning of the next one, and to my great surprise I saw a new character walk into the story and shaking things up a bit. It all went well,  very well; way beyond my expectations.

Reality was lurking just outside the door of the writing boot camp, 

heavy with portents: a room full of European Union reports, and 

a table spread with leaflets on EE institutions, agencies, and all 

sorts of euro-info. At the far end of the picture, right next to the 

door, a map of ancient China.

The boot camp took place in a small room in the Annexe of the seventh floor of the library, in an ambience perfectly suitable for concentration: a small room overlooking slate roofs and gables, with good light for looking at the computer screen, and the ultimate tool of productivity, the lack of internet connection. There were fifteen or sixteen of us, in various stages of their PhD writing, but most of them in the writing up stage. In this sense I was one of the ‘youngest' in the room, being only in my second year (well, the end of it now),  which was pleasant for a change! I work best listening to music: I listened to Handel’s Julius Caesar, Rinaldo, and Orlando, and Lully’s Alceste and Armide. During the entre-acts I went downstairs for a coffee (the cappuccino in the vending machines is surprisingly good - or I was just gagging for coffee!) or I stretched my sore neck and shoulders. I was blissfully immersed into the world of the novel, nine hundred years back, away from the turbulent present.

Lately I have often wished reality could leave me alone for a few hours at a time every day. A writing boot camp was perfect for this. I gave myself license not to care about anything else for those specific hours while I was accountable to myself for the set number of words at the end of them. I was incommunicado, which is a kind of freedom less and less available in our tech-heavy days; still I was not completely cut off, for I knew that at the end of the writing day I could catch up with everyone. I was not distracted by my books nor tempted to go off on another tangent - basically an excuse to waste time amusing myself with things that will never make their way into the book - yet I could bring one book or article with me for reference or make notes for targeted info to look up later. The sight of all those people typing busily into their keyboards was a great inducement to do the same.

No wonder the writing boot camp worked for me. The time and the tools were offered by the university; the motivation and the hard work were mine. For optimal results it takes both sides.

Autumnal windows, old and new.

Now that the clocks have gone back one hour and the sun sets before five o'clock, I love to get up early, earlier than daylight, and watch the light come in and then the slow or swift fall of leaves and the change of colours around me. This is the view from the window of the old office (right), and the new (below), where I moved last week. For my wish was granted at last, when I had lost all hope it would ever be. 

I often re-read Persuasion at this time of year, and I particularly love the following passage, in which Anne Elliott is walking in the country with her annoying sister and some friends, her former fiancé, Captain Wentworth, among them: 

The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory. (...) [A]fter another half mile of gradual ascent through large enclosures, where the ploughs at work, and the fresh made path spoke the farmer counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again, they gained the summit of the most considerable hill, which parted Uppercross and Winthorp and soon commanded a full view of the latter, at the foot of the hill on the other side.

It is typical of Jane Austen to say the most important thing as an aside. She never means to preach, and this is one of the reasons why she is such a convincing writer, besides being such a constant pleasure to read. 

'Meaning to have spring again' should be my new motto. 

Yesterday, we went on another tour on the sightseeing bus (possibly our tenth or more since we moved to Glasgow; I've lost count). It was an undecided day, between rain and shine. Perhaps this is why there is something water-colourish in this picture of Glasgow University above one of the bridges over the river Kelvin, just before the stop for the Kelvingrove museum. I have no idea where the cream frame came from. I'm still learning how to use the ipad, and sometimes it seems to have a will of its own. I don't mind. The glass between the image and the lens seems to have changed the light, ehnhanced it somehow, touched up the colours, given the clouds an extra swirl. 

Looking at a picture I took and seeing in it something I did not mean to put there is always a pleasant surprise. Much like writing a piece and forgetting about it and then reading it again after a while, and thinking: "Who wrote this? Did I write this?" It's a kind of happiness, that.