What happens when your muses move out?

My inspiration

My world is changing at the moment. Gorgeous daughter is getting married in less than two weeks and youngest son moves out to live with his girlfriend next week. Think eldest son will be moving out very soon too also to live with his girlfriend. I will have an empty nest. What has that got to do with my writing. Quite a bit actually because they were my inspiration. They are part of the reason I wrote young adult fiction.

But as you can gather from above they are all in their 20s now so are at the top end of YA anyway. Does that mean I need to change my writing? Do I have a right to continue writing YAF? What happens when your muses move out? Will I be able to still write? Rachel Ward wrote a insightful post on a similar idea this week on Author Allsorts Blog. I have no idea what the answer to these questions are going to be. It will be a wait a see moment.

As you know from last week I have a new story to write and though it has a young adult protagonist it is very different from anything I have written so far. I am loving writing and am very inspired by it but have yet to find out whether IC thinks it is working and worth pursuing. IC and I were having a conversation this week about writing (we weren't supposed to be talking about that but we had gone off at a tangent as we do oh so frequently!). We were talking about the need to maintain momentum if you get published. You need another book (or at least a good idea) there ready. But of course there some people who don't want to write anymore. They have had their one book published and that's all they wanted. This I find very difficult to understand. I have to write, or at the very least I constantly have ideas going round in my head, and I know from some of my writerly friends they feel the same. I cannot imagine just writing one story. I watch people and make up stories about them. I look at artefacts and think about what has happened to them, what might they have seen? My world is full of 'what ifs?' just like Rachel.

I am hoping that with my empty house I will have 'a room of one's own' to write in.I also hope this will give me the head space to create wonderful narratives. And even though my muses will have gone the stories will still flow because, like Rachel Ward, I find teenagers fascinating. I love to see them trying to work out who they are and developing such strong identities with their whole lives ahead of them. However, I must continue to keep an eye on teenage culture, continue to read young adult fiction and watch what is making their world turn.

Yesterday I had to set up a royalites account for an academic book I am about to write. That is pretty daunting too. All very grown up. It is based on elements of my PhD but also a lot more. I will be relieved to have the space to research and write it in too.

Time to embrace the new world and fight the fear. Please excuse the obvious sentimentality of this but they may be moving out and starting wonderful, well deserved new lives but they will always 'still belong to me'. Thank you for being the best children anyone could ever wish for CH, LH and TH and good luck for the future gorgeous people. I am so proud of you all. (Oops is that vomit sounds I can hear?!)

Elation and fear!

Why elation and fear I hear you ask? Well I am elated because I have finished the first draft of the rewrites and a week ahead of the deadline I had set myself. On the other hand, I am full of fear that it won't be what the editor wanted. I have to say it is not ready for her to see but I have something tangible to work with at least. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end, which seems to flow too. Miracle!

Of course, these are not emotions that only I have as a writer, I know we all go through them. Meg Rosoff wrote a great post the other day about finishing the book,which is well worth a look. I was delighted to read that some of her first drafts are 'thin'. I know that is a problem of mine but as I write cold and edit hot I should be able to sort that. My plan now is to print it off, have a quick look through it and create a book map (yes I know that is probably the wrong way round but it is the way I work), it will help me see where there are holes. (Thank you to IC for the map btw). I will then put it away for a a couple of weeks, maybe if I can be strong the whole of July, and then I will go back to it with eyes afresh. It will be that editing time where you have to distance yourself from the piece and read it as a reader and not as a writer this time. Should be fun.

This book is a rewrite of my PhD novel, last year's great achievement, but apart from some characters it bears very little relation to that story. Even the name has changed from Ham & Jam  to Trafficking. But I have to admit I think it is better for it. Don't get me wrong it was tough killing my babies like that. The PhD novel had been a huge part of my life for a very long time and it was hard to give up sometimes, however, you have to do these things all in the name of art.

I feel I am standing on the edge of the high wire (see Keren David's post where this idea came from and Candy Gourlay's brilliant response). It is a moment where there is a lot of potential ahead and it is down to me to make sure I make the most of it. That's another part of the fear - what if I waste it? But I mustn't think like that. It is all about looking forward. Having read Candy's post it made me thing of some high wire moments in my past where I haven't grabbed the moment and I deeply regret it. However, it is not all negatives, I have also grabbed several other moments and they have made a huge difference. One of which was making the decision back in 2002 to go to university after I had lost my business through illness. Who knew that that idea was going to take me to this point? It had been my way of not vegetating in the corner waiting to die as the medicos seemed to think I should, instead I found a whole new career and love of life. And I am sure it is going to continue like that.

I have pinched this from a friend's recent post because it is one of my all time favourite songs and I know I have used it before but hey who cares.

The Civil Wars and 'Dance me to the end of love'