Avril Joy

Orchid in the new white bathroom -T H Bathrooms - Trevor was great, comes highly recommended

Now my Danny Beck  novel is finished and has, I’m delighted to say, had the first thumbs up from my agent-  well for the beginning at least! – there is suddenly space in my life. Today is also the day I expect our new bathroom to be finished  (the old one was coming up for thirty years old) – more space again – firstly in the room itself but in our lives too as we won’t have to get up quite so early every morning or go out midday to find a loo to use! and we wont have to clean up rubble and dust every evening or take it to the tip the next day along with sink and bath. Although Trevor was the tidiest person ever working in my house and always cleared up – and did a great job!

I love the finished product – clean, white and spacious and I am particularly conscious now, having created what amounts to two new rooms, conservatory and bathroom, in my house, of the power of space. How space brings with it a calmness, room for thought – how noticing it and preserving it it can benefit our lives and I suspect our writing too.

Artists sometimes draw or look closely at the space between objects in order to find their form; the space between things can be as significant as the things themselves. In the past, when I was at work in the prison, I felt that as soon as I finished a novel I had to start the next immediately- I think I felt if I didn’t I just might not be able to continue doing both.

Now things are different, now I’m going to use this space that comes on the completion of  a novel -  a mere 88,500 words! by looking into it, by thinking,  reading (lots of reading), by exploring ideas – by embracing it

Here are some thoughts on space from Tricycle Buddhist review-  if you log on you can suscribe to their daily dharma

Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way – deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it.

It’s like looking at the space in a room: you don’t go looking for the space, do you? You are simply open to it, because it is here all the time. It is not anything you are going to find in the cupboard or in the next room, or under the floor – it is here right now. So you open to its presence; you begin to notice that it is here.

– Ajahn Sumedho, from “Noticing Space,” Tricycle, Fall 1995

So I will be exploring, noticing  space but alive to inspiration from wherever it may come – after all as  writers we have to write - it’s what we do

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. - John Updike

Last night we watched The Hours, somehow I missed it first time around when Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portryal of Virginia Woolf. ‘What did you think?’ John asked when it finished. It was impossible to say, impossible then to put my thoughts into words.

I was transfixed not by Woolf’s story but by Laura Brown’s – played by Julianne Moore – a 1950′s housewife in Los Angeles whose husband is oblivious to her emotional unravelling – and the child in the corner, her young son, who realises so much more and experiences the threat of  disintegration and her abandonment.

In the film Laura Brown books into a hotel intending to commit suicide but, unlike my own mother, she draws back from the attempt. I was eight, maybe nine when my mother attempted suicide (she was not successful.) The event swims far back in my mind, occassionally surfacing like a half-blind sea creature  from the deep and murky waters of the past.  Was I the one who found her? Probably – that’s what I’ve been told. Probably didn’t feel quite good enough an answer for someone trying to make sense of that darkened room, the bottle of tablets, the awful distress…but it was all I got or am ever likely to get now. Probably it was me – it looks that way.

I don’t think about it or the aftermath so much now. Like all the difficult things in my life then and all the good things in my life since, it is a part of who I am and therefore a part of my writing. My writing is filled with loss – I know – and I have yet to write a mother who lives. All the mothers in my novels are either dead or absent.

Perhaps this is the year I will write ‘a Mother’ – maybe not – but I was already feeling it was time to surprise myself and write something life affirming and optimistic and now after last night I am even more convinced. Not that this will change the writer I am but it might just be fun.

Here is a picture of me, taken by David, my son,  in my new  coat – I bought it yesterday – a snip at £25 in the sales – I walked away from it, then thought – Oh what the hell it’s a fun coat and I know my daughter Katie would love it - what better excuse did I need to go back and buy it?