It's August, six months since "The Vandervelde Documents" was published, and I am now fairly sure that the only one of my objectives it will achieve is that of having a book published. I always knew it would be hard to sell a decent number of copies, and I accepted that I would have to do most of the work myself, but I did anticipate some help from the publisher. So far I haven't yet heard of a single copy sold through their agency.
I can cope with constructive criticism, but I find it very hard to deal with indifference. Although I'm hungry for approval, I do not at all like promoting myself. It feels undignified. Dignity? I don't feel like a proud person. I can very quickly go from being proud of some achievement - the garden for instance - to feeling ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed of the 'Documents' but I can see all its faults, and would much rather set it aside and move on to a new project.
A month ago I set myself the task of writing a thriller with a very complicated and difficult plot line. The idea was to start the book in the middle and then work back to that point again from the future and from the past. Writing on a reverse time line has been done, but I only know one example - Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. This revolutionary structure would, I felt, make it conspicuous. If I could get it published by a 'proper' publisher it would also stimulate sales of the 'Documents' because it would be set in the same near future world.
I had got about a quarter of the way through this project when I was swamped by feelings of inadequacy. It was not working. I could not do this thing. I changed the format, did some sample chapters, changed the format again. Now it was making me tense and my particular brand of nervous tension is a project killer. Once something, some feeling of inadequacy, becomes a trigger for it I cannot escape. It strikes suddenly and lasts a long time. Migraine sufferers may know this mechanism, but I've never had a migraine so I don't know, and I certainly don't want to find out. The crawling sensation I get in my stomach is very unpleasant but I can still function. It spoils a day or two, but it's not disabling.
It is, though, something I am afraid of, and it is this fear which constructs a feed-back loop. If a certain activity - in this case writing - sets it off then I am afraid of the process of writing. At that stage even thinking about it becomes a trigger. For a week I tried, with the aid of beta-blockers alcohol and pain killers, to work through it. Teeth clenched I wrote and organised and wrote again, but it just got worse so 2 weeks ago I stopped. I had given in to one of my demons and I was ashamed.
Now I've had a holiday from writing and have begun again. I have written up my illustrated diary which has garnered some very favourable comments from the few facebook friends who have read it. Now, though, I have to bite the bullet and decide how to share it on the web. I have 4 blogs, most of them neglected. I have a facebook page for the Documents which has been neglected since April when I found that paying for it to be promoted had no effect whatsoever except to introduce me to a number of young ladies in far away countries who for some reason wanted to 'like' my page. I could simply post the diary entries on facebook, but I couldn't then insert the pictures in context.
I have decided to revive this blog. The early morning are even more important to me now that I have focussed on travelling alone to seek out the natural word. After mid-morning I usually have to share it. Even quite early there may be a few other dedicated souls around, but this space is big enough for the like - minded to enjoy each others' company. What I can't stand is anything that begins to look like a uniform. There are too many of us old men going around nature reserves in camouflage clothing weighed down with a mass of gear - the big telescopes and tripods, the huge zoom lenses and the expensive binoculars. "Look", I want to say, "I'm not like those people." But of course I am. I have the camo jacket (by favourite jacket, bought from Tesco for £15) I even have two camo caps. Now I have the 'scope' and the tripod. I started with just two gadgets: a super-zoom compact camera and compact 25 x 8 binoculars. I saw lots of lovely creatures and landscapes and took lots of amazingly sharp pictures, but in low light and at full zoom all I could get was a blurred dirty looking picture: enough to identify but with no artistic merit. I still use both, but now have a big super-zoom 'bridge' camera, a pair of 40 x 10 binoculars and an 80mm telescope. I have several books on wildlife photography and it seems all the pros use very expensive Canon cameras and lenses. Before I even consider this I am determined to get the most out of the two cameras and the telescope, and this is partly what I will be exploring in this diary.
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