The Ghosts of Future Nevers

The ghosts in my head at Halloween are the ones that never came to be. The direction I didn’t take. The place I could be now if I’d chosen differently.

The shadows I contemplate at this shadow-contemplation time of year are sadness for the me I was then and the support she didn’t have and the extended rippling of that further out into my university experience – which never recovered – and my life in general than I could have predicted.

I’m happy with the decision itself. It was always the right one, and never have I had even a second’s regret in twenty years.

But the shadows it cast are long, all the same.

not one of us

I went out for dinner and drinks with colleagues last week, and found myself on the receiving end of an interview about non-monogamy from one of them. And it was not fun.

Let me preface this by saying that the chap in question is a perfectly nice person and that none of this was aggressive or confrontational in the least, it’s just that we are people who seem to be approaching the world from opposite directions.

The interview – and it was an interview rather than a conversation – was littered with so many misconceptions and assumptions that I honestly didn’t know how far back in the association chain to go with my responses. What, he wanted to know, would I do if my ‘permanent partner’ wanted to become monogamous? The fuck is a permanent partner?! Well, the one that you live with. I don’t live with a partner (Although I have in the past, which does rather illustrate that a shared mortgage is not an indicator of eternity. And hang on, do you think that anyone you don’t live with is, what, some sort of temporary passing fancy? A little harsh, these people are in my life because I *want* them to be and they seem to want to stick around – there’s no built-in expiry date that I’m aware of!). Oh, so you don’t want to live with anyone? When did I say that?!

Look, let’s go back to basics. That is not how I approach relationships, and it wasn’t when my relationships were monogamous. I have never seen marriage and/or shared space as a goal. They are, rather, something to which I am open if a connection with someone develops in that direction. I do not *aim* for them, but I don’t *not* want them either. They are a possible aspect of the important thing, which is the development of fulfilling connections.

In the absence of being able to escape, I had a stab at explaining further, which probably didn’t work because he wasn’t really receptive and I was weirded out and wondering how the hell long we were going to be in the restaurant (and then hit the cocktails rather too hard in over-compensation once we did escape – oops), but broadly speaking I tried to get across that…

For me, every relationship – whether between friends or between lovers – flourishes to whatever extent the connection between those involved, in conjunction with the space, time and attention given to it, allows (and yes, of course, sometimes there’s enough going on in your life already that you simply don’t have as much time or emotional resource as you would like). There has to be something there initially, of course, but my heart is generally in it for the long haul and it takes time and trust for connections to deepen and strengthen. My closest friends are those from school, and we’ve weathered all sorts of storms and had all sorts of wonderful times, will have been doing that for 27 years this September, and I would trust them with my life, heart, and yarn collection (as long as Cate and Laura promise to learn how to do something with the latter before our 40ths).

I have never met anyone and immediately imagined them as a nesting partner, and yet I was happily in just such a partnership for a decade. Most folks don’t make the moving-in call within a couple of months of the first date, after all, do they? When I meet people who make my heart flutter or in whom I can see a potential buddy, that is exactly what I sense: the excitement of a new connection, the potential, the opening up of a field of possibilities. Why constrain future growth by espaliering the sapling before it’s even started to grow? Let’s explore!

He didn’t get it, of course.

And I got quieter and quieter and more and more unresponsive, until the conversation thankfully turned to meat and barbecues and I could allow my brain to quietly ooze out onto my shoulders during the benign dullness of a conversation in which I couldn’t take part (brief diversion on the glories of halloumi aside), hot on the heels of one in which I actively didn’t *want* to take part.

I do, genuinely, understand that people who say they are Just Interested frequently are indeed just stumbling across something new to them and want to know a little more about it. But it’s a question of tone and of degree. The odd question, from someone who genuinely listens to the answer, is normal enough as part of an actual *conversation*. But an impromptu interview, wherein you pelt your dinner companion with a series of questions and fail to either properly take in their responses or note their attempts to end the conversation? Not fine. I am happy to chat a little, assuming it is a genuinely back-and-forth chat, but it is *your* job to educate you, not mine.

And I have had variations on the theme of this interview – whether prompted by ordering the vegetarian option, the fact that I do not have children, the information that I have never been married, that I am bisexual, by my relationship structures, or various other things – for twenty plus years. It is difficult at this point to experience it as anything other than yet another incredibly tediously executed reminder that I am not One Of Us in whatever company I happen to be in at the time, because let’s face it, they wouldn’t be poking the different if there was no different to poke.

Thing is, all of those things might be of passing interest to you, but they are intrinsic and deeply personal parts of me. Finding myself delivering a catechism in response to your Just Interested at best and defending myself against misconception and insult at worst is tiresome, boring and fundamentally alienating.

JFGI.

Something Changed…

Facebook tells me that five years ago, there was a thin layer of snow on the ground and a hardy robin was bathing in the fresh water I’d just put out in the thawed ground under trees.

Five years ago, the view from my bedroom window – which wasn’t only *my* bedroom window – was very different in more ways than just the colour.

A year ago, I was preparing to welcome old friends to a house that was neither that one nor the one I’m in now.

It’s an odd little feature, the memories one. Flagrant cynical encouragement of further platform engagement, of course – this *is* Facebook – and I can quite see that there are times of which folk may not wish to be reminded, and some they’d rather not think about just yet or at this particular moment.

But I like it. So much has changed in the last two years, and all of it has been so very necessary and so very much for the better. That the upheaval of the end of a long term relationship and the financial, living situation, and life disentanglement that involved was stressful doesn’t negate that there are some nice memories from those years and that there were good times doesn’t negate the fact that drawing things to a close was an essential and healthy process. It’s a nice thing to get a reminder of the way the happinesses in my life have evolved, of the agency I have taken – and continue to take – in shaping my life to include the people, things and ideas that most inspire me.

Of course, three years ago, I also agreed that the Conservative Party should adopt a slogan of ‘putting the n into cuts’. Some things do not change!

Anniversary

The earth was damp; tiny clumps of soil nested under her nails as she worked it.

A day for worms.

Arms slick with dew, decorated with dirt and grass and fallen leaves, she finished as the candleglow of dawn started to waver across the sky. As the sun grew stronger, she shook the debris from her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair, and began to walk back towards the town.

By the time she’d reached it, the sky was clear October grey and folk were scurrying to work. She walked on until at last she was outside the house she remembered so clearly. This time when she pushed the door, it opened easily at her touch.

She found him in the kitchen, startled him halfway through a lunch of leftover pizza.

“I said I’d come back.”

He froze, absurdly, mid-bite, eyes fixed on her face.

“Come with me.”

She held out her hand. He groped for words.

She reached out, took his arm.

“Come with me.”

She hooked his arm through hers and led him through town. She was irresistible.

All the way through and out of town they walked, arm in arm, until they were back at the patch of earth she’d left that morning.

She held him close then, and whispered, “You see? I came back. Happy Anniversary.”

And arms cold as a crypt, smile fierce and strength implacable, she drew him deep into the damp soil in which he’d left her a year ago. After a time, his screams became choked with soil and the churning earth stilled around him.

Above, rain plashed away signs of the struggle and the flurrying wind scattered autumn red and gold over the makeshift grave.

Out

It’s a strange, brittle and highly personal thing, the Out.

It’s been a week of discussion of outs and privilege and
intersectionality. I’ve talked with polyamorous folk who aren’t out to their entire circles, non-heterosexual folk who are out with nearly everybody except their parents, friends who have fought a thousand fights in other ways.

All of us have our own ways of managing our outedness, our own worlds we protect when we make the choices we make on how out to be about what and with which people, and we may therefore blink and worry if someone unthinkingly circumvents that little raft of calculations we make each time and outs us instead of allowing us to out ourselves. These moments may be no more than a passing comment or a surprising but unproblematic revelation to you, but depending on the potential cost to us if you are less than cool with this part of us, we may be holding our breath and wondering if we will suddenly have to start hefting a defensive conversational axe or, more likely, Dealing With The Inevitable Questions.

Because the thing is, there *are* myriad calculations involved in each revelation to each person of each way in which we colour outside the lines. When we don’t get to make those calculations ourselves we can feel unsettled. Because there is shit at stake for us. We’re risking – every time – the disapproval or withdrawal of a person who makes up a part of our life to a greater or lesser degree. Some of these things may be relatively minor, but some of them, for some people, in some places… well, the flicker of a shutter of disapproval coming down in an acquaintance or colleague’s eyes is hard enough to deal with, but at the more extreme end we can end up losing jobs (oh come on, even where it’s hard to kick people out directly people’s prejudice operates on their interactions and career decisions), losing friends, with splintering families. Losing life and liberty, even, because this global village has some houses that ain’t so fond of certain things.

So even where there’s an assumption that Most People Will Be Cool With It, we may get twitchy when the control is taken from us and we don’t get to assess the threat level ourselves. You might have, all innocent and unknowing, just pitched us unprepared into a battle.

Outing other folk – not cool.

And then there’s the other side of things. The side which says if you *can* be out…

A group, a few drinks into the evening, as the conversational depth increases.

Michelle used to put a fake wedding ring on when she took her child to events with other parents, a decade older than her, because when they clocked it they relaxed around her in a way they didn’t when they thought she was a young *single* mum. Clara is black, and while mostly people aren’t so unaware of the conversational norms in this corner of this world as to be super-blatant in their racism, micro-aggressions are everywhere and she’s developed a thick skin and a tendency to make notes of dates, times and comments and judge when the time is right for more. I was a bisexual kid who was confused only in that there didn’t seem to be a word for me, and that the prevailing rhetoric wanted me to ‘pick a side’ or called me greedy, or worse, and so I didn’t tell anyone and I didn’t challenge the homophobic and biphobic comments I heard and so carried on feeling… unsafe, along with everyone else who must have been doing the same thing I was doing. I’m not even sure I told the diaries I wrote as a teenager – the conversation never really snuck outside of my head. At that age so much is an AmINormalShouldIBe dance, and that was one of a few ways in which I felt I must be wrong or broken. Never ashamed, as I know some people were made to feel. Just… like I couldn’t be totally honest about various aspects of myself, and never understood or supported accordingly because how can you be when you’re so hidden? All of that? If you didn’t know what the word ‘othered’ meant, there’s your heap of shifting definitions.

Our experiences are not directly analogous – some of us have privilege(s) that others don’t and have had an easier ride of it accordingly. But we found a degree of common ground in having each had to defend key aspects of our selves from stupid questions, vapid assumptions and hurtful behaviour at one time or another.

The conversation meanders around these things for a while as we each poke at and share the places in which we’ve developed extra layers, and then at some point, Clara asks why I bother labelling my sexuality, since it doesn’t matter. And to anyone in that room, in terms of how we relate with people, it doesn’t.

But. It does matter.

It matters to me, because it matters to other people. The label is needed for (or is it by?) other people, because other people are the ones who make the unthinking assumptions that result in people feeling othered.

I am a white, middle class, well-educated, cis woman in a reasonable position in my career and with the constructive support of my family and the only aspect of that which doesn’t have inbuilt privilege is that I’m a woman. And yes, parenthetically speaking I’ve turned a blind – well, wincing – eye to some of the sexist crap at every workplace I’ve ever worked because when it comes down to it, no-one has the energy to be a warrior all day every day and it’s even harder to find that when you’re young, powerless in one sense and not fully aware of your power in others and at the start of your career with credibility battles to fight as well.

For the rest, though. I have power in ways that some don’t. I work somewhere where although there’s a flicker of surprise and not knowing quite what to do with the information when senior management ask what the pink, purple and blue flag pinned to my handbag is or find out which organisation I’m planning on volunteering for, there is also no negative consequence. Diversity support is coded into my contract and protected by the laws of my country, and I work with decent people and have enough power – both professionally and in terms of personal articulacy, confidence and education – to smash back any lazy assumptions lobbed my way.

And yet. If it comes up in situations where I’m a little unsure about reception, it’s not uncommon for me to begin by saying that I’m not straight – which is problematic because my identity shouldn’t be defined by what I’m not, but it’s a gentler sell to the unaware from ‘presumed straight’ to ‘not straight’ to ‘bi’ and it sidesteps a whole raft of issues around identifying as bisexual vs pansexual vs queer.

But. If I – with all my privilege – can own a label which attracts prejudice, then just maybe it will help just a tiny bit to change the climate for those for whom it’s less safe to be out, and maybe other kids won’t be quite so likely to reach the conclusion that they must be broken in some way and bury vast aspects of their make-up until they’re well into adulthood.

It’s a small and relatively easy thing for me in most of the settings in which I find myself. But it isn’t, for some, and while I’d love for positive social change to be seismic, in reality it’s usually incremental and because of that every tiny way in which I – and people like me, if they feel able – can influence prevailing culture and rhetoric is a tiny way in which I stand against the things that made me, Michelle, Clara and a million other people have to go into battle against the weight of culture in ways people with other sets of privilege never even considered.

So if you didn’t know – and it’s no secret, but the thing with coming out, as anyone who thinks about it knows, is that it’s not a one-time only announcement so much as a succession of conversations – then this is me making it crystal clear, because I am the only person who should ever out me, that I am bisexual.

We’ll save the rest for another day, shall we?

Childfree

Maybe it’s the turn of the seasons, maybe it’s the impending onslaught of family occasions, maybe it’s… something else, but at around this time of year my childfree status often seems to get a little poke.

It’s never been a particularly militant status, but it has frequently been a misunderstood one, as I am approximately the thousandth childfree woman to observe.

It’s not, you see, that I don’t like or don’t want to hang out with children – wrong on both counts (as with, oh, loads of other childfree people), although I’ll admit that as the youngest in my birth family, with no nephews or nieces, the lack of practice does render me a bit inept and awkward with the younger ones in particular. It’s not even that I don’t want to adjust my life to fit around them – my career is interesting and enjoyable but it wouldn’t take priority over a person. How could it?

It’s just that quite simply I’ve never actively wanted my own child; it’s not a presence of Do Not Want so much as an absence of visceral WANT! And for me, while I am lucky enough to have a geographical and socio-economic background that means I can make choices about these things, I can’t square the requirement to steward a shiny new person towards a healthy and happy adulthood with anything less than a total commitment to so doing. Child-rearing is important, yo! So while I’ve continued to experience a lack of active want, that’s what I’ve acted upon. I’ve never said ‘never!’, I’ve merely consistently said ‘nope, not my thing’ and can’t really imagine that changing at this point.

And now that I’m 36 rather than 26, or even 30, people tend to actually believe me when they find I don’t want children (which after years of them not doing so comes as a blessed relief) – something about tipping over the 35 mark did that. Of course, you still get the odd person who treats the revelation as an opportunity to play Twenty Questions because They’re Just Interested In Your Reasons (see also: being vegetarian), but by and large I don’t get the You’ll Change Your Mind speech these days.

What I do get, however, is people asking if I like children (This has always made no sense to me. Children aren’t a single unit, I can’t adore or deplore them en masse. They’re individuals. Do you like people in their 50s?) or assuming I don’t, or don’t have any interest in hanging out with them.

Which puzzles me.

I’ll admit to the aforementioned awkwardness-borne-of-inexperience (I will happily read the thing your child has just thrust into my hands, find a flag app on my phone to entertain your flag-obsessed son or answer questions about the YouTube video about earthquakes with which you’re distracting them while you produce breakfast as best I can, but I’m blowed if I can remember any nursery rhymes or games), but that’s it.

People are nuanced. Childfree might apply to my uterus, but that doesn’t mean I expect or want it to apply to my entire life. Likewise, I enjoy my friends’ kids (I hope that’s mutual, but who knows?) but that doesn’t mean I want my own. There’s nothing contradictory in that, though I’ve heard that accusation a few times.

My closest and longest-standing friends all have kids, ranging in age from around a year to 10, and every single one of them is a joy to be around. And the thing that’s most joyous is that when you have a relationship with their parents you get to watch the child get to know herself, the parents get to know the child, the siblings get to know one another – you see a whole web of relationships flex and grow as each child grows. Just as most people who have ever been around kids do, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of watching tiny babies – and some of them really were tiny – grow and develop into their personalities, further and further over time. I get those vision-upending glimpses of the world through kids’ eyes. And yeah, ok, I get to see a tantrum or two. I find them easy enough to forgive in a tired and overwrought 5 year old.

I recognise traits from women I’ve known for most of my life appearing in whole new people. I watch loved friends find happiness in their choices and demonstrate skills that maybe even they never knew they had.

I see a small tribe of completely awesome young folk forming and figure there’s hope for us human-types yet.

I am awed and humbled to know so many people shepherding folk towards adulthood so compassionately, responsibly and effectively.

Just don’t ask me why I don’t want a child of my own. I haven’t the faintest idea, quite frankly, but I do know that a) it’s not about me, it’s about the kids to whom I don’t think I’d be doing justice without that want, and b) it’s none of your damn business.

Travel: Krakow, June 2013

It’s taken me over a month to get around to writing this post about my travels to the wonderful city of Krakow, Poland, in June of this year. Oops.

So, Krakow – a beautiful city, centred around a square that’s both vast and architecturally stunning. We went there pre-UK heatwave, and found ourselves experiencing a Polish heatwave (I’m led to believe that countries with more consistent climates than England refer to these weeks of warmth and sunshine as ‘summer’), much to our delight.

The square is lined with places to eat, both indoors and al fresco, and since this is Poland the food is both tasty (seriously, try the Pierogi – Polish dumplings, which can be either savoury and sweet and come with a bewildering variety of fillings. They’re on pretty much every menu and they’re absolutely delicious) and inexpensive. You’ll find it a touch pricier on the square than elsewhere in town, but it certainly won’t break the bank. While we’re on the subject of food, there are ice cream and kebab shops everywhere. Unlike in the UK, kebab shops aren’t merely something into which you stumble after a heavy night – for a couple of quid, I grabbed a mighty, not greasy at all and bloody mouthwatering falafel kebab for lunch one day. If you’re after something a little more sophisticated, though, you really won’t be disappointed – there are excellent eateries all over the place, and while as a veggie I wasn’t spoilt for choice in terms of dishes in each place (but then, I never am!) I never lacked for quality meals.

First order of business after tipping off the plane was to go forth and fall upon dumplings and a cold drink, and then explore the city.

Since we’d been up since 4am, we figured we’d take it easy with one of the buggy rides around the main areas of the town. You’ll find various vendors around the square (always unfailingly polite and never even slightly pushy), and it pays to negotiate on the price, but if you do the full tour of the old town, the Ghetto, and the Jewish Quarter it’ll take you a couple of hours and give you a good overview of the city and an idea of the places you’d like to come back to on foot. Also churches. You’ll see a lot of churches. Very religious country, Poland, so you will see more elaborate churches than you’d think it would be possible to cram into a few square miles. They don’t call Krakow ‘Little Rome’ for nothing! But of course, it’s not without a synagogue or several either – despite less pleasant recent history, Catholics and Jews lived and worshipped in the same city perfectly harmoniously for many years.

Some of the churches are even several hundred feet underground. The church in this picture is in the depths of the Wieliczka Saltmines, and has been entirely carved from rock salt by the miners. Everything. Altar, statues, friezes depicting the Last Supper – all of it is made from salt. Even the beads on the chandelier are pure salt.

This may be the most spectacular part of the salt mines, but it’s certainly not the only thing of note. It’s an extraordinary place to visit – cool, clean air (reputed to be extremely good for the health – there’s a spa hotel on the same site), decorated at intervals with wonderful statues and sculptures ranging from ancient kings to for some reason an odd little woodland scene involving dwarves. Again, it’ll take a few hours (and isn’t suitable for those of limited mobility – there’s a lot of walking and stairs; there is an alternative wheelchair-friendly route, however) with a knowledgeable tourguide.

Worth a visit, too, is Schindler’s Factory over in the Ghetto. It’s a media-rich, densely informative museum to war-era Krakow, and honestly speaking I found that after a couple of hours I simply couldn’t take any more in, between sensory overload of how the messages were delivered and the sheer awfulness of what was being talked about. The reminiscences of people who had been children at the time of being forced into – and out of – the Ghetto were a bone-shocking level of powerful.

Above ground and when you’re not steeping yourself in history, Krakow is a fabulous city for fans of al fresco people-watching. The Jewish Quarter is still the site of some beautiful buildings (you’ll get the spiel about how some of them appeared in Schindler’s List), including a bar/restaurant that now occupies the site of what were several tiny shops – the original external signs are retained, a suggestion of brickworks illustrates where the shop walls used to be, and the whole is rather charmingly decorated with appropriate knicknacks. Ariel restaurant, shown here, does indeed feature in the film – and serve rather delicious food!

It’s worth venturing into the main square in Krakow in the evening, too – it has a beautiful vibe, and there’s always the chance that as well as being able to soak up the atmosphere and gaze at the swifts circling one of the high towers at twilight, you’ll catch an unexpected street performance

Of course, we had ultimately come to Krakow for a reason. Auschwitz.

We left it until the day we were flying home, knowing that we didn’t want such a powerful and painful experience to taint our entire break in what is a genuinely beautiful city that is well worth a visit and revisit in and of itself.

And it was horrible. Truly horrible. Words can’t really describe the experience with any justice. As you enter, a sombreness descends. The feeling that you’re in a place of such extensive and systematic vileness is almost tangible and grows more oppressive and upsetting as your guide – and hats off to them for doing a tough job with extreme skill and sensitivity – takes you around the camp.

The scale of massacre was, as we all know, vast – but numbers can be hard to appreciate on their own, as abstracts. Here, you will be forced to see just a fraction of what those numbers meant in real terms. Collected within, in various piles, were the belongings of just some of the lost victims of Auschwitz. A mound of glasses. A whole room of brushes. A collection of baby clothes. A huge, huge expanse of several tonnes of human hair, from the heads of just some of the women. And two full rooms full of shoes. Flat shoes, heeled shoes, fancy shoes, plain shoes, new shoes, beaten up shoes, big shoes, small shoes. Just piles and piles and piles of shoes stolen from the dead.

And a collection of empty gas canisters.

Only one of the gas chambers survives, at either Auschwitz or Birkenau, and it’s a solemn and silent procession of visitors to end your time at Auschwitz I before heading just a little way up the road to the terrifyingly industrial-scale deathcamp that is Birkenau – Auschwitz II.

It’s a vast and desolate place now. There’s little there but the site itself, an imposing brick entranceway, a railway line that terminates there. Most of the buildings housing inmates were wooden (pre-fab stables, actually) and have not survived but for the eerie brick chimneys rising in neat rows across the fields. Those that remain give just the tiniest hint at the squalor in which the inhabitants must have been kept. Piles of rubble now mark the spots where thousands lost their lives – the gas chambers, where the clinical art of murder en masse was perfected, were blown up before Allied forces arrived.

A memorial, in numerous languages, now stands. Because people should have somewhere to pay their respects to the dead, and events such as these should never, ever be forgotten.

And the birds do fly over Auschwitz, now.

—-

Krakow” href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/catfeathers/sets/72157634106083922/” target=”_blank”>Flickr set of Krakow.

Longhand, Shorthand, Typing and Scribbles

It’s a funny thing, writing. Different types of writing, different moods and different stages of the process all seem to demand slightly different approaches.

My diaries have nearly always been handwritten. There was an experiment with typing them way back when Windows 3.1 was the In Thing, but by and large, I like a good quality notebook and a decent ballpoint pen for my ponderings. I don’t like the restriction imposed by actual diaries – some days there’s nothing much to say and other days there’s pages of it, so a page-per-day format makes little sense in my eyes. Far better to just head the notebook entry for the day with the date, day, and anything else I happen to think significant with regard to my moods and feelings, and just go. Half the time I don’t quite know what I’m going to write about before I sit down at my desk and open the book. I’m not one of life’s ‘got up, put washing on, watched tv’ diarists, though you’ll see a bit of general life-recording in there, but nor am I an angsty stream of consciousness type (Well, not these days. Twenty years ago when I was in my teens, maybe. Mind you, at that point I used to draw cartoon strips in ’em as well from time to time.). It’s reflection, on self, events, others and life, and it requires a medium that allows for a freeform yet easy-reference approach.

Blogs, on the other hand – and I’ve been blogging both personally and professionally for over a decade in various places – are typed straight into WordPress as befits the medium. They’re snappier, not so personal, constructed rather than reflective, and so they suit a style of actually getting the words out that reflects that, and a medium that makes cut, paste, delete, edit, publish, share super simple.

Stories, well, they can go either way. I have an ideas notebook which contains bits of stories, random scenes which may or may not be revisited some other time, listed-out story outlines and character descriptions, event flowcharts and scribbled bubble diagrams to explore the various different ways a particular theme could be taken. There’s always just enough there to get the idea out of my head and onto paper, but no more. I use diagrams if it feels right, if there are several directions a thing could take or themes I want to explore, because spiralling thoughts can’t be pinned into sensible lists.

I’ll often write first drafts, or the start (and by ‘start’ I mean ‘first bit I start writing’, which is of course rarely the actual start of the piece although it might be the start of the backstory that’s later revealed) of them, in longhand – partly because it’s often more convenient if I’m out of the house (although I’ve learnt that writing erotica in your lunchbreak at work isn’t the best idea in the world) and partly because there’s something about the process of physically putting pen to paper, of crossing out words that don’t fit, of scribbling notes in margins and drawing whooshing arrows to swap paragraphs around, that helps me to shape those initial doughy lumps of story idea to a more workable state. Once that initial kneading is done and a touch of further tinkering is added via the laptop, the rest seems to flow much more easily through fingers that can type faster than they can write.

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