Rediscovering Books Anxiety

First of all, the inevitable British weather conversation.

It’s a bit hot. Warm enough for you? We’re not equipped for this. I don’t mind it on holiday, but this is ridiculous. Other countries manage it. It’s fine when you haven’t got to do anything. One ray of sunshine and the trains pack up.

I think that more or less covers it.

As we all melt in whatever number heatwave this is, I’ve embarked on my annual summer re-reading rounds. I go back to books I haven’t read for decades, sometimes since my teens, and give them another go. Mostly these are books I didn’t like at the time, and want to reappraise in the light of old age. Some are ones I re-read every year because I love them, like anything by Alan Garner. The Harry Potter books used to fall into this category, because I thoroughly enjoyed them and they brought back memories of my son being enraptured when they first came out, and queuing outside WH Smith’s with my daughter at midnight, eager to get our paws on The Deathly Hallows.

Sadly, I can no longer read JK Rowling’s books, because the wonderful messages of acceptance and inclusivity which were such a part of their appeal ring a little hollow in the light of her attitudes now towards trans people.

Before anyone has a go, I don’t advocate ‘cancelling’ her, I don’t care if anyone else wants to read them, but I can’t, and I miss them.

There are some books that I don’t re-read because I’m scared to.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (part of her Hainish Cycle of stories and novels) and Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence sequence, changed my view of the world. I read Martha Quest, the first of Lessing’s sequence, in the summer of 1976, the year I graduated. That was also a heatwave year, and I did a lot of reading while lolloping on Aberdeen beach. My parents had moved there for my Dad’s job. My Dad was a minor cog in the oil industry, and so was, unbeknownst to him, putting all his energies (no pun intended) into creating the heatwaves we have now.

I read The Four-Gated City, the last of the sequence, after I’d moved to London and joined the rat-race. I finished it one Monday morning, reading the final few pages on the commuter train from East Croydon to Victoria. I stepped out of the train knowing I was a different person from the one who’d started reading Martha Quest on Aberdeen beach.

I’ve read pretty much everything both Le Guin and Lessing ever wrote, but I’ve never gone back to either the Hainish Cycle or The Children of Violence. A while ago I did start re-reading Shikasta, the first in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series. That had also profoundly affected me, but this time around…it didn’t work. I’ll be honest, it often takes me a couple of chapters to get completely into a Lessing book, and then suddenly I tip over the edge and I’m seeing her characters in front of me, and thinking like them, and quite often speaking like them as well. This time, I stuck with Shikasta for about a third of the book, and then I packed it in, because I didn’t want to spoil the precious memories I had of it, and who I was, at a particular time and in a particular place.

It put me off going back to certain other books.

Books do have different meanings, for us readers, at different times. Our life experience changes us and maybe we know a bit more about the writer, which alters our understanding. But sometimes it’s like bumping into that person you knew in your early twenties, when you had the best time and you shared everything, but you lost touch, and now you’re standing in front of each other and you’re wondering what you ever saw in them. Sadly, you conclude it’s better if you just smile and move on, before you spoil all of that precious past.

And it is much less awkward bumping into someone you didn’t like back then, only to find they’re a lot more interesting, and a lot more sympathetic, than you ever realised.

Anyone else have Rediscovering Books Anxiety? Or am I just a lazy coward who prefers to cling to the memory of an old and very special relationship, rather than the threat or promise of a new one which might involve re-evaluating myself as well as the other.

Stay safe in the heatwaves. I do always feel I have to apologise for being a child of the oil industry, although it really wasn’t my Dad’s fault, he just managed supplies to rigs. Yes, the rigs that were denuding the planet of its innards. OK. I’m sorry.

Thanks for reading.

Jane

That stuff doesn’t stay in your boots, you know

The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and Mince Pies In The Shops Already?? is with us. Rather like a bear waking up at the wrong time, I’ve been emerging, blinking, into the welcome light of a return to reasonable health and sanity. I used to hate it when life went off the rails for a bit, mainly because, as a single parent with two full-time jobs (one at home and one in the office), I really didn’t have time for all that mental health shit. Just get on with it, kid. But, as my Mum used to say, ‘That stuff doesn’t stay in your boots, you know.” (No, the words make no sense at all, but you kind of get the gist.)

Now I’m old and retired from both full-time jobs, I had the space to indulge in a full breakdown. All the accumulated Black Dogs/Clouds/Portents/Whatever demanded their turn, and despite my insistence that “I’m seventy-one, now I really don’t have time for this mental health shit.”, the buggers wouldn’t go away until they’d been given satisfaction. I thought you were supposed to be wise and have come to terms with it all by the time you’re seventy-one. Turns out you’re just as screwed up, and your knees hurt.

My GP was lovely, handed me a tissue while I sobbed in the surgery, and prescribed Fluoxetine. After the regulation number of weeks in which it definitely Gets Worse, it started to Get Better. And then I couldn’t eat. I mean, I could put food in at one end, but a matter of minutes later it would explosively emerge from the other. I got fed up chucking clothes away. “Damn tummy bugs.” On the positive side, I lost nearly a stone in a week, so in my more delirious moments I did wonder if this was actually the universe being kind. (I’m a podge. I’ve always been a podge. Being a podge at my age probably isn’t the best plan.) I missed a family anniversary/birthday gathering, and thus lost the chance to get a cuddle with my newest great-nephew. Eventually, exhausted and pissed off, I forgot to take my pills. And the food stayed put.

I’d never made the connection, but there it was on the bit of paper in the packet. ‘May cause…’. Always read the bit of paper.

I’m off the pills now, trying not to return to full podge status, and for the first time ever, able to accept that yeah, that stuff really doesn’t stay in your boots (the mental health issues, not the food) and it’s fine to acknowledge that. I’m on the waiting list for a ‘talking therapy’ and really grateful for the lovely family and friends who have been so kind and understanding, and ready to help me overcome the Fear of the Page that blocked the writing for a bit.

We should all have time for this mental health shit, even when it’s at its shittiest. So it was discouraging to read that prejudice against people with ‘mental health issues’ is rising in England, and that research by Mind shows that one in ten people would be unwilling to live next door to someone with a ‘mental health condition’, even if that person was receiving treatment or had recovered. There is also increasing hostility to community mental health facilities. Violence against people with mental health issues, which has always been more of a problem than violence by people with mental health issues, is also on the increase.*

I’m deeply saddened, but not surprised. It’s part of a tendency that has always been present and is now becoming more acute: where there’s a recognisable shortcoming in society, blame the people who are the victims of the shortcoming rather than the people causing the problem. Do migrants, legal or illegal, make the decisions about their housing, financial support, work status etc? (There’s a load of deranged bollocks talked about this subject, but the system is a mess.) Do people with serious mental health conditions decide that mental health care is becoming more and more difficult to access? No, of course not. If you want to hold someone responsible, find out who actually pulls the strings, rather than beat up people who, like you, are having their strings yanked in all directions. 

Also, what the hell is a ‘mental health condition? I’m not daft. I’m an elderly, white, middle-class woman who can more or less pass for ‘normal’ in most settings. It ain’t me they’re coming for. My daughter, however, has tonic-clonic epilepsy, a neurological condition which may or may not be accompanied by mental health issues, and she’s had to put up with all sorts of abuse and discrimination. 

Being seventy-one doesn’t mean you’ve sorted everything out. I still feel like the kid sitting on the stairs peeking through the banisters at grown-ups doing grown-up things. When a kind adult says to their child, “Let the lady get on the bus first,” I still look round for the lady we’re supposed to be getting out of the way for. But I have learned that just being alive means you have a ‘mental health condition’, and we ought to be supporting those who are less able than some of us to resist the string-pulling.

As you may have gathered, Fear of the Page has gone. Rant mode is now engaged. Thanks for reading! 

*‘Alarming rise’ in mental health stigma in England, research shows | Mental health | The Guardian

What I’m reading:

Not a lot lately, if I’m honest, due to concentration issues, but I have just started Lucid by Oraine Johnson (Gollancz). It’s a debut fantasy/sci-fi (genuinely, a mixture of both) novel – one chapter in and I’m already mystified, in a good way!  

AN UNINVITED GUEST

How are you getting on with AI?

Every time I open up a blank page on the computer, Microsoft’s Copilot bounces up, tail wagging, tongue hanging out, asking if I would like to draft with it. No ta. Every time I write an email it asks if I would like Copilot to rewrite it. No ta. I tried to uninstall Copilot because it was getting on my nerves. Computer said no. I am really not keen on uninvited guests.

I would imagine most writers these days use AI for purely practical purposes. I spell-check. I word-count. I don’t use any writing software tools (Scrivener etc) because, to be honest, I prefer to keep my tech simple, rather like my brain when it actually encounters tech. I save, I meticulously file, I back-up. To several places. I print out, because I can’t edit on the screen, and in any case I see editing as an intimate and sometimes very irritable relationship between me and the current version. It needs to be physical.

I’m an editor on a community writing website. It’s free to join and people can post anything they want, as long as it doesn’t break our terms and conditions, which basically involve guaranteeing it’s all your own work and not being an arsehole. The only reward writers get is being flagged-up if an editor feels the piece is particularly worthy, or being selected as a pick of the day, week or month if it’s worthier still. The idea of the site is to enable and encourage anyone who feels the urge to get their writing out there and maybe get a bit of feedback. We have prose writers, poets, published writers, unpublished writers, people writing in any and every genre. It’s great.

We’re increasingly having to run things through an AI checker. Which is a bit of AI which will tell you how much of the piece in question is likely to be AI generated. We have a strict ‘no AI’ policy when it comes to the actual writing.

It's a bit of a mystery to me why people use AI to create creative writing. Surely the whole point of the thing is to put yourself out there, for whatever reason – artistic glory, competitive instinct, or the much-maligned motive of making enough money to pay your bills. I can see why anxious or lazy students use it for essays – I thoroughly disapprove, but at least, if you get away with it, you’ve got a certificate in your sticky mitts, and every time you look at it you can feel the warm glow of knowing that you obtained it under false pretences. I get that it could be useful for job applications. In that respect, is it any worse than the friend who used me to write resumés and job applications, in our youth, because I was ‘better at words’ than they were? 

But why the hell would you do it on a website where the sole purpose is to develop your own creativity?

Is it that ‘winning’ is everything, even if ‘winning’ is no more than a nod from an editor? 

Is it that people are frightened of being not good enough, even when there’s no actual definition, on our site, of what is good enough? You do your best. You contribute. You offer encouragement to others. We hope you enjoy. Your AI tool will not enjoy.

I’m not inherently anti-AI. There’s no point in being so, apart from anything else. It’s here, you can’t uninvent it, we have to learn to live alongside it. Members of my family greatly enjoyed ABBA Voyage, with the avatars. Someone (not one of my family) asked me why I was so against people using AI in creative writing when I was so pleased my family had enjoyed themselves listening to recordings of ABBA songs while watching gussied-up videos of ABBA. It’s questions like that which make me wonder whether the machines have taken over already. 

The real point of writing, the absolute essence of it, is that it’s a thing you feel you have to do. It’s a part of you. It’s not always the happiest of parts, but you can’t ignore it. We shouldn’t let AI take that away from us. 

What I’m reading:

The Time Traveller’s Guide To Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (Vintage). The Guardian called this ‘…the most entertaining book ever written about the Middle Ages’. I don’t know about that, I’m not an expert on books about medieval England, but it’s enormous fun. I thought it would help with research I’m doing for a story about a medieval ghost, and it’s the most enjoyable bit of research I’ve ever done. When AI finally does crack time travel for us, this book will give you all the information you need for your weekend in the 1300s.

In The Shadow Of Gods by Rachel Deering (Black Bough Poetry). Declaration of interest: Rachel is a fellow editor on ABCTales.com. She is also a much-published poet whose work on nature, mythology and folklore creates its own magic. Even if poetry isn’t usually your thing, if you like being enveloped in a world of blurred boundaries, glimpses of beauty and cruelty, and explorations of all nature, including the human kind – you’ll love this.