When I’m in the middle of a thicket of my own creation, I berate myself for over-estimating my ability. I think I can do things. I plunge forwards and eventually come out the other side but only after tying myself in Gordian knots of difficulty. This is a serious character flaw. The danger comes from wanting to do things for myself rather than paying to have them done for me. Wartime upbringing? And a freelance lifetime spent not spending money if it can be avoided.

I’ve just spent days tussling with getting a novel onto CreateSpace for free. I can do that, I thought – no trouble. In the past I’ve done much more complicated, digital-type things. But, but, but…. The thicket grew around me. I could not get the margins right. It should have been so simple. The breakthrough came when, after checking and checking every detail, I discovered in a small corner of my Word doc menus a tick in a box which should have been unticked. I’d ticked it hours before thinking it would solve my difficulty. It didn’t. I’d solved the main problem in other ways but that wretched tick was still throwing the format. Stupid idiot, I hissed through teeth clamped as though in rigor mortis.

When eventually I’d got it right – not perfect, but right enough – and I’d got the format approved by the website, I spotted a glaring textual error on the back jacket. I’d called my main character Bess instead of Beth. Long pause for more hissing, gnashing, grinding. I can’t even get the names right! So what about the quality of the content, the actual writing? Ay, there’s the rub. I can write. I’ve been told that often enough. Yet here I am, giving up all idea of ever finding a publisher for my work, fooling around with margins and typos to self-publish my work. Do you mind if I go off and sob in a bush for a moment.

I’ve just booked our next year’s holiday. We and our good friend Christine will be joining our daughter Sophie and her family on the Greek island of Kefalonia. We’ve never booked anything so far in advance. The reason? We don’t want to miss the opportunity of a family holiday. It seems that certain places are so popular, they get booked from one year to the next.

The last time we were on Kefalonia we were there to join conservationists who were monitoring turtles. This was in 1984 or maybe 1985 when we were gathering material for a book on Greece. I find now what I wrote then. Here’s an excerpt:
…
“Most islands have at least one long sandy beach. In the past there might have been one or two fishermen’s houses there. Villages seldom grew in such places. They were too vulnerable to attack by sea, and rarely provided natural harbours and safe anchorages. Recently roads have been built to such beaches and hotels and villas have sprung up, answering our demand for places to sop up the sea and sun of summer. The turtles who have always used these beaches for laying their eggs now peer anxiously out of the sea at dusk to see if the last holidaymaker has left the sand for his supper. One such long sandy beach on the southern coast of Kefallinia is still untouched by building. In the daytime a few holidaymakers may find their way there, but at night the beach still belongs to the turtles. …

“A sliver of moon, three days old, grows bright in the sky and with the stars throws light on sea and sand. The cool of a deep well, and the silence of a church, settles over the great expanse of night sea, sky and land. Every so often, in the scrub at the back of the beach, there are secret scurryings – perhaps stone martens – and at intervals all along the beach, some 10 metres from the water’s edge, clutches of eggs, the size of pingpong balls, have been laid by turtles over the summer months and buried beneath the sand. After 63 days in the warm of the sand, the tiny turtles hatch and with vigorous flippers and the unerring strength of instinct scrabble to the surface, over the sand and into the sea. This summer, the hatchlings emerge to find themselves in a wire cage, marked carefully and clearly in Greek and English ‘Please do not disturb. Scientific experiment in progress.'”
…

At the time it seemed impossible that conservation groups could persuade councils and governments – in Greece and Turkey – to limit development in the turtles’ traditional egg-laying grounds. Lights from hotels and restaurants would confuse the turtles coming ashore to lay eggs, and disorientate the babies trying to reach the sea. The economic benefits from tourism would win over conservation, and turtles would disappear. Yet the reverse has happened. Tourism has flourished and so have the turtles. Hillsides behind sandy beaches have become resorts, and tourists at waterside tavernas watch flotillas of turtles swimming among the boats.

Doom and gloom turned turtle.

A number of years ago, when I realised that I wasn’t the only previously-published writer finding it hard to get fiction accepted by traditional publishers, I set up an ebook publishing website for people like me. It was satisfactory to be doing something towards getting good, or good-enough, writers read. Anyone who produces ideas and writes a novel is in the position of sitting on a spring – I mean a spring of water, not a bedspring (hideously uncomfortable), yet nowhere near as painful as the psychic hurt of being a fount of new ideas without an outlet.

Rejections from publishers are hard enough for writers who’ve never yet been published. Even harder, I reckon, for those of us who have had success in the past. It’s taken me years to accept that I will (I have to put in the word ‘probably’) never be traditionally published again. I think in the last week – yes, as recently as that – I have accepted this. With the acceptance has come a release. I am going to embrace self-publishing.

Not for the first time. In 2006 I self-published a novel called “Making a Difference”. I used an American print on demand publisher called Trafford. I worked out that if I could sell 100 copies, I’d cover costs. Which I did. But I don’t find it at all easy or pleasant to treat my friends like potential buyers. It’s like being a pavement artist on your own doorstep. I’d much prefer not to have to do it. But the alternative is to put work in the bottom drawer and never bother to write again. We might as well exit this world.

So let’s let the spring bubble. Self-publishing doesn’t mean your book is poorly written, poorly put together – though it may be. There is no guarantee of quality, nor is there a guarantee of quality in traditionally published books. A lot of bad books get published by big name publishers. A lot of good books never see the light of day.

So ever onward … More of this another day. I’m involved at the moment in uploading the file of a novel which I abandonned by the wayside when I started “The Cousins’ Chronicle”. This one is called “White Lies” and it’s about adoption. I’ll have more to say about that —- and it may be to resounding silence. Who’s out there?

If anyone reads this, just leave me a hello in a Comment. Writers don’t fully exist unless the equation is completed by Readers.

Can you imagine asking a whole lot of primary school kids if they want to remain in school or leave it? Even at that age most of them would realise that the choice was too starkly simple for the complexities of the question. Would you trust the majority decision was the right one for everyone in the school?

As David Mitchell – clever, funny writer – said in his Observer column during the run-up to the referendum, he didn’t feel qualified to form an opinion on the question. The politicians had reneged on their responsibilities. After all, they are voted in to parliament to debate difficult questions of national importance.

Left to our own devices, many of us kept asking for the facts. But there could be no valid facts about a situation as hypothetical as a future exit from the EU. Besides, facts are rarely served up from an unbiased source.

The choice was as simple as between red and black on a roulette wheel. We were left to question our guts and vote accordingly. A couple of friends spent the weeks before the vote on opposing sides. Each day they swapped positions and voted against each other on the crucial day.

The referendum acted like a giant screen on which we hapless citizens could project all our hopes and fears, whether they were relevant to the hoped-for outcome or not. I noticed that many of the same arguments were used by each side. If we remain, this will happen. If we’re out, the same “this” will happen. An Alice in Wonderland world. Now we are to live with the result, created by a tiny majority of the small proportion of the population who voted.

Let’s cross our fingers – and wish Theresa May good luck.

Was the driver of the white truck who mowed down hundreds in Nice mad or bad – that is, entirely evil? It’s the same question that people asked when Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 campers on a island in Norway in July 2011.

Breivik wanted all Muslims deported from Europe. He was not a member of a group. The white van driver was not part of a jihadi cell. Lone wolf killers with obsessive ideas are the hardest to detect by the security forces before they kill. But their mental peculiarities may have brought them to the attention of, first, families, then neighbours, then mental health teams. Should everyone be more alert to danger signs?

Terrorism – violent death promulgated by fanatic believers in a creed – provides territory for the mad to be bad in.

I’ve received a very encouraging email about my present writing project from one of my distant cousins, a mutual descendant of the family who exchanged newsletters throughout the Second World War.

His grandmother Grace Werner, my father’s first cousin, was one of the contributors.

If you have any wartime memories – your own or those of a member of your family – do write to me.
susie@aliveinww2.com

This is my fourth post.  I’m getting more familiar with manipulating the wordpress site and I think I’ve set up a form that will suit me.  That’s  static content on the pages in the menu on the top right of the home page, and a non-static home page on which I can blog away like this.

The last time I wrote in a free-flowing manner was in the late 1970s when Peter and I were going through emotional turmoil, sorting out the midlife crisis of our marriage.  I wrote masses each day.  When we had come through the crisis and had moved house, I had a big bonfire of all the outpourings – rather regretful of losing some of the better expressions of feelings and thoughts but not wanting to share them with anyone beyond the original reader, Peter.

In normal circumstances I’m a very fiddly writer, going over and over each sentence to see that I’ve said absolutely exactly what I intended to say.  I’m never satisfied.  I daren’t re-read my published work because, if I did, I’d be miserable I couldn’t make it better.

The site’s new page (which I hope will appear in the menu today) is a work in progress: a description of my present writing project, the Cousins’ Chronicle.  I re-write it every time I look at it.  Anyone who reads this and likes writing too, do tell me your writing habits.  I believe there are some people who can write quickly and perfectly without any need for tidying up as they go along.   I’m not one of them.

I have a friend (Hi, Christine!) who never fills in the subject line on emails.  How sensible of her.  Thinking what the subject is before you write your message can be hard.  When the subject you’ve chosen leads to a long chain, it can be confusingly out of date by the time of the last addition.    Imagine.  Subject heading: many congrats.  An email chain that ends a month later with the message So sorry you didn’t get your new job.  I chose “Seconded” as title for this second post, thinking of committee meetings; someone proposes a motion and it gets seconded.  I’ve spent the morning working out whether a post is a blog. The word blog makes me think of muddy footprints.  I can hear a cry go up: “Look what you’ve done.  Blogs all over my clean kitchen floor”.   Possibly, and possibly not, the first page of the Alive in WW2 website will show my muddy footprints as I make them.  Will they then get posted onto another page of the site.  And will they ever get read?

This second post invites the comment “Seconded!”