Interview

Interview with Judith Barrow
http://www.judithbarrow.co.uk/today-im-really-pleased-to-be-chatting-with-author-catherine-marshall/

Keeping the faith

It's a waiting game, this business of trying to become writer.  Sending my squalling infant manuscripts out to agents and editors, I am strung with a combination of hope and anxiety which becomes, by degrees, a bobbing calm and eventually settles to grey resignation.  And then the realisation that I need to get on and do - write - other things.  But it has made me very good at waiting.

It has occurred to me this week that it's made me good at other things too.

Adapting to change: in terms of rewriting an entire novel at the behest of an agent or editor who then walks away, sure, but always having faith that change is a force for good and welcoming it rather than resisting.

Being captain of my own ship: putting my books on Kindle, promoting them and believing in myself.  If I don't steer my own course, who will?  Courage and resilience are required for life.

Embracing diversity: excellent for characterisation.  Also excellent for tolerance, acceptance and living peaceably in the world and accepting everything it has to offer.

Sometimes I quail under the weight of doubts and misgivings but I don't know if I would bear these traits at all if I weren't at heart a writer. I know I couldn't be one without them. 

Seize the Day

So here I am - here I was - fully grown-up, married for three decades, children grown and gone but in regular contact, doing a job I find tedious in the extreme to help pay bills and the mortgage which looms over us yet, paddling about in the sea-froth of self-publishing

and I hear that two of my friends have died

One, a past friend, was killed by cancer and as her husband had also died several years before, left their daughter an orphan. The other, a now and future friend, was killed in an accident. I want to say more but can find nothing which isn't a cliche. And after all, the bare facts are enough.

As the aftershock begins to fade, their deaths somehow assimilated, I am looking at the landscape of my own life differently. Another cliche of course, but one with its own imperative. The tedious job is to be ditched, my children and husband to be held close. And dipping my toes in the cold and careless tide feels akin to apathy. I must plunge in, while I can. Suck the marrow out of life.

Thanks, Walt Whitman. Thanks Robin Williams for speaking his poetry so inimitably. And thanks Sam and Val for a lesson in perspective you would never have wanted to give.