"Thornfield" in Jane Eyre I’ve said it before and no doubt I’ll say it again: I love the webbiness of the World Wide Web. I love writing posts that link to other posts, both mine and other people’s, even as I worry that those phrases picked out in blue might impede the reading process. Even when I’m not forging links across the Internet, I enjoy rooting for commonalities, such as those between the novels of those writers featured in my debut novelists Q&A’s or plucking from my bookshelves novels on a specific theme, such as water or transgenerational trauma. (You can see how it gets obsessive and it’s little wonder my posts take so long to write.) Yet I’m much more cagey bringing different spheres of my own life into the blog. Yes, I’ll prattle on about gardening and make oblique references to the pleasure I get from singing in a choir. But until I started my series on fictional psychologists and psychotherapists, I kept my professional background entirely separate from my identity as a writer and, even now, the more structured and formalised are the alternative universes I occupy, the less comfortable I feel about providing a portal to them here.
Looking back across the valley If, as it says on the sidebar, Annecdotal is the place where real life meets the fictional, those other “me”s are bound to creep in here. My voluntary work in the national park edged its way into the blog last year when I wrote about a storytelling walk and I’ve mentioned it again on Twitter at the beginning of this month when we repeated that walk in the rain. I’ve also shared my nascent plans for a similar walk around “Jane Eyre territory” (and discovered, courtesy of Luccia Gray, there are actually three contenders for the location of Thornfield, although only one fits with my proposed route). While on one level it’s obvious I’d develop my interests in this manner, on another level it feels as if I’m breaking a taboo to mix up my writing and rangering selves. Which brings me to the latest prompt from the ever-imaginative Charli Mills to craft a multi-verse situation in 99 words. You’d be better off checking her blog for a definition, since I’m still not sure how it’s different to the slipstream fiction I’ve written previously or, indeed, to magic realism (for which I’m referring you to this lovely new story from Teagan Kearney). I’ve ended up borrowing from Charli’s flash to come up with this little tale of the collision between my fictional and walking worlds:
From the viewpoint (excuse my feeble zoom) Shrugging off my rucksack, I find a flattish rock to sit and imbibe the view. Deep in the valley, the manor house nestles among fields of sheep. They tell the tourists North Lees inspired Rochester’s home in Jane Eyre.
I swivel round to watch the climbers on the gritstone and, when I turn back, flames lick the battlements of the hall below. I jump up and race towards it, skirt dragging on the heather, bonnet ribbons flapping in the breeze. I hear the ghoulish laughter of the woman in the attic. My heart calls out to Edward, my love.
This mélange of real life and fiction also reminds me of a question I asked of my Liebster nominees: If you could invite a fictional character to write one of your posts, who would you choose and why? Lora chose the poodle from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Liesel from The Book Thief; Susan chose any bookseller other than Bernard Black; Nicola passed on this one because of the impossibility of occupying the mind of another writer; AnnMarie plumped for Anne of Green Gables; and Ava wanted Rick Dockery from John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza. If you’re also a blogger, I wonder who you’d invite?
I swivel round to watch the climbers on the gritstone and, when I turn back, flames lick the battlements of the hall below. I jump up and race towards it, skirt dragging on the heather, bonnet ribbons flapping in the breeze. I hear the ghoulish laughter of the woman in the attic. My heart calls out to Edward, my love.
This mélange of real life and fiction also reminds me of a question I asked of my Liebster nominees: If you could invite a fictional character to write one of your posts, who would you choose and why? Lora chose the poodle from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Liesel from The Book Thief; Susan chose any bookseller other than Bernard Black; Nicola passed on this one because of the impossibility of occupying the mind of another writer; AnnMarie plumped for Anne of Green Gables; and Ava wanted Rick Dockery from John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza. If you’re also a blogger, I wonder who you’d invite?
RSS Feed
