While I take great pleasure in my ability to harvest fruit and veg from my garden, I don’t get particularly excited about cooking it. As I couldn’t let it go to waste, I’ve been rustling up some strange concoctions of beetroot, courgettes and beans lately and rushing to put them on the table before it gets too cool to dine in the garden. Cordon Bleu it’s not! I’m hoping my response to Charli Mills’ latest flash fiction prompt won’t also come out as a dog’s dinner.

Looking for inspiration for my 99-word food story, I turn to the novels on my physical and virtual bookshelves. Consistent with my miserablist inclinations, there’s a dominant theme of the problems that food or its lack can bring. In Shelley Harris’ novel, Jubilee, a boy’s divided loyalties to his white friends and Asian family is played out in his response to the food his mother plans to cook for a street party in 1970s Britain. (You can click on the link to find the quote.) One of the enduring images in Alison Moore’s debut, The Lighthouse, is the way in which, on a catered walking holiday along the Rhine, the main character consistently fails to get the food he has paid for. Although Lewis, the central character in her second novel, He Wants, is forced to endure fewer physical privations, his food is unsatisfying because it’s not what he actually wants.

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.

The latest flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills sent me cruising my geographically-arranged bookshelves for novels on the theme of water. Waiting for the Rain by Zimbabwean Charles Mungoshi was my obvious starting point since, as usual at this time of year, my garden is particularly thirsty. I try to conserve water by harvesting rain from the drainpipes and pounding my plot with a watering can as the sun goes down behind the trees. But, with my tendency to precrastinate over arduous tasks, I can often make extra work for myself by transplanting seedlings in the heat of the day, then bemoaning their failure to thrive. Yet, through this, through the dirt under my fingernails, I feel a connection to those subsistence farmers whose very survival is dependent on the rain. Of course, there’s an over romanticism bordering on the delusional in this assumed affinity between my pampered life and theirs.

The Westerners’ illusions about the poor is one of the themes of Ann Patchett’s novel, State of Wonder, about secret research in the muddy waters of the Brazilian jungle. It’s not too much of a boat ride from the Amazon basin to the West Indies, the setting for Jean Rhys’s reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s mad-woman-in-the-attic, The Wide Sargasso Sea. Depending on how far they’ve drifted off course, we might also encounter Grace Winter on those waters, fighting for survival in Charlotte Rogan’s debut novel, The Lifeboat. From there, we could sail through the Panama Canal into the Pacific ocean, where, in Yan Martel’s debut, The Life of Pi, a young man shares his lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger.

For most of my 20s I lived with a man who had spent his early years in a village in Punjab.  His father, despite being permanently settled in the UK and not having a huge amount of surplus cash, was determined to buy a house with a plot of land for each of his sons “back home”.  In his mind, it was worth going without in his current place of residence to invest in the place where his family had lived for generations. 

I was reminded of this on reading Johanna Lane’s debut novel, Black Lake.  An Indian immigrant might seem worlds away from of a country gentleman in Donegal, yet my ex-boyfriend’s father and Irish patriarch, John Campbell, shared a similar tenacious attachment to their ancestral lands.  While one moved thousands of miles away and the other made an uncomfortable compromise to enable him to stay, both their identities were rooted in the soil of their homelands.

Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry: how the British love to talk about the weather.  With climate change in the offing, we’ve even more to chew over: floods, drought, winters that drag on for ever or seem never to arrive.  How could a Britisher not be inspired by this week’s prompt from Charli Mills for her flash fiction challenge?  Climate change in fiction: bring it on!

I’ve already turned up the heat on Annecdotal, with my previous post on the novel, Instructions for a Heatwave.  I’d been going to save it for a sultry summer’s day – should we get one this year – but Charli’s prompt makes it equally topical as we come to the end of a showery April.  What I recall of the summer of 1976 is how unprepared we were for the heat here in Britain.  How we must’ve sweated in our heavy nylon clothes as we endeavoured to keep up our cold-climate routines.  Just as Gretta in Maggie Farrell’s novel continues to bake her own bread in inflated temperatures, I have a vivid memory of how, the heat already unbearable, my ironing just had to be done.

We seem equally unprepared for the floods that now beset our shores with alarming regularity.  I’m not sure exactly when I read The Flood by Maggie Gee – but given that it was published in 2004, it can’t be that long ago – but, since then, events that seemed exaggerated in the novel have been played out again and again on the evening news: stinking streets; stranded cattle; ordinary people going about their business by boat.  The privileged are determined to continue as normal in Maggie Gee’s apocalyptic London: the infrastructure may be crumbling, people may be homeless and the rain interminable, but President Bliss directs his energies into wooing celebrities at an evening “do”.

Approaching a big town or city by train is like entering a stately home through the back door. The tracks skirt scrapyards and dustbins, edge past tumbledown housing with washing flapping on the line. On a train journey in Britain, you might also notice a patch of open ground that resembles neither a demolition site or school playing field. It looks as if several gardens have been detached from their houses and brought together, except that here, instead of lawns and shrubberies, you’ll see rackety sheds and beanpoles, and row upon row of that green stuff you’ve plucked from supermarket shelves.

Allotments have been part of the British landscape for around 200 years. The Allotments Act of 1925 gave local authorities a statutory responsibility to protect the land on which the urban poor might grow their own food. In the middle of the last century, they tended to be the preserve of the flat-capped working-class male; he would grow the carrots and spuds and her indoors would cook them. Later, families and foodies contributed to an allotment revival.

Like the community of writers, allotment holders are highly supportive bunch: when I started mine, the old hands couldn’t resist stopping by to tell us what we were doing wrong. Now I do my growing in my own garden, but I still rely on the lessons – and repeat the same mistakes, according to my husband – that I learned back then. And, because writing is like gardening, I’ve written allotments into a couple of my short stories. Plastic, just published by The Treacle Well, pays homage to the allotment tradition while raising concerns about the threat of pollution to the soil on which we all depend. Albarello di Sarzana is a lighter read celebrating the communal side of allotments and the wonder of growing one’s food. In Stealing the Show from Nature, a gardening project on a much larger scale provides the backdrop to a rough patch in a marriage.

It won’t be long before I’m sowing seeds in the greenhouse again. In the meantime, it’s great to celebrate last year’s garden harvest along with this writerly one. Please share your thoughts below.

Although I knew a little about the elephant-headed god from my travels in India many moons ago, these weren’t exactly stories I’d heard my mother’s knee. What if others were more familiar with the story than I was? Would I be able to engage people? What if I forgot my lines? 

Of course, I needn’t have worried. Thanks to Chamu’s support and a lovely group of tolerant walkers, I had a fabulous time telling my two stories, as you’ll see from the pictures below, and from others on the Hindu Samaj website. 

The experience got me thinking about the differences between story writing and storytelling. Although I often read my fiction aloud to check for stumbling blocks, telling a story without a script to an audience is another matter altogether.

As a reader and as a writer, I treat adverbs with suspicion and every adjective has to earn its keep. Yet the oral form has a baroque feel to it, bustling with verbal curlicues, never using one word when half a dozen will do. Repetition, cliches, It came to pass and In due course – I welcomed them as joyfully as I attempt to edit out each just and quite from the written
form. It wasn’t the presence of two delightful children that made me spout such archaic and nursery-style phrases; they seemed appropriate for the story to flow.

Relaxing into the role, I began to tell the story physically: modulating my voice;
exaggerating my facial expressions; making judicious use of pauses. I don’t have an extroverted bone in my body, but I couldn’t help falling into the rhythms and performing.

This will be no surprise to those familiar with reading bedtime stories, but to me it
was a revelation, and I’m looking forward to doing it again at the end of August next year, only better. (If you watch the video below, you'll see there's lots of room for improvement.) If you'd like to come, the details will be on the Ranger walks calendar.

If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed I've delivered all the posts I promised for October (gold stars all round). For next month I hope to bring you the fourth instalment in my series on fictional psychologists and psychotherapists; a look at internal obstacles to achieving one's personal and fictional goals inspired by my Q&A with Anthea Nicholson, as well as my recent post on character motivation; and why I'm raving about a small book of psychoanalytic case studies. I've also got posts in the pipeline on writers' routines; writing in the first person plural; old-age stereotypes; leaving home; another look at rhythm and my love affair with allotments. Hopefully there's something you'll want to come back for.

If you're still wondering how the elephant god got his head, you can read a précis of the story here:

The video picks up the story halfway through, when Shiva has chopped off the head of Parvati's darling boy and is sending out his bodyguards to find a replacement.

Or go here for a musical version of the story.

The sun and rain have delivered a magnificent harvest in the garden.  When I took this photo, it looked as if the self-seeded marigolds would be my most successful crop, yet now we’re overrun with home-grown lettuce, cucumber, beans, courgettes and mangetout peas.  Like the gardening fanatic in my story, I can eat potatoes fresh from the soil.  I’ve frozen tubs of spinach and baby  broad beans, roasted beetroot and cobs of sweetcorn and whizzed up my basil into a delicious pesto sauce.  True, the slugs have taken their share, and picking bucket-loads of red,
white, and black currants sometimes can feel like more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s deeply satisfying to reap the rewards of all that backbreaking planting and weeding and eat the food I’ve grown myself.

Over on The Creative Penn, it’s time for a mid-year writing review.  It’s good to be encouraged to take stock and I’m gratified to find I’m not the only one nerdy enough – or when someone else does it, sensible enough – to transfer that real-work objective-setting stuff into my writing.  As with the garden, I can sometimes be too focused on the jobs undone to  recognise what I’ve got.  The seeds that didn’t germinate are like my stories that didn’t get written.  The tedium of harvesting the soft fruit is like the sometimes Sisyphean task of sending them out into the world, but, if I don’t make the effort, my words, like the berries, will rot on the stem.  Looking back at where I was six months ago can help remind me how much I’ve achieved.

Yet we need to avoid being overzealous with our goals, remembering
that, like the weather, the outcomes of our writing are often beyond our
control. Aside from the whims of editors, at times even internal factors
like motivation and enthusiasm will elude us.  So we’ll always feel like failures if we let our drive for improvement obscure what we already have.  And even achievable goals require goalposts and one sure thing about metaphorical goalposts is they keep on moving and those writerly satisfactions of external recognition in whatever form will leave us craving a bigger dose.

I make no apologies for signing off with the much-quoted Kipling's If.  Sometimes words become clichés because they make such good sense.

If I could cultivate such equanimity in relation to my writing, turning into a man (see last line of the poem) would be a small price to pay. 
How about you?

Are there no bounds to my capacity to grapple with internet technology?  Last month it was Facebook, now I'm making my first foray into - or should that be onto? - YouTube.

Okay, it doesn't quite do justice to the wondrous sight of the butterflies feeding on the buddleia in our front garden but, when summer's long gone, it will serve as a lovely reminder of what was.  We'd been bemoaning the fact that it was rare to see more than a couple of butterflies in one place in England these days when, all of a sudden, swarms of peacocks started sunning themselves on the walls and using the paths through the long grass as an airport landing pad.  They're joined now and then by a painted lady and a comma, along with the silver Y moth that flaps its wings as eagerly as a hummingbird, and the pesky small and large whites that lay their eggs inside my cabbages.
I know I can't compete with dancing kittens – and nor do I aspire to – but I'm pleased to have a record, albeit a shaky one, of this beautiful phenomena, and grateful for the background music courtesy of YouTube to play over the rumble of the traffic.  And, of course, if I ever need to upload a more writerly video, I've got a head start as to how to go about it.
Do share your own experiences, as well as what you think of my tentative first steps.

The seed of an idea that grows into a story.  The fact that, however much you plan, some seeds take root where you least expect.  The backache and sheer hard graft.  The dreadful dependence on powers (like editors and weather) beyond your control.

A job or a hobby, an itch or obsession, something to dip in and out of according to the seasons or your whims.  It can be wonderfully therapeutic to feel the soil between your fingers or the pen in your hand.  Such a thrill to finally see the fruits of your labours: the food on the table; the words on the printed page.  Yet the disappointments of both writing and gardening could have you climbing the walls in frustration, and often will.

Is writing like gardening or is this forced analogy my apology for being a total* ignoramus on the subject of Japanese fiction (I've decided that Kazuo Ishiguro's work would be cheating) as I announce the online publication of my short story The Japanese Garden?

*Not total, but forgotten: on my bookshelves I find
Black Rain Masuji Ibuse
Masks Yukio Mishima
Both now transferred to my To Be Reread pile!

I'm not given to risk-taking, especially not on something as scary as the net where trolls can monitor your every move, so I thought long and hard before starting my blog. Mostly what I thought was: No, that's not for me. Quick, draw the curtains, you never know who might be peering in.
Then, all of a sudden, I had a new computer and a brand-new blog. Learning my way round both Windows 8 and Weebly at the same time, perhaps I should be grateful that it was the computer and not me that went into meltdown (miraculously only a couple of days shy of the end of the no-quibbles return period). Aside from the first post, which seems a bit pointless, but I'm leaving up as part of my ten-step programme for combatting shame (not that ten steps are anywhere near sufficient), I'm glad I've done it, but I'm still not sure what it's for. There's a part of me still thinks it's quite mad – but that might be the same part that thinks that any project not set up with the explicit purpose of pleasing my mother is mad, I'm not sure how seriously to take it.
Yet I’m seriously addicted and, I think, in a good way, so read on if you want to know the three reasons why I got into blogging and kept going.

Here's the competition link and here's the back story: I've got a voucher offering a  substantial discount off a beginner's writing contest to give away. I won it by not being a beginner and would prefer it not to go to waste. I've never hosted a competition on this website and I thought it might be fun. I've set it as a reading task, in order  to be scrupulously fair on people merely contemplating learning to write fiction, as well as enabling me to test out something regarding the opening of my novel. I've given the competition closing date around the time the snowdrops will be withering away.

I've scattered seeds where I could around the internet, but this town-crier lark is still quite new to me, and it's hard enough to bring the writers in to see what's here, let alone the non-writers who, by definition, don't have writing websites and blogs. So if you can pass this on somewhere it might be of interest, please do. Thank you. And, just to clarify, I'm expecting the
snowdrops to be gone by the end of March.