Curiously, a day or two post-deadline and I am ansty, restless, unable to relax. The work involved in completing my degree represented a marathon, not a sprint. Months spent in deep, deep editing (like deep sea diving but not as dark) and then a thesis in which I interpreted, analysed and second-guessed everything I knew about writing and publishing. Imaginations of faceless external examiners considering my words. ‘Hello there.’ The result? Handed in and now bereft! Unsure what to do with myself, I am stranded mid-half term with one child revising (or not) and the other presently skidding across a slip’n’slide in the garden, hastened by hosepipe water and some fairy liquid. Oh the joys of summer. I think a lot about my book and it feels like a friend I’ve neglected; one I need to get back to, but not yet. It’s like we’ve had a silly falling out and now we are licking our wounds. Meanwhile other, new books spring fresh up in my mind and I think about writing something else. Infidelity! I shall be leaving my first novel for my second and that seems premature; a flirtation. My first one is not even finished. This is what professional writers do – write one, sell one, write one, sell one.

So I go back to the small things, reading, cooking, laundry, podcasts and googling. I’ve started running again after years off. I thought my body had stopped cooperating but, turns out it will. It’s as freeing as ever, the rhythm of it and the unmistakable endorphin-hit about an hour after. Then the aching legs and tired muscles. Summer running is one of my happiest pursuits. Due to unforeseen circumstances alluded to in my previous post (apologies for my opaqueness) I find myself accompanied by my husband each day and so we potter about, slightly freaked out by the proximity we share after so much absence in recent times. I’ve called on good friends to help steady our boat and so there have been nights out and evenings in, huddled at the table drinking wine and pondering whether this mid-life we find ourselves in is some sort of twisted trick. The three-generation juggle of ourselves, teens and older parents. We escape with boxsets – Billions and Bloodline – and promise ourselves only to watch one episode at a time. It’s like TV catnip.

The tractors near my house plough new furrows and I try to guess what crop will appear in a few short weeks. Courgettes? Coriander? Broccoli? Potatoes? It’s become the norm to be surrounded from May to September with farm-workers and night time tractors and irrigation tubes as wide as your thigh.

I figure I shall take the summer off, a self-congratulatory pause for educating myself further. If I graduate I shall have two degrees! Who’d have thought? And then by September, when the crops are harvested, I will go back and start in earnest in my efforts to become a published author.

I attended the last of my college sequentials. I have from today until May to write a series of critical essays – a thesis if you will – about writing and publishing. It’s a pensive time for me, I’m not going to lie. The culmination of my time at college has been a fevered, bordering-on-uncomfortable process where I have percolated what it will mean to complete a two year Creative Writing Masters degree. I will emerge from the crysalis to become what, exactly?! When asked what I do for a living I could say ‘writer’ with authority, couldn’t I? I spend my days writing and thinking about writing so that qualifies me, right? But have I been published? No. Have I earned money from writing? Not really.

Aside the academics, I have to decide what must be done to complete my novel. There’s an impatience in me; I feel as if I have waited years to produce this work and now I’d like it to progress. But it’s not ready yet. Meanwhile, I have learnt so much about myself in these two years. It was intimated to me that my life might not have been ‘literary’ enough to meet the constraints of the publishing industry. People like writers to have been monogamous to their trade. To have toiled in the strange half-life of spilling their thoughts to paper for others to read, for that to have been their raison d’être. It feels to me that we prefer that story; the usually impoverished, angst-ridden writer who is steeped in the literary conventions we’ve come to expect. Surrounded by books, educated in books, connected to books.

My trajectory doesn’t fit. I actually left publishing in my twenties, abandoning books to work for a corporate. I can categorically say: I sold out for the money. I wanted to do business. I spent my time penning legal defences and protocols for a multi-national. I wrote emails and policy documents and in my spare time, later on, wrote this blog as an outlet. Added to this is another transgression, which is hard to articulate, but is this: I like frippery. Fashion. A certain lightness of life. This side of me does not fit the category of ‘serious writer’. Yet when I wrote my novel what came out was serious.

It’s an interesting conundrum. I’m an advocate of being oneself. I’ve been around the block, I’m not about to morph myself into something I am not.

So an internal tussle ensues.

This blog is a place where I come to write. A bit like going to a mini-retreat. I have always curated an online space that is pretty and thought-provoking and generally has been surrounded by a loyal community of readers who are interested and engaged. This has persisted for many years and I can’t imagine a time when coming here won’t feel like that. One thing I have established is that people read blogs because they want to know about the person, not the brand. Not the product. It’s the honesty of human connection we are all after.

So I am trying to reconcile the two. Does being a writer mean one must dress/look/speak/adhere to the conventions of being a writer? One to muse…