Fire, Fire

No photos for this post. Don't feel like it. Farmdoc is off fighting a fire not far from here. I'm worried about him and I'm worried about the fire.

Sharon, our share farmer, and I have just been on the phone discussing what we'll do with our livestock if the fire comes through here. As for our possessions, we both decided we'll walk out the door with almost nothing: for me it's my laptop and my new iPod Touch on which I am playing Scrabble with a stranger in New York. My opponent's in bed now. At least she's stopped making moves and it's late there, and I guess she's female, though why I say that I don't know.

It's not that I don't love all my old pottery, and the kitchen paraphernalia that used to belong to Farmdoc's grandmother, and all the other bits and pieces I've garnered over the years that tell so many stories. My father's rowing cups from before the Second World War, paintings, books, books and more books, my collection of enamel candlestick holders...it's just that I can't be bothered with any of it right now.

I'm just babbling. Call it nerves.

The other thing I'm doing at the moment, when I'm not compulsively typing, is cleaning. Farmdoc will be pleased. I NEVER clean. So far I've scrubbed the back porch wall and mopped the porch floor. Now I think I'm going to go off to sweep and mop the floors inside the house, and for some reason I feel like making jelly. Jelly? Who knows why? Childhood comfort food maybe.

There's very little smoke here so the fire can't be headed in this direction, can it? Though I know a wind change can make a huge difference. Last night's fires were deliberately lit. This one probably was too.

I don't want to ring anyone to talk about it because I don't want to worry them. And besides, there's nothing to worry about, is there?

The Tasmanian Fire Service website currently informs me about the fire at Liena Road, Mole Creek:

TFS and Forestry Tasmania crews are currently on-site, working to contain and bring the fire under control.

OK, which flavour jelly shall I make?

Managing Fear

I still don’t know what the fear of facing my novel was. Maybe I was afraid that it’d be terrible, or that I wouldn’t be able to read it objectively; or maybe it was just that my heart now lies with my non-fiction book. Piecing a new story together, discovering new terrain is so exciting compared with the dull slog of revision.

I work a lot with fear and anxiety it seems to me. Fear that I won’t do justice to my material, or that I won’t be able to enter it fully. Fear of facing work I have done when I haven’t seen it for a while. I have developed techniques for dealing with some of my fears, such as the empty page – or screen – but I’ve still got a long way to go.

How I handled the problem this time was to give myself plenty of opportunity to make excuses, and then I stood firm: NO MORE DELAYS ALLOWED. I made myself a cup of peppermint tea, broke off a couple of squares of chocolate and then I forced myself to sit down and start reading.

It was hard for half a page and then I was in and away.

I knew before I started one problem in particular I needed to solve. I had to show why two of my characters had married. The reader had to understand what was at stake. This was my friend Christine’s excellent advice and I had no idea how I was going to do it. But by the time I’d reached the end of the first page the material had inserted itself in the simplest and most natural way.

All that fuss over nothing.