The Writing Life, Ongoing
I keep writing a word down on a sticky note, and then I toss it out for one reason or another, and eventually write it down again. The word: conditions. Conditions. Conditions.
What am I trying to remind myself of here?
My screensaver on my computer all this last year has been a slideshow of my photographs of Rome in 2022. I saw them one way for the last 12 months, and now I’m seeing them in a new way now that I have 3000+ new photographs from our trip there in November of 2023. The conditions were really so different! The photos are so different. We tried to see a number of new places, though we did hit some of our personal faves again. In 2022 I had just got my FujiFilm Xt4 camera. I thought I knew what I was doing with it, but I really did not. So that shows in some photos (not others). Maybe it’s because of distance/time, but I think I might have taken better photos a year ago. Was it due to conditions? My physical or mental state? The flukiness of light? How we see things is such an interesting phenomenon. It’s hard to see the recent images without being hard on myself. Should have persisted, taken a few more, tried a different angle. Should have etc. But with the older images, I’m gentler with myself, or, the images seem more as though they were taken by someone else. This tells me that one day I’ll also like my newer photographs more, or be able to see them differently if not more clearly or tenderly.
In Rome this past time, I knew I’d be returning home to my book Apples on a Windowsill arriving soon after in the world. One of the first things I did when we got there was to put some apples on the windowsill. These ones. When we got to our place we didn’t know what the light was going to be like at what time of day. We’d looked at all the reviews and photos of the apartment, but the reality is always a bit different. What would the view from the windows be/feel like? What would the windowsills really be like? How could we adapt ourselves to the conditions?
I think both Rob and me had thought we’d be getting more flowers, taking more photos of flowers, and we did get a bunch or two. In 2022 this was a big focus for us! We arrived a week later this time, though, and for whatever reason, the flower bunches didn’t call. The flowers we’d hoped for didn’t seem available. The season was different, conditions were different. Of course they were!
If you read / subscribe to my Beauty School Patreon, you might have read about how we decided one day early on to get a small lemon tree from the flower stall at the end of our street. This precipitated a bit of a delving into citrus in Italy. We bought a book titled The Land Where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee, which Rob read, and which is in my towering TBR stack. He loved it, and we both became obsessed with the orange trees in the neighbourhood (Celio, near the Colosseum). Rob has even painted one and I have hope it will precipitate a whole new series for him that he can work on alongside his flower series. Who knows though, where the artistic heart leads….
So, yes, near the end of the trip, after photographing rather a lot of various fruits on the windowsill, I knew I had to get back to the apples! It was that rather lovely moment in the writing life where you’ve “finished” with the book, it’s out of your hands. It hasn’t arrived yet in the world, and few have read it. You can just fantasize that it will be well received, haha! I never have too many delusions of grandeur, ie becoming a bestseller worldwide etc. I guess my hopes usually are in the direction of, please let it fall into the right hands, the hands of generous and likeminded readers. That’s all. May it find those few who might have reasons to love it a little, and underline a few things, and dog-ear a few pages.
And so far it has. People have been posting photos of the book on tables and windowsills, making their own still lifes with it, and I can’t tell you how delightful this is to me!
(I’m going to be updating “news” / brags over on my author website because most of you will have seen the same stuff on my social media).
Separate to the book news, I have to say that the fact that Kerry Clare has found the title of her upcoming book on my previous post, made my heart sing. If we can be inspiring each other out here, then the time and love we pour into these internet spaces, really does seem worthwhile, right?
I always think it’s an interesting time in the writer’s life after a book has just barely made it into the world. You’re done with it, but then talking about it and reading from it will often spark more ideas on the same subject…and then, where to put those? Are the ideas for something new…or just to hold on to for oneself?
It felt so bittersweet to photograph these apples on a windowsill in 2023 after the book had been “put to bed.” But also, hopeful — the process of making, creating, trying, delighting, that all can still continue. The certainty of changing conditions will always be opening up new vistas….
