Christmas is coming

Christmas is coming and Jean is getting fat. I've been enjoying going out for Christmas meals, and sod the diet.

It's snowing today. Brrr!! But I'm happily ensconed in front of the fire, making occasional trips to the window to enjoy the sight of it. It does look nice, I must admit. I could quite enjoy snow if it wasn't cold and wet and prone to turn to slippery ice.

Well, I've at last got all my cards sent and presents wrapped. Very few people are getting presents from me this year because I've made a donation instead to a children's hospice. I think now I've got everything done that needed doing today, I've no excuse but to get on with some writing. I wonder why I've started to put writing at the bottom of my list of priorities. Once I start writing, it's usually OK, but somehow it takes me a lot of time and effort to clear the decks and make a start on the writing.

If anyone happens to be reading this, HAPPY CHRISTMAS, AND BEST WISHES FOR THE NEW YEAR 2010.

Forty years on

Today I went back to the deteriorating former mental institution where I spent some time as a patient forty years ago. This picture shows that they cleaned up the stonework about a year ago, but not the clock tower. It still has an eerily, Gothic appearance to me.

As mentioned in an earlier blog posting, I did go back there recently to be filmed in the grounds for a documentary which goes out on BBC4 in the New Year and is to be used by the Open University. This documentary has been given the (purposely provocative) title of 'Mental: A History of the Madhouse'.

The filming today, however, was for another (unrelated) BBC documentary, one which will be shown on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Inside Out programme, and this time we actually went inside the building.

The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum (as it used to be called until the name changed to High Royds Hospital) was once a magnificent building (from an architectural standpoint) with intricate mosaic floors, stained glass windows and elaborate archways. It is now in a dismal state of disrepair. At first we were told we wouldn't be allowed to go inside without wearing tin hats (health and safety rules) and boots, but this was later waived. I met up with reporter Charlotte Leeming, two camera men, and a site construction official who let us in.

With a camera man in front of us, Charlotte and I wandered along freezing cold, dim corridors with peeling walls and muddy water on the floor, while I reminisced about this place in the late-sixties and early-seventies. I remembered seeing institutionalised long-stay inmates shuffling along these corridors, some chuntering to themselves, and looking dejected. I was a teenager then, who felt I'd somehow strayed into a different world.

We went into the ballroom. Yes, among the labyrinth of corridors in this house of horrors, there had been a huge and grandiose ballroom. My mind travelled back to the teenage me at a Christmas dance there, and I could picture again the sad-eyed patients in paper hats doing a largactil shuffle around the floor to the sound of a band playing 'White Christmas'. It seemed strange to be there inside that same place forty years on, and the memories were so vivid.

Look back, accept, and then let go. Time to move on.

Damn it!!!

It all started when a magazine editor contacted me to ask if I could email a photo of myself. This was to go with an article I'd written ages ago and had almost forgotten about. Of course she needed it straight away. I hadn't got a suitable one. Husband to the rescue with his digital camera. 'It'll be best taking it outside to get more light,' he said. So out we went.

I closed the front door after us, not realising that when Ian opened it, he'd left the key on the inside. Closing the door locked us out! I'd gone outside with no coat and wearing a thin T-shirt and flip-flop slippers, as I'd expected to be only a few seconds. It was a freezing cold day.

After a heated squabble on the doorstep about whose fault it was that we were locked out, we decided we'd be best channelling our energy into thinking about what to do. We wandered around the house and decided it was burglar-proof. Meanwhile, I was slowly freezing to death. Ian, too, was only wearing a T-shirt, but he belongs to the strange species who go out jogging like that in all weathers, so I figured it was worse for me.

Our neighbours are usually out at work during the day, so what a relief it was to see our neighbour's car. It turned out she was off work sick. A few months ago she would have had our spare key for the back door, but we'd lent it to a workman who had fitted our new kitchen, and never given it back to her. Anyway, we rang a locksmith from her house, who arrived about an hour later.

The locksmith couldn't open our front door, so he had to drill into our back door and then fit a new lock. This cost us £132. Damn it!!!

Christmas is coming

I'm not a Christmas person. This is something my husband keeps saying about himself, but it does apply to me, too. I really don't like Christmas; the commercialism, the false glitter, the excuses (who needs one anyway?) for over-indulgence. And then there's the wondering what to get people who don't really need anything. They might end up with the 'hideous tie so kindly meant' (quote from a John Betjeman poem, I think).

So here we are again. Stores are already displaying their Christmas wares, and pestering me with the sound of carols. Soon the shops will be too crowded to move in. And let's stick paper hats on the heads of the homeless, the downtrodden, the oppressed, and get them to sing something about dreaming of a white Christmas. White? Oh, no, not snow as well. The car won't start, pavements will turn into ice rinks and I'll slide on my bottom down the steep part of our street. Sod all that. I'd love to hibernate until it's all over.

Bah! Humbug!

What next and what now?

I'd like to say my absence from blogging for a while has been because I'm working hard on writing my novel. But, unfortunately, I seem to be spending more time trying to decide what to do than actually doing it. I have three unfinished novel manuscripts in my drawer and I can't make my mind up which (if any) of them I should be concentrating on next.

Meanwhile, there is still 'The Dark Threads' to publicise. There's not much point in having a book 'out there' if few people know about it, hence I've been forcing myself to take centre stage and jump through hoops. Here's what I've done so far which, if nothing else, has been a learning experience.

First, I had promotional postcards printed to distribute to anyone who might be remotely interested, depicting my book cover on the front and details about it on the back. I included my phone number on the cards, which (for reasons I'll leave you to ponder) might have been a mistake. Looking back, I suppose I should have first set up a website (my next task), with a means of contacting me through that, to put on the cards. But then, not everyone uses a computer.

I joined a speakers club and practised until I could stand up and talk without looking and sounding like a timid little mouse. It worked. I've done three book-talks so far: one to a university group, the second at a bookshop and the third at a library. OK, three talks aren't many, but more opportunities to talk at libraries will be coming my way soon, I am told. I also did two radio interviews.

Local newspaper reporters interviewed me, and I got extensive coverage in several regional papers. I was interviewed in London for the Sunday Times, but guess what? They lost the interview tape. I've recently been re-interviewed over the phone. Will the feature eventually appear? I do hope so, as I desperately need more national coverage if my book is to sell successfully.

I've written articles for magazines, the latest of which should soon be appearing in the HCPJ (Healthcare, Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal). Dorothy Rowe reviewed my book in Openmind, and on her website (Articles-Openmind-Two Books). I got a good review recently in 'Therapy Today'. However, I need features and reviews in magazines other than just the specialist mental health ones. I'm awaiting the next issue of my favourite literary short story magazine, 'The Yellow Room', with even more eagerness than usual, as it will contain a review of my book.

I contacted Mark Davis, and he has featured me on his increasingly popular High Royds Hospital website (scroll down and click onto 'Dark Threads'). One thing leads to another, and a BBC TV reporter has just emailed me after reading about me on that website and she'll be talking to me shortly; I'm not sure where (if anywhere) that will lead, but watch this space . . .

I have taken part in a BBC TV documentary, funded by the Open University, about the history of mental health care, which will appear on BBC4 early in the New Year. This involved filming me as I wandered the grounds of the now closed-down hospital on a bleak, blustery evening, looking pensive as I remembered the horrible time I spent there back in the sixties and seventies. I'd been hanging around in the 'gives-me-the-creeps' derelict hospital grounds for ages waiting for the filming to start. I was cold and hungry and wanted my tea, so when they told me not to smile on camera, that was dead easy! Three of the pics taken are on the hospital website (click into 'Blakeways Productions' and then scroll down to click the thumbnails on the left).

The following day the documentary crew filmed and interviewed me at a house in Ilkley. I got hit in the face with the edge of a box (as you do) the night before, leaving an ugly scar on my face (I'd been trying to reach for a box on top of the wardrobe). I arrived late (got well and truly lost on the way) so didn't even have time to comb my hair before starting. My confidence diminished further with all the interruptions during the interview; a noisy lorry outside, fridge-freezer attention seeking, someone's mobile, sunlight in wrong position, my hair sticking up at one side (the camera man informed me about half-way through) and, finally, the house owner's cat repeatedly meowing to come indoors and join in the fun. With all the retakes, I fear I'll either look flustered or bored on film.

Is getting a book published worth it all in the end? Yes, I think so. Well, nothing beats going into Waterstones and Borders and seeing it up there on the shelves.

Writing as therapy

Writing about painful experiences that have a strong bearing on the author's life may be seen as writing as therapy. People often say that a therapeutic act of writing should be kept private. Whilst I agree that writing purely for therapy is quite different from writing for publication, I do believe that sometimes the raw material of therapeutic writing can be transformed into a creative act and crafted for publication.

When I was young, I kept detailed diaries and, although I didn't see it as such at the time, I suppose what I was doing in them was writing for therapy. As teenagers often do, I pored out my thoughts and feelings, filling my diaries with teenage angst. Writing things down helped me to make sense of what was happening in my life. These diaries were never intended to be made public, and rightly so. They were for my own benefit. It didn't matter that they weren't well-crafted, edited, or proof-read to iron out any grammatical errors or sloppily-written parts. It also didn't matter if the content would bore other people to death. For me, the diaries served their purpose as catharsis.

My diaries also served another purpose later. They helped me to gather together material for my memoir 'The Dark Threads'. Perhaps when I began writing my memoir I was writing it as therapy, but then I decided I wanted to share my experience with others. No longer just writing for myself, I began to write with the aim of publication. It was a tentative dream at first. I knew that the odds of getting it published were stacked against me, but what I aimed to do was write a book to the best of my ability, and aim for a publishable standard.

By the time I'd nearly finished my manuscript, 'misery memoirs' were popular. If, by this term, we mean a sensationalised account that piles misery upon misery, without analytic reflection, then I definitely did not want my book to be categorised as such. It is not a misery memoir, but perhaps I need another posting to discuss this, so I'll leave the topic for later. And no, no, no, it is not ghost-written!

Once I had decided on writing a memoir, truth, of course, remained paramount (truth in memoir will make a good subject for another blog posting at a later date), but now I had to stand back and try to view the quality of my writing objectively. I had to discipline myself, hone my writing skills and work hard to learn and apply the craft of writing, so that I could take my raw material and turn it into something creative, something that would, hopefully, grab hold of and maintain the interest of others: something publishable.

Have I succeeded? Well, I did succeed in getting published. Others are actually paying to read my book! I went into Waterstones and Borders the other day, and there it was on the shelf. But have I succeeded in writing a book that others, people who don't know me, will find worth their while paying for and reading? That has to be left up to readers to decide.

My book is reviewed in the latest edition of 'Therapy Today', along with two novels about patients in psychiatric hospitals: 'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry, and 'House of Bread' by Amanda Nicol. The reviewer describes me as 'a powerful representative of that disenfranchised group - psychiatric survivors. But what about the silenced? What about their stories? We, and they, must hope that Davison will continue to use her compassion and talent to tell their stories too.' I like reading nice things about me like this (of course I do), though I don't really see myself as a spokesperson. I would much prefer that people were empowered to tell their own stories than have someone speak for them, though I know that, for many people who were silenced by the mental health system, speaking for themselves is sometimes, sadly, never going to be possible.

The review in 'Therapy Today' concludes with words that are relevant to what I've been discussing in this posting. If I have done what the reviewer says in the last two sentences, then I am well satisfied that I have achieved my aim for my memoir: 'The characters in "The Secret Scripture" find writing therapeutic; the telling of their stories is the restoration of narratives ruptured by their histories. The authors of "House of Bread" and "The Dark Threads" also restore the ruptured narratives of their lives in the writing of these books, making them therapeutic acts. But these are also works skilfully crafted from the raw material of personal experience and stand as books in their own right. These three books demonstrate that writing is both a therapeutic and a creative act.'

Do as I say . . .

I've just read something that tickled me and thought I'd share it:


20 RULES FOR WRITERS

1. About those sentence fragments.
2. Always pick on the correct idiom.
3. And avoid all asinine alliteration.
4. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
5. Avoice cliches like the plague.
6. Between you and I, case is important.
7. Correct spelling is esential.
8. Do not put statements in the negative form.
9. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
11. Don't use no double negatives.
12. It's important to use apostrophe's correctly.
13. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.
14. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
15. Remember to never split an infinitive.
16. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. The passive voice should never be used.
19. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
20. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

WILLIAM SAFIRE (Journalist, speechwriter for Pres. Richard Nixon and author of Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House, 1975), drawn from several sources. Safire died 27th September at 79.