Twice In One Week?

Perhaps blogging more than once a week is asking for trouble... oh, but how much more trouble could we be in anyway? The business sections of all the papers keep finding metaphorical cliffs for companies and entire industries to fall off, the Raptors manage to lose horribly to the 76ers, (letting the not-as-good-as-they-looked-last-night team shoot a crazy 55% from the floor for the game) and it's a miserably grey and rainy day in November.
Which makes me wistful for grey and rainy Ireland.
I don't want to go into too much detail about my Amazing Irish Adventure, lest I spoil things for the book. But I do want to mention, at least briefly, the wonderful, kind people who helped me on my travels.
Travelling in another country is a fascinating, absorbing experience for anyone. But a middle-aged woman is perhaps ideally suited for the type of travel that requires the traveller to disappear, to blend in, and slip among the throng unnoticed, discreetly making notes and listening to others talk. At 44, if you're a woman travelling alone, you travel alone. No-one is going to start up a conversation with you unless they have to; shop keepers, waitresses, and lost tourists seeking directions will form the bulk of your encounters.
This is great, much of the time.
But some of the time it's horribly lonely.
It's especially lonely if you're used to a bustling house full of Guitar Hero-playing children and their friends, set to the soundtrack of bins of Legos sent crashing to the floor as eight-year-old inventors scramble to find that one crucial piece for their world-weather-controlling device, telephones and doorbells ringing non-stop and someone howling at an inscrutable, non-compliant computer.
In the end, Ireland was an almost perfect balance between that long sought-after state of being left alone with my thoughts, and not being left alone.
But I think I might have gone a little mad, had I not had the great fortune to meet certain people during the first week of my trip. The Hopkins family - Dermot and Cathy, and their lovely and inspiring daughter Alice - are the sort of people who make you reach for a thesaurus, because the ordinary adjectives - like "kind" or "intelligent" aren't glowing enough. How many people would take a complete stranger under their wings, trap themselves for an entire day on a boat with her, just so that she could see how her characters could manoeuvre a vintage river barge through a lock and under bridges and along a canal?
The incredible Hopkins family fed me, let me drive their magnificent boat (!!!) and showed great patience and generosity as I pestered them with questions. In the process, they gave me a glimpse of just the sort of warm, loving, family Hazel and Ned will encounter. I could never ever repay them.
But I also had the good luck in that first week to stumble upon two of the very finest places to stay in the Irish countryside: Markree Castle, just outside Sligo, and Lough Key House B&B, just outside Boyle. I could travel for months and months and spend untold thousands of euros, and never find anywhere as welcoming and wonderful. Markree Castle was perfect in every way, and staffers Rachel and Alex could not have been more helpful. And Lough Key House - a stone Georgian B&B straight out of the best novels of Noel Streatfeild and E. Nesbitt, introduced me to the incomparable Emily, Frances, and their good friend Lydia, to whom I owe so much. These are people I will never forget. I could not have invented Lough Key House; I am so grateful that Frances has.
My travels took me to Yeats country, Connemara, Galway and the Aran Islands, and saw me criss-crossing the mid-western counties, before finally ending up in Dublin. In Connemara I was fortunate to have a fantastic guide, Fergal, from Ireland West Tours, and in Inis Moir, I was privileged to share a pony and trap with Yolanda. And in Dublin, Evelyn made sure my stay at Waterloo House B&B was everything I hoped it could be.
I needed to make this trip, to write the book I want to write. And I spent nearly three weeks in a frenetic race, trying to take in everything I could, to leave nothing undone. But in the end, the people I met will shape my writing at least as much as the museums, the cathedrals, the stone age and medieval monuments, or the scenery. I'm so grateful to everyone.
Obviously, travel of this sort is not challenging in the way that it would be if one journeyed to a place of danger or privation, or even simply to a country with a language and culture that differed dramatically from one's one. Clearly any sense of dislocation is minimal when you're exploring a country already familiar through books, films, or televsion - a country where they speak your language, a country whose history and culture shaped that of your own.
Even so, travel can make you stupid.
At least, it can make you feel stupid.
You know, for example, how to go into a store and purchase something. But in another country, you will probably stand - or queue - in the wrong place, and fumble with the money. Perhaps you'll be able to read the signs or names of places but chances are excellent you will mangle them in the pronounciation. And even if you've made the prudent decision to avoid opposite-side driving, you will still have to navigate those roads as a pedestrian - and remembering which way to look turns out to be far harder than it sounds.
Everything is more complicated, yet laughingly simple or obvious once you've figured it out. And you are always surrounded by strangers for whom - of course - buying a Luas ticket or taking a bus is all second nature and plain as the egg on your face.
I'm very grateful for this trip for what it means for the book. But I'm also grateful because I feel as if I just spend several weeks living the life of a child. Because surely this is what it's like to be young? To be trying every day to function in a world that you're still busy de-coding, surrounded by systems and procedures everyone else seems to know or understand. To constantly have to tug on someone's arm to ask how or why?
How easy it would be, in those circumstances, to grow frustrated or fretful.
How amazing it is, then, that children behave as well as they do.
The helpfulness and kindness of so many people I met in Ireland made my journey the trip of a lifetime. I'll try to remember that, the next time I'm volunteering in my children's school, or hosting playdates in my harried home.
j

The Lazy Blogger's Return!

I'm back. And even though I suspect no-one ever actually reads this page, I apologize anyway for the extended absence. Look at all the incredible things that happened while I was gone! Summer, for starters. Here in Toronto, Canada, we had grave doubts summer would ever arrive. But it did and it was everything summer should be. At least, I hope summer came to the city - in truth, I spent it mostly in the country, at an 1858 farmhouse, with 98 acres of pasture, cornfields, and woods. It was the first goof-off summer I've had in years. We picked wild strawberries and raspberries and watched beavers dam the creek, and we climbed trees and kicked soccer balls and we turned croquet into a blood sport (surprisingly easy to do). We slept under the stars and sang songs around a campfire and swam and gardened and talked to frogs and mink and rabbits. We built and launched rockets. We lost kites to hungry trees (including one especially voracious maple) and we startled the deer that came to drink the cool creek waters at dawn. We had a summer.
After all the snow and grey of last winter, we made every moment count.
But before we knew it, autumn arrived, and with it the return to school, elections here and in the United States, and a new-look Raptors team with the aging (but still great?) Jermaine O'Neal and the slender but stealthy Roko Ukic added to the roster.
Lots going on.
And thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts, I missed it. Well, most of it.
I was in Ireland.
Yup: Ireland.
!!!!!!
In fact, I've only just returned from the most exhausting, absorbing, exciting, and amazing adventure: nearly three weeks exploring Ireland. Alone.
How? Why? Well, much of the credit goes to my brave spouse, who turned a blind eye to the mounting bills and shouldered the task of caring for three children on his own. And even more of the credit goes to the children, who rose to the occasion with grit and grace, never once setting the house on fire or accidentally bringing peanut butter to school in their lunches.
But most of the thanks goes to the Canadian taxpayers.
Last winter, I received the most wonderful gift: a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to work on a third Hazel Frump book. According to the rules, I could use some of the money for groceries and childcare, and some of the money to travel to Ireland, where the next adventure takes place, to research the book.
I can't tell you what this grant has meant to me. When I visit schools, I am usually asked, by younger readers: "Are you famous?"
To which I reply cheerfully that I am not.
The follow-up question is most often: "Are you rich?"
Rather less cheerfully, I explain that I am not.
"How come?"
"Because... I write children's books."
I explain that writing for children is a very expensive hobby. I'm lucky to have a husband who can support me, and children who recognize that some things that are worth doing come at a cost. Children's books, and children's authors do not, as a rule, make much money - J.K. Rowling notwithstanding, they never have. And to be brutally honest, my books are not selling well.
Now, it may be that my books don't sell for the simple reason that they aren't very good. Most of the time, particularly at three a.m., that is what I think.
But then I remind myself that although most bestselling books for children are terrific, many terrific kids' books never become bestsellers. Sometimes good books - like good TV shows - don't find their audience. Sometimes they are cancelled.
Just ask Joss Whedon.
So when the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me that grant, the money was important (oh so very important) but even more crucial was the vote of confidence. I had ripped open the envelope and tossed it on the recycling pile, and the letter was drifting down to join it, before the first words of the opening sentence registered: "We are pleased to..."
Pleased?
That didn't sound like a rejection. And I should know - I had thirty-four rejection letters for The Mystery of the Martello Tower before HarperCollins came along. Some of those letters were written by people who clearly relished the task, relished it more than might be considered seemly; still, no-one had ever been bold enough to use the word "pleased" when rejecting me.
I snatched the letter back and studied it, reading it three times before the words sank in. The Canada Council for the Arts was awarding me a grant. Me, the forty-four-year-old mother of three whose books were languishing unsold in storerooms across the country!
Someone out there believed my work was worth supporting. Someone not related to me.
I can't begin to explain how wonderful that was. Is.
In the end, of course, I will have spent far more on writing the next book - on travel and subsistence - than the grant would cover. But that's hardly the point. The letter - and the money - buoyed me more than I can say. I am now determined, so very determined, to write a good book, a better book, my best book (not to mention a book that might actually sell) because of it.
I want to prove the Council right. I want Canadian taxpayers to know that they were right to support me, and that their support meant everything, that it made the difference between a story in my head and a book in the library.
I left for Ireland just as the global economy slid off a cliff. You can imagine the guilt, the worry. I lay awake a few nights before departure, fretting: should I cancel the trip and send the money back?
It was too late, too many costs were sunk, too many arrangements made; alea jacta est, as they say. So I went. And it was everything I could have hoped for and more and better.
Next post, I'll tell you about some of my Irish adventures, and the incredible people who helped me along the way.