Not a Write Off vol: 5
The one where repairs have started, we've slept in four different beds, and my novel has fallen off the edge of a cliff
Well, well, well, what a difference a month makes. The last time I wrote my journal, I was coming out of a slow, if not low-key stressful summer. Yes, there was lots of construction noise at home. Yes, I became a little obsessed about how much food the baby ate and roasted a chicken at 8am because she liked it once and I desperately wanted to replicate that meal. Yes, me and the baby became library nomads so she could catch a nap in the daytime, but we were bumbling along nicely. I was hitting my word count and holding my novel in my head in a way that felt sensible and good. Up until now, I’ve been worrying that I’ve over-plotted, with each story strand clinging to my manuscript like a stubborn octopus, each one firmly suckered to the sides. I had made sense—if I can use that word—of the mess.
There are a ton of metaphors that use the symbolism of water to describe challenges. ‘When it rains, it pours,’ ‘fish-out-of-water,’ etc, etc. In our case, it wasn’t rain, but a burst water pipe, and yes, it did pour, right down our walls, through our lights, and across our floors. I wasn’t a fish-out-of-water, but a highly-strung mum who used nursery time to pack our bags again and again as we moved location.
Every time someone has asked me about how I’m doing, I parrot ‘You know what, it’s fine! It’s okay! We’re safe! That’s all that matters!’ It IS fine, we ARE okay, we ARE safe, but we’re also really tired. But y’know, the body does a really fun thing when you’re stressed, which I personally feel is an oversight of evolution. Pandas have no survival instinct. Tortoises can suffocate under the weight of their own guts. Humans pick up EVERY SINGLE ILLNESS when they’re run down. Like, come on! Really?!
I read somewhere that you shouldn’t start a story off by either your main character waking up or complaining. I can only apologise, because you may have just woken up and I’ve started complaining, but we’re here for the long run now, so I promise to give you a positive narrative arc over the course of this newsletter.
Anyway, onto something that has been vexing me. An overdue apology.
You know who I deserve that apology from? Ryan Gosling. The Notebook has a huge amount to answer for when it comes to setting the precedent for how easy it is to acquire a home with a white picket fence and window boxes. Now, although we did a lot of renovation ourselves (still have mixed feelings about our choice to remove a bath tile etched with a Bible quote), it still isn’t as complicated as resolving domestic repairs.
In order for work to start at our flat, a huge amount of planning and paperwork has to take place, oftentimes by my partner who has had to give up time with the baby to ensure we have a home to go back to. This was often on the back of severely broken nights, as the baby developed a cough like a chain-smoking East End granny. If you swap the donkey for a baby and the bucking for spontaneous vomit, we were playing a high-stakes, nightly game of Buckaroo. Just as she got over that, she decided to lick approximately 74 balls at the local soft play and the result was a long night in children’s A&E, a tonsillitis diagnosis, and a metric truckload of penicillin to get her better.
Let me say this: doctors and nurses are literal angels on earth, especially paediatric ones. They have calm voices. I trust them. But when a nurse quickly and calmly told me to feed 200ml of orange squash to my naked baby via syringe whilst also trying to catch her urine in a bedpan wedged between my knees, I slow-blinked, three or four times.
‘How am I supposed to do that?’ I asked, whilst trying to wrestle my squid-child into a sitting position without displacing the bedpan.
‘Try your best,’ she said.
Friends, I tried my best. The baby tried her best to get the fuck off my lap. She had tonsils the size of golf balls and wanted to crawl under the cubicle curtain like it was the 100m Olympic sprinting final. I tried and tried. I squirted squash in her face, in my face, and at one point, the nurses face. Then, when it came to catching her urine, she pissed on my leg and I could have cried.
But, we did it. I don’t think I’ve ever punched the air so hard. It was like attaching a balloon to a greyhound and trying to pop it with a dart from the moving platform of a hot air balloon travelling in the opposite direction. Seemingly impossible, any yet, we got there in the end.
She’s doing a lot better. I’m doing a lot better, because my night’s aren’t spent on high-alert, listening out for big coughs from a tiny throat and the subsequent splatter of vom.
The biggest achievement for us collectively has been getting through the past few weeks, hopping from one friend’s home to another, over to family, and back again. But in terms of personal achievement? She and I are on different planets.
She has learnt to crawl. I have managed to shower every other day.
She has learnt to stand on her own. I have learnt how to eat a whole packet of prawn cocktail crisps using one hand only.
She has learnt how to safely chew toast. I spent an entire day of last week with one eyebrow drawn on.
Because priorities have understandably shifted, I have given up my time whilst she was at nursery to pack and re-pack our bags in preparation for changing location. Let me tell you, if packing was a competitive sport, I’m on the podium. I can pack for two adults and a baby in around twenty-five minutes. As a chronically indecisive person, this has been a real game-changer for me. When your choices are limited, there’s a strange kind of freedom that comes with scrunching your to-do list into a tight-fisted ball and lobbing it at the wall.
There is one Big Thing that has suffered as a result of all this. The novel, the novel, the novel. I am behind. I am behind on being behind. My deadline has already been shifted by a year, as has the publication date for my fourth novel. I have every reason to feel bad about this. Historically, I would have done. Even now, every so often, I see prolific authors talking on social media about ‘never missing deadlines’, even when the odds are stacked against them, with babies and marathons and three books on the go. I’m sure there are many that are like me, who send apologetic emails to their agents, who stay awake at night worrying that they’ll get dropped for submitting manuscripts late. I could pick up the proverbial hammer to clobber myself with, or I could accept that life just… happens. Writing is happening, but in the margins of my main project. Hell, I’m sat here typing this and not typing my book. This has not been my novel’s month, but next month, I’m all in. Promise (she says to herself…).
In other ways, my work is flourishing in unexpected and wonderful ways. I have taken on more mentoring clients than I thought I would, after months worrying about the risks of going freelance. Writers are sharing their aspirations and stories with me, and I’ve just found out that two of my previous mentees have acquired agents. I am working with words from so many angles and it feeds this bookish soul of mine. Most importantly, I’m building a working and writing life that is flexible enough to work around the baby, which is great because she’s a massive laugh and I’ve become quite attached to her.
My Not A Write Off win this week:
This section is supposed to be about my writing. Not someone else’s, but mine. Guys, I cannot boast that I still managed to write in the midst of everything that happened in the past month. When I was thinking about to put here, I honestly thought about making something up. I haven’t journalled, but I ran a workshop on journalling. I haven’t written fiction, but I have edited other people’s. Sometimes, the balance tips more in one direction than the other and—hey—you gotta just go with it because I’m so done with getting cross about it. Maybe if I had more sleep I’d have more energy for it, but I’m not about waste night juice on self-flagellation. My Not A Write Off win this week has been turning up to type this. It’s been proof that if I can’t write about life, even when it’s garbled and silly, I feel like my head is full of bees. Oh, also I used an hour of nursery time to have a bath and have zero regrets about that.
Mentoring
Back in… when was it. July? August? I can’t remember! I mentioned that I was going to take a two-footed leap into the world of freelancing after I was made redundant on maternity leave. I have been mentoring and coaching writers for a few years now and have known for a while that I wanted to do more of it. But, y’know, I’ve always had some sort of employed work. Thus, the fear of a flexible wage! I need to keep feeding the baby melty sticks! In a delightfully surprising move, I have had more mentoring requests than I expected, so that has given me a big ol’ boost. I am super busy from now until Christmas, but if you’re looking for support with your writing project in the new year, I’ll have capacity to take on one or two additional mentees. If you’d like to chat over your book in a free thirty-minute call, let me know.
I also offer one-off Plot Cloudbusting sessions (like physio for your book) and Submissions Surgery (cover letter, synopsis, first 3,000 words).
You can read more of my writing by picking up my novels, either from any decent bookshop or through your local library (never feel bad about this - I actually make more money from a library loan than a Kindle purchase). The Lonely Fajita (2021), The Sister Surprise (2022), or The Wedding Crasher (2023). My books have sold nearly 20,000 copies and I am so grateful that people like my dark lil’ sense of humour and fish-out-of-water heroines.
Reviews of my work:
'‘I relished this witty, tender story of loneliness, growth and friendship. Mann has a fabulous knack of finding the funny in life’s small detail’ - Pernille Hughes
‘Heartwarming, charming and witty’ - Sophie Cousens #1 bestselling author of This Time Next Year
‘The perfect blend of warm and witty you can't help but smile (and laugh) throughout’ - Helly Acton, author of The Shelf
‘Had me laughing all the way through, and I got weepy at the end’ - Sara Nisha Adams, author of The Reading List
‘I laughed the whole way through and cried at the end. The perfect smart, escapist read’ - Freya Sampson, author of The Last Chance Library
‘As comforting as putting on your cosiest sweater and fuzzy socks. I loved every moment of it’ - Jesse Sutanto, author of Dial A For Aunties
‘Yet another hilarious and touching book from Abigail Mann, with a cast of great and terrible characters and a setting full of Succession-esque glamour and drama’ - Lex Croucher, author of Gwen and Art are Not in Love
‘Abigail Mann is at her absolute best . . . she skillfully uses comedy alongside other more serious topics’ - Holly McCulloch, author of The Mix Up
• Profiling readers who love (and hate) my novels
• The real reason you can’t keep to a writing routine
• What I did for fun in autumn
Share your Not A Write Off win in the comments below, or drop me a note if you want to chat about anything mentioned. Thank you for being here!