Not a Write Off vol: 6
The one where we move back home, catch three viruses in three weeks, and I identify The Problem plaguing my novel
It’s nearly the end of January, which means that the offer I’m running for an annual subscription is almost up. If you’d like 20% off, use this link and it’ll automatically deduct for you. It works out to £2.33 a month (down from £3.50 for a rolling monthly subscription).
If you haven’t come across one of these posts before, let me give you a quick tour. It’s the less polished recap of the past month, a bit like a diary entry. Imagine that I’ve grabbed you for ten minutes, thrust a doughnut in your hand, and then proceeded to garble a life update at you through a mouthful of flaky pastry. Links to recent posts, upcoming Q&As, workshops, and mentoring opportunities are at the end.
The last time I caught up with you like this, we were living in other people’s houses whilst waiting for our flat repairs to finish (I speak about it here if you have no idea what I’m talking about). Friends, we moved back. We spent almost three months away from our home. In that time, the baby learnt to crawl, I became an Olympic level packer, and my novel crawled towards the finish line a dozen words at a time.
Amongst the obvious joy of being back home was being around my own things. I am a very things person. In 2015-2020—in the glory days of Scandinavian inspired minimalism—I tried very hard to get on board with bare wooden floors, white crockery, and naked candlesticks. Okay, when I say I *tried very hard*, I replaced my university crockery with white hand-me-down plates and bought a clothes rail for a capsule wardrobe that never materialised. I am someone who has kept a year’s worth of illicit classroom notes from fifteen years ago, when I was sixteen. I have a small but very dear collection of tiny frogs that live on a bookshelf, their fat faces smiling into an arguably over-cluttered room. I can get sentimentally attached to single socks. Being around my own things again has been joyful.
You know what has been less joyful? The never-ending winter plague of 23/24. My friends and family warned me that nursery would bring with it a conveyor belt of bacteria into the house and they were right. My baby is in nursery one day a week, because that’s all we can afford right now. Since October, she’s had to miss five or six days of nursery because of illness and to tell you that each time it sends a wrecking ball through my week would be an understatement. Right before Christmas we had hand, foot, and mouth (a.k.a blisters everywhere you don’t want blisters) and we’ve just recovered from norovirus. Our towels have been washed and dried so rapidly that using one is like getting intimate with the sharp edge of a Dorrito.
When babies are ill, everything is thrown off. I couldn’t work, or write. When I got ill too, I wore the same pair of fleecey pyjama bottoms for three days and they all but levitated into the laundry bin by the time I was better. The past few weeks have felt very similar to the time period in which I was learning to drive; lots of false starts, speeding around the corners, and running into red lights.
This is the whole reason why I started Not a Write Off. I knew it wasn’t healthy to continuously measure my weeks by how many words I had written or how well my books were doing in the Amazon ranking. Stories are what make me feel like me. If I can’t write them, I can read them, if I can’t read them, I can listen to them, and if I can’t listen to them, I can talk about them.
As long as I keep thinking that, I am not a write off.
During my stint in my own sick bed, and whilst I was a human sick bed for the baby, I have listened to Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarrow. It’s fantasy. It’s high fantasy. I haven’t read anything involving dragons in over a decade and to be honest, it felt silly to begin with. Everything is high stakes and everyone is horny. Even the dragons are shagging. The humour is jock-like, the dialogue angry and sincere. I didn’t think I’d like it. I was—admittedly—being pretentiously judgemental. It took one chapter for me to become completely obsessed. I kept sneaking off to do chores, just so I could listen to more. I want to study it so I can figure out just how it’s so compelling and then use those techniques in my own work. Guys, I am a dragon stan.
The novel…
For those new to the group, I am currently editing the first draft of my fourth novel for HarperCollins. It’s a contemporary comic story of two ex-best friends who are forced to go on holiday together after one ghosted the other five years before. I started it just after I got pregnant and then took a huge break mid-writing to settle my baby into life earthside.
Partway into the story, I changed a sub-plot, which meant that the first five or six chapters needed rewriting. Deciding which chunks to write new, how to re-order the plot, and what I needed to save hurt my head, like someone was trying to make a balloon animal from my frontal lobe. I figured it out, but I also realised something else. The POV was wrong. It’s in first person, present tense at the moment and it needs to be close third-person, past tense. Thus, I have to rewrite the whole bloody thing. I don’t think this will be hard necessarily, but it will be confusing and quite possibly a but boring. It takes a lot of concentration to read in one POV and immediately translate that into another. Thank god for white noise and coffee.
The baby…
She may be a time vampire, but she is cute, so here’s what’s happening with the baby.
She turned one. She had two cakes, was confused by the candles and why everyone was singing, but clapped herself when we blew them out. She has *don’t jinx it, don’t jinx it* gone back to sleeping for more than one or two hours at a time. Praise be! She points at things she wants to be taken to or food she wants to eat. She almost always then doesn’t want the food. She loves birds more than ever. She dog-piles her soft animals. Her hair is long enough to put into bunches. She swings her foot up onto the bath when she wants to get in or out and looks like a ballerina warming up. So precious. She hates having her teeth cleaned. Less precious.
Finding joy in…
December was a time of truly terrible television. Don’t get me started on films. I haven’t been to the cinema since I went to a baby-friendly screening of Barbie, which involved around 200 hormonal mothers and babies stuffed into one room and at the end it was almost impossible to tell who was crying more. Last year, I spent the first three weeks of the year nursing my baby all night whilst mainlining The Traitors. This year, my partner and I have been watching the new series together whilst she sleeps on her own and OH BOY is it good. Truly, I think you must be pathological to not enjoy it. It’s an extremely camp study on mass hysteria and I love it. I’ve also been watching Ghosts (love) and am looking forward to the new series of Big Boys, which was one of my favourite comedies from last year.
My Not A Write Off win this week:
It’s small, but not insignificant. I veered myself away from the canyon marked: ‘Your working life is doomed!’ when I realised I had lost over a third of my childcare days this past month. If I mentally nosedived every time my calendar-blocked month took a clobbering, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. Yes, it’s shit, and unbelievably expensive, but other things have risen to the top of the priority list instead, like looking after a sick baby and choosing not to send the afore-mentioned crawling petri dish back into nursery early. I could have spent the evenings writing when she went to bed, but to be honest I’ve been absolutely wrung out and didn’t want to. Why does that feel so terrible to say? Ah, who cares, I’ve said it now.
💡 Mentoring
January has been wonderfully busy for mentoring. There are some new novels creeping into the world and I am unbelievably happy to be helping them get there. One of my writers described me as a ‘book midwife’ recently and I like it! Much less guts, but at times, equal amounts of angst.
I currently have space for one writer who would like fortnightly or monthly support. I won’t lay out all the details here, because my website has all of that covered.
If you’d like a one-off Plot Cloudbusting session to break through a specific project barrier or want to get a query package looked at in Submission Surgery, I have space for those too.
✍ Workshop: Love at First Write
Okay, this is the silliest and best workshop idea I have ever had. You know the show Married at First Sight? Well, I’ve taken the principles of the show and turned it into a writing workshop that will help you commit to your next writing workshop. It’s hosted with the London Writer’s Salon, who are the best writing people on the internet, trust me.
Thursday 15th February 6pm
Ever heard of love at first sight? Well, let us introduce you to love at first write!
In this one-hour interactive workshop, we will take an intimate look at your potential writing projects, go on a few ‘dates’ to evaluate their worth, and decide whether to take them to the final commitment ceremony.
If the idea of choosing what to pursue stresses you out, don’t worry, this workshop is going to be a lot of fun. By the end, you’ll have evaluated your priorities, creative values, and will leave coupled up with the writing project of your dreams.
To reach this stage, I will encourage you to:
• Reflect on your previous writing projects
• Identify red flags and green flags in future projects
• Future proof your writing projects by actively nurturing your choice
If you’d like 15% off and are a free or paid subscriber, drop a comment below and I’ll email you a code, because I love ya.
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
Why becoming an author won’t give you the creative fulfilment you need
*CREATIVE CLOUDBUSTING Q&A*: thread and video playback for paid subscribers
February’s three-minute writing challenge (prompt will go live on February 14th)
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!
Loved following along on your comings and goings in this. I also just went through an illness while caring for my little one and watching how it affected my writing, my mind, and just like my overall access to hope 🫠 it’s such a journey. And I keep hearing about this Fourth Wing thing. I may just have to do it now. Just wanted to say hi 🙋🏼♀️(trying to move through the “I don’t have anything interesting to contribute” emotional trope bc I know how much it means to me when people share how they responded to my work) and that I breezed right through this. 💖