Thinking-soup

Don't get me wrong. I am enjoying working with two huge projects (beginning the MA and getting the book-show on the road) at the same time. It's just that sometimes I feel a bit disintegrative.

The MA head needs to read, reflect, re-read, make a note or two and carry on reading. It is a quiet, creative process and takes time. And I love it - though it isn't always easy. My mind seems to find new ideas in quiet spaces; I notice things between the lines in a way I don't when I'm simply reading for fun.

Meanwhile, the book is at the typeset stage. It needs reading for mistakes. My head is looking, not for ideas (please not ideas - this book is, basically, finished!), but for sentences that don't scan. Or the confused 'thats' and 'thans' and 'ifs' and 'its' and 'it's'. The lonely lines at the top and bottom of pages. It needs a logical, more detached, clinical approach. I cannot let it get under my skin - not now. This is a mechanical process and I am trying to approach it as such.

Which means I am asking my head to switch from clinical to reflective mode, like brain-skipping. And, though it's rare that I move directly from one task to another, they may be separated in time by nothing more divisive than a cup of coffee. I am aware that my thinking is beginning to feel like a sort of cognitive soup - a soup with bits in coalesce in an almost unidentifiable way. (Surely we've all tasted soups like that - they might have begun life as vegetables, but who knows what they are now?) When I wake in the morning one or other book is at the top of my thinking agenda, but in a floaty way. It will neither make itself knows as an identifiable problem, nor sink to the bottom so something recognisable can appear.

I will, I tell myself, get used to this. And my book will, before long, be on its way, with a real cover and read pages and (gulp) real readers? Which will clear the decks a little.

But in the meanwhile, I'm drowning in thinking-soup. Anyone have any ideas how to start swimming?

Writing in public spaces

I read an interview with Stephen King the other day. It's obvious, simply from counting the number of books he's written, as well as the insight of On Writing, that he works compulsively hard. But the comment that surprised me was when he admitted taking editing to a ball game.

Now, I know nothing about 'ball games' - other than the clips seen on films or TV. They always seem to include a lot of nailbiting and cheering and people carrying large cups of coca cola. And sometimes people climb over each other in the stands, or miss the action because they are too busy kissing. So tell me - do they have plenty of pausing spaces - spaces where it is possible to divert thinking from the ball game (Stephen King is, apparently, passionate about the red sox) and re-immerse oneself in something written? How does he do that? Allow his brain to be so involved in two such disparate things?

I do write in public - especially when I'm travelling. When I'm away I write anywhere - my diary overflowing with the tiniest details of bus stops and train stations, cafes, hotel rooms, corners of parks, by rivers, watching the sea. How else to record the mayhem around me - the goat giving birth on the ghats at Varanasi; the smell of Germolene in a hostel room in Kuala Lumpur. I even wrote in the back row of Sydney Opera House, after the first half of Rigoletto; a man from Glasgow climbed up to me to ask what the acoustics were like up there. By the time he'd gone I had just five minutes to scribble my thoughts on our conversation, Rigoletto, and the Opera House itself. But it had to be done.

When I'm at home my little notebook nourishes passing thoughts. Ideas for stories (rubbish, mostly); overheard conversations; incongruities. And I read - on buses and trains, in cafes. (I don't read on buses and trains when I'm travelling - there's so much going on out of the windows, and I don't want to miss anything!)

But editing? At a ball game? Surely that requires a very different headspace. If I'm writing when I'm out and about I write about what I see. And I read if I'm somewhere predictable, and can bury my head in a book for a while - not dipping in and out of it. Maybe it's me - and I need an editing space. But you - can you take editing to the ball game?