What have I got to blog about?

In common with a lot of people, I'm a bit of a displaced person. I spend half the year living in the beautiful hilltop town of Lectoure in SW France and the other half in a very different but equally stunning place, the city of Edinburgh, Scotland's capital. (Sorry Glaswegians, but it IS.) Wherever I am I write....novels, short stories, shopping lists and now blogs. It's a curse and a blessing, this compulsion to put everything into words. Here's to all you fellow writers out there who, like me, hope some of our words will find an audience!



Monday 4 July 2011

Tilting at windmills



A couple of weeks ago, we had a wonderful holiday in Norfolk. It's a place in England that neither my husband nor I have ever really visited and we were keen to see the famous Norfolk Broads. We pored over the map in our beautiful holiday cottage, locating the area dotted with huge blobs of water and labelled with various names ending with the legendary word 'broad'. We both had pretty similar preconceptions, that we'd round a corner in the car and there would be vast stretches of water shimmering all around us, the landscape dotted with old-fashioned windmills.

But as usual, our preconceptions didn't match with reality. It turned out the broads have to be explored by boat, not by car, that they're mainly inaccessible by road. So after several false attempts up roads that only yielded tantalising glimpses of the tops of cabin cruisers and the fleeting billow of yacht sails, we decided it was time for lunch in a local pub. And that was where our exploration got underway.

We sat at a table next to a family party, parents and grown-up offspring, and pricked up our ears at hearing the son ask his father how many pubs you could visit on a pub crawl round the broads. The elderly man immediately reeled off a list of pubs and their exact locations on the shores of the broads. "That's the man to ask," my husband whispered to me. And he was right. It turned out the pub expert had been a pilot on the broads for more than thirty years. He gave us exact directions to an old windmill we could get access to, a mediaeval bridge, impassable to river traffic after heavy rains, and to villages where we could stroll on the water's edge and enjoy the vistas we'd envisaged.

I had the feeling that friendly pilot had crossed our path for a reason. He transformed our day and spared us a lot of disappointment. The whole experience resonated for me in terms of writing and life. When I finished my first novel several years ago, euphoric with blind optimism, I sent it off to an agent and waited for the letter to say they wanted to take me on. My first rejection letter took me by surprise. It gave me my first inkling that maybe my preconceptions about getting published were misguided. Over the years, I've benefitted from the 'pilots' with experience of how the whole publishing industry works, and I've realised how naive my early preconceptions were.

One of my favourite Bible verses is Isaiah 42:16 - it's been a 'pilot' verse for me over the years: I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them...

How about you? Have you experienced any 'pilots' in your life, people who challenged your preconceptions and set you on the right path?