Starling's on her way

I am the happiest writer. Today I signed a publishing agreement with the lovely people at Fairlight Books to publish my first novel, Starling, in 2022. 

I'm utterly amazed and delighted. Way back in December 2013 I started work on Starling with a picture in my mind of a formidable woman living off-grid. Mar is right-thinking, radical, fierce and determined. She's awesome in every sense of the word and I was a bit scared of her. Still am, if I'm honest. What would it be like to be her daughter, I wondered? Starling was born, always on the move, always watching Mar, always ready to run.

Nineteen years later, when the novel opens, Starling and Mar are holed up in a wood in their van, out of petrol, money and friends. Then Mar simply leaves. Starling can skin a rabbit, make nettle stew, fell a tree, but is it enough to survive - to live - when she's alone in a world she's learned to distrust and despise?

I love my characters and am so happy I'm going to spend the next six months immersed in their story, working with the Fairlight team to finish the novel I first dreamed of writing over seven years ago. (This is my bulging and battered notebook, full of the ideas that fed Starling.) 

It's been quite a month. I've tidied away all my copywriting files and cleared my diary. With the Arts Council grant supporting my Slow Medway project for the next year and Fairlight's commitment to Starling, I am going to write full time from next week. As I said, I am one very happy writer.

Slow Medway: finding the river

This, though I'd be amazed if you can tell, is a sketch of the patterns on the surface of the River Medway where the water surges fast just below the weir at Chafford and splits around a small grassy island. It makes so many different shapes and movements in one short stretch of water - I was glad I'd forgotten my phone because it made me really look at what the water was doing. Though I'd no idea what was happening beneath the surface - I was tempted for a moment to jump in and feel it for myself.

I made the sketch last Sunday, huddled against a pillbox out of a searingly bitter wind, in celebration of something truly amazing.

I've been given an Arts Council grant to write a book. I still can't quite believe it. My book's about the River Medway, my slow journey down it from my home to the sea, how my life has been touched by the river ever since I was a baby, and how I'm still not sure whether I have any right to lay claim to it. 

I've been thinking about memory, place, identity and time for a while now. My Dad was the River Engineer, but his memory has flowed away, leaving only faint marks where once he had such deep knowledge and love for the river. 

I've lived near the river for much of my life - sometimes on its banks, sometimes just over the hill. I'm aware of it, always checking its level when I drive over a bridge, noticing the saturation of the soil, swimming in it every summer, paddling up and down it all my adult life, almost drowning in it one January, finding my deepest calm when I slip into its olive, silty waters.

And yet. I'm never sure what the river means to me. I've never been sure if I belong. It was my Dad who was the engineer who had to manage the horrific floods of 1968. My husband is the elite canoeist. Others know far more than I do about the river's ecology. Everywhere I go there are Keep Out signs.

What does it actually mean, to feel you belong somewhere? How would I know if I belong? Does anyone? Can we belong to a place?

I've been very slowly travelling down the Medway for the past year, starting from the cattle pond in the field over the road. It's the source of a tiny tributary and it took me a long time to walk the handful of miles to the main river. We were all locked down, and my ME was bad. I'd walk a mile at a time, then come home to rest.

And once I recovered, I was back to work so my Medway journey had to fit into the gaps in my life, as writing always has. But with one email from the Arts Council, I'm liberated. I'm going to spend the next year exploring the river from my tiny tributary to the estuary. (That's my tributary below, turning fast into a bigger stream.) I'll return to places I think I know well, and on out to the tidal reaches and marshes that feel as exotic as anywhere I've ever been. I'll talk and listen to people whose lives are deeply connected to the river. And I'll wander, and wonder, about rivers and people, time and memory.