Tag Archives: milestone

Milestones

 

 

milestone

Last month my blog clocked up one thousand hits. I was quite surprised at how pleased I was with reaching that milestone. This got me looking back at all of my posts to see which had been the most read, and I realised that, with the exception of the “cooking trilogy”, every post I have written is related to some milestone or other (I suppose family meals could be milestones too!).  Why is this? – I wondered.

Perhaps it is because I tend to measure my life by those milestones – I know many people who do the same, perhaps we all do to a degree. Each marker in time  is some kind of right of passage to another stage, another chapter, of our constantly unfolding lives. I actually get annoyed with those count downs to milestones, as I see that as wishing one’s life away.The Christmas countdowns that start well before December are one such annoyance, wishing time away just seems plain wrong to me – we have only one life in this world, so why wish for it to pass more quickly? Like most people I’ve experienced times when I have wished time would pass more rapidly and give way to better times, but now those better times are here I don’t want the days and hours to flash by. Father Time though seems to have a wry sense of humour and, as the skilled illusionist that he is, gives the appearance of life passing slowly when things are  tough, but speeding it up when life is good.

Looking back at my blog posts, which only started in June 2014, the milestones are a combination of personal and societal. The death of my mother and the death of a good friend were two events that put life into sharp relief, a time for evaluation and re-evaluation of my own values, needs and desires. That’s when I began to write again and I have marked days of inspiration, reaching 15,000 words  in my book (20,000 now!), and now one thousand hits on my blog; these are small achievements, yet they mark my passage towards something I’ve always hoped for – some form of literary achievement. I haven’t recorded every milestone of course – that might be a little tedious for anyone who reads my blog  – but also some of these milestones are best kept private, so for example I’ve not recorded the details of my son’s departure for university and my daughter’s theatrical and musical exploits, they are things we talk about as a family, and that’s where the details stay – within our family.

Milestones though can be about more than just  personal achievement or marking the (hopefully) happy progress of our lives. Some milestones are marked on a national, and even global scale, there are some that will always be commemorated. In this blog I have written about the anniversary of D-Day and the observance of Remembrance Sunday – both all the more poignant as 2014 marks the 100th year since the outbreak of the first world war and seventy years since D-Day. Our nation marked those milestones with great respect. But they are still just that – milestones, they mark a point reached and another years distance from the real events, and the milestones become history themselves.

On a more upbeat note our US cousins have just celebrated Thanksgiving, a major annual milestone, and a time for friends and family to meet and give thanks for each other and what they have been blessed with. A positive and reflective milestone. Soon we will celebrate Christmas and then New Year, traditionally times when we look back at the previous year and it’s milestones.

Milestones become history the moment after they are reached. I am reminded of possibly one of the finest lines from a contemporary play, from Alan Bennet’s “The History Boys”, it is spoken by the pupil Rudge, who up to this point has been mostly monosyllabic: “How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another”. It is a line played for wry laughs in the play, but of course it is true. History, is merely a sequence of events that occur in succession – whether that is our personal history or society’s. If we can do our utmost to make sure that “one thing after another” is made up of positive actions,valuable achievements, and enriching behaviours, for ourselves and those around us, then our personal histories we will have a strong influence on our society.

Perhaps there is a moral in here somewhere, and as we approach the end of 2014, for me that moral might be that in 2015 I am going to do “one good fucking thing after another”.

 

Note: Apologies if the expletive causes any offence, however it is a direct quote and loses it’s impact and emphasis if censored.

 

Fifteen Thousand Words

I have actually found the time to write a second post this month! One of the reasons that I started this blog was to get me back into the habit of writing on a regular basis, the discipline of having to write something at least once a month for my blog gives me further incentive to continue writing my novel. It has worked. In my spare moments away from the day job I have pressed on with my book, and have now reached the milestone of fifteen thousand words. It is a key milestone to me, as I imagine this to be about a third of the way to completion.

The story has twisted and turned a great deal so far, I have rewritten characters and subplots and wrestled with both narrative and dialogue – never quite sure if I have got the tone, balance, or subtle inferences correct (let’s not even discuss grammar and syntax!). This novel started life as a playful adventure for me, I began with quite a spring in my step confident that I would reach the summit of my own literary mountain with ease. However, now I am about a third of the way in I am feeling a little out of breath, the upward gradient is becoming a lot steeper than I had expected.

Time has also been ‘wasted’ (other writers will rebuke me for saying that!) by retracing my steps – a necessary precaution to make sure I have taken the correct path with the storyline, and that those little detours along the way were merely distractions and not glaring opportunities to develop the plot in a better way. I know my characters well now, I can talk to them, even be them, when I am writing, though some are still to show their true colours. I have had a real fight with myself over a key part of the plot, which requires the reader and one of the main characters, to suspend disbelief in the improbable and impossible and take something at face value on the evidence staring them right in the face. I’ve negotiated that hurdle, and as I’ve landed on the other side on my lead foot I have accelerated away.

There is still a good way to go, but I am encouraged that this time I have not given up, the finished article is some way off but it is much closer than I could have hoped for after just a few months writing. The climbing and running analogies I’ve used are no accident, as I see the writing process, the creation of a story, development of ideas and characters, very much as an expedition, with different terrains to navigate. At times it feels like a race – a race to get all of the ideas in some semblance of order onto paper, and a race to move the story forward. The next blog post on this topic may well be after Christmas, when I hope to have reached thirty thousand words – about two-thirds of the way to completion. I would love to hear from other writers about how they cope with the daily challenge of trying to write something meaningful.

Image acknowledgment: The Power of Words by Antonio Litterio.

Image acknowledgment: The Power of Words by Antonio Litterio.