Tag: writing

Today There Was Birdsong and Wind

June 30, 2024

My head was full of voices. The voices of the complex characters of the book I’ve been editing for the last month. The voices of the characters of my own work-in-progress, the four protagonists jostling to be heard. Real life voices from my volunteer work; voices from the books I’m reading or listening to, voices from the tv shows I’m watching. Family voices. Friends. I needed silence.

Today dawned windy and cool, a day stolen from fall. The foot pain that’s been plaguing me for the past two weeks has gone, rest, exercises and new orthotics doing their job. A day for walking, then. (Not too far, so I don’t aggravate the foot again.) It wasn’t until early afternoon I actually escaped my desk for the Arboretum, hoping the cool, occasionally showery day meant it would be fairly empty.

It was. I walked the internal trails, rather than the perimeter, which is always busier. A house wren chattered at me; indigo buntings and redstarts sang from cover. From the canopy, a red-eyed vireo repeated ‘see me see me see me please’ over and over. There were no voices, human or imagined or electronic.

I saw a couple of people, exchanged quick ‘hellos’. The only other mammals were squirrels. I took pictures of wildflowers: in this regenerating old-field ecosystem, they’re the immigrant flowers of southern Ontario: Queen Anne’s lace, birds’ foot trefoil, vetch, clover, ox-eye daisies.

When I reached my favourite bench, with its view over grassland and bushes, I sat. An eastern kingbird hunted insects in graceful swoops. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower. A crow called. Bees buzzed; a chipping sparrow echoed them with its tree-top trill. No one disturbed me.

I didn’t sit long, maybe fifteen minutes. My mind stayed quiet. Has stayed quiet, so far. Tomorrow there are characters to listen to again, and friends, and the ambient hum of the cafe where on Mondays we meet to write and then have lunch and talk. It’ll be fine. Because today, there was birdsong and wind.

Learning to Listen

April 16, 2024

Thoughts of an Aging Birder

I’m standing on a boardwalk through a wet woodland: deciduous trees, damp soil, emerging plants, ephemeral ponds. Superficially, it’s not so different from the boardwalk through wet woodland I was standing on less than two weeks ago. One on the eastern side of the Atlantic, a kilometer from the North Sea; one on the western side, 1500 km inland. Different ecosystems, certainly, but what I notice today is the difference in the soundscapes.

Boardwalk, Wild Goose Woods, University of Guelph Arboretum.
My photo.

Recognizing all but the most common bird songs is a skill that has eluded me for fifty and more years. But at sixty-six, my vision a little compromised both by vitreous detachment and its resultant floaters, and by incipient cataracts, I’ve been trying harder to sort out the songs, to identify by sound. (My aging and arthritic spine also appreciates not having to hold up even my light Swarovski 10 x 32s as much, too.)

My hearing remains good, thankfully. In On the Marsh, Simon Barnes writes of friends who can no longer hear the high contact calls of goldcrest; the screams of swifts overhead, he tells us, are inaudible now to Sir David Attenborough. That day will no doubt come for me, but it’s not here yet. I can still pick out goldcrest in England, and its almost-doppleganger cousin the golden-crowned kinglet, here in Canada.

In the first week of April, the soundscape at RSPB Titchwell was dominated by onomatopoeic chiff-chaff calls. European robins sang from low bushes; a blackcap added its melody from a higher perch. Wood pigeons, endlessly cooing, added a bass line, punctuated by the equally endless screaming of black-headed gulls and the occasional explosive chatter of a Cetti’s warbler.

Red-winged Blackbird male, Point Pelee National Park, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Here in Guelph, on the boardwalk through Wild Goose Woods a few hours after dawn, the dominant sound is the chirr of red-winged blackbirds, the screeching laughter of northern flickers a close second. Another bird calls its own name: fee-bee, fee-bee. American robins sing cheerily from mid-level branches, and from the nest on the light standard over the playing fields I hear an osprey’s plaintive cry.

I’d know where I was—roughly—from either soundscape. While I’m focusing more on what I’m hearing through necessity and a wish to understand more of the landscape I’m moving through, looking at all the parts of the whole and not just on birds (I can identify a phoebe by song at the same time I’m looking at a bloodroot flower unfurling, for example), I’m also thinking about it in terms of my other life, that of the writer. Of the seminar on worldbuilding I’ve offered to give here in Guelph in the autumn, and all the things that are part of a convincing fictional world or will evoke a real one. Soundscapes are one of them: part of the whole which both characters and the reader, one hopes, inhabit.

Whether any writer can separate entirely the slice(s) of the world in which they live from their created worlds, I don’t know. I can’t. In this, I can only write what I know. There’s a circularity to this: writing has made me pay attention to aspects of the world I might have not noticed; a lifetime spent outdoors whenever I could informs what I write. The Titchwell soundscape?  It has a place in the story that’s beginning to unfold, and perhaps that book will be just a little richer because my aging eyes have made me listen more and look less. I’m fairly sure my life is richer, too.

What are the odds? ONE resolution for 2024.

December 30, 2023

As 2024 approaches, my ‘finish by the end of the year’ list is just about manageable. My ‘to do in January’ list is—umm—a little packed. More so than it should be, but it’s so I can take February off completely and go birding in Spain and Portugal.

Except…I have a book coming out in February: Empire’s Passing, the eighth and last of my Empire’s Legacy series. But it isn’t a standalone, and if people who’ve read the others don’t find out it’s out for a few weeks, frankly, so what?  Books don’t go bad. My nine-year-old first book, Empire’s Daughter, still sells steadily. There would have been I time I would have worried about not being present online for Passing’s release. That time is past.

I’m making one New Year’s resolution this year: to stop overachieving. This past year is a blur. I spent three months nearly 6000K away from home, dealing with the funeral and settling the estate of a cousin, learning to navigate a new legal and tax system, clearing the house, selling the house. And writing a book, because I had promised it would be out, and I was going to honour that promise.

 I also wrote five short stories, four for an on-line magazine (of which I am also the webmaster) and one for an anthology. And edited three other books. And chaired and edited our community newsletter, co-coordinated a writing group, read and reviewed a number of books for a book tour company, drove a van with my niece’s furniture to Nova Scotia, took a cousin on a ten-day driving holiday, developed and ran two full day planning sessions for a community group, gave a guest lecture in Philadelphia, kept up (well, sort of) with my two blogs and my newsletter, and tried to maintain some sort of social media presence. While attempting to learn Spanish, volunteering for another community writer’s group, and doing in-person book sales and open mic nights. Are you tired yet?  I am.  And not just from this year.

2014 – a decade ago, nearly– was a watershed year for me: a year in which I was diagnosed with Stage 3, high-grade cancer. It was also the year in which my publisher went out of business, the rights to Empire’s Daughter reverting back to me. In that year of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I got Daughter ready for self-publication (I wasn’t going to spend another two years querying again – I didn’t know if I HAD another two years). While renovating the house, driving myself back and forth to radiation (an 80 k round trip, five days a week, for five weeks), and doing almost all the grocery shopping and cooking.  Are you rolling your eyes yet? But I was determined. Life went on as close to normal as it could, I learned to create an epub, and then format a paperback, and navigate KDP.

Two weeks after my chemo ended, we flew to Texas to go birding. Then I went back to work for a short time, and took official retirement, as did my husband, on the 15th of May. The next day, we flew to England for a month. Then we came home, bought a new house in town, and put the country one up for sale. My father had died (at almost 99) that winter of my treatments, and I helped (a bit) with clearing that house, as well as packing up our own,

We moved. I started volunteering with the community newsletter, and with a local writing group. I started the next book, and a blog, and then another one. I walked a lot, biked, and birded. I started editing and formatting books for others, and began a small imprint that has now published my own eight books and five for other people. We went to England in the winter to walk and bird. I took a lot of on-line university courses, on Roman and medieval history, and on landscape archaeology.  I read a lot of books, and wrote a few more. They were short-listed for and/or won a bunch of awards, which was nice.

We travelled, a lot: Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia. The Caribbean – ten islands in ten days, or close to it, for birds. Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, for the snow leopard I thought I’d never see. Rome, for me, for research. And always England, for ten weeks or so each January to March.

One year I flew back from England for four days for my brother’s funeral, a too-quick, too-young death from cancer. Then I went back, and kept writing, and walking, and birding, because that’s what I do, and came home and kept on doing what it is I do here, too. You don’t waste second chances, and I got one. My brother didn’t.

And then came COVID, and the world changed. I wrote more books, of course. Social media became more important, just to talk to people and make connections. Zoom became part of my life: the community newsletter meetings, the writing group meetings, even family. Until this year.

Maybe a younger person, or a better organized one, could have juggled things better. Maybe I should have just admitted I’m 65 years old and I don’t have the physical or mental energy I once had. And it did all get done – the newsletter and writing group meetings done across time zones 5 hours apart; the newsletter layouts done and PDFs made and emailed for printing; the social media posts scheduled, the Amazon ads planned and monitored. Books were read and reviewed. Short stories were written. The English estate was settled, the house sold, the legacies distributed. Empire’s Passing was finished, and beta read, and edited (and edited and edited) and formatted. Maps got drawn. I even went birding, and wrote some blog posts, and did all the other things I listed in the fourth paragraph.

But I’m tired, as I said. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. I’ve proven, mostly to myself, that I could do what I always wanted to, and write good books, and the series is done. I’m not planning to stop, but I am going to slow down. (My husband is laughing, by the way. He doesn’t believe me.) More reading. More photography, maybe a return to some artwork and some poetry. Things I’ve neglected. Less productivity. Fewer social media posts, probably fewer blog posts. Some new learning, and some ‘getting to know you’ stories about new characters. Longer walks. A slower life.

Think I can do it?

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Equinoctial Thoughts

March 19, 2023

I left spring behind in England, missing the reported return of chiff-chaffs to Norfolk by two days. I’d heard of other migrants arriving—stone curlew to a secret site, for one—at the same time the last of the winter redwings were leaving, heading north. The blackthorn was in full flower, the local woods were full of primroses between the stiff green stalks of bluebells poking through the leaf litter, and the wood pigeons were courting in the garden.


Outside my window there is freshly fallen snow, on top of the several centimeters already on the ground. Tomorrow is the first official day of spring, and the forecast is for warmer weather, but also for more snow, falling in the cold nights.


But I will have a year of two springs. Already the turkey vultures are back, and the hooded mergansers; red-winged blackbirds buzz in the swamps and flocks of tundra swans whiten corn stubble fields a little further south and west. Sap is rising; maple syrup is being made.


Over the nine weeks I was in England I watched the field across the road go from stubble to fresh-ploughed soil, gulls and rooks following the tractor, to the hazy green of an emerging cereal. The belt of trees up on the hill changed colour subtly, the dull grey of winter overlaid with the golds and pinks and greens of swelling buds. The blackbirds and robins began singing earlier every day, and continued later.


It’s harder here in my suburban bungalow to watch the gradual shift into spring than it was in my edge-of-village house in England. But I intend to return to paying attention this year. Almost fifty years ago, the first serious writing I did was a journal of the coming of spring to my southern Ontario home, a project sadly interrupted by mononucleosis and a month of exhaustion. That too was from an edge-of-village, mostly rural setting. But I have easy access to woods and fields, rivers and parkland, and little excuse not to observe and record. A.E. Houseman wrote:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A Shropshire Lad

Of my threescore years and ten, sixty-five will not come again. So I shall go look at things in bloom, and listen to birdsong, and watch the gradual transformation of a winter world.

Image by Noma Lotern from Pixabay 

Drawing a Squirrel

November 4, 2022

It’s been five years and more since I wrote anything here. Two Simple Lives started out as a blog about early retirement, about learning to live with a (little) less, about appreciating the small things in life after a life of extensive birding travel. When I started it, my first book had just been published. When I stopped writing it, my second had just come out. For the last five years, most of my life’s been taken up, one way or the other, with being an author.

The seventh book comes out in six weeks. I loved writing it, the challenge of a difficult voice, the interweaving of two very different stories. And during the height of the pandemic, writing kept me centred and purposeful. I’m not about to stop: there’s one more book in the current series to write, and the glimmers of an idea for at least one after that.

But this week I made a list of all the things I’d like to do. It’s an eclectic list:  draw squirrels and birds and leaves (why squirrels?); write poetry again; look at maps; read a lot more; cook creatively. All things I used to do. On top of that, there’s no denying we’re living in challenging, difficult, times: the climate crisis; the erosion of human rights in every country; increasing intolerance and division; soaring inflation.  I feel a need to respond to these, even if it will be in small and local ways. (And without preaching about it, don’t worry.)

I tend to get restless every five to six years, wanting a change. Most of this year’s been spent working out what that change needs to be. What it came down to (I think – only trying it out will tell) is that I don’t want to be a writer with a few snatched moments for other interests on the side: I want to be the birder/walker/biker/artist/landscape historian who also writes books. Which is who I was, before.

I make sense of my world through words (except when it’s maps, but that’s a different subject), so I must write – just less fiction for a while, and more observations and thought. For those of you who want that last book of Lena’s story – it’ll come. Just a bit more slowly, probably.

I hope some of you enjoy what ends up on this blog, although that’s not why I’m writing it. Book reviews and articles related to writing will remain over at marianlthorpe.com.  

And now, I’m going to go draw a squirrel.

Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay 

Grumpy Thoughts

September 15, 2016

I am annoyed by things that prevent me from writing, that keep me from my 750 words per day schedule. None of these are bad things, really: the errands of everyday life, some book deliveries, mundane things. And yet they’ve messed up my schedule this week, and so I’m grumpy.

There are other things making me tetchy, to be fair. I’m still aching a bit from a car accident twelve days ago, one that left me with massive external bruises (from the seatbelt) and internal bruising of my sternum, and it’s this latter that still hurts sometimes. Ibuprofen takes care of the pain, but it upsets my stomach a bit, meaning less coffee and no spicy food for a while. Grrr. (Yes, I know. I walked away with only bruises and the insurance company payout on my write-off car was more than fair. Stop griping, self.)

Next whine….after three months, we still haven’t sold our house. In itself that isn’t a big problem, it’s more that unless we do, our winter plans can’t be finalized. And we want to go back to the same cottage in the same village in England that we always do. And it’s getting close to needing to book it. I counsel patience, but it’s starting to worry me. Plus this house still seems unfinished…our pictures and some furniture remain at the old house, for staging; I miss them. Another grrr, another reminder to my better self: this isn’t a financial burden, so what are you bitching about?

And as usual, I’ve written my way out of my bad mood. What it really comes down to is this: you can be living the life you always wanted to, as I am: my life pretty much revolves around working with the written word, and birding, and not much else, but the ‘not much else’ isn’t ever going to go away: I still have to clean up hairballs, buy groceries, get my hair cut, put the garbage out, clean the toilet. Get over it, self. And get to work!

A free book!

February 15, 2016

I’ve been neglecting this blog, but sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Spinnings ARC coverWhat I have been doing is preparing my next book for publication, although to call it a ‘book’ might be misleading: it’s actually two short stories and one related poem.  It’s a quick read, and right now I’m offering an e-book version to anyone who is willing to add a rating or a review to Goodreads.

So, if you’d like an advanced review copy, send me an e-mail at marianlthorpe at gmail.com, or reply to this post here, or on Facebook or Twitter.  I’ll need your email, and whether you want an e-pub (for iBooks) or a Kindle file. Indie authors depend on reviews and ratings on Amazon and Goodreads, and every one helps.

I’ll post the real cover soon…it should be available to me in a few days.

Thanks for considering!

 

 

Landscape and Story

November 7, 2015

A few minutes ago I clicked on a Twitter link on marketing (vs. selling) e-books.  I read through the strategies, and sighed.  I don’t want to do any of this…but should I be?  And then I realized: no.  I quite like what I do, where I am as an author, where I’m going.  I don’t actually want to be a ‘best-selling’ author if that entails hours of publicity, marketing, talks…..that’s not why I write.

All my life I have explained my world to myself in words.  As I get further into my coursework in landscape archaeology, I realize that much of Empire’s Daughter, and much of Empire’s Hostage, the in-progress sequel, is actually, at one level, a fictionalized interpretation of the landscape archaeology of Britain in the post-Roman world.  I ‘kind-of’ knew that, but two days ago I opened a textbook to a map almost identical to the one I drew in the planning of Empire’s Hostage – the northern European world seen upside down – with north to the bottom of the map. An epiphany. Two of my deep passions melding, and a realization, that in my own way, like J.R.R. Tolkien, I am creating, in my writing, a world to mirror and interpret the real landscape that holds my heart.

So I will keep writing with a fuller understanding of why I do.  I’ll keep connecting, through my reviews and blog posts and Twitter, with other indie writers; some of those connections are pure serendipity, like the review I’ll be doing of Ian Cumpstey’s Warrior Lore, English verse translations of Scandinavian warrior ballads – ballads that just happen to play a role in Empire’s Hostage. I hope my reviews help other indie writers sell books. Some of them will take a look at or give a shout out to Empire’s Daughter. Others won’t. Either is fine with me, now I know, viscerally, why I’m writing what I write.  It really is for me, and for the landscape that tells its stories to me. Only, and all, that.

Lifelong Learning

October 17, 2015

I am sitting in ‘my’ study carrel at the university, the one I’ve been using on and off for thirty-something years.  Today I noticed some new(ish) graffiti on one side: ‘Today is my last day in the library EVER’.

How sad I find this, because it implies to me that the person who wrote it finds learning, books, and study a chore, or worse than that, just something to be endured so that real life can begin.  I’ve come to the library today not to write, as I often do, but to check out books, something I’m allowed to do as an alumna, and these are books I need for my new course.  While learning and books aren’t my whole life by any means, they remain – even thirty years after graduation from university – a hugely important part of it.

I am unbelievably excited about this new course – The Archaeology of Landscape I, offered through the University of Exeter Distance Learning program.  Unlike the two I took last fall and winter, this one wasn’t free, so I had to really think about whether or not I wanted to spend the money (and time) such a course requires.  But it really wasn’t that hard a decision.

And now I’m looking at a pile of seven books to be read for the first three weeks of the course.  They have titles like “Ideas of Landscape” and “Imagined Country:  Society, Culture and Environment”. I can imagine what most of you are thinking!  But for me, this is feeding a deep need.

And that’s what the best learning is about.  Don’t turn your back on it, just because school and university were perhaps not quite what you hoped.  I can remember being less than impressed with some aspects of my graduate program and quite a few of my undergraduate.  High school was worse.  Then I taught, and was less than impressed with some of what the curriculum required.  I did my best to make it relevant and interesting, but it was a hard go sometimes.

But now I am (again, as I did last fall) learning for the love of it, learning things that will change forever the way I see my world.  Someone (maybe George Bernard Shaw?) said once that education is wasted on the young. I don’t agree with that, but it is certainly not the sole province of the young.  My father was telling me of new things he’d learned through reading and documentaries to within a few weeks of his death at 98.  I hope, very much, to emulate him.

Spaces in Togetherness

October 14, 2015

I haven’t been writing much recently – either in the blogs or on my novel, or in any other genre – and it’s taken me a while to work out why.  For a number of reasons – mostly to do with house renovation work – when I’ve gone walking, I’ve gone with BD.  And as much as I love my husband, and like walking with him, it’s a different experience than walking alone.

BD’s a talker.  I’m not.  So while walking with him is a good time to talk out issues, or brainstorm ideas, it’s not conducive to the half-daydreaming, let-the-thoughts-swirl workings of my creative mind. Sooner or later (sooner, I think) I’m going to get bitchy.  I need to write.  To write, I need alone time, preferably walking-alone time.

It seems so silly, to take two cars in different directions to walk separately.  (We may live in the country, but the roads are busy enough, and hilly, and there are no sidewalks and no real shoulders, so walking from the front door is unwise except early on weekend mornings.)  If I add a walk to my errand trips to town, all well and good; I’m there anyway.  But I am having trouble giving myself permission to not walk with BD, when it’s the more sustainable/less consumptive option on any given day.

But, of course, I must, or I won’t write.  And it’s not like this is new revelation.  The title of this post is a paraphrase of a quote from Kahil Gibran, and was part of the reading I did at our wedding, thirty-four years ago.  I knew then I needed that alone time.  We’ve had twenty-five years of summers off together to practice what retirement life would be like, and this issue has come up then too.  It’s not even really a ‘problem’: unless we haven’t seen each other for some days, BD is completely happy to walk without me – in fact, he mostly prefers it, as he acknowledges that my presence means he is less observant of his environment, and therefore he sees fewer birds.

So the real problem is my unconscious falling into patterns of behaviour because they are familiar, or appear superficially easier, or satisfy an immediate need rather than a long-term one.  Problems almost all of us confront, daily or weekly.  The problems that remind us that life isn’t to be lived on automatic pilot, but should be considered, contemplated, parsed.  That give us opportunities to outgrow habits and behaviours that are not healthy, and grow towards ones that are.