Jo Ind

I’m a writer. I write books. I write for newspapers. I write  for the web. I’m a writer. I am – honestly.

Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.

Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.

Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.

I am a writer – it must be true.

So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,

the empty brain,

the silent room.

PLEASURE.

That’s it, I’ve said it.

I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:

• to have a voice
• to showcase work
• to create an archive of material
• to explain a business
• to connect with people
• to improve SEO.

I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap at my lap top as I am right now is because I enjoy it.

There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.

The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s  more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.

And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.

In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc.  It’s all good stuff.

But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.”  That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.

I get heartily sick of the challenge of raising a family being characterised in terms of work/life balance.

Who thought of that phrase?

It makes it sound as though the only things we need are to earn a living and spend time with our families.  The implication is that so long as we’ve risen to the  challenge of getting work and childcare covered, we’re sorted.

Well, I’ve got news – we’re not.

I have another need and that need is for solitude.  I’ll say it again, but louder: “SOLITUDE.”

I need time to be alone/pray/write. (I use forward slashes rather than commas because I’m not sure if they are different things.)

It is that need for solitude that too often goes unrecognised and therefore gets squeezed and therefore needs naming in capital letters.

Earlier this year I agreed to give a talk on revelation, identity and social media at the Greenbelt Festival. I rashly took this on in January when I had just taken redundancy and therefore anticipated I might be twiddling my thumbs around the August Bank Holiday (ho, ho).

As a result I have  had to clear the time (three whole days so far) to be by myself and do a bit of reading and thinking and praying and writing – whatever name you give to what I do in my study.

Do you know? It has made me feel so good…. I was able to pay attention to random thoughts that had surfaced and been left hanging around like odd socks for far too many years.  I felt peaceful, deeper, ‘gathered-in.’

I must do this more often. I WILL do it more often. Prayer/writing/solitude might not get named in “having it all” features in glossy magazines but I’m naming it and I’m doing it now.

When I announced in my last post that I’d got a new business card  – deputy site editor of NHS local – I made a mistake.

Do you know that feeling of having told a half-truth? It’s not about telling a lie. It’s about settling for less than the truth deserves, neglecting to tell the most important part of a story. (more…)

At last, I can reveal I have a new business card….

It’s not wonky in real life – that’s down to the photographer’s skill and creativity.

Since February I’ve been working for Maverick Television, the company that brought us Embarassing Bodies and How to Look Good Naked, to make a ground-breaking website for the NHS in the West Midlands.

We’ve still got a little way to go to be where we want to be but the password of NHS local was lifted yesterday.

I wrote this poem one Mothers’ Day several years after my mum had died. Recently I lost Arch, aged three, in the supermarket for about five panic-striken minutes. That experience has brought me back to this poem, re-living it, this time as the mum.

The night after my  mother died
I lay in fear.
I am a child in a supermarket
Terrified
Searching for my mum
Between the aisles.

There she is.

In the sleepless dark
I toss between the faith
She would never abandon me
And her breathless body
Growing cold
In my hands.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the public relations industry and I certainly don’t hate people who work in it. Some of my best friends…..(Jayne Howarth, Ros Dodd etc). Unlike some journalists I actually feel grateful to good PR firms. Let’s be honest, in recent years working on a newspaper would have been far harder without them.

What I hate is doing PR. That’s all.

I feel the need to say this because since I’ve been a self-employed writer, at least once a week I get a call from somone I’ve featured in the Birmingham Post in the past, who wants me to write about them again. They suppose that now I’m freelance I’m only to happy to tout my work round a range of publications and, they imagine, earn a multiple fee from them.

To which I can only say that I would sooner pickle my head. In fact I DID say exactly that to one hopeful – he still didn’t understand I didn’t want the job. (more…)

May my work be the way

May it be my worship

May it be the growing of my heart and the connecting of my soul

May it be my reaching out and drawing in

May it lead me home
 

Written while on retreat at the ZeroCarbonHouse, Balsall Heath, Birmingham.

When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like this:

But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn. (more…)