Category: Life

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Breaking The Streak

Last week was a week of endings: projects completed, tethers cut, deadlines met. One friend handed in her PhD; another passed their viva. I handed in pass pages for Moth to a Flame, the last book in a trilogy I started in 2014 with a character I created in January 2012. And I also uninstalled Duolingo and said farewell to my 1850-day streak.

It would be weird to blog about my friends’ PhDs, and I haven’t entirely processed my feelings about coming to the end of the project I’ve been working on for my entire adult life, so today I’m going to talk about the last of these endings: my break-up with the owl.

It wasn’t, I should say, primarily or wholly an act of protest. The team behind Duolingo have made many choices in recent months and years that I have disliked, any one of which would have been reason enough to leave — the restructuring of the “tree” into a path where you can’t choose what topic to focus on and spend all your time stuck repeating the same five things over and over again; the decision to stop supporting and updating certain courses, including the Welsh course; the alleged reliance on AI at the cost of human jobs; the general way that the gamification and microtransactions of the platform have gradually overwhelmed the learning experience…

All of these would have been good reasons to leave. But the Irish course, which has been my primary focus for a long time, has never been a particularly well-constructed course. For a long time it lacked audio for the vast majority of sentences; a year or so ago they changed this with the addition of computer-generated voices that are, at times, so unclear it’s impossible to answer a question correctly. It contains far less vocabulary than many better-supported courses (only around 1700 words), hadn’t been updated in years, always lacked meaningful grammar notes, and was bereft of any of the features like stories and dialogues that appear in the French course and a few others.

They’d been talking about a new Irish “tree” for years, but it never materialised. I held out hope that it would, and continued to use the one that existed, because while deeply, deeply imperfect, it was better than nothing.

And this, I think, characterised my entire relationship with Duolingo. It was better than nothing, and nothing was likely to describe my learning without it. I struggled with motivation but, more than anything, I struggled with continuity — so while I might do ten exercises from a book in two days in a fit of enthusiasm, it would be followed by months of not touching the book at all.

The Duolingo streak is a flawed metric of progress, but it is also very, very useful. Two minutes a day, five minutes a day, ten minutes a day — it’s not a big commitment, and as the numbers rack up on that streak, it becomes harder and harder to say, “Nah, I don’t feel like it.” It forces consistency. And while two minutes a day isn’t enough to teach you a language, it will teach you a lot more than zero minutes a day.

It did teach me a lot more than zero minutes a day would have done. Maybe I don’t recall every single one of those 1700 words, but I can recognise them, and I could probably cobble a sentence together with most of them. There are a lot of jokes about the kinds of vocabulary and phrases that Duolingo teaches, and how useless they are, but multiple times I’ve been in conversations with more fluent speakers and discovered I know a word they’ve forgotten, because I learned it from Duolingo. There are even grammar rules I’ve learned from Duo, through sheer repetition.

1850 days.

I have been learning Irish for a very long time. I’ve tried, in the past, to outline the shape of my learning journey. It hasn’t been a quick one, or a consistent one, or a direct one. It’s been interrupted by life, redirected into Old Irish, disrupted by my sensory processing issues, and delayed by my poor memory. But perhaps that 1850-day streak gives us the best estimate. Five years ago, in early 2019, I decided that this was the year I was going to commit to learning modern Irish. And Duolingo was one of the tools I was going to use to do that.

1850 days is a long time. Five years is a long time, and the past five years have been particularly chaotic for me. I’ve moved house nine times since I started that Duolingo streak. Nine! I’ve moved to Ireland, and then back. I’ve started a job, left a job, done an MA, got top surgery, had another job, started a PhD, published two novels, written a bunch more — in other words, my Duolingo streak has been pretty much the most stable thing in my life since I was 23.

Of course, it would be misleading if I didn’t acknowledge that there were chunks of that time when I was learning Esperanto, or Welsh, or flirting with Latin, or poking around the Scottish Gaelic course. But for the most part, I’ve been doing some kind of Irish learning throughout those five years. Sometimes, it’s been active: taking classes, attending conversation groups, going to the Gaeltacht, doing exercises out of a book. Sometimes, it’s been passive: idly scrolling Twitter and trying to decipher tweets as Gaeilge, putting RnaG on in the background, or — most commonly — doing the bare minimum to keep my Duolingo streak and then checking out for the day.

The bare minimum, it turns out, is still something.

So why have I uninstalled the app?

Not as an act of protest, but as an act of love. Of respect for myself and my progress. Of acknowledgment, because I’ve come a long way. Of appreciation for the Irish language as something more than a daily obligation and a rote exercise.

Duolingo has been useful to me — more useful than you might expect. I notice that words come to mind more quickly when I’m regularly in practice with vocab-matching than when I’m not. Perhaps, if they hadn’t redesigned the learning ‘tree’, it would have continued to be useful, because I could force myself to re-do the verb exercises I struggle with (will I ever remember the forms for the future tense?), but now, denied the opportunity to choose what to work on, I’ve reached a point where it can take me no further. I probably reached this point a while back, but I owe it to myself to finally acknowledge it, and move on.

I am a long way from fluent in Irish. My grammar is bad, and I struggle to put sentences together coherently, making conversation challenging. I understand much more than I speak, but am embarrased about my inability to respond. It sometimes feels like fluency is a completely unobtainable dream, meant only for others more linguistically talented than me; after all, if it were possible, wouldn’t it be closer by now, after all these years?

Maybe. Maybe I am fundamentally bad at languages, and will never be fluent.

But last month, I finished reading six books in Irish — children’s/YA books, for the most part, with simpler language, but I read them. I’m currently reading my first adult novel in Irish, and following it. I attend classes and conversation groups, and despite my poor grammar and tendency to be “ag déanamh” everything rather than risk another verb, I make myself understood. I find myself thinking in Irish, talking to myself in Irish (or in a horrific combination of Irish and English…). I’ll never particularly enjoy radio, because auditory processing isn’t my strong point, but I can pick out the meaning of headlines and news reports, rather than it feeling like a wash of meaningless noise. I watch documentaries on TG4, and draw connections between the Irish words I’m hearing and the English subtitles I’m reading, transcribing the audio in my mind into words I know I’ve seen.

A year ago, I said that I owed it to myself to acknowledge my progress, rather than always making self-deprecating jokes about my inability. Now I think I owe it to myself to stop treating myself like a beginner. I need to stop treating the language like an exercise and start living through it.

What do I mean by that? I don’t live in a Gaeltacht area, or even in Ireland. (I miss seeing the street signs and posters in Irish that I used to see when I lived in Cork.) The majority of people I interact with have no Irish. Conversations are in English, street signs are in English, forms and labels and websites are in English.

But, you see, I can read in it now.

From the outside, this seems like academic progress. “Well done, you can do basic reading comprehension exercises, move to the next TEG level” or whatever. But from the inside, this feels like a breakthrough, even though I’m still slow and stumbling and reliant on getting the gist of a sentence rather than grasping every word. This isn’t just about making progress in class, but about fundamentally moving forward in my relationship with the language.

Because I’m a reader. That’s what I do, almost every day, in English: I read. Hundreds of books a year. I read far more than I watch TV — or socialise, to be honest. It would be fair to say it’s my primary hobby, as well as a crucial part of my work as a PhD student and my life as a writer. A good chunk of every day is reading. Where conversation classes and TG4- or RnaG-assisted immersion felt like an active commitment and an attempt to Learn Irish™, reading is just… what I do. If I can do that in Irish, then Irish can start to be a part of my life, not just homework.

And if it’s part of my life, then I don’t need an app and an alarm and a streak and a threat to make me do a little bit every day, because it’s already there. It’s already in my mind, and in how I’m seeing the world around me, and in the books I’m reading. The consistency will come naturally, and without the sour edge of resentment: “Ugh, hang on, I gotta do my Duolingo now.”

In other words, I can live in it.

I am grateful to Duolingo for everything it has taught me. I’m frustrated with the roadblocks it put in the way of that learning through unhelpful updates. I resent that something as simple as a daily streak could have such a hold over me that deciding to uninstall it felt like a massive life decision. But mostly, I’m ready to move on. The owl got me this far, and now it’s time to fledge and leave the nest myself.

Go raibh maith agat agus slán, a Duo.

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Farewell to 2023

Is it a cliché to write a round-up of the year on New Year’s Eve, or a tradition? I suppose the answer probably depends on how much you enjoy reading the round-up, and how much of it seems like poorly concealed bragging on the part of the writer. Either way, I’m doing it anyway, because I promised myself I would blog more this year and this is the kind of thing one blogs about. Bite me.

2023 has been a mixed year, as so many years are. In many ways, it was a vast improvement on 2022, primarily because I only moved house once, rather than five times in ten months, as was the case between Nov 2021 and Sep 2022. This offered some much-needed stability and gave me a chance to start recovering from the past few years: the profound isolation of living alone during extended lockdowns, and the disruption and trauma of my year of Constantly Moving House.

The year began with uncertainty, as I submitted my PhD funding application with no idea whether I would obtain funding and therefore whether I’d be doing a PhD at all. Actually obtaining said funding was far more complicated than anticipated and dragged on until August, but I did secure it, and I’m now a term into my PhD. The result is that the year is ending with a greatly increased level of stability and certainty: I know where I will be for the next three years, and I know what I will be doing. Summer 2026 is the earliest I will finish my PhD (it may well take longer), and since I know the main outlines of my publishing schedule until 2027 (more on that later), I can make plans for the next couple of years that don’t involve extended periods of job-hunting — a massive relief.

Me looking dapper in a garden wearing a waistcoat, suit trousers, shirt, and tie, leaning on my cane and holding onto a tree with the other hand.
Matriculation, October 2023

I can’t, of course, guarantee that I’ll stay in this house, even if I decide it’s worth putting up with its extortionately expensive electric heating and immersion heater for another year or two. My landlady might decide to sell, or to raise the rent beyond what I can manage; I might decide that with my diminishing mobility, it’s not viable to continue living four miles away from my department with only an electric bike for transport, and attempt to move somewhere closer. But I will be staying in this city, expensive and imperfect as it is.

There is a great relief in that, after moving so much last year. There’s something profoundly dislocating about being completely unable to put down roots or make IRL friends because as soon as you get to know somebody, you end up moving away and never seeing them again. My closest friends have been primarily internet friends for years, and I value those communities greatly, but there’s something alienating about having no friends at all in your local area. Recovering from top surgery last Spring, alone in a flat I’d only just moved into, made that very clear; starting to make friends and connections in North London in the summer and then being forced to move again and leave them behind emphasised it.

After repeated moves, some of which weren’t your choice, it’s hard to trust that you’ll stay somewhere long enough to make it worth putting down roots and building connections. It took me nine months in my last rental house before I could start thinking about improving my living space with a loo roll holder and some other small bits of DIY, because I was still constantly on edge and waiting to leave. (And since they put our rent up 11%, we did end up moving again after the year’s contract ended. But a year is much better than three months.)

But I have been sixteen months in Cambridge now, and I will be here until at least summer 2026. That is a level of stability I have not known for… well, arguably my entire adult life, since undergrad was characterised by being uprooted from college at the end of every term and returning to my hometown. Since turning 18, the longest I have lived in the same place (house/flat, but also city) is 14 months, in Cork — will 2024 be the year I beat that record? Maybe. Maybe, finally, I can start to hope as much.

(I am so very tired of moving house.)

Rectangular plastic planters against a brick wall with pansies and violas in flower.
Flowers alongside my house.

There have been challenges, though. Mentally, the last couple of years did a number on me, something which continued to affect my work life, my personal life, and my spiritual life for a solid chunk of 2023; recovery wasn’t linear. My health has continued to fluctuate, but with a general downward trend. Much of February was characterised by a bout of vestibular neuritis, an inner-ear infection which is deeply inconvenient for somebody who cycles everywhere and was, at the time, participating in a ballet show. Balance being essential to both ballet and bicycles, it made for a rough few weeks. That was, it turned out, the end of my dancing for the foreseeable: a recurrence of a knee injury from 2021 and a longstanding hip problem really made themselves known and got gradually worse. In July, I began using a cane almost all the time when walking, having previously only used it intermittently, and this proved to be a long-term fixture, lasting the rest of the year. Even with the cane, I’m not able to walk very much.

This loss of my mobility has been difficult to deal with. The first half of the year was substantially enhanced by being able to go for walks at Milton Country Park or to visit the bunnies at the Science Park, both a short cycle ride from my home in North Cambridge, and while I still occasionally make it there to look at the ducks, I can no longer enjoy tramping around the lakes the way I did before. In the summer, I went to Utrecht for the International Congress of Celtic Studies, and to Donegal for an Irish-language course, and found both experiences significantly marred by inaccessibility and the challenges added by my reduced mobility. This autumn, I’ve been unable to attend protests and demonstrations because I can’t walk or stand enough to participate. And not being able to dance — not knowing when I might be able to dance again — is its own kind of grief.

A whole-cast photo from a ballet production. I am in the front row, sitting cross-legged wearing red ballet tights and a loose black shirt.
I have a talent for being cast in a character role that means I get to be in the front of group pictures while actually not doing very much in the show itself.

I hope that 2024 will bring my mobility back to me. I’m seeing a physio, and I’m having an X-ray this month to try to get to the bottom of the hip problems, which are long-standing but dramatically worse than they used to be. It’s hard to imagine I’ll get better fully, when these injuries have already lingered so long, but I can’t let myself believe they’re permanent. Most realistically, this episode will be like the one that afflicted my hands in 2013: I’ll get very slowly better, enough to do most of the activities I used to do, but perhaps never to the same extent and always with the threat of pain. A compromise with my body. But we’ll have to see.

And there have been unexpected challenges of the smaller, less existential kind: three punctures in six days when my bike is my only means of transport was a bad week, especially as one involved replacing the entire motor wheel (£££); the general torment of potholes and terrible weather as a cyclist; being harassed by transphobes on Twitter (that’s one part of the site I won’t miss) after accidentally drawing the attention of Glinner; badly timed train strikes and storms disrupting journeys… all the usual challenges that are always skimmed over in the highlights reels of people’s lives. Well, maybe not the transphobes part. May was a complicated month.

There have been victories this year, too, particularly when it comes to publishing. The Hummingbird Killer was released in mid May, and though it’s hardly been a bestseller and reviews have trickled in very slowly and in small enough numbers to make me concerned for my sales, it seems to have mostly been well-received by fans of the first book. The French edition was released in November, with a gorgeous cover; I eagerly await receiving my own copy of this, and of the ‘poche’ edition of The Butterfly Assassin (a smaller, cheaper paperback format that the French publishers release around a year after the original large-format fancy paperback).

Me on stage with my cane and a microphone, wearing a green mask, a green corduroy jacket and brown corduroy trousers.
Accepting the YA Category award at the Sheffield Children’s Book Awards in November.

The Butterfly Assassin was shortlisted for the CrimeFest 2023 Best YA Crime Novel, although it didn’t win; it won the Silver Award at the Sussex Amazing Book Awards 2023, voted for by school students across Sussex; and it won the YA Category at the Sheffield Book Awards 2023, run by the Sheffield Library Service and voted for by readers. I’m extremely grateful for these awards, which show that my book does resonate with its target audience. I first wrote The Butterfly Assassin when I was 18, as the book I wanted to read and couldn’t find, but that was a long time ago, and I’m increasingly aware that I no longer know what it’s like to be a teenager. I think it’s very different in 2023 than it was in 2013! But clearly, if the teens are voting for my book, then I am tapping into something real and meaningful about that experience, and I’m extremely grateful for that validation.

Due to the British Library’s extended outage, I can’t access the PLR loans dashboard, but when I checked the figures earlier this autumn, I’d had something like 930 library loans between July 2022 and June 2023 — something that means more to me than sales or awards, since as a teenager, almost all of my reading was from libraries. We didn’t have a bookshop locally, and it would have cost a fortune to keep up with my reading speed, so that, for me, is the pinnacle of author life: to be in libraries, and to be read. These would be mostly The Butterfly Assassin, since The Hummingbird Killer was released at the end of the reporting period, but there were a few loans for THK in there too.

A bookshop mostly full of people sitting on folding chairs, and me at the front with my books on a table next to me, talking.
Waterstones St Neots, July 2023

I had the chance to do a couple of events, including a book club in St Neots which had a great turnout — a big improvement on last autumn, when I took a lengthy bus trip for an event nobody turned up to :| (It happens. It’s a rite of passage. Didn’t make it any more fun at the time.) I held the launch for The Hummingbird Killer at Housman’s in London, and manage to pressgang enough friends into coming to make up for those who couldn’t make it due to train strikes. I signed books in a variety of bookshops, with my favourite — for the novelty and surprise of it — being The Four Masters Bookshop in Donegal Town, because I didn’t expect them to have my books at all, but when I popped in en route to the Gaeltacht, there they were.

Me in the Four Masters Bookshop in Donegal Town, holding up copies of my books. I'm wearing a raincoat and a rainbow mask, and my hair is wet.
Donegal Town, August 2023

During the second half of this year, I edited Moth to a Flame, the third book in the trilogy. I finished my copyedits today, and am preparing to send them in, probably tomorrow, to meet my deadline of the third of January. This book has presented unique challenges, and I have no idea how it’ll go down with readers, but after a few existential wibbles about saying goodbye to a series I’ve been working on for my entire adult life, I think I’ve finally reached the point where I can be confident that I’ve told the story I was trying to tell to the best of my ability at this time. And maybe in three years I’ll look back on it with regrets or wish I’d written it differently. But that’ll mean I’ve improved as a writer, so if anything, that would be a good thing.

Moth to a Flame will be released in May, like the first two, and I hope to be able to share a cover with you soon. (I’ve seen it, it’s great, but it needed some tweaks and refinements before it can go public, so it’s not up yet. Soon, I hope. Just as soon as we can settle on a tagline.)

And what’s next? Well, something very different. Because one of this year’s victories was that I did secure another book deal, after an agonising sub process, and I can’t wait for the official announcement so I can tell you all about it. It’s a new direction for my career as a writer, on the publishing side, but it’s one I’ve been working towards for a long time on the writing side. Those who follow me on social media (and especially those who look at my Instagram Story) may have an idea of what this entails, based on what I’ve been researching and editing recently, but soon I’ll get to tell the rest of you, too.

And a year wouldn’t be complete without writing something new — ideally, something unplanned and spontaneous 😅 Last year, it was the accidental vampire romance novel. This year, in February-March, I drafted a brand new book, provisionally titled The Animals We Became. It’s a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the story of Blodeuwedd, exploring gender, sexuality, and trauma, with an unhealthy dose of animal transformations along the way. Although it’s only a first draft, I’m really proud of the book so far, and really excited to see what more I can do with it over the next year.

On the academic side, this year finally saw the publication of my “trans Cú Chulainn” article — an article that explores boundary-crossing, category crisis, gender, and Cú Chulainn, based on my undergrad dissertation and substantially revised in 2020-21, but lost in the academic publishing void for a while. It received some very gratifying attention from those who’d been waiting patiently for it, and I was glad of that. I was also asked to contribute an article about a conference I attended about The Lament for Art O’Leary in Cambridge earlier this year, based on a blog post I wrote about it, which was published in Dúchas II in the autumn. There’s more about both of these articles on the ‘Research‘ page of this site.

A photo showing my three published peer-reviewed articles so far: a copy of Quaestio Insularis 22, labelled "Láeg article"; a copy of Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 83, labelled "Maines article", and a copy of the Proceedings of the Association of Celtic Students VIII, labelled "Cú Chulainn article".

I also had another article accepted for publication, pending revisions — submitted in January and accepted in August, I haven’t yet managed to finish the revisions due to life getting much busier! But as long as the academic publishing void doesn’t catch me again, I can be reasonably sure that 2024 will see the publication of that one, which looks at the role of Láeg mac Ríangabra in different recensions of Táin Bó Cúailnge. This was my first time having an article accepted as though I were any academic — i.e., not a postgrad conference proceedings, not a prize for ‘young scholars’, but a standard, regular journal with peer reviewers who don’t know me or my age or anything else about me. So that was quite exciting. Or will be once I eventually get around to finishing it.

My year wasn’t as action-packed or full of travel as some people’s seems to have been — I’m not much of a traveller, and I’m still being very cautious about COVID. Still, it involved a few trips, mostly of the research variety. In the spring I went to Yorkshire with my parents, to visit York, Leeds, and “Espera” — or at least, the area where Espera would be if it were real. You’ll see some of the fruits of this research trip in Moth to a Flame.

Me grinning in front of a road sign for Weaverthorpe
“Espera”, April 2023

In July, as I mentioned above, I headed to Utrecht for the International Congress of Celtic Studies, my first time in the Netherlands. My paper went well and I made some great connections with others in my field, although I was also in the grip of profound PhD funding stress and also trying to do the paperwork / financial referencing for a house, so it was quite a stressful trip. In August, I went to Donegal again for two weeks to work on my Irish, and managed not to catch COVID there this time. Did buy rather more books than I meant to, though. (It doesn’t count if they’re in Irish…)

I left my library job at the beginning of September, and the autumn was dominated by starting my PhD, as well as edits and research for writing projects. This included trying to make the most of the library resources available to me, and to visit rare books / special collections as much as I can — I want to see all the manuscripts they’ll let me get my hands on! The autumn also included the readalong I hosted here for The Butterfly Assassin. I’m not entirely sure how successful this was as an effort to build community on this blog and encourage discussions and comments, but it was an interesting exercise for me, especially alongside book 3 edits.

I didn’t achieve everything in 2023 that I set out to do. For starters, I set a goal of trying to make a YouTube video about medieval Irish literature once a month, or at least 10 overall, but I haven’t made a single one since last December, despite getting halfway through a script for several. I also decided I was going to try to go to bed by 1am, and to work backwards to midnight; unfortunately, I remain entirely nocturnal and this has not happened. (Nor have I eaten vegetables five times per week, and as for “walk a bit more to improve stamina for knee/hip”… yeah, my knee and hip had other plans.)

But I think I rolled with 2023’s punches a little better than I took 2022’s, and they were lighter blows, too. Yes, there were moments when I was so stressed I wanted to throw up. Yes, I had my share of anxiety attacks and days when I called in sick because I couldn’t face getting out of bed. And no, I did not make it to Quaker meeting more than about four times the entire year — another legacy of 2022 and bad experiences, as well as a side-effect of my nocturnal habits making it hard for me to get up on a Sunday morning. But that’s okay. Not everything goes to plan all the time. We survive and we carry on.

I can’t predict what 2024 will bring, but I feel a little more confident making plans than I have done these last few years. And I’m trying to make the kinds of plans that will help me feel happier and more grounded in my life — plans that will help me put down roots, live a less chronically online life, and find more of a work-life balance. They may not succeed, but the trying is important.

If 2023 has been a good year for you, then I hope 2024 builds on those joys and brings you even greater ones, and if 2023 was terrible, then I hope that rock bottom proves a strong foundation for a much better and brighter future.

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On Learning Irish (Slowly)

A couple of weeks ago, Timehop reminded me that it was eight years since I bought my first Irish-language book: Ulchabháin Óga, Gabriel Rosenstock’s translation of Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson’s Owl Babies. This was one of my favourite picture books as a small child, and is often quoted in my family, so when I started learning Irish and discovered there was an Irish-language version, I bought it immediately.

I shared the post with a joke about how my reading level hasn’t really improved in the last eight years, but on later reflection, I had to admit that this was unfair to myself. Not only was I not continually studying modern Irish for that eight years — in fact, for the first 3.5 years of that period I wasn’t studying it at all, because it proved too confusing on top of my medieval Irish studies — but I also have improved, and I’m doing myself a disservice not to acknowledge that.

For example, last summer I read An Leon, An Banríon agus An Prios Éadaigh (The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe), and while progress on An Capall agus A Ghiolla (The Horse and His Boy) has been slow, that’s been far more to do with fatigue and available brainpower than my language skills. True, I’m able to read the Narnia books in part because I read them so many times in English as a child that I have a sense of the gist of the story, even where I can’t follow the exact wording, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a children’s novel like that is a big step up from Ulchabháin Óga. When I’m done with these, next on the list is probably An Príonsa Beag (The Little Prince), and I’m looking forward to one day tackling An Hobad (The Hobbit), but I think that’s a long way away yet.

By making self-deprecating jokes about my reading level not having progressed in eight years, I’m undermining the work that I’ve put in to improve, and that only reinforces the part of my brain that feels like I’ve made no progress and will never attain anything resembling language competency, let alone fluency. And trust me, that part of my brain doesn’t need the help. So, I decided to be stern with myself: no more denying my progress, even if there hasn’t been as much of it as I hoped. Let’s focus on what I have achieved.

And, partly in the light of this, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about language learning strategies, and the ways in which I’ve inadvertently sabotaged my own Irish learning by trying to do things the way I thought I was “supposed” to do them. None of the conclusions I’ve come to will be any surprise to anybody who knows anything about language pedagogy, I suspect, but they seem — like languages themselves — to be the kind of thing I could only learn by doing it myself.

I got off to a bit of a rocky start with Irish, not least because I learned medieval Irish first and therefore my grasp of grammar is about eight hundred years out of date. My early attempts at learning didn’t follow any recommended structures or map neatly onto TEG levels, so efforts to work out whether I would be classed as an A2 or B1 learner (terms that still mean little to me) were always wildly skewed by not knowing the “expected” vocab but knowing a fair amount of other vocab instead. My listening and speaking skills were, understandably, weaker than those of people with more opportunities to speak Irish IRL: learning independently offers few opportunities for conversation, and my auditory processing issues mean I struggle to listen to the radio in English, let alone in Irish.

But when I realised, a couple of years ago, that I’d learned things in the “wrong” order, my instinct was to try and squeeze myself into the straitjacket of structured learning. I knew that vocab was a problem and I was missing a lot of the expected terminology, so I found a Memrise course that followed TEG levels and set about trying to learn all of the required terms for the A1 and A2 courses.

This was… phenomenally boring.

I don’t know about you, but trying to make myself do things that are boring is like pulling teeth. I can’t do it. I loathe being bored. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never managed to stay in any one job long-term; by the six-month mark I’m getting the mental equivalent of itchy feet. Boredom is the mind-killer, and trying to motivate myself to sit down with a long list of vocab I had no personal investment in, because it was what I was “supposed” to know, came pretty close to making me give up on Irish entirely.

It’s not that I don’t need to know that vocabulary, or that structured courses are a bad idea. And learning lists of vocab can be incredibly useful when it comes to giving yourself the tools you need to muddle through a conversation: it’s useless knowing the grammar if you have no words to put into those sentences. I credit Memrise with helping me get through A-Level French — and my subsequent studies in medieval Irish, too, with all the custom lists of vocab I made to help hammer those words into my head.

But when it came to learning modern Irish and actually engaging meaningfully with the language, measuring my progress against those arbitrary standards and trying to force my brain to care about lists of words chosen by an unseen organisation was not inspiring, and it didn’t foster a love of the language. There was a crucial difference between sitting myself down with a TEG vocab course, and making a list of words as an undergrad to help me survive the unseen translation exam. The lists I made as an undergrad were relevant to me. They were words I needed, to achieve my aims with the language. This list? Wasn’t mine. Didn’t mean anything to me. Why, then, was I forcing myself to spend time on it?

Picking up Narnia in translation was an act of self-compassion. I knew that my reading skills were stronger than my speaking and listening skills (and, indeed, my writing skills). I knew that I knew the story, but wouldn’t know all of the words. I thought that giving myself the chance to use what I did know to figure out what I didn’t would be more engaging and teach me more than punishing myself with vocabulary — and it was. I felt a sense of accomplishment I never got from finishing a Memrise course, and while I wouldn’t say I recall too much of the new vocabulary I picked up from the book, it did help me better recognise sentence structures and phrases used in fiction.

For me, as somebody whose interest in Irish is primarily an interest in Irish stories, learning how storytelling works is useful. It is something I want to know about the language. But more than that, it provided a framework in which the other vocabulary I’d learned could actually be useful to me.

For example, one thing I’ve done repeatedly in Irish language courses and always found dull is learning how to describe my room. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t often sit around with my friends and say, “So how many bookshelves are in your room? My bedside table is on the rug. The rug is green. There is a lamp on the table.” (Except, perhaps, in the context of having recently moved house.) But sometimes, in fiction, they describe rooms. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but it hadn’t really occurred to me before that here was an application for all that vocab I’d been diligently trying and failing to memorise.

Lucy came to Mr Tumnus’s house for the first time, and the narrator told us about his cosy little home, and how the furniture was laid out, and what was on the table — and I learned all the words I had been failing to learn, without it ever feeling like a box-ticking exercise. It was amazing how much more compelling a topic could be once it was placed in a context where I might actually use it, and while, again, this sounds painfully obvious, it was one of those things that just hadn’t occurred to me. My main Irish-language conversations happen on a Zoom Oíche Comhrá, where nobody’s furniture is ever discussed at length, or on courses in Donegal in the summer, where the topic has also never come up. But in a story, when describing a setting… yes, that could be useful after all.

And this, I realised, was at the heart of it. I was never going to get to grips with the language in the abstract, as a list of topics I was Supposed To Know. I needed to get to grips with it on a level that meant something to me, that was useful to me, that had a frame of reference in my head.

And yet, somehow, I forgot this lesson, and went back to my vocab lists. I do at least make my own these days: I keep a list of words I learn in classes, and add them to Memrise afterwards to try and consolidate the lesson, which I find useful. (I have a poor memory, and will never remember vocab otherwise.) I write down the words I look up in An Capall agus A Ghiolla, and I add those too. I look up words from tweets, news articles, documentaries, and pop those into the list for future reference.

And then I started adding words I picked up from a list of nature vocabulary, and I got stuck. No matter how many times I went over the flashcards, they wouldn’t stay in my head. I could remember a few, but the rest skittered away and I muddled them up over and over again.

I thought at first that I was just stressed (there’s been a lot of that lately), and it was inhibiting my ability to remember words, but when I actually thought about it, I realised what the problem was: these words meant nothing to me in English, either. I didn’t know what a pitted bog was, or a bog hole. I thought I knew the difference between a pasture and a meadow, but I wasn’t totally clear on that, and what was a water meadow? There was probably a significant difference between a moor and a heath, but I couldn’t have told you what that was, either.

I am a child of suburban London. I have learned more about nature over the last few years, but I still don’t have the understanding of these terms that somebody in rural Ireland would have. The reason I was struggling to distinguish between the Irish words was because I had no mental hooks to hang them on, nothing to relate them to. Half the time, I needed to look up what the English translation meant, because the word in the dictionary was only passingly familiar.

And what it took for me to realise that this was the problem was compiling another list of vocab: words relating to librarianship. Words that do have hooks in my brain, because I am a library assistant. With each word that I added to the list, I could imagine using it. I don’t have a particularly visual brain, but I can remember pictures I’ve seen; I can hold a picture of my workplace in my head, and look around it, and mentally label things with Irish words. Those words mean something to me. Those are words I can imagine using, if I went to a library in search of Irish-language material.

So of course they would be easier to learn, the same way that the first words I learned in Irish mostly related to musical instruments. I already had somewhere in my brain to put them, so they weren’t just sloshing around, ready to leak out the second I wasn’t actively practising them.

I don’t intend to give up on learning those unfamiliar Irish words. I was prompted to add them in the first place because I was watching a nature documentary on TG4 and wanted to recognise more of the language without reading the subtitles. But I’ve realised from all of this that I will have far more success with learning if I allow my own life to direct my learning, and if I look up terms that I might use (and will therefore reinforce with use, rather than forget immediately). More than that, I’ll have far more fun if I learn through things I want to do, like reading a book, than through things I would never do in another context (describing my bedroom furniture to a stranger).

And, honestly: yes, directions in Irish are hard, and I struggle with all the different words to represent a static direction, moving towards a direction, and coming from that direction. But the biggest problem with learning to give directions in Irish is that I have no sense of direction, full stop, and struggle to give them in English. No wonder I was finding that a particularly hard part of any lower intermediate class I took.

I would like to be able to engage with Irish more in my everyday life, and it’s tricky, because I don’t live in Ireland, let alone in an Irish-speaking area, so I’m rarely around other Gaeilgeoirí. But step one to doing that is one I can do for myself: work out what I want to have the words to express in Irish, and find those words. Then, and only then, will the language start to take shape in my brain.

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To Watch The Year Turning

From September 2020 until November 2021, I lived alone in a small one-bedroom flat in Cork. I could count on my fingers the number of people I knew in the city — indeed, the country — and for the majority of the time I lived there, none of them were allowed in my house. This was particularly true in the early part of 2021, when Ireland returned to lockdown. My few in-person MA classes moved online, and my social life consisted of shivering through meetings with my supervisor on a bench outside on campus, and sometimes talking to my landlady through an open window. When I signed my book deal for The Butterfly Assassin, I celebrated with a trip to Tesco, and then to the Lough, a nearby urban lake, to tell the waterfowl the news. (I could tell the ducks were impressed.)

A swan on a serene lake with a grey, evening sky. The light is reflected in the water.
Cork Lough, January 2021

As long as I have the internet, and therefore the opportunity to inflict my weirdnesses on other people, I have a reasonably high tolerance for being alone. Pain and fatigue make in-person socialising difficult, before we’ve even come onto the question of my food disabilities and how to work around those. I like alone time, and I liked the freedom of living by myself: not having to sneak around when I stayed up until 3am by mistake again, and knowing that everything in the kitchen was safe for me to eat because I was the one who put it there.

But I can’t deny that it was an incredibly lonely fourteen months, even so. A loneliness which dragged on when I moved back to the UK: although I lived with my parents for a couple of months, I then moved out into another flat, alone, and was for the entire time I lived there either preparing for or recovering from surgery, meaning I was functionally still in lockdown. All in all, I had around eighteen months of profound isolation.

This had its effects on me. Most noticeably, when I eventually did move in with other people, people I hadn’t known before then, I found it much harder than I’d anticipated. I’d heard people talking about the pandemic as “traumatic”, but since I hadn’t been too badly affected (I’d been furloughed with full pay early on; I’d managed to complete my MA; I’d made progress with my writing career; I hadn’t yet caught COVID myself), it felt presumptuous to imagine that such a term applied to me. Trauma was for the essential workers and the nurses and those who’d been unable to see their loved ones before they died — not for being alone in a tiny flat for a year.

So I ignored the way my anxiety spiked around my new housemates, the way I never felt safe at home, the sheer discomfort of being forced into proximity with others and the constant sensory overload simply from sharing space. I figured I’d get over it, and until then, I would grin and bear it. I did a terrible job of this, had more panic attacks than I had done since about 2014, and hit the point where I was keeping snacks in a box under my bed so that if I couldn’t face going into the kitchen in case I met a housemate there or en route, I would at least have something to eat. But I was fine, clearly.

(I probably should have been kinder to myself. It might have made that transition easier.)

I’m giving this as necessary context to explain that I am not, in what follows, trying to romanticise lockdown. If anything, it was the profound loneliness of this period that I want to underline. It was loneliness that meant I spent so much time at the Lough in Cork, talking to the swans and the geese.

But during that long period of being alone, I started to notice things I’d never paid attention to before. I watched the birds in my landlady’s back garden, and learned how to recognise a jackdaw, a hoodied crow, a rook, a pied wagtail. When I walked to the Lough, I passed a house where there were often starlings in the front garden. I learned to know a coot from a moorhen, to recognise a tufted duck when previously I’d only known mallards. I came to recognise black-headed gulls and their distinctive “headphones” look in winter, something I can now never unsee when I look at them.

When I moved in with strangers last year and found my anxiety overwhelming me, it was the nearby woods that offered an escape. I downloaded an app that would tell me what the trees around me were, and grew to love the hornbeams and the way their trunks entwine around each other, hugging, growing in each others’ embrace. I watched the green of the leaves change gradually over the course of the three months that I was there, the light splintering the floor in new patterns.

The sun shining through trees. The trunks are dramatically silhouetted against the light, and cast shadows across the ground. There is a deep gully or fissure in the ground, as though there was once a stream there.
Queen’s Wood, London, July 2022

I wanted to see the seasons turn, but that didn’t work out, and I moved away and left the woods behind me.

But now, even in my dull, newbuild housing estate, there is nature. Back in October, after moving house five times in ten months, I made a promise to myself: I would still be here in the spring. As a symbol of that promise, I planted tulips and daffodils in the front flowerbed, so that I would need to be here to see them flower. And they have flowered, and I am still here. Some of the tulips were stolen, but those that remain are red and yellow and a combination of the two, droopy because they grew too tall but brightening up the house for everyone who passes by.

And: there were eight starlings in my garden today. My housemate drew my attention yesterday to a goldfinch on our garden fence. I often go for walks in a nearby park, a little over ten minutes away by bike, and am learning to recognise the trees there, too. I have watched them bud, and now the earliest leaves are emerging, and blossom flourishes. There are robins abundant, and sometimes I catch sight of wrens and bluetits.

And the lakes there — overfull after a wet spring — offer swans and geese and mallards and tufted ducks and black-headed gulls and coots and moorhens, all my old friends from the Cork Lough. But also cormorants, which I had never seen before. In February, they perched on the bare branches of a forgotten tree protruding from a small island in the lake; now, after two months of rain, that is almost underwater. I don’t know where the cormorants have gone. I watch for them anyway, waiting for them to come back.

Then, this evening, I cycled a little way to the Science Park in the north of Cambridge, which is absolutely teeming with wild rabbits — and their babies, hopping among them. In the late evening, with the Science Park deserted for the weekend and the traffic thin and distant, I heard bird calls I didn’t recognise at all, joyously loud.

I am a nature-deprived suburbanite. In the corner of London where I grew up, there are sparrows, and pigeons, and parakeets; these last green invaders are prone to chasing off many of the other smaller birds, so that’s more or less it for regular visitors. There are squirrels and mangy urban foxes, but few other creatures. I had never seen a hedgehog until university when, as an undergrad in Cambridge, I caught sight of one as I walked home from an event. It is still the only hedgehog I have ever seen in real life. I’ve seen deer, but most often in Knole Park, a National Trust property in Kent, and not anywhere less managed.

Fallow deer on a stretch of open parkland with a historical house in the background.
Deer at Knole Park, Christmas 2019

I commented on this a couple of years ago, when I was working on a book where the seasons and the natural world were more relevant. I felt like I had no connection to that aspect of things. For me, seasons were something that happened on the calendar, something that determined how many clothes I wore and how wet I got while cycling to work, but nothing that meant something. My characters lived at the whims of nature, and would have tasted the seasons on their tongue as they roamed their medieval forests; I couldn’t imagine that. I wondered if I needed to move to the countryside for a while for ‘research’, but my inability to drive made this impractical as a strategy.

Now, though, I can imagine the hope that those early buds on the trees would have offered a man who hardly survived the winter. I can imagine the way the light changes from spring to summer as it filters through the green canopy overhead — the leaves at first pale and thin, the colour deepening as the year turns. I can picture the rapid flitting of a wren, startled by a passing human; the businesslike scurrying of a pied wagtail that seems to have forgotten it can fly; the audacity of a squirrel certain that you’re intruding (although, I remind myself, it would be red squirrels that enjoyed those medieval woods, and not my bold, domineering greys). In my mind, I can see starlings resplendent in their finery, and blue tits squabbling in the branches, and small wild rabbits with their tails flashing white as they hop hastily away.

I still don’t know what all of the trees are around my favourite park. I am hoping to find out, once more of them have leaves that will make them easier to identify. There are hornbeams here, too, a few of them: not as many as there were in North London, but they’re there, like old friends. And oaks, too, I think. But the rest I don’t have an eye for, yet, and when I walk there sometimes all I can think is I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay. I want to know what they look like in the summer and into the autumn. I want to watch the year turn and the seasons change. I want to know what manner of creatures I’ll spot once the rain lets up for five minutes.

Maybe there will be hedgehogs, eventually. I would like that.

A tree covered in white blossom, overhanging a lake. There is a swan just visible between the tree's branches.
Milton Country Park, April 2023

I don’t have my characters’ experience of the world. Nobody does, in this modern day and age, though others get closer to it than I do. But I have learned to appreciate the small changes that I never noticed from a bus window on my way to work. To notice the birds that sit on our fence, and those that squabble in the grass. To watch the ducks slip on ice in winter and stomp disgustedly across sodden footpaths in the damp spring. To hear the coots calling out across the water as they make ripples with their lonely journeys.

Perhaps I’d have learned to see these things without lockdown. I’ve always liked looking at animals whenever I’ve been somewhere to see them — it just didn’t occur to me to look for them in other places. But there was something particular about that isolation in Cork, where I sometimes had little to do except make a few circuits of the Lough and read the signs there that told me about the birds of the area. There was something about the anxiety in North London, that sent me fleeing to the woods for comfort. And although neither the loneliness nor the anxiety was something I would want to repeat, they did give me this gift.

The next time I have news to share about a book, I will go to the lakes to tell the waterfowl, but not because I’m not allowed to see anyone else. This time, it will be because my stories owe a debt to the time I spend stomping around the park while trying to figure out a plot point, talking to the beasts because it’s easier than talking to myself. It will be because the swans taught me to appreciate a beautiful strength. And it will be because I want the trees to know, too.

I am still very allergic to nature (so allergic to pollen I can’t eat fruit in case my immune system tries to kill me), and still only just capable of keeping a succulent alive, but I feel a little better connected to the world now. I’m learning its rhythms, which for so long I didn’t know. And I hope this year, I will stay in the same place long enough to see the seasons turn.

But for now, it is spring, and there are wild baby bunnies, and the trees are heavy with blossom and the promise of leaves.

Two small grey-brown wild rabbits in front of a rabbithole, in a scrubby area of land with a mixture of grass and weeds.
Baby rabbits at Cambridge Science Park, April 2023
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Mentor, Master, and Medievalist

A few wee disconnected bits of news for you today, because a lot’s been happening lately. I’ve mentioned most of this on Twitter already, but it can be hard to keep track of that kind of thing, so here it is, in convenient blog post format. (I miss the internet of the 2010s, when everything was in convenient blog post format…)

The first is that I’m mentoring with Rogue Mentor! I’ve wanted to mentor for a while — I credit my experiences as a mentee in Author Mentor Match with having taken The Butterfly Assassin from “okay” to “publishable”, and I’ve been wanting to give back to the writing community. Rogue Mentor is a chilled out, low-key programme with no time limits or high-pressure showcases, and I’m really looking forward to getting to work with an author to take their book to the next level.

I’m looking for someone who has reached the point where they don’t think they can take their book any further on their own, and they just need another perspective / pair of eyes to make it click so that it’s ready for querying. I’ll be there for my mentee through as much of that process as they want me to be, and honestly, I see this as a chance to make a new writing friend, too, Mentorship can create a sense of hierarchy, but we’re all just people, some of us slightly further ahead in our writing journeys.

So, if you have a book that you know isn’t quite ready but you don’t know how to get it there by yourself, maybe consider submitting to me, and we can figure it out together. Even if you’ve never considered a mentorship programme before, why not think about it? Sometimes all you need is somebody to ask the right questions, so that you have to come up with the answers. Everyone needs a “But why?” reader, and when it comes to character motivations and worldbuilding, I like to think I’m pretty good at that. Plus, it’s invaluable to have someone who has been through the querying / submission process before you, to help you gauge what’s “normal” and keep calm during the process, so if that’s a direction you’re interested in, you might benefit from submitting.

My MSWL is here, but I wouldn’t say it’s an exhaustive list of the only types of books I’m interested in. If I haven’t mentioned something, and it’s not on my anti-MSWL either, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not interested in it. Just means I don’t know, yet, that I’m interested in it. Checking out my last blog post, where I shared my recent reading habits and preferences, might help give you an idea how likely I am to enjoy something. If I don’t seem like a great fit, do try one of the other Rogue Mentors! There are people looking for all sorts of genres and books, and they might be someone who’ll love yours.

You can submit to me during the April 22-25 submission window, and we’ll start working together in early June. (Mentee announcements are 26th May, which is my publication day, so I’ll probably be slightly busy that first week.)

Please do consider submitting! I’d be particularly excited to have a UK/Ireland-based mentee, but I’m open to anyone who has a book that I might click with.

The second piece of news is that at the end of May, I will be at the International Literature Festival in Dublin for my first panel as a newly-hatched baby author! Timed perfectly for two days after The Butterfly Assassin comes out, it’ll be a brand new experience for me, and I’m… slightly terrified.

I’ll be on a panel with Maura McHugh, who writes comics with folkloric/mythological influences. We’ll be talking about dark stories, monstrosity (of both the human and the beastie variety; The Butterfly Assassin has no actual monsters, but it certainly has monstrous humans), and all manner of things like that; I’ll probably end up talking about medieval Irish lit, too, so it promises to be an entertaining one.

Full details of the event are here. It’s on the 28th May, which is a Saturday. If you’re in Dublin, or close enough to get there, it would be wonderful to see you there! I’ll also be visiting some bookshops on the Sunday, so that’s definitely the weekend to catch me if you’re Ireland-based.

Speaking of Ireland, I was in Cork last week for my MA graduation ceremony, and I’m now officially a Master of Early and Medieval Irish. It was lovely to be back there; I took the opportunity to go to a friend’s talk about medieval Irish literature, as well as to see some parts of the area I never got the chance to see as a student. It was strange being back in the city now that everything has opened up so much, because there were Covid restrictions throughout my time living there. The spectre of Covid still lingers — my supervisor couldn’t be at graduation due to testing positive — but all in all, it was a very different Cork from the quiet, closed-up city I mainly experienced.

A selfie of me wearing a black mortarboard and a black graduation grown with a blue and green hood over an orange jumper and a white shirt. I am a white person with a buzz cut and orange-tinted glasses. I'm smiling at the camera. In the background are shelves of antique books in grill-fronted cupboards.

Many people wanted to know what’s next for me, and whether I’m going to do a PhD. As I’ve said before, I only want to do a PhD if I have a thesis topic in mind that excites me — not just for the sake of it. Since I don’t yet, I’m taking a little break from academia. But, I’m working on adapting some of my MA work into articles and papers, and there are a few research projects I’d like to explore as an independent scholar, so that doesn’t mean it’s going to be all quiet from me on the medievalist front. First steps will be to figure out how to become a Reader at the British Library, so that I can actually access materials… friends with library benefits are all very well, but a nerd cannot work from scanned PDFs alone.

As that suggests, I’m going to be staying in London for at least the next year, and probably longer. I’m about to move house again, for the third time in six months, and this time, I’m hoping to be there for a good while. Maybe not long enough to make it worth shifting all of my books over… but long enough to bring more than a shelf’s worth. I hope. It’ll be a new corner of London for me, and I’m looking forward to exploring, and trying to put down some roots and be part of a community.

So that’s what’s coming up for me: a house move, a gradual process of getting my life in order in a new location, and a slow ramp up in book events as publication (now only six weeks away!) draws ever closer. And, hopefully, amidst all that: a mentee, and the chance to be part of the writing community from a new direction, too. Join me! It’s going to be an interesting few months.

With only six weeks to go until The Butterfly Assassin is released, now is a great time to pre-order. We have a subtly-altered cover (check out the Books page for that) and I’m excited to see the finished copies which will also have a very funky spine… 👀

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Control And Recovery

You would think, after eight years in a perpetual yo-yo of decline and recovery, that I would know how to write about recovery. I don’t. On this occasion, recovering from top surgery and a knee injury and pandemic-induced inactivity simultaneously, there’s plenty of material. But some of it’s gross, and some of it’s boring. Some of it is a story of anxiety (“Is this healing correctly? Should it look like that?”), and some of it is a story of determination (daily walks getting slowly longer as I test my ability to walk without a cane). Sometimes, it’s staring into a mirror wondering whether I’ve always been this wonky, or whether I need to go back to the osteopath because my spine’s gone twisty again. None of it makes for a tidy narrative or an inspirational story.

Here’s the part that’s a story: three years on the NHS gender clinic waiting list and no sign of a first appointment, so I went private for top surgery, because selling The Butterfly Assassin gave me the money to do it. And that’s narratively significant and tidy, because The Butterfly Assassin is a story about struggling for control over your body and your life, and this was a form of taking back some of that control. It’s also a book I first wrote during the summer of 2014, around the same time I was having my initial gender crisis. These facts are probably not a coincidence.

The rest is messier. The rest is about balancing my squeamishness, my fear of being visibly trans in an increasingly hostile world, and the fact that surgery cost two-thirds of my yearly income with the fact that I needed to feel at home in my own skin, in an urgent way that wasn’t compatible with the absurd NHS waiting lists. The rest is private: my choices, my anxiety, my body. No matter how the media likes to pretend that trans lives must be endlessly subjected to public debate and examination.

The knee injury, though, I can talk about that. I hurt it in October, and since then my walking has been limited to what I can manage with a cane. My reliance on it has gradually reduced — initially I could hardly walk at all — but I was still using the cane when I travelled for surgery, and my inability to lean on it without aggravating my chest afterwards forced me to focus on rehabilitating the knee. There’s a lot of that, when you have hypermobile joints that perpetually injure themselves. Decline and recovery, decline and recovery, a constant process of rebuilding and relearning and reshaping.

So I’ve been going for walks, because they’re the only exercise I can manage. The unseasonably warm spring weather has helped, making it easier to motivate myself to leave the house, although there are still days where I’m tempted to stay in bed all day. But I force myself out. Sometimes, the walks are short: up the park, a quick circuit of the Pokéstops, taking over the gyms again if somebody’s kicked me out, and then home to recover. Sometimes they’re longer, not always intentionally, as I go a street or two beyond my usual circuit and then drawn further afield by curiosity to see what I’ll find.

Two things have made these walks bearable, even at the beginning when they were brief and slow and required frequent rest-breaks. The first is that I’m living in a new area, and so even a circuit of the streets will bring me sights I’ve never seen before, rather than the dreary familiarity of an area where I’ve lived for years. Novelty creates excitement, even when the novelty is just a different block of flats and row of shops. Since I’m due to move again next month (I’ve begun to feel like I will never not be moving house), there won’t be time for this area to become drearily familiar, and instead I have a sense of urgency, like I need to make the most of it while I’m here.

The other is Pokémon Go. I know: it’s 2022, not 2016. But in 2016, downloading Pokémon Go did wonders for my fitness, prompting me to take that extra digression on the way home just to loop in a couple of extra Pokéstops, rather than always taking the shortest route. It helped me build my stamina and strength, something that’s essential to managing my hypermobility. I stopped playing a while back, but last year downloaded it again to try and motivate myself to leave the house more often. It didn’t work very well then — it helped a little, but then I hurt my knee, so I couldn’t go out — but now it’s coming into its own.

Walking slowly, pausing often, and sticking only to familiar routes where I won’t accidentally find myself too far from home are boring limitations on an ordinary walk. But Pokémon Go makes them easier to bear. I walk slowly, so that gives me time to catch the Pokémon I pass. I’ll pause at a gym to reclaim control of it, giving myself a chance to rest and lower my heartrate before I continue. And I’m always looking at a map of the area, so it’s easier to find my way back when I stray off course.

It has become — in a strange kind of way — an accessibility aid. This game, which was not designed for me, and which favours those who can walk significant distances and regularly, is helping me to manage my disabilities and rehabilitate an injury that has plagued me for months. It makes it worth putting my shoes on just to manage a 15-minute walk, because at least that’ll help maintain my streak of visiting Pokéstops. It has, unexpectedly, gamified recovery.

The game has its challenges and problems. The repetitive movements aren’t great for my hands, and staring down at my phone probably isn’t doing great things for my neck either. But my knee is improving. The other day, I managed to walk for ninety minutes, which I haven’t done in months. My mind feels clearer for it, too: an hour each day away from Twitter and the endless news cycle of doom and despair, the rising cost of living and the spread of virulent transphobia and the war in Ukraine and the perpetually growing COVID figures…

It’s frustrating, when people turn out to be right that fresh air and exercise help. Partly because I’m a creature of the indoors at the best of times, and partly because I don’t always have a choice about my ability to experience those things. For months my knee has kept me trapped, unable to walk further than 10 minutes from home in case I can’t get back again, and no matter how much I wanted to go out and exercise, I couldn’t. Anxiety quickly begins to close in when you feel you’ve lost all sense of control over how you manage it.

But now the winter is coming to an end. The days are getting longer, and the air is getting warmer, and I, like the flowers, am slowly coming back to life again. Slowly getting some colour back, and raising my head to the sun. One gentle walk at a time.

I’m beginning to feel hopeful now that when I’m allowed to dance again, once the post-surgery restriction on cardio has been lifted, I might actually be able to. I’m beginning to look forward to choreographing, to having space to dance in a way that I haven’t since the start of the pandemic. Getting my rhythm back. Expressing myself in a way that doesn’t need words. This time, without having to strap myself into a painful, over-tight sports bra before I start.

With every day that passes, as I get stronger and as my chest heals, I begin to feel that little bit more at home in my own skin. And it’s not body positivity per se. My body and I will always have our wars, particularly over its inability to digest anything I might actually want to eat. But it’s body neutrality. It’s recognition of the self. It’s glancing in the mirror and going, “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Flaws and all. Rather than feeling caught in a trap, caged in by something I don’t have control over and can’t relate to.

The Butterfly Assassin is a book about struggling for control over your body and your life. About wanting autonomy when you’re losing even the ability to function on a day-to-day basis. About trying to find a balance between surrender and stubbornness: when to ask for help, and when to go it alone. In the eight years since I first drafted it, I’ve lived that over and over, through different periods of decline and their subsequent eras of recovery, and I know that recovery will never be ‘final’, but always an ongoing process. That’s what chronic means. It’s never just one injury, one surgery: it’s a dozen small things and all their effects.

Still, I feel hopeful now that when the book comes out, in two months, it’ll be a much stronger version of me who is there to greet it. Not the hermit-like winter me, kept trapped by pain, but the version of me that takes a slightly longer walk every day, and feels my body remembering what it feels like to do what I want it to do.

Maybe I’ve learned to write about recovery after all. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing you relearn every time, the way I relearn how to walk, the way I regain my strength. An endless cycle. A perpetual process of becoming myself, and claiming my own body.

The Butterfly Assassin will be released on the 26th of May. You can pre-order it now.

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Letters From The Past

The first email I got this year was from myself.

I’d written it in July 2012, addressed to the Me of 2022, and scheduled it to arrive in the future. It didn’t come as a complete surprise: I knew I’d written the letter, because I’d been wondering, recently, where I’d saved it. There were a few of them in total, written between 2012 and 2015, all to be read in 2022 (because it was ten years after the first, not because the year was special). But I wasn’t expecting the email, and I suppose on that front, my past self is lucky that I never deactivated my old email addresses despite changing my name.

In this first letter, my sixteen-year-old self speculated about what I might have done in the past ten years, and also tried to give me some advice. This had the weird effect of feeling like I was being patronised by myself, although at least younger me was self-aware enough to know that there was no way I’d be taking any advice from a teenage version of myself. Still, it was a snapshot of my expectations for my future, and one that managed to surprise me despite thinking I knew my past self quite well.

It was funny to see the kind of things I wasn’t sure if I’d remember. I made a reference to Brave New World, then wondered if I’d get it, and supposed that if I did, it was either because I hadn’t read many more books, or because I’d reread it recently. Well, I’ve probably read well over a thousand books since I wrote that letter, and I absolutely couldn’t tell you when I last read Brave New World, but I still remember the helicopters, so sixteen-year-old me needn’t have worried on that front.

Some of my teenage self’s expectations were predictable. “Published? I really hope so. If not, I wonder what happened. Did you stop writing? Give up on your dreams?” I want to say: not yet, give me a few months, come back to me in June and I’ll have a different answer for you, I never stopped, I didn’t give up. I want to tell my younger self that sometimes things take much, much longer than you were expecting. I had high expectations for myself as a teen writer; I was convinced I’d be published before I was twenty, or at least not long afterwards. (You can imagine the crisis I had on my twentieth birthday when I realised that definitely wasn’t going to happen.)

Then my younger self gives me some advice that reminds me exactly how young sixteen really is. “You know, scrapping teenage fantasy doesn’t mean giving up on everything you ever wanted to do, it just means being realistic about it. If you’re still writing, but you have a day job and you’re struggling to find the time, remember – if you really want something, really really, then you’ll get it. Eventually.”

If only the world actually worked like that. If only wanting was all you needed to ensure success. I know what I meant: I know I was trying to encourage myself not to give up, even if things didn’t take the path I was hoping they would. But I was writing this from the point of view of a mostly able-bodied, mentally stable teenager. Becoming disabled and grappling with my mental health has left me with a very different perspective — that sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want something or how hard you work, because it will be taken from you. The hardest lesson I ever learned as a teenager was that determination and willpower aren’t enough and you can’t actually overcome every barrier in life just by trying hard enough.

The same naivety is visible later in the letter: “I hope you’re still writing. And dancing. Whether or not you’re a dancer or a dance teacher – and if you’re not, DON’T think of that as failure! – I hope you’re still using that gift somehow.” It’s funny: my sixteen-year-old self had such high expectations for me as a dancer, despite the fact that I’d only recently returned to classes. I really thought I might be able to do vocational training one day, or become a teacher. These days, I’m trying to gradually rebuild enough strength to even do a barre, after being kept out of the studio for the best part of two years by the pandemic and a cascading series of injuries.

And hey, I’m not supposed to think of it as a failure that I didn’t achieve my dreams in that regard. Which, well, I wasn’t, but I appreciate the reassurance anyway — and maybe my younger self would have been proud of some of the performances I’ve done in the intervening years, even if they wouldn’t quite be able to fathom how it feels to have a left knee determined to stop me dancing. I know they can’t imagine that, because of the way sixteen-year-old me went on to tell me I couldn’t give it up now, and should start classes again if I’d quit. Again with the assumption that all anything requires is determination.

It’s strange, to be reminded that once upon a time I trusted my body to still be able to do what I wanted it to in the future. It never even occurred to me in 2012 that it might be my health, not my choices, that changed my plans.

At least there’s one regard in which I wouldn’t have disappointed my past self: “I wonder what you did at uni. Was it ASNaC? Or did you go a bit more normal and do, like, English or something? Please don’t say you did something normal. I’m disappointed in you if you did.” With a BA in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and an MA in Early and Medieval Irish, I can definitely promise my younger self that I didn’t do something normal at university.

This anxiety about abandoning my teenage weirdness pervades these letters. Letters plural, because although I did go looking for the file containing the others, I didn’t need to: the 2013 letter showed up in my inbox this morning.

The 2013 letter is an interesting one, written maybe two weeks before I injured my wrists and temporarily lost the use of my hands, developing chronic pain that still plagues me to this day. I’m much harder on myself in that one: rather than simply wondering whether I’d managed to get anything published yet, I told myself, “I’m disappointed if you haven’t made it to successful author status yet. You better have published a few novels though. I mean, I’m seventeen and I’ve completed 12 first drafts and written Watching nine times, so you legitimately have no excuse for not doing anything. You can just dig them out and edit them, right?”

Harsh. But I get it, I really do. Seventeen-year-old me had spent the year writing intensively, averaging about 90k a month. I never stopped. Every time I finished a book I’d start another one, barely resting in between, and I had half a dozen more lined up in my head to work on. It was like I couldn’t stop, until the moment my hands went caput and I was forced to. Of course I wanted to know it was worth something, that it went somewhere, that I wasn’t wasting my time. I was sacrificing my time — and my health — at the altar of writing, and I wanted an answer.

This letter, written two weeks before my injury, shows again that hubris of able-bodied youth: “you legitimately have no excuse”. Would I have said the same if I knew I was going to spend the next year using voice recognition because I couldn’t type? That I would be having to reconstruct my entire sense of self because I lost a huge chunk of my personality, social life, and dreams when I lost the ability to play music?

No excuse. What a letter to leave for your future self. Again, I leap to defensiveness: come back to me in a few months, I’m trying, I didn’t give up. But I know it isn’t this me that past me is talking to, really. It’s that me. It’s the version of me that I was pushing and pushing until the moment I snapped.

Throughout the letter, there are references to fandom and nerdiness (I was really into Hannibal at the time, apparently), bookended by speculation about whether I’d get the references, whether I’d know what I was talking about. It’s like I thought nine years would be long enough to forget everything about my adolescence. And that’s what I mean about the anxiety about losing my weirdness. I think the fact that most of the adults I knew weren’t interested in these things made me think that as an adult, I wouldn’t be either.

I was seventeen, and at seventeen you’re in this weird, nebulous, liminal state where nobody can decide whether to treat you like a child or an adult. You’re an adult when they want you to make choices and take responsibility; a child when they don’t want to have to listen to you. In this letter, I can see those pressures weighing on me, this fear that if I wanted to be ‘grown up’ I would have to let go of all the things that made me, well, me. The bizarre hopes and dreams, the niche interests, the nonconformity… I was even worried whether future me would still be queer, or whether that would genuinely have turned out to be a phase.

(It has not.)

“Please tell me you followed through with SOMETHING you wanted to do as a teenager,” I begged my future self, because apparently nothing scared me like the idea of becoming a “straight, married, normal person with an office job”. And while in hindsight it is hilarious that both of these letters, 2012 and 2013, wonder if 2022!me is married, I can’t help but feel sad for my younger self, who didn’t have a roadmap for their future. I didn’t know how to imagine me as an Adult Who Stayed Weird, because I didn’t know anyone like me. Just as I didn’t really know what a queer future would look like, because I didn’t know any older queer people who might offer me alternative paths to follow.

Both of these emails were scheduled on the same day, in early July 2013, which means I don’t think my 2014 and 2015 letters will be showing up in my inbox over the next couple of days. But I dug them out anyway, and the mood there is very different.

The 2014 letter was written in January of that year, so it’s only a few months later. Still, that version of me feels much older. Much sadder, too: midway through one of the hardest years of my life, grappling with pain and new limitations on my body and my hopes for the future. Maybe that’s what made my eighteen-year-old self so much kinder than their younger counterpart. Eighteen-year-old me had learned that the pressure to live up to your younger self’s expectations could be crushing, and they didn’t want that for me.

They wrote, “I think what I want really though is for you to be you. I’ve spent a lot of time clinging on to dreams that were broken and worthless instead of finding new ones and I don’t want you to do the same thing so, if you can, just be you. Write books if that’s what you do (and I hope it is), but don’t feel like you have to because your eighteen-year-old self would be disappointed if you didn’t.”

Eighteen-year-old me had learned that you can’t keep clinging to something that’s no longer what you want, just because you wanted it for a very long time in the past. They’d learned that sometimes plans change, and it’s not within your control, but if you keep trying to stick to the original map once the road has been redirected, you’re going to end up stuck in a bog somewhere.

Eighteen-year-old me was also less focused only on what I might personally have achieved. They were thinking about the world: “I hope the world is a better place for you. I hope there’s a better Minister for Education than Gove, and not everything is about straight white dudebros, and that the world isn’t so cissexist and heteronormative…” It’s interesting to see these glimpses of my political concerns from early 2014, but it’s tough to imagine writing back to my younger self and telling them how much worse so many things have got.

Not everything is about straight white dudebros, at least: books especially are far, far more diverse than they were in 2014, particularly in YA, and my current self has access to stories than 2014!me couldn’t even imagine picking up from a mainstream bookshop. But the world is a darker place, overshadowed by the pandemic and the government’s perpetual mixture of incompetence and corruption, dogged by climate change, and punctuated by widespread mainstream transphobia in the media. How can I tell my eighteen-year-old self that? How can I take away their hope that the future would be a better place?

I can’t, of course, but it’s a sobering thought.

And finally, we come to my last letter. 2015. “I’m Finn, sometimes, you know,” it begins, because nineteen-year-old me wasn’t sure how to address the letter or how to sign it off, caught in the grips of an ongoing identity crisis. It goes on to wonder why I’m writing, when I have enough journal entries and poems to give my future self a pretty good picture of who I used to be, but then says, “I still kind of want to write these letters. I always think about who I’m going to be. I think it’s because I’m not so sure about who I am now.”

I can understand that. I know myself better in 2022 than I did in 2015, and certainly better than in 2012, but I still perpetually wonder about my future self. If I sat down to write a similar letter to me in 2032, what would I say? I can’t fathom a version of me who is in their mid-30s. It seems impossible. Absurd, even, and any letter I write now would surely feel as childish and far removed from myself in 2032 as the letter from 2012 does now. I know people who have 3-year, 5-year, 10-year plans for their futures, but I don’t have a strong enough sense of what I want to do that: I can’t work towards a goal I can’t visualise.

That’s something I have in common with my nineteen-year-old self, I suppose, but not with my seventeen-year-old self, who thought the biggest risk to my dreams was me abandoning them, and not life getting in the way.

When I wrote this letter in 2015, I had just been told I might have coeliac disease, and was grappling with the idea of yet another health issue to work around. I hoped future me would “beat” my disabilities, but I said I’d understand if I didn’t. If it all got too much, and I took to my bed. Well, I haven’t given up on anything much. But I do spend a lot of time in my bed, and I guess at nineteen I understood that. The fatigue was beginning to close in already.

There’s one thing, however, that really stands out from that letter: “I’m working on the Moth Trilogy at the moment. Book one is proving more difficult than ever, but I drew a new map of Espera today, and I’m pretty proud of it. I hope you’ve done something with these books, because they are taking up a lot of my thought power and energy. If you haven’t, though, I can only hope it’s because you’ve found something else worthwhile to work on.”

The Moth Trilogy became The Butterfly Assassin. The professionally-designed map that will be in the final book is based on the one I drew the day I wrote this letter. Book one may have been “proving more difficult than ever”, and it may have taken another six years to wrangle it into shape, but I got there.

I got there, I want to write back, it was worth the thought power and energy, it was worth the time, it was worth all the other books I wrote and abandoned, you were right.

2015 is the last of these letters, and the one most open to the possibility of changing. I was a self in flux, and I knew I would continue to change. I asked myself whether I’d ever followed through on some of my plans. If I hadn’t, was it because I was too scared, or because I’d found a different path that made me happier? It echoed the post I wrote a few weeks ago, about trying to make my choices based on love, not fear. It seems I’ve understood this tension for longer than I realised — and that I knew sometimes I need a reminder to consider why I’m actually doing or avoiding something.

From my sixteen-year-old self, who couldn’t really imagine giving up on any of my current writing projects, to my nineteen-year-old self, who had accepted that I might move on but really hoped they’d go somewhere, I can see a shift in how my teenage selves perceived future me, and what that says about how they perceived themselves.

Two weeks after writing 2013’s letter, I was forced to face the fact that we cannot predict our future. That sometimes our bodies let us down, and our plans become impossible, and it doesn’t matter how much we want it, that doesn’t mean we can have it. 2014 and 2015’s letters reflect that knowledge. They make fewer demands of my future, but they offer soft hopes: that I won’t have given up or abandoned my dreams, but found better ones. That I’ll have moved on, rather than walked away.

What I learned between sixteen and nineteen was that you don’t always get a choice about which of your dreams you’re able to keep pursuing. Sometimes, things fall by the wayside because of circumstances outside of your control. But sometimes, you move on because you’ve found something better. You set aside an old dream, and create a new one; you shelve a book, and write another. And that’s okay. Good, even. Because you can’t always be trying to live up to the expectations of your younger self, who didn’t know what you know now, who wasn’t who you are now.

But sometimes, your younger self really is the foundation on whom your adult self is built. And all of them, all these past selves, were hoping I would keep writing, and that I would be published by the time I read their letters. January 2022 still sees me in the pre-publication void, but I’m close. So close. By July, the ten-year anniversary of writing the first of these letters, I’ll be able to honestly say, Yes. I did it. I did what you wanted. I did what we wanted.

Even despite the year spent dictating because my hands didn’t work. Even despite abandoning all the novels my teenage self had high hopes for. Even despite not “beating” my health issues. Even despite the challenges of the publishing industry being greater than I ever imagined.

I did it. It’s my debut year. The Butterfly Assassin comes out in May.

I’m pretty proud of it, said nineteen-year-old me, and honestly? So am I.

Add The Butterfly Assassin on Goodreads, or pre-order it now.

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Why I Have (Not) Made Words This Week

I send a lot of emails, and all of my emails are extremely long. I get this from my mum. I vividly remember my form tutor at school telling me he found her emails intimidatingly long (she also worked in the school; she wasn’t emailing him about me) and I sympathise. I like to try and anticipate all the questions and clarifications the other person might need, and provide as few opportunities for misinterpretation as possible. Also, I have a lot to say. I mean, you’ve read my blog posts, right? Anything under two thousand words is a rarity.

However, I’ve concluded that a lot of my emails can be boiled down to three basic types.

  1. I know I was supposed to make words, but I have not made words, because {explanation}.
  2. I know I was only expected to make a few words, but I made Many Words, I’m sorry, enjoy.
  3. I made many words but they were the wrong words, so that doesn’t really help you, sorry.

Mostly, I alternate between type 1 and 2. One week, my emails to my supervisor will say, “So, I know I hadn’t actually told you I’d started writing, but here’s fourteen thousand words that you weren’t expecting. When did you want to have a meeting?” The next week, I’ll be saying, “Unfortunately, I have made no progress whatsoever. Should we postpone?”

Frequently, the in type 1 actually turns it into a type 3: “I have made no thesis progress but I did write 8.5k in planning notes for a novel.” “I need some extra time for these edits because I had to write an academic article.” “I know I was supposed to be translating this quatrain, but have you seen my blog this week? I made so many words.”

Sometimes there’s another explanation, usually along the lines of “unfortunately, Pain” or “I was being a depression slug and therefore nothing has happened at all in any direction”. However, these can be tricky to word. What’s an appropriate amount of disclosure? Is it enough to say I didn’t get something done “because of my health” or do I need to be more specific than that? Perhaps it’ll have more effect if I describe the exact way that the tendons in the back of my hands feel during a flare (“like cheese wire, slicing the skin from the inside every time I move my fingers”), or what kind of a migraine this one was (“there is a demon sitting in my eye socket, chewing on the back of my eyeball”).

To help myself navigate this delicate balance between necessary disclosure and inappropriate oversharing, I decided to compile some excuses for why I haven’t made words, or have made the wrong words, or have made more words than I was expected to.

Bonus points if you can figure out which of these are excuses I have actually truthfully made.

  • Unfortunately, I was possessed.
  • I fell asleep on a hill and ended up in the Otherworld, which would have been fine, except I forgot to bring earplugs and I didn’t manage to get out of there before their band sent me to sleep. Best nap I’ve had in ages, though.
  • I had to go to war to defend the honour of a semicolon. I lost, but I did manage to save three commas during the fighting.
  • The demon to whom I accidentally sold my soul while trying to source a copy of that one out-of-print academic book told me they would give it back, but only if I wrote them an exclusive 10,000 word fanfic about their obscure medieval Irish OTP before midnight. I spent the first three hours trying to figure out which Cormac they were actually talking about, and by the time I finished the story my eyeballs were melting. On the plus side, I now know far too much about this one obscure character who shows up, like, three times.
  • I had only intended to write the 2k you asked for but I entered a fugue state and by the time I came out of it there were eight thousand words in the document. I don’t know how they got there but I’m afraid to delete them in case I anger some kind of supernatural beastie.
  • The muse… the muse has abandoned me… I have been cruelly repudiated…
  • I was baking. Would you like some cake? No, I’m not trying to distract you, it’s a genuine offer. Well, if it also serves to distract you, that’s a bonus, but — of course that’s not my intention, how dare you suggest such a thing.
  • Studying palaeography gave me too many feelings about this one secondary character, and so I rewrote the entire novel to make the manuscript production scenes more accurate. I realise I was supposed to be transcribing a text, but I’m happy to send you the sexy scribe scenes if it would help demonstrate my knowledge.
  • I was distracted by my quest to resurrect Robert Graves for the sole purpose of fighting him in a Tesco car park.
  • I was distracted by my quest to resurrect Iolo Morgannwg for the sole purpose of fighting him in a Tesco car park.
  • I was distracted by the possibility of killing two birds with one stone and resurrecting Robert Graves and Iolo Morgannwg so that they can fight each other in a Tesco car park. Unfortunately, all the books on necromancy are held in Special Collections and due to the pandemic, their hours have been very limited, so I haven’t yet managed to book a slot.
  • Somebody was being wrong on the internet, and, well,
  • I accidentally looked at my novel for five minutes too long and decided I hated all of my prose. So I rewrote it. Here’s a surprise redraft.
  • Óengus visited me in a dream and told me many great secrets. Unfortunately, I never remember my dreams, and so I have absolutely no idea what they were. I’ve spent three days trying to nap long enough to prompt a repeat performance, in case more of it sticks this time.
  • I had a disagreement with a crow, and I might be cursed.
  • I had a disagreement with a swan, and I might be cursed, but I definitely have a broken arm.
  • I had a dream about a book that was utterly crucial to my thesis and now I don’t think I’ll eat or sleep until I’ve searched the earth to find it. I can describe it to you — do you know anyone who might be able to find it?
  • In order to properly edit the science scene, I had to teach myself several years’ worth of chemistry and then design a complex, brutal poison. As I have not taken any science subjects since I was sixteen, there was a learning curve. Also, I think I’m on a watchlist now.
  • I’m sorry I haven’t answered your emails for the last four months. I was busy single-handedly defending the province in a series of elaborate single combats.
  • In a follow-up to my last email, I would like to clarify that it was not entirely single-handed, as my best friend and designated driver was also present. However, I would like to emphasise that neither of us had a phone charger and therefore responding to your emails was still entirely impossible.
  • I believed that the most effective way to write a synopsis was to travel to a point in the future at which I will have already written the book, read the book, and then come back and summarise it. Unfortunately, even after I had solved the small hurdle of building a time machine, this caused a recursive loop of plot holes. Eventually I had to travel into the past before I had this great idea and destroy my own time machine, but of course this trapped me there. I’ve been waiting three weeks to reach Tuesday.
  • Wait, it’s Monday? Damn. Didn’t wait long enough.
  • I was bitten by a radioactive pancake and needed to take a week to adjust to my new superpowers. They have not so far encompassed the ability to consume either gluten or milk, so I can only assume this is punishment for my hubris in trying to make pancakes in the first place.
  • I am very small and I have no money, so you can imagine the kind of stress that I am under.
  • I did translate the quatrain you assigned me for the seminar, but it turned out to be a summoning spell for an extremely grumpy creature (who insisted “demon” was an offensive term), and he, uh, maybe ate my notes so that nobody else could use the spell.
  • After retranslating the quatrain, I have concluded that it only became a summoning spell because I misidentified a word as dative when it should have been accusative. In my defence, it’s a Middle Irish text and the two are virtually indistinguishable at this stage.
  • I was abducted by aliens to compete in a Scrabble tournament to determine the fate of the world. However, they couldn’t agree on an orthographic standard and spent four days arguing about spelling. They did not take kindly to my input, nor to the accusation that orthographic standards are frequently classist and also colonialist. Also, I’ve never played Scrabble before, but they thought I was lying and refused to explain the rules. So I might have doomed us all. Sorry.
  • I tried to make sourdough, but gluten free bread is like… the worst. It didn’t end well.
  • My landlord knocked a hole in my kitchen and I had to excavate my computer from underneath the dust before I could even send you this message.
  • I fell asleep on the bus and wound up in Tralee.
  • I fell asleep on the bus and wound up in Galway.
  • I fell asleep on the bus and wound up in a síd apparently only accessible via a portal in a Bus Éireann station. The only way to leave is by bus, and, well, they’re Bus Éireann, so it was three hours late.
  • Due to overwhelming terror of mortality and the fear of not writing all the things I want to write, I have not slept in three weeks in an attempt to get words on the page. Here are 350,000 words of assorted novels. I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what order they’re supposed to go in.
  • I received a letter from a desert island castaway who could only be rescued on a raft made entirely of essays about queer theory in Celtic Studies. Since there aren’t enough of those to make a raft, I had to write some. I think we’re nearly buoyant but one big wave could end that.
  • Somebody recalled the exact library book I needed for this thesis chapter so unfortunately, I had to hunt them down and kill them.
  • Did I mention that I was possessed?

And finally,

  • Trying to write an MA thesis at the exact same time as editing your debut novel and planning its sequel is actually really hard, and I can only make academic words by neglecting fiction words or vice versa. In order to handle the guilt about the things I’m not doing, I decided to do neither of these things, and instead write an increasingly silly blog post, so that I can feel equally guilty about all of them.

In conclusion, I have made some words, but they were the wrong words. I’m sorry.

If anyone sees Óengus, tell him to email me next time.

If you enjoyed this post, you can support me by buying me a coffee, or by pre-ordering The Butterfly Assassin.

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Legendary Linguist or Mortified Monoglot?

As Duolingo introduces a new level, “Legendary”, above the usual five — one that will turn my golden Irish skill-crowns a silvery blue-purple — I find myself wondering how much my Irish has actually improved in the months years since I started the course.

My 937-day Duolingo streak has not been solely dedicated to Irish: there was also a brief flirtation with Gaelic and Latin, and more recently, a sustained affair with Esperanto. But the Irish course remains the only one where I’ve completed all skills up to level five, and am now in a position to try and prove myself a Legend.

Racing through the no-hint ‘challenges’ required to gain Legendary status for the early skills, I can’t help but think it’s testing me more on my knowledge of Duolingo than my knowledge of Irish. Laziness has meant that, ever since I completed the Irish course, I’ve found myself “practising” skills I already knew back to front whenever my weekly XP dropped too low and I was on the verge of beeing yeeted out of the Diamond League. As a result, I have the sentences basically memorised, at least up to the first checkpoint and some way beyond it, and no longer need to really think about what the words actually mean, or how the grammar is constructed.

There’s certainly a value to the no-hint challenge; I probably overuse hints, not trusting my own memory or spelling even when I’m right, and the structure of these new Legendary lessons means they are harder than the ordinary lessons of the lower levels. But I breeze through them. One done, three done, five done, more. I’m a legend, apparently. I’ve gone from twentieth in my leaderboard to first in a day. I’m proving my linguistic skills with every correct answer.

And yet, when I go to the online Irish conversation evening I attend most weeks, my contribution is always the same. Dia duit. Tá tuirse orm, agus tú féin? Tá sé ag cur báisti i gCorcaigh. And then I lapse into silence, struggling to follow the thread of the conversation, let alone contribute to it. When I do try and speak, my clumsy sentences are peppered with English words and apologies.

My journey with Irish began four years ago, or seven years ago, or longer, depending on where you count from, and it hasn’t been limited to Duolingo — the Irish course in particular offers a woefully incomplete education in the principles of the language — but the app still symbolises the paradox of my failure to learn the language despite going through the motions. No longer a beginner, out of my depth in intermediate classes, and miles from the academic Irish I need to read the articles relevant to my field of study, I exist in a perpetual state of monolingual frustration, wondering how on earth it is people actually attain fluency in any language other than their mother tongue, since I seem completely incapable of it.

Four years ago: I spent the week at Oideas Gael in Co. Donegal, for their annual Language & Culture Summer School. Mornings were spent in the level one Irish class with the other beginners, acquiring an Ulster tinge to my Irish that has never entirely faded. Afternoons were spent set-dancing, the Irish instructions more or less incomprehensible to me and my partner, a classmate from level one. Some of them we figured out through logic and process of elimination (“the door says slí amach, so amach must mean ‘out’!”); others we replaced with our own terms (“swap the women!”), having given up on parsing the language being called out as we frantically copied the others in our set.

I left Donegal exhausted and headache-ridden, but with slightly more Irish than I had when I arrived. I intended to go back — last year, this year — but Covid and practicalities have so far interfered with those plans.

The most important vocab: “I would like a cup of tea, please. Thank you.”

Before that, seven years ago: an optimistic fresher with big ideas about how well I’d cope with the workload at Cambridge, I signed up for the extracurricular modern Irish classes being held in the department. I made it most of the way through the term, overwhelmed and exhausted and completely incapable of remembering anything I learned, before I acknowledged that it was never going to happen and dropped out.

Before that… what came before that? Teenage me discovering an early precursor of Duolingo, a website that promised to teach me Irish through flashcards. I learned dia duit and the names of some animals and little else; the one that stuck was féileacán, butterfly. I’m not sure why that word, more than bó or madra. It charmed me, I think, and in that moment I began to understand Irish as a living language, one that real people spoke, which wasn’t limited to fantasy novels and Clannad.

Before that: not much. The Clannad CD my uncle bought me. Learning Siúil a Rún by ear, with no idea what the words actually meant, the taste of the sounds in my mouth little more than nonsense syllables endlessly repeated.

Where did my Irish journey begin? Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 20. And then it went in circles, endlessly, never breaking out of the loop.

I’m being unfair to myself, of course. I know that I’ve improved from where I was seven years ago, or even where I was four years ago. But how much? Enough to justify the hours spent on Futurelearn, Duolingo, in online classes at UCC and Oideas Gael? Enough to make me believe I’ll ever be anything other than a monolingual Anglophone? Enough to read the articles my supervisor recommends without recourse to Google Translate, a dictionary, and several hours of crying? Enough to stop feeling like an outsider in my field, an impostor, incapable of catching up to those who grew up in Ireland and took Irish at school and never had to go through this painful, painstaking process as an adult?

There’s something intensely alienating about being an English person in Celtic Studies — about being any non-Irish person — and not having Irish, and not knowing how to get it, either.

I have five years of studying Old Irish under my belt, and two more years of independent research on the literature. And yet Modern Irish has never been part of my training, and now, as I move into looking more at early modern material, I feel keenly the lack of it. My inability to read scholarship written in Irish feels disrespectful, but I’ve yet to find out how on earth I’m meant to learn academic Irish. Classes for adults and international students focus on conversation, and the rhythms of dialogue are miles from the complicated passive constructions of academic articles. I have been taught how to give directions, but not what to do when a writer insists on putting their sub-clauses first. I’ve learned how to describe the furniture in my bedroom (when will I ever need this?!), but not the technical vocabulary for the collection of folklore and oral storytelling.

There’s a wall, and I’ve hit it: the endless purgatory of the advanced beginner, the lower intermediate learner, the medievalist with a solid understanding of the grammar who can’t string a sentence together. Classes where the genitive is considered too complicated go over my head in terms of finding the words to make myself understood, and I want to say, Old Irish has four and a half cases, I’m not afraid of the tuiseal ginideach, just teach me how to speak. I can read more than I can understand but my memory fails me when I come to write. My anxiety fills me with distrust in my own ability to remember a word and its usage, and so every sentence I speak is prefaced by apologies and followed by a hasty translation into English, in case I wasn’t understood.

I’m perpetually aware of my outsider status. English in Ireland. English and studying medieval Irish literature. English and explaining the Táin to Irish people, feeling like I’m sasanachsplaining, feeling like one of these days, somebody’s going to tell me I have no right to think I understand Cú Chulainn better than they do, when for four years my research has revolved around him. Self-conscious about my pronunciation at conferences and in videos, second-guessing every name. Unable to explain to supervisors and faculty exactly how bad my Modern Irish is, because they assume I’m being self-deprecating, used to Irish students who, despite their protests and claims that “the way it’s taught” means they’ve learned nothing, still have twelve years of study under their belt. Frustrated at how few resources there seem to be to reach the level I need, because the answer feels like I just asked for directions from an unhelpful uncle: “Well, if I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t have started here…”

Tá Gaeilge agam remains a lie, despite all my promises to myself and despite all my efforts otherwise. But my Duolingo account shows an Irish tree glowing gold and now, partially, a silvery blue-purple that tells me I’m a legend.

Yeah, right. A legend about an anxious Sasanach, verbose in English and silent in Irish, passionate about the Ulster Cycle and afraid to pronounce the Irish name of it. Rúraíocht. Google Translate struggles with that one. Rory? it offers hopefully, and I can’t even mock it, because it handles the sentences in this article I’m reading a lot better than I do, untangles the knots of their construction so that all that’s left for me is to repair the torn threads where a technical term slipped through its net.

What do you buy an Ulster Cycle nerd for Christmas? A framed print of a Cú Chulainn illustration and multiple versions of the Táin.

The real reason I don’t speak at Irish classes and conversation evenings is because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my outsider’s tongue, ashamed of my failures to learn, ashamed that I seem to have no facility for languages at all. My sensory processing issues and poor memory team up to leave me bewildered and speechless whenever I’m put on the spot, unable to comprehend a word that’s said to me or, if I manage that, find the words to respond. For somebody who can make English dance to their tune and has been known to talk for six hours straight, this wordlessness is humiliating.

It will be good for your Irish, says my supervisor, when I tell him how hard I find reading articles in Irish. Wait, you can read Old Irish but Modern Irish is a struggle? ask incredulous internet friends, not realising that when it comes to Old Irish, nobody is trying to take my dictionary away from me, and nobody is asking me to shape my own thoughts into the language. Only to unravel others’, and that’s easier, because try as I might, my thoughts seem unshakeably English in their nature, and resist the process of dismantling required to remake them into something that makes sense in Irish.

I’m not monolingual by choice. But I seem incapable of being anything else.

And so I go back to Duolingo. Maybe this time, by the time I’ve got through the course, I’ll dare say more than I’m tired and it’s raining in Cork. Maybe I’ll start to trust my tongue not to fail me and my memory to give me the right words. Maybe I’ll stop freezing whenever anyone addresses me directly in conversation.

Maybe, but probably not.

Legendary, indeed.

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Lowering The Barre

The mantelpiece makes a poor barre.

It’s Thursday morning, and I’m wearing my ballet shoes — a rare occasion these days, even if today they’re paired with faded black leggings, laddered in one thigh, and an oversized My Chemical Romance t-shirt I bought myself as a gift for hitting a writing milestone. I’d love to say I got up early to start the day with a barre, but my knees don’t actually bend when I first get up, let alone the rest of me, so it’s almost noon by the time I press play on the familiar piano music.

I’m in my living room, which is a mediocre studio at best, barely half a dozen paces diagonally, made narrow by the sofa. The mantelpiece is slightly too high for a barre and, being a solid block of wood, leaves me with nowhere to put my thumb, but it’s my best option; the stools by the breakfast bar are too low and unstable to be a viable alternative, and there’s no space for other furniture here. Still, it could be worse — at least I’ve something to hold onto.

I told myself when I moved in that I’d do this. The first time I saw pictures of the flat on Daft.ie, I saw the living room and thought, “Oh, I could do a barre in there!” Its laminate flooring seemed a step up from the carpet in my old house in Cambridge, even if it’s a fraction of the size, and having anything to hold onto that wasn’t a dining chair was exciting. I pictured myself doing a barre each day, or at least a few times a week, building up my strength in anticipation of studios re-opening.

I didn’t.

Dance has been the main casualty of lockdown for me, with studios closed and classes cancelled and every space to small to jump in. Combined with the loss of motivation, I plummeted from dancing five days a week in preparation for a show to dancing maybe once a month, and my fitness has gone with it.

But now, in quarantine and twitchy with energy I don’t have space to walk off, I’m trying again. I’ve told myself I have to do twenty minutes. After twenty minutes I can stop, but not before. It’s a useful rule, because sixteen minutes in to what would once have been only the first third of a class, my FitBit informs me that my heartrate is well into the peak range and I’m sweating enough to have to prop open the front door (there are no windows in the living room).

I make it through my twenty minutes. I manage thirty, if you include stretches — which I do, because the cage of protective muscles around my injured hip that was plaguing me a year ago has tightened into a knot and my flexibility has suffered. My legs are shaking a little with exertion, and I suspect I’ll need a nap this afternoon.

It’s a start.

On Friday, I don’t dance, not because I’ve chosen inactivity but because I’ve decided that a better use of my restless energy is to reorganise all of the furniture in my bedroom. This is easier said than done, since the room isn’t large enough to allow for manouevring, and furniture has to be disassembled and reassembled in its new location. I spend so much of the afternoon taking objects up and down the stairs that I end up hitting my 8,000 step count for the day without leaving the flat, despite it being barely ten paces from one end to the other.

On Saturday, I wake feeling like I’ve been beaten up.

This is not unexpected, but still, the double-whammy of the aches from Thursday’s barre and Friday’s furniture-wrangling leaves every muscle in my body aching. Some are easily identified: my hamstrings are protesting the stretches, my quads the pliés. Others are a mystery: why are my forearms so sore? I spend the day in bed and it’s only in the evening that any energy returns, but when I attempt a plié it feels like my thighs are screaming, so I decide to give the barre a miss.

This is how it always goes: a day where I dance, three more where I don’t. I know from past experience that there’s little to be done for the aches but to push through them, and eventually they’ll recede, but those first few weeks of trying to remember how to move are fraught with the pain of readjustment, and it’s hard to endure it long enough to come out the other side. And my fatigue doesn’t help, with the uncompromising way it fells me when I dare to overstep.

Sometimes it feels like I’ll never dance again.

I remind myself regularly that this is not the case. Past experience is proof enough that interruptions don’t have to be final. Two years without Irish dance has nothing on the six years I previously took away from it; a year without a ballet class is not without precedent and always, always I’ve come back. Slowly. But I’ve come back.

Do I resent those interruptions? Sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what I could have become if my eleven-year-old self hadn’t walked away from ballet and sometimes I’m grateful that I did, before the toxic studio environment could warp my self-image at a formative time of my life. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d be a champion if I’d stayed with my original Irish dance school and sometimes I’m relieved I never found out whether or not that was the case.

But however I feel about stopping, the restart is always a perpetual state of recovery, trying to remember how to be somebody from my past and how to relearn what they once knew within the context of my present self. To constantly start again is a step backwards, a step away from the chance to grow and improve — in some ways. In others it’s its own opportunity. And it isn’t worthless.

I tell myself this a lot, when I’m resenting the process of re-learning, when I’m watching videos of my past self doing effortlessly what my stiff joints won’t allow today. I pretend to believe it. I’m told the power of positive thinking is life-changing, but most of the time it feels like strategically lying to myself, both in the promises I make and in the illusion of believing them.

This isn’t worthless. This simple barre, which exhausts me and highlights all the weaknesses of my body, isn’t worthless. It’s a process of reclamation, taking back a control and a power I used to have. It’s in defiance of the small space and the temptation towards inertia. It’s a step away from a screen, from social media, from the world, and back into mapping out the contours of myself.

Even when I’m not happy with the picture they paint.

The mantelpiece makes a poor barre. But I swap my bedroom slippers for ballet shoes, plug the little speaker into my phone, and begin.

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