This isn’t exactly unusual — I’m a nostalgic person, prone to accidentally losing hours scrolling through old pictures and reminiscing. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d be less nostalgic if I had a better memory. Mine’s terrible, so often, looking through photos like that is the only record I have that things happened at all, that versions of me ever existed.
I’m a chronic re-reader, too — again, my terrible memory can make even frequent rereads rewarding, because inevitably I forget plot points and character details, but even the books I’ve read so many times I have sections practically memorised still feel comforting to go back to. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. Sometimes I don’t feel like embarking on something new: I want a familar world, familiar characters, a story with a rhythm that feels like one of those songs you knew as a child but had forgotten entirely until you heard it again.
But recently the nostalgia’s been reaching new heights. I found myself playing RuneScape — a truly desperate state of affairs, considering how many years it’s been since I last did that. If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have told you my RS days were firmly back in 2007-08, and yet there I found myself, obsessively training my mining and smithing skills and trying to remember the quickest way from Lumbridge to Port Sarim.
And fanfic, always a source of comfort, has reflected this same nostalgia. I still read considerably more published books than fanfics (at least in terms of wordcount, if not in terms of titles), but I’ve been finding myself spending a lot more time on Ao3 recently… reading Les Mis fanfiction primarily published between 2013 and 2015. It’s not that there aren’t newer fics (the Les Mis fandom has been around in various forms since 1862, they’re not going anywhere), but it’s those older fics that I keep going back to, the dynamics and fanon that I remember from sixth form, when I was more active in the Les Mis fandom and was first dipping my toes into transformative work. Why? I don’t know. Because they’re comforting. Because they feel safe, somehow.
Then there’s music. My music taste has always been fairly eclectic, and I’ll give most things Spotify recommends to me a go, which means I often end up getting really into some obscure band that released one album in 2012 and nothing since. So, okay, I would never describe my playlists as up-to-date or engaged with the zeitgeist or whatever. I’m clueless about new releases and charts (are charts still a… thing?), which isn’t a deliberate refusal of the popular or whatever, just a side-effect of how I engage with music.
But recently, I’ve been regressing. Going back to the albums I loved when I was twelve or thirteen. And, okay, I started writing at 13 and I joined Spotify in 2009 and I’ve been making character playlists just as long, so yes, songs from those albums are still on my writing playlists, and it’s not like I ever stopped listening to them. But I’m pretty sure I haven’t listened to The Black Parade on repeat this much since roughly 2008. In my defence, it’s (a) completely full of bangers and (b) perfect for one of my writing projects, so it’s been helping me through my revisions lately, but that doesn’t change the fact that I found myself singing/yelling along to practically the whole album in my living room the other day, and might have ordered myself a MCR t-shirt as a special treat.
It’s a pandemic. That’s my excuse.
But — that is my excuse. Not to psychoanalyse myself (kidding, I love psychoanalysing myself), but I can’t help thinking this nostalgia is a symptom of all the uncertainty we’re experiencing about the future. Without a way to look forward — because we have no idea what the rest of this year will look like, let alone the impact it’ll have on next year — I’ve found myself looking back, seeking comfort in something familiar.
I saw someone on Twitter saying, “Can’t wait to live in precedented times again.” And I think that’s probably a big part of why I’ve been finding comfort in media that reminds me of the world ten or fifteen years ago. While I’d never choose to live 2007 through again — and would be even less keen to re-experience 2013-14, which was one of the worst periods of my life — it’s the familiarity that feels safe. The fics are set in a ‘modern’ world which is safely contained, separate from the drama and change and uncertainty of reality. RuneScape, while it’s changed a lot since 2007, is a way of whiling away the hours that reminds me of being eleven; it’s untouched and separate from adult reality.
And The Black Parade? Is just a really good album, to be honest.
(But it reminds me of home. It reminds me of my 12th birthday, listening to it on repeat via my old Creative Zen V and docking station, accompanied by the model dragon my sister gave me as a gift, which I’d named Máire. It reminds me of half a dozen characters I spent my teenage years writing about, because I have more writing playlists with MCR songs on them than without. It reminds me of being fifteen and afraid to like anything too visibly, making self-conscious jokes about listening to ’emo’ music because I was afraid to admit what I liked. It reminds me of all my teenage angst, which shouldn’t be comforting, except it is, because I’m not a teenager anymore.)
I’m willing to bet I’m not the only person looking to the past right now. Not just looking at Facebook ‘Memories’ of a year ago as lockdown loomed, or the year before with our normal lives untouched by pandemic, or five years ago to our undergrad days, or whatever. But finding comfort in old hobbies, familiar media, well-loved stories. Not exactly regressing to a past version of ourselves, but leaning on them for strength, because in a world where so much is uncertain and unfamiliar, sometimes you need something that feels safe.
Our unprecedented times keep getting more precedented, the longer this goes on. What was strange and unfamiliar a year ago is now a bleak reality from which it can be hard to see any escape in the near future. But the uncertainty remains: the impossibility of making plans, the constant rescheduling of anticipated experiences, the vagueness about the future.
And when the shape of the future is impossible to discern, perhaps it’s inevitable we’d find comfort in nostalgia.
Recently, I found myself in the position of needing to shift to a new blog host. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with my old host — SiteGround has been keeping the site running smoothly since 2017 — but circumstances have changed. Back then, I was getting nearly 30k hits per year, and I felt optimistic it would continue to climb. Last year? 3,000 hits. Suddenly, what had seemed good value for money had become a major expense that I couldn’t justify, and I needed to switch over to something cheaper.
I have a few ideas as to how this might have happened, and a lot of it’s on me. I deleted my entire archive in late 2019, which meant the pop culture-heavy posts from 2013 and 2014 that had been sustaining me with passive hits via Google suddenly stopped making a difference. And, of course, you can’t expect people to read your blog when you rarely post — since the re-start, I’ve only posted 19 times, which is barely once a month for the time that’s elapsed (and nowhere near as regular).
But also, the internet’s changed. It used to be full of small sites — blogs and badly coded personal websites and obscure, niche forums that sustained themselves on the same systems they’d been using for 15 years with no flashy changes to the UI. Now, it feels like everything has become far more dominated by big social media (Twitter, Instagram, etc), and there’s less space for those unpolished little corners.
And, I mean, I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, so I certainly wouldn’t want this to come across as a hypocritical lament or a tirade against social media. But sometimes I miss the world of blogs. I met so many of my teenage writing friends through blog chains like Teens Can Write Too, and some of them I’m still in touch with, all these years later. Blogs were a space that was ours, that we could customise and moderate and shape to fit what we needed. Those spaces are harder to find these days.
Though, of course, blogs self-evidently do still exist, or I wouldn’t be writing this; I don’t want to be like those people who say Tumblr is dead and nobody uses it while there are people like me who’ve been there since 2011 and have no plans to leave. But I think it’s fair to say the world of blogging has changed. Personal blogs are less of a thing, because it’s so much easier to give people updates on your life via Instagram. Professional blogs, expert blogs — those are still around. But let’s be real. I’ve never been professional a day in my life.
Anyway, what point does this musing have? Not much, except as justification for why I hopped hosts again. Since I am generally useless at remembering it exists, this does mean I don’t think I managed to transfer over my associated email account (finn AT finnlongman DOT com), so if you emailed me recently — and by that I mean in the last 3 months — your email might have been yeeted into the void, never to be seen again. I think we’ve all learned not to expect prompt replies from that account, but… well. I usually try to reply eventually. Even if it’s a year late. I’ll try and get it back up and running again, but I may have missed the point at which it was possible to recover existing messages.
Part of me feels the need to justify the continued existence of this site, too, so it’s possible having recently paid money to ensure that, I might be more motivated to post. But as Ireland continues its endless lockdown, I find I have less and less to say that isn’t thoroughly depressing. It’s very uninspiring, to spend your life in the same three small rooms, and never to see another person. Perhaps that’s why I’ve once again forgotten how to write poetry, though late last year it felt like I was remembering.
Those of us who live alone are encouraged to reach out and talk to others online, but — what is there to say? What can we talk about? I bought a different brand of tea this week, maybe. Or, my sleep schedule is now so disastrous that I may as well be living in a different timezone. I’ve heard it’s the same for those who’ve been locked down with their partner — after a while, you’ve had every conversation. There’s no news. Everything you’ve experienced, they’ve witnessed, because neither of you can leave.
Still, I’m British. When in doubt, there’s always the weather. And oh, the weather here in Ireland has been miserable. I know the stereotype is that Ireland rains all the time, but I think maybe as Brits we underestimate that. We think we know rain. We think, It can’t be that much worse than England. But the difference is, I’ve found, that the south of England (the only place I’m qualified to talk about) will rain for an hour, maybe two, during an overcast day; a particularly bad storm might last longer. When Ireland rains? It will rain relentlessly for six hours. The entire day will be lost to the downpour. It’s so persistent, and sometimes it goes on for days at a time.
It has not, as you can imagine, done my seasonal depression much good. Which combined with isolation and Regular Bog-Standard Clinical Depression has resulted in… some not-great mental health days, I will confess.
But today, the sun is shining, and while the signs of spring are few and far between, they’re there. So it’s time for me to turn off the computer and, for once, go outside.
If you’d like to support the continued existence of this blog, please consider buying me a coffee.
For the last few years, I’ve tried to resist the temptation of making New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve pointed out that they’re a lot of pressure to put on an arbitrary date; that change can come at any time; that I’m the kind of overly-ambitious perfectionist who makes unrealistic goals and only sets myself up to fail.
And hey, all of that’s probably true. But we, as humans, like markers, don’t we? We like stories and names and ways of dividing up the world into pieces that feel a little bit more manageable to process. And sometimes we just need an excuse to prompt us to reset the clock and start over again.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from 2021. I was lucky: though 2020 had its struggles, it wasn’t an especially bad year for me. Personally speaking, I’ve had far worse years, and on some levels, 2020 marked more progress for me than I’ve had in years, a chance to finally break through of the holding pattern I’ve felt trapped in. That’s made it a little weird marking the end of the year, which has been so hard for so many people. Like I’m afraid to admit I didn’t hate it, in case it seems like I’m bragging.
There are some things that have been on my lists of New Year’s goals/resolutions/wishes for years that don’t have to be any more. “This year, I’ll finally query properly” was one I’ve been telling myself for a while. “This year, I want to find an agent.” Don’t need that one on the list anymore. Not sure where I stand with figuring out progress or direction or next steps: I returned to academia, but my MA’s only a year-long programme, so at some point I’m going to have to figure out what I’m doing next, again. But not yet.
There are things I want from this year that aren’t within my power. A vaccine. A book deal. Top surgery. Better health. In some cases, there are steps I can take towards them, and in others, I only have to wait. So I’m trying not to make those sorts of things my resolutions, because they’re not goals or plans, just wishes.
The question, then, is: what do I want from this year, that I can actually control?
I want to get better at Irish, which means nothing so much as putting the time in, day after day and week after week. I’ve made progress, but I’ve got a long way still to go, and always I look for shortcuts and different methods and some kind of magic trick that will just make it happen.
I want to spend less time looking at screens, and especially less time on Twitter, and more time learning what I’m like when I don’t have an audience. It’s hard, when all socialising these days is online, but I’m increasingly convinced that social media doesn’t bring out the best in me, and I want to learn to put it down for once.
I want to play the violin more often. I want to start dancing regularly again, even if I have to change it up a bit to fit in my tiny living room. I want to try and do calligraphy again. I want to remember hobbies that are physical, not digital. I want to let them stay hobbies, and stop trying to feel the need to be the best at everything.
I want to get better at letting go of negative emotions. I want to get better at keeping a check on the ways that I spiral – to stop going to bed at 3am, to start eating real meals on a semi-regular basis, to stop using sugar to convince my brain to function (because it’s wrecking my teeth and my gut).
I want to polish my Bisclavret retelling, finish my Lancelot/Galehaut retelling, maybe write something completely different and new. Maybe come back to another waiting draft or build more of words I’ve already created. I want to keep writing poems, learn to write short stories, and maybe, possibly, remember to blog more regularly.
And with blogging – I don’t want to do it because I feel like I “have” to. But to build a community again, a proper one, not based on outrage and sharp retorts and one-liners the way so much of our internet communities are these days. A chance to go back to building my own online space, instead of being trapped in the currents of big social media.
I want to see more of Cork, as the weather grows warmer and the days grow longer. I want to make the most of the time I have in Ireland, because I don’t know what will happen when I finish my MA. And when we’re allowed: I want to go to the Gaeltacht; I want to visit the places I’ve never visited that are now just a bus-ride away; I want to learn more about this country where I live.
I want to make more videos about medieval Irish lit, not because creating “content” might earn me subscribers and Ko-Fi tips or whatever, but because I want to share the stories I love with people who would never encounter them otherwise.
I want to read books in the same unselfconscious way I did as a kid, where I would reread the same book half a dozen times, where I wasn’t counting how many books I read or trying to keep to a goal or worrying what anybody else thought about my opinions. I plan to keep track of them in a document on my computer, for my own sake (my memory sucks), instead of feeling the need to track every little thing on the internet.
In the end, most of these boil down to the same kind of idea: I want to stop performing my own life, and start living it. (So of course I started by writing a blog post about it…) A challenge, when I’ve lived so much of my life on the internet, and when there are so few other ways to interact with people at the moment. But sometimes I feel like I’m holding my own emotions at arms’ length because I’m so busy worrying about what I’m ‘supposed’ to be feeling, and I want to break free of that.
2020 didn’t completely suck for me. There was loss, and there were a few months of being too depressed to function, and all in all it had some moments I wouldn’t care to relive. But the last couple of years… it’s felt like whatever else happens, I’m still growing into myself. After a few years where I felt like I was only ever falling apart and crumbling and losing pieces of myself, a year where I come out the other end feeling like me is a good year.
And on that level – 2020 was progress. 2020 was taking steps I’d been hovering on the edge of for a long time. 2020 was writing more and finding an agent and moving to Ireland and starting an MA and presenting at a conference and learning how to press ‘Send’ instead of always hesitating at the final barrier. 2020 was healing (even though chronic pain is never entirely gone). Sometimes 2020 was lonely, but mostly it was just about shining a light on all the ways I haven’t yet learned to live with the inside of my own head, making me aware of my insecurities and my doubts.
So that’s one for 2021: I want to learn how to live in my brain and in my skin, instead of always looking for distractions, and though I doubt I’ll be able to rid myself of my insecurities in a year or longer, I want to learn to live with them.
And I want to come out the other end feeling even more like me.
This Remembrance Sunday marks two years since I attended my first Quaker meeting at Friends’ House, in London.
It wasn’t an entirely typical meeting. There were a number of people there specifically to mark Remembrance, among them several members of Veterans for Peace. While my own attendance was triggered by an interest in Quakerism that had been growing for about six weeks at that point, my choice to attend on that date specifically was related to a growing discomfort with how Remembrance was being celebrated in mainstream society, and a desire to mark the day in a way that centred peace.
Quaker meetings, for those who aren’t aware, are primarily silent, but if people feel moved to speak (‘give ministry’), they stand up and do so. I’ve attended meetings that have had seven pieces of spoken ministry over the course of an hour, but those were definitely the outliers; most I’ve attended have had one or two. This meeting was a particularly quiet one, with no spoken ministry until close to the end, when a visitor stood up to express the peacefulness he’d felt throughout the meeting.
But after the meeting had been brought to a close, visitors were invited to stand up and introduce themselves, and one by one they did. There were conscientious objectors and veterans with stories of how they had stood up for their pacifist ideals. People who had been in prison, or lost their jobs, or otherwise demonstrated their commitment to peace even at personal cost.
When it came to me, I stood up and very quickly said, “Hi. I’m Finn. I don’t have a story. I’m just here.” And sat back down.
It’s the most and least honest I’ve ever been. I don’t have a story. I’m just here.
We all have a story – my journey to Quakers and interest in pacifism didn’t spring spontaneously from nowhere – but in that moment I was struck by a peculiar impostor syndrome about the fact that at the age of twenty-two, as I was then, I had nothing to show for my ideals, no demonstration of what it meant that I was a pacifist.
I still don’t. My pacifism is frequently an academic one: I’ve read books, written blog posts, thought about it a lot, but sometimes I feel calling myself a pacifist, while ideologically true, is a little bit like calling yourself a queer ally just because you don’t call people by homophobic slurs. It’s a title I’ve done nothing to earn.
Because pacifism isn’t opting out of conflict. Pacifism is working to resolve it through transformation, not violence. Pacifism is a commitment, a requirement to work actively to dismantle violence in ourselves, our communities, and our society more broadly. Pacifism requires action. Pacifism can be forceful, defiant, even aggressive.
Pacifism means addressing the roots of conflict: inequality and poverty and greed. It isn’t enough to passively oppose violence – we have to dig down to the roots of what makes people feel it’s necessary, and cut away the rot. We have to create alternatives and empower people to turn to those.
Sometimes it feels I falter at the first hurdle, though – addressing my own instinctual violence. Peace doesn’t come naturally to me; my first instinct is always to lash out when I feel threatened. I’ve struggled a lot with feeling like I’m faking my pacifism, the same way I feel like I’m pretending to be a better person than I am because being kind doesn’t always feel natural either, and has to be a conscious effort.
I believe that good is something you do, that peace is something you choose, that kindness is a decision you make. But that doesn’t free me from the impostor syndrome that I feel. One day, I think, I’ll make my peace with that, too.
I don’t have a story. I’m just here. But one piece of the story I don’t have is that my maternal great-grandfather was a conscientious objector, who spent the First World War imprisoned for his stance. Although many conchies were religious, my understanding is that my great-grandfather’s position was a political one, because of his socialist values. It affected the rest of his life: his educational opportunities, the jobs he could get. It wasn’t about a few years of labour in Dartmoor, but his entire future.
I guess he figured that was a reasonable sacrifice.
It’s one of the things I’m proudest of in my family history (although this may be because most of my family history is a mystery to me beyond the vaguest of details), and it’s part of what drew me to the Quakers, when I encountered historical accounts of their involvement with conscientious objectors. The more I learned about my great-grandfather and conscientious objectors, the more I kept stumbling on the Religious Society of Friends, in novels as well as historical material.
Always history, though. Most people’s mental image of Quakers seems to be a 17th century one, but mine was an early 20th century one, caught up with the war and all the political struggles around it. I knew they were still around, in theory, but I had no idea what they were up to these days.
So I googled it, and the next day I was at Friends’ House, trying to learn more.
My relationship with faith is a complicated one. I would be hard pushed to say for sure what I believe, and I’m constantly unlearning and re-evaluating inherited ideas about God. These days, I learn more theology from Twitter than from sermons (and I’ve deeply appreciated the opportunity to hear Jewish perspectives on Biblical stories from the various rabbis I follow).
But when it comes to religion, in the sense of a corporate body of people… I’m glad I found Quakers. Whatever I do or don’t know about my spiritual beliefs, I can find a kind of stability in those testimonies: peace, equality, simplicity, truth, sustainability.
PESTS. Because historically, that’s what Quakers have been, and that’s what we still aim to be – speaking truth to power, making good trouble, and refusing to go with the flow. I’ve got a long way to go before I can count myself as an active contributor to that tradition, just as my pacifism could serve to step out of the moral philosophy section of the library and into the world, but now I’ve got people around me bearing witness to those ideas every day. Though it’s been hard, in lockdown, to feel that connection to others I used to feel in silent meetings (Zoom is not cutting it for me, I’ll be honest), I’m still profoundly grateful to have those threads drawing us together.
My Quaker friends inspire me every time I see them lighting a candle against the vast darkness of the world, making things brighter one small light at a time. And if two years haven’t brought me certainty or peace, at least they’ve brought me a path to follow, to see where it takes me.
So. Two years since I first crept nervously into a meeting with my white poppy on my coat. London and Edinburgh and Cambridge and Liverpool and Cork and Zoom. Thanks for being there, Quakers.
Content warning: this post is about grief and contains references to suicide.
I am always haunted at Hallowe’en.
Not by ghosts in white sheets or creepy faces at the window. Just the kind of ghosts that live inside your head, half-forgotten until something draws them back to the surface and then all of a sudden you’re haunted again.
I’m not good at letting go of ghosts, in general. I’m not good at death, and I’m worse at mourning. Maybe this is a sign of privilege – that I’ve not had enough practice with it. So small griefs become bigger, burdens I should never have been carrying weighing me down because I never learned how to relinquish them.
And one of my ghosts comes out – appropriately enough – at Hallowe’en.
You know, one of the things I love about the internet is that no matter how niche or specific your interest, somebody out there has a blog about it, runs a website dedicated to it, spends their life researching it. You might be idly googling some lyrics to a traditional ballad and the next thing you know you’re on Tam Lin Balladry, scrolling through dozens and dozens of different versions.
That’s how I found Abigail.
Well, I know, now, that her name was Abigail, but actually, I primarily knew her as ‘tam-nonlinear’, her Tumblr username. She was the author of Tam Lin Balladry, collecting versions and recordings and retellings and compiling them into one site, but she also used to post about it on her blog, along with jokes and memes that referenced the ballad. We crossed paths because I posted something about one of her descriptions and the fact that it had made me laugh, and she reached out to me.
It would be wrong, probably, to say that we were friends – ‘acquaintances’ is a better word, or ‘occasional passers-by on the weird street that is Tumblr’. Different generations, different backgrounds, we fit into that weird in-between space of online coexistence, united by a common interest though we’d never have crossed paths in real life. Still, I’m easy with my online friendship, and tend to refer to anyone I’ve ever talked to as a friend, so that’s how I think of her. Maybe that’s wrong, and I don’t really have a right to that word. That’s one of the things I often wonder about.
Every year, around Hallowe’en, her Tam Lin posts would intensify – the story told in the ballad takes place at Hallowe’en. Every year, I’d reblog them, with the quiet delight that comes from understanding a niche joke. It’s not a holiday I’ve ever celebrated (growing up, my family actively ignored Hallowe’en), but I came to enjoy that particular nerdy celebration.
Almost four years ago, immediately after Trump’s election, Abigail died.
As someone with a lot of internet friends, of course I’ve thought about it – how I’d find out if something bad had happened to them, whether anyone would think to tell us, or whether they’d just disappear from my life and I’d never know what had happened. In this instance, I found out because she’d scheduled two blog posts. The first asked for somebody to take over Tam Lin Balladry, so that it could continue to exist as a living resource and not merely an archive. The second was looking for homes for her cats.
It was the cats that got me, at the time. I didn’t know how to process the idea that she was gone, and I had absolutely no idea – still don’t – what was an acceptable level of grief to feel for someone whose real name I hadn’t known until they died, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the cats. How they wouldn’t understand that she wasn’t coming back.
Would like to sleep by your side, she wrote about one. Will sneak up on you for a cuddle, about another. And for the rest of the day, the week, the month – even now – I keep coming back to those cats, and how they would be waiting for her, but she wasn’t coming back.
I suspect that some of that initial grief was guilt. Her last post, a few days earlier, had not been a happy one, and there was a part of me that felt I should have seen that something was wrong and done… what? Something. Anything. An ocean away, as a random 20-year-old, I still felt like I should have helped.
Perhaps, considering how little we knew each other, I should have let go of the grief by now. It’s been four years. But I can’t. Because if I think too long about how she wanted Tam Lin Balladry to survive, to outlive her, I have to think about the fact that the site’s last news update was from 2016. Yes, it’s still there on the internet, but it isn’t the active project it used to be. Of course it isn’t. Abigail thought she was replaceable – swap out the parts and the world continues. She wasn’t. The site’s stagnation is a reminder that the world needed her in it.
Instead she has a strange kind of immortality in the form of her Tumblr posts.
That’s the thing about Tumblr, far more than any other social media site – nothing is ever really gone. No matter the fate of the original blog, as long as somebody, somewhere, reblogged a post, it will continue to exist. Posts from eight years ago readily recirculate, accumulating new comments and discourse, and since the dashboard has no timestamps (unless added by a third-party plugin), they might as well have been posted yesterday.
Every Hallowe’en, I see posts from tam-nonlinear circulating again. Jokes, mostly. Snappy references that people familiar with Tam Lin can smile at and move on. Probably, 99% of the notes on those posts come from people who have absolutely no idea that the person who made those jokes is dead.
(Sometimes, I wonder how many ghosts there are on Tumblr. How many conversations are living on like echoes.)
But I know. And we may have hardly know each other, and yes, it’s been four years, but every time I see those posts I think of her. And I’m not the only one, because I’ve seen the way others start posting Tam Lin jokes and references at this time of year, trying to fill a hole we shouldn’t have to fill. Is it how she’d have wanted to be remembered? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s the best I’ve got.
An odd immortality. But her memory survives nonetheless.
I think about her every Hallowe’en, but this year I’m thinking about her more, with the election looming. I have so many political keywords muted on Twitter for the sake of my own mental health, and still it’s impossible not to feel the weight of it bearing down on me, even an ocean away. I think about the last four years, and wonder what would have happened if she’d lived. If her worst fears have come to pass or if maybe she could have held out long enough to see things get better.
Perhaps I shouldn’t still miss her – perhaps my grief is presumptuous and unjustified and those who knew her better look on me and wonder how I dare to say that I lost someone. (I went back and forth for days on whether to even post this; was it an act of commemoration or just weird and inappropriate? I hope I made the right call. Maybe I didn’t.) Perhaps it’s strange to grieve for someone with whom my connection was so fleeting. But it was a connection that meant something. In however niche and specific a way our lives overlapped, they did overlap.
Perhaps all of us underestimate how much those connections mean, how much meaning we ascribe to casual interactions, how many people would miss us if we were gone and how long our legacy – even if our legacy is Tumblr posts about Tam Lin – will outlive us.
And that reminds me of the tweets I saw following the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: a reminder that Jewish communities don’t use “Rest In Peace” when somebody dies, but “May their memory be a blessing”. I’ve thought about that a lot this year – it has been a year full of loss for so many people. It makes sense to me, brings comfort where rest in peace doesn’t. What does rest in peace even mean? How would we know? What comfort does that bring to those left behind? It seems to me the phrase does little to acknowledge that mourning is the part of the living, not the lost.
But may her memory be a blessing means something, brings some comfort. When faced with grief, all we have is memories – may they bring comfort. May they remind us of the good in the world, may they be a little piece of the departed that stays with us, may their legacy ensure that they’re never really gone.
I will probably never not think about Abigail when I hear or read something about Tam Lin. Probably, this abstract sadness and sense of displaced grief will keep recurring, every Hallowe’en. But what she left with me – us – was not only the loss. It was the information, the enthusiasm, the jokes, the passion, and that legacy survives.
In my last post, I shared the news that I signed with an agent, Jessica Hare, for my novel Butterfly of Night (and hopefully many more). I had enough interest in that news to make it feel worthwhile to write a follow-up post giving a bit more information about the whole process and how it worked for me. This is not exactly a “how I got my agent” post, because it’s less about the mechanics and more just a summary of the substantial journey that led up to this point. I don’t intend to suggest that the steps involved are replicable or that they should be replicated (there are… definitely faster and more efficient ways of starting a writing career than the circuitous route I took).
Since this is a journey that has taken six or eleven or sixteen years to bring me to this point, it’s hard to know exactly where to start. You could start in December, when I began querying this book, or you could start in 2004, when I wrote a play and made my friends act it out for me — a play I later turned into a story that might have been a novel if I hadn’t abandoned it partway through. The story was extremely violent and sad. I have not changed.
2004 seems a little early, though. Maybe 2009 is a better place to start — the year I joined the writing website Protagonize, where I met some of my oldest writing friends. I wrote my first novel in November 2009. It was completely terrible, but I was fine with that. I’d written it mostly to prove that I could, starting NaNoWriMo on Day 7 with no plot, no characters, and no idea how to write a book, so I’d had no expectations that it would be readable. Perhaps going into it with that very careless, light-hearted approach is why I was able to finish it in the first place. Everything’s easier when you don’t take it too seriously.
From there I wrote a dozen other novels, and they gradually got less terrible as I went along. I edited some of them; I queried one of them briefly. In 2012 I created a character called Isabel Ryans, intended as a major but secondary character in a crime novel. Despite at least two attempts at writing that book, I never got very far with it, and eventually abandoned both it and its cast. In 2014, I looked again at this character Isabel, realised that her backstory was the most interesting thing about her, and began to ponder how I might tell that story.
The result, eventually, was Butterfly of Night, my fifteenth novel.
It remains one of the only books I’ve outlined before I started, which is partly because I had always intended it to be a prequel to that crime novel I’d started. I wrote an outline that I thought would get me roughly to that point, and I sent it to a friend to read over — Cathryn, whom I’d met on Protagonize in 2009 (see, I told you the story really started there). Cathryn pointed out quite clearly that what I had was an outline for two books, not one: there was a substantial gap in the middle, a new set of stakes, and several new characters. So I abandoned the prequel idea, and began to consider the whole thing as a trilogy.
I was in the middle of my A-Levels while I was doing the planning, and with uncharacteristic restraint, I didn’t dive in right away, instead taking a bit of time to figure out the characters. My A-Level revision didn’t only delay me, though — it also helped. While learning a very large amount of French vocab in a short space of time (hundreds of words — thanks Memrise, you saved me), I used to look for patterns and stories in the odd combinations of words that would come up. I also occasionally found inspiration in the words themselves…
Timehop post from 26th May 2020
I posted the above on Facebook six years ago yesterday – the 26th May 2014. Papillon denuit, I thought, was such a dramatic way of saying moth. I wanted to see if I could use it somewhere.
It actually ended up becoming a major motif in the book. I shared my initial premise and blurb on this blog in May 2014, noting that I had two guilds of assassins called “Comma” and “Hummingbird”, but that these were placeholder names which would probably change. A reader said that they enjoyed the bird/butterfly theme, which is… how I found out that Comma was a type of butterfly. It slotted very nicely into place with the butterfly of night idea, and of course, that ended up being the title. I never did change the names of the guilds.
Anyway, I wrote the first draft of Butterfly of Night in July 2014, for Camp NaNoWriMo, finishing it while on holiday in Guernsey with my parents. My writing style is always to complete a draft very quickly and then abandon it for weeks or months before coming back to edit it — I recently returned to a book for the first time in five years — and that’s more or less what I did with BoN, too. I’ve written a new draft of it every year since 2014 (except this year, so far…). The second draft in 2015, the third in 2016… it was my Camp NaNo project multiple times, and I was never quite happy with it. Some of the rewrites were extremely drastic, changing entire plotlines; others were smaller, but still made substantial changes.
There’s also one draft I have absolutely no memory of writing whatsoever, but given that my memory is pretty spotty in general (thanks, chronic pain and mental illness), I try not to dwell too much on the fact that I’m missing that period entirely…
In 2016 I tried entering the book into Pitch Wars, but it didn’t go anywhere. I continued to edit. In early 2018 I sent out a few queries, but without much conviction: I still wasn’t totally happy with the book. I just didn’t know what to do next — I felt I’d done as much as I could do alone. So later in 2018 I tried entering it into Pitch Wars again. This time I got a couple of full requests from mentors, but ultimately wasn’t chosen.
I wasn’t sure what to do after that — should I query again? Work on something else? I spent late 2018 pretty busy with other projects — the second draft of Bard, the first draft of To Run With The Hound (one of the most challenging first drafts I’ve written because of the research involved). I had a Christmas job in a bookshop, which kept me busy, and distracted me from thinking much about querying. Then, in early 2019, I saw some tweets about Author Mentor Match, the submission window for which was due to be opening in a couple of days.
The idea of Author Mentor Match was to pair up unpublished writers like myself with a more experienced writer — someone further along the journey, even if their debut hadn’t come out yet. It was a mentorship programme similar to Pitch Wars, but a little less intense, as it didn’t have a deadline or an agent showcase. On a whim, I entered Butterfly of Night — I’d felt like I needed external support to make it better, and it couldn’t do any harm, after all.
Then I forgot about it entirely, until I got the email that I’d been picked. I was at the bus stop on my way home from dance at the time, and I had to read the email multiple times before I actually took in what it was saying. I’d been chosen as a mentee by Rory Power, author of Wilder Girls. It wasn’t until I saw her tweet about it that the excitement really hit:
Rory’s edit letter did what I hadn’t been able to do over the last few years: it asked the difficult questions I hadn’t been asking, and pointed out the fundamental structural problems. Being me, I looked at it, I looked at the book, and I went, “Welp. Time to burn this down and start over.” But like, in a good way.
So I did. I pulled the book apart and I rebuilt it from the ground up. It was the only way I was going to make those structural changes work — if I tried to fiddle about with the existing book, I’d only end up ruining what I already had. I spent a bunch of time digging deep into worldbuilding and character backstory, writing 15k of notes of all the stuff that would never make it onto the page, and I let that help me reshape the story. Having Rory there to bounce ideas off was invaluable — although many of the things she’d picked up on were issues I sort of secretly knew were there all along, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do so drastic a rewrite without someone to reassure me that it was genuinely worth the effort.
At times it felt like I wasn’t editing Butterfly of Night, I was writing a brand new book with a few similarities to the old one. But in the end, what emerged did feel like the same book — but refined and recut and made into something new. And better. So much better. I cut scenes that had been there since the first draft, and writing it in 2019 was always going to be a different experience to writing it in 2014 (I’m a different person, with a very different worldview), but the heart of it still felt the same.
And, you know, there are still little details in there that date back not just to the first draft of BoN, but to that terrible crime novel I abandoned in 2012. The fact that Isabel’s organisation is called Comma. The fact that she speaks Esperanto. The fact that she owns a green coat very like the one my sister owned at the time, which is now mine. They’re tiny details, now long dislocated from their original explanations and given new ones and integrated into the worldbuilding in different ways. But they’re a reminder that nothing is ever lost and no draft was ever a waste of time. They’re all part of the foundations on which this version of the book was built.
Worldbuilding on a bus
After that, Rory read the new draft, pointed out a couple of scenes I really didn’t need, and generally reassured me that I hadn’t broken the book completely. I did another quick redraft (I think it literally took about two weeks), cutting out those scenes, smoothing things over, and making the book 10k shorter overall, bringing it down to 90k instead of 100k in length.
And then I started my job and neglected it for a few more months. But one of the best things about Author Mentor Match wasn’t just Rory’s feedback — it was the community that formed among my fellow mentees. We were the sixth group of mentees for the programme — Round 6 — and although not everyone in R6 joined in with the obsessive and worryingly active Twitter group chats, there were enough of us in there to form a close-knit group of writing friends, ready to cheer each other on through drafting, edits, and the dreaded querying. We called ourselves Write Club.
Without Write Club, maybe BoN would have continued to lurk on my computer for months more, but as others embarked on querying, I began to get something like FOMO. No matter how torturously slow the process seemed, or how many rejections everyone was getting, I felt like I should be putting myself out there. I’d been working towards this for so long, but it was just so easy to send five queries and then chicken out and never send anymore.
So, in December, I started querying. It was all fairly conventional: I used Query Tracker to find agents, I read their MSWLs, I followed them on Twitter, I sent a few queries at a time and personalised them as best I could… I got a full request and a partial very early on, and another full request straight after the partial had been rejected, which was encouraging… and then nothing. Three months of straight rejections. Actually, mostly it was three months of silence, and then there was that one afternoon I got three rejections in a row, which was a rough day, I won’t lie.
I was beginning to give up, though. I hadn’t sent that many queries, especially compared to some of my Write Club friends, but I was still running out of people I thought might like my book, especially as I was predominantly focusing on UK-based agents. Once I spread my net further afield and sent to some US agents, I opened up a whole new set of possibilities, but my feeling was that a UK agent would be a better fit — and there didn’t seem to be that many of them who repped YA. In mid April I got one more full request, but I was still feeling fairly discouraged, and beginning to think about what I might do next. Maybe I’d work on my Bisclavret novel, and query that in the autumn…
Then #DVPit happened. #DVPit is a Twitter pitch event for authors from marginalised or under-represented backgrounds, a group I consider myself to belong to by virtue of being queer, trans and disabled.
Tried to find a picture of me that would represent that. Here I am looking tiny and gay last year.
I’d participated in #PitMad, another pitch event, a month earlier, but had had little interest from agents, so I wasn’t convinced that #DVPit would be any different, but since it was a smaller and more focused event I thought it might work out better. Aaaaand… it did. Maybe my pitches were just better, but I found I got a surprising amount of interest, enough to send half a dozen more queries, this time knowing that the people I was sending to were actually somewhat interested in my premise.
And that’s how I found Jessica! Within an hour of sending her my query she requested the full, and a few days after that emailed me asking if we could have a video call to ‘discuss editorial thoughts and next steps’. I thought it might be an R&R (revise & resubmit), so I tried not to get too excited about it, but in fact she offered representation. At that point, I had to email all the other agents who still had my query or full, asking if they were still interested and so on; a few more asked for fulls, I finally got closure on my older fulls, and I settled down to wait for the two-week deadline to be up in order to make my decision. I had sent 45 queries in total.
It was a tense couple of weeks. I was waiting on emails about next year and scholarships and so on at the same time as waiting for agents to get back to me, so essentially I jumped every time I got an email.
In the end, I didn’t end up with competing offers, so I was spared having to make a decision. A few agents stepped aside, some because they weren’t able to read the book in time, and I had a couple of near-misses — one got back to me on deadline day because she’d been going back and forth on it: she loved the book, but didn’t know how to approach submissions on it, and didn’t have a clear vision for that side of things.
Honestly, I was relieved not to be put in a position to have to decide between multiple people. I hate decisions, and there are always pros and cons on both sides. For example, if one of the bigger, well-established US agents had offered… would their experience supercede the fact they were in the US, for me? What about an agent with a lot of high-profile clients — would their extensive contacts make up for the fact they’d probably have less time to focus on me and would take longer to get back to me about things? Jessica is a very new agent, so I knew she’d be able to give me more attention than someone with a larger list, but since a lot of the advice I’d been given about looking for agents included things like “talk to current clients” and “check their sales history”, I was also a tiny bit nervous.
But I asked her lots of questions, she answered them, and ultimately I got the vibe that she really loved Butterfly of Night. What really clinched it, though, was the fact that she wasn’t expecting me to stay in one genre and only ever write dark, stabby YA books. I also write adult fiction, and I’ve never understood genre (I’m not good at fitting in a box), so I was very keen to find someone who would support my career in whatever direction it ended up going, even if it didn’t seem like a straight line on from BoN. I signed with her on the 15th May, and it’s hard to say which of us seemed more excited about it!
So that’s how it happened. This is a long post, about 3,000 words — but this was a long journey. From eight-year-old me deciding I wanted to be an author to eleven-year-old me setting myself wordcount goals to thirteen-year-old me’s first novel to eighteen-year-old me’s first draft of Butterfly of Night. I’m twenty-four now, far from the ‘teen writer’ I once was, and I’ll never be an overnight sensation — I look in astonishment at friends who are querying their first or second novel, because BoN was my fifteenth and I really needed to write all those bad books before I was able to write this one.
But these things take as long as they take, and Butterfly of Night was the kind of book that needed to spend a long time in its cocoon before it took flight. Now all that’s left to do is wait and see where the journey takes me next — and write more books, of course.
Me at eighteen, the week I finished the first draft of Butterfly of Night.
This isn’t really a blog post, as such — I seem to have lost the knack of that. I thought when the lockdown started I might start blogging regularly (to track the passing of days, if nothing else; to leave some record of all this that’s more comprehensible than my scribbled journal), but the fact that I’ve not posted since February shows you how well that went. Looking in my drafts, I found half a post from March about some of the books I was reading. Totally forgot I’d even started that.
Instead this is just a handful of pieces of news, because although they’re few and far between these days, I suspect I still have a few readers on this blog who don’t follow me on other social media. That is, if I still have any readers after letting this blog fade so completely into obscurity. My stats have officially flatlined for the past few months, and by flatlined I don’t mean “held steady”, I mean they’re at 0 views. Oops. Turns out, if you want people to read your blog, you actually have to write it. Astonishing, that.
Anyway, news:
I’m now agented! As of Friday, I’m represented by Jessica Hare of The Agency (London) Limited. She signed me for Butterfly of Night, a YA novel about a screwed-up teenage assassin and her poor life choices, but I think it’s safe to say we’re both in this for the long haul, so fingers crossed it’s the start of a long and productive partnership! I’ll talk about this whole journey in a future post, if you’d like me to — depending on where you start the story, it dates back to 2014, or 2012, or 2009, or 2004, so it hasn’t been a speedy process. I have a lot of thoughts about it all, so let me know if you want to hear them.
I (re)wrote a book. Two books, actually. In April and early May I rewrote Bard, my SF Arthurian novel from 2016. I wrote a second draft of this book in 2018 that brought it closer to what I wanted it to be, but I wanted to make some major changes this time around, mostly relating to worldbuilding (which I’ve got substantially better at). Unfortunately, in fixing these aspects, I managed to screw everything else up, and the book is now 134k of disappointment. RIP. At some point I’ll rewrite it again, but at the moment I don’t want to look at it at all, so it might be another two years before I can bear to do that… Once I was done with that, I leapt straight into another project, mostly as an attempt to avoid reality, and wrote 102k in 9.5 days. So, yes, that did bring my total up to 236k in six and a half weeks. I haven’t pulled something like that since 2013.
But reality really is terrible, isn’t it? I just… can’t read the news. Can’t watch the news. I’m coping by avoidance, and it seems to be working okay, until the news intrudes on my own life and then it all becomes unbearable. On Monday I learned that somebody I knew at university had died because of Covid. Although we weren’t close, I still have a lot of fond memories of him, and this totally knocked my feet out from under me. I averaged about 12k a day for the rest of the week through sheer determination Not To Think About It, which… is one way of dealing, I guess.
I’m due to start an MA in the autumn. I have no idea what form that’s going to take, right now — whether I’ll be doing online classes, whether the start of term will be delayed, what exactly it’s going to look like. I haven’t yet confirmed where I’ll be studying, as I’m waiting to hear about scholarships and funding, but it’ll most likely be either University College Cork or Maynooth University. The MA’s in Medieval Irish, so you can see exactly how well my ‘I’m not staying in academia’ thing went. Terribly. It went terribly. I appear to be the kind of person that academia just happens to. But planning for the future is hard when nobody knows what the future is going to look like, and I’ll readily confess to being considerably anxious about the whole thing.
I shaved my head. It’s the quarantine mood. Didn’t make that much of a difference for me, since I had very short hair anyway, but now I’m fuzzier than ever. That’ll be fun, when I eventually manage to get my passport updated with my new name — something that’s been put on hold by the current situation. Yes, it is making me somewhat anxious not to know whether I’ll have an up-to-date passport by the autumn or whether I’ll be carrying my deed poll around everywhere trying to make sure I get registered in the correct name. I also made some bread, but gluten-free bread is hard, so I’d say it was only a limited success. Getting good at making naan-type flatbreads tho. My dry yeast’s a year past its date so all bread is flatbread at the moment.
I think that’s all the news I’ve really got to share with you at the moment, but with luck I’ll be back in the not-too-distant future with real posts. If you’d like me to talk about writing/agent stuff, let me know in the comments and I will do that.
I don’t really make New Year’s Resolutions anymore. They’re too much pressure, and the emphasis on success or failure to achieve some arbitrary change no longer seems like a particularly helpful way of approaching things. But it’s still nice to see a new year as an opportunity to begin some new project, or set oneself on a new path.
Last year, I wrote a post (now consigned to oblivion along with the rest of the blog archive) about how I wanted my focus for 2019 to be on peace — making peace with myself, but also choosing more peaceful paths in life general, and thinking about my commitment to the idea. I don’t know how well I succeeded at that; possibly I’d have done better had I remembered that particular declaration more frequently. But I did find myself pondering it now and again, and I certainly thought a lot about violence and pacifism in my writing, and what stories I wanted to tell.
This year, I decided that my theme would be honesty.
(I’m not intentionally working my way through all the Quaker testimonies — peace, equality, simplicity, truth, sustainability — but now that I’ve started, I can see the value in carrying on this way… I could certainly use to tackle ‘simplicity’ before my book-hoarding tendencies become entirely overwhelming.)
Honesty is a tricky one. Honesty is as much about being truthful with myself as it is about telling the truth to others. I am great at lying to myself, justifying unhealthy behaviours or excusing away negative thought patterns. I’m also good at letting indecisiveness prevent me from ever living a truly honest existence, and I’m so afraid of being impolite that I’ll tell a dozen white lies and half-truths just to avoid saying something that might be construed as rude.
Anxiety. It can really get in the way of the best intentions.
This year, then, is about being honest. About admitting what I want and doing what I need to do to achieve that. About telling people how I feel, and living with the temporary discomfort of those conversations rather than the longterm resentment of not having had them. About declaring who I am, and then having the courage to stand up for myself about that. Correcting people about pronouns, rather than letting it slide because it’s easier to live with the discomfort of untruth than the potential awkwardness of the correction. Balancing safety (never speaking up) with truth (being who I am).
As part of that, I changed my name.
Changing your name by deed poll in the UK is a remarkably undramatic affair. Despite the scary legalese of the document itself, that isn’t actually an essential part of the process (you can just as effectively write on the back of an envelope “hi my name is [x] now” and as long as it’s signed and witnessed, it’s theoretically valid). The fancy wording and posh paper can be helpful in persuading banks and other organisations that the deed poll itself is legit, though, which makes it sometimes worth doing.
I’ve been considering changing my name for a long time, but I’d concluded there was no real rush. Most people seemed happy to call me Finn if I asked them to, and since I’m almost always read as female, my name wasn’t exactly outing me — even if it did lead people to make assumptions about my gender that I didn’t want them to make. I figured I could wait until my passport was nearer to its expiry date, and then do the change, so as to minimise the cost of updating it.
But that wouldn’t be until 2026, and that wait had started to feel too long. I’m working on applications for MAs at the moment, which made me realise that when I get another degree, I want it to be in a name that feels like me. I want to write Finn Longman on academic articles, and have the weight of authority behind it. I’m querying at the moment, and when I hopefully sign with an agent, I want that to be a name that feels truthful, too. Not one that feels temporary and incomplete, missing a major part of my identity.
So, in the light of all that, Finn is now my middle name. I know quite a lot of people who go by their middle names — my boss, for one, and a close friend of mine. Now, I guess, I’m one of them, in most contexts.
I thought long and hard about the change, and whether or not I should commit fully and make Finn my first name, but in the end this seemed like the best option. I didn’t want to let go of my first name entirely — not only is it important to my parents, but it has significance to me, too. It’s a connection to part of my heritage that I’m not willing to leave behind at this stage. But if I made that my middle name, I ended up with slightly unfortunate initials, and it didn’t flow as well as this way around.
I thought about keeping my old middle name, too: Joy. But it didn’t seem to fit, and I couldn’t make it sound nice. Letting go of Joy was more difficult than I expected — nobody in my family has ever called me by it, but it was a part of my authorial identity for several years, and I guess I’m more attached to it than I thought. There’s something symbolic in it, though, to let go of the ‘joy’ that is expected of me and to find my own, instead, to seek it where I think it’s meant to be instead of having it imposed.
I guess keeping my first name just seems less risky. After all, there’s the plausible deniability of not having changed my first or last name that will make my life much easier if I forget to update my name on one account or another — a fair few accounts don’t even use the middle name. Maybe it’s cowardice, but I think it’s compromise — finding a truth that works for me. Yes, it seems like a lot of money to replace my passport (not due to expire until 2026) for the sake of a middle name, but on the plus side, that’s six fewer years of having blue hair and an undercut in my passport photo, which is probably a good thing.
It was a small change, really, swapping three letters for four, but it was a difficult one nonetheless. That’s why I did it this weekend, when I had friends in town for a conference who could act as my witnesses and encourage me to go through with it.
And so, in the end, I signed my deed poll in the pub.
Here’s to making 2020 the year I’m honest, with myself and with the world. We all have our truths to live, and this is a small part of mine.
I thought about writing a regular post summing up the past year and the decade before it, but that seemed like a cliché, so I decided instead to write a letter to my younger self — the person I was as the year turned from 2009 to 2010.
Dear younger me,
It’s hard to know how to start a letter like this. You’ll hate me if I gush about how young you are, because you’ve always hated being patronised. I don’t mean it like that. I just mean… well, you’re not me yet, are you? You’re hardly even you. You’re a half-formed thing, much as you like to think otherwise.
Venice, Summer 2009.
But the groundwork’s there. The skeleton of who I’d end up being. Actually, as I stare down my twenty-fourth birthday I look a lot more like you, almost fourteen, than some of the selves I’ve been in between. I do Irish dance again, for a start, just like you do. I compete in preliminary championships and I’ve taken masterclasses with Ciara Sexton. I can practically see you freaking out from here, and you don’t know the half of it.
I quit, though, for a long time. That seems absurd to you — you’re still in love with it, still in the honeymoon period. In about a year and a quarter, you’re going to walk away from it. You’re going to do ballet instead — another thing you can’t imagine right now. You won’t go back to Irish dance until you’re 21. It’s what you need, or at least, it felt like it was at the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an easy decision when it happens.
Then there’s the music. I’m trying to remember exactly where you’re at right now. 2009… oh! Of course. You just joined the wind band. They were playing the title piece from Riverdance and you being an Irish dance nerd, you wanted to be a part of it. It was a great concert, wasn’t it? I remember the high of it. You took up the piccolo this year as well, I think, but I don’t exactly remember where you were at with the violin.
You’re going to lose that.
Sorry. It sounds blunt when I put it like that. It was blunt when it happened. You’ve got about three more years, and then you’re going to injure your wrists, and develop debilitating chronic pain. They’ll tell you you’ll be playing again in a few months and then six years down the line you still won’t be able to hold a fiddle for more than about fifteen minutes before the pain kicks in. You’ll lose your entire social life — this is what happens when you put all your eggs in the orchestra basket. It’s going to suck.
September 2011.
It’s going to shape most of the rest of the decade, too. Your entire identity is going to end up moulded by this, which is what I mean when I say that you’re not me yet. You’re still able to trust your own body, trust that you’ll be able to do whatever you like without triggering pain that will leave you unable to write for days on end, or too fatigued to move. You don’t even have any real food intolerances yet, though you’re going to lose the ability to eat fruit some time in the next year or two (trust me, that’s the tip of the iceberg…).
You’re going to lose so much, and it’s going to be so hard, for so long, and there’s nothing I can do to protect you, no warnings I can give that will prevent it. Your body is a time bomb. You could spend your whole life being careful and eventually it would still go off.
You have no idea what’s coming. And for that, I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you now to make the most of it — especially music, which you’ll lose more completely than anything else. I also wish I could tell you to install and get used to voice recognition software before you lose the use of your hands entirely for a few months, because that would really help me down the line, but… I can’t.
Let’s talk about writing instead. Another thing you’ll almost lose — but don’t worry, at least you get that one back. You’re only just beginning to realise how important it is to you. You’ve got two short, crappy novels under your belt (I hope you don’t mind me calling them crappy. I’m pretty sure you’d describe at least one of them that way, and … just trust me on the other one, please), but you’re going to write, like, seventeen more before this decade’s out. Some of them you’ll rewrite half a dozen times. Some of them will be bad, some of them will be good, some of them have potential but they’re not there yet.
You’ll self-publish three poetry collections. Have your poetry appear in a couple of small magazines. Write literally hundreds of thousands of words in blog posts (and then delete all of them). You and Charley (yes, you’re going to stay friends) will help co-write a boarding school mystery. You’ll write YA and adult and fantasy and contemporary and everything in between. Most of it’s going to be at least a little bit gay.
(Oh yeah, spoiler alert: you’re not straight. You’re not even a girl. You have a lot of identity crises coming, younger me, and none of them are going to be easy, and I’m closing off this decade still not having the answers to a lot of seemingly simple questions. Good luck with that.)
Hadrian’s Wall, August 2014.
It’s going to feel like everything’s taking forever, and you’re going to be struggling to find direction or the courage to take the plunge and just send your work out into the world. Eventually, you’re going to enter something called Author Mentor Match, and you’ll get in. You’ll team up with a more experienced writer (if I tell you it’s Rory Power, author of Wilder Girls, it’ll mean nothing to you, but I promise you it’ll mean something a decade down the line), and she’ll give you the support you need to tear your book apart and rebuild it from the ground up. You’ll make friends, too, with the other mentees — a writing community you haven’t had since Protagonize shut down, and which you desperately needed.
Oh, yeah, right. Protagonize shut down. It’s okay, though. You had a good few years of it, made some lasting friends, caught that writing bug for life, and really, in the long run, it’s probably a good thing that all of your writing from 2009 and 2010 isn’t still floating around online. I know you’ll be annoyed at me for saying that, but I don’t mean it to put you down. If anything, it’s an encouragement. You’re going to get so much better at this.
I guess while we’re on the subject of Protagonize, we should talk about right now. New Year’s Eve 2009/10. You’re about to lie to a moderator who caught you making a sock puppet account to boost your own ratings because you’re way more insecure than you’ll ever admit to being, and you’re going to get banned from the site for a month. I don’t think you’ve had that conversation yet (I think it’ll happen tonight), but… it’s coming.
You’re an idiot, younger me. An idiot for making the fake account in the first place, and even more of one for lying to a moderator about it and then arguing with them when they (rightfully) made you face some consequences for it. I’m pleased to report that you’re going to grow out of that, at least; ten years down the line I’m not as honest a person as I’d like to be, but I’m working on it, and I never did anything like that again.
So. You’re going to start this decade banned from the site. Unable to access or continue any of your existing stories, you’re going to start something new. Write the first few chapters of it and then abandon it until, oh, around April, when you’ll rediscover it and keep going.
That book’s going to go through nine drafts and then you’re going to shelve it. You thought it was a standalone at first, then the first book in a trilogy. In a few years you’ll realise it’s actually a much later installment in a larger series. Then, eventually, you’ll realise that virtually nothing of that original book will survive, but for some version of a few of the characters.
But those first wisps of characters that you began to develop during that month of creative isolation are still going to live in your head in ten years time. Alex Kian Robson? He’s right here. I call the series Death and Fairies, which was a joke that stuck. Alex isn’t the main character any more (he got demoted), but he’s very much there. So is Jennie. You didn’t know what kind of story you were trying to tell yet, but you laid the first stones of it anyway.
So it’s not a waste of a month. It just feels like one. It’s your own fault, but cheer up — things can only improve from here.
Cambridge, October 2016.
And they will, in writing terms. I cannot understate how much you’re going to improve in ten years. And finally, right at the end of the decade, you’re going to keep your promises to yourself and you’re going to start querying — properly, this time. It’s a book you haven’t even thought about starting yet, though you’re only a couple of years away from creating the bare bones of its protagonist, Isabel. I think you’d like it. It’s sad and violent and there’s no kissing at all.
It would take too long to tell you everything that happened in the past decade. Some things I think you’re going to have to find out for yourself. You’re going to face… pretty much everything for the first time, I think. You haven’t really experienced much yet. You’re going to lose your grandparents, and that’s going to suck, and your brother’s going to move to Canada (you’ll miss him more than you’ll admit). You’re going to have some pretty dark moments and sometimes it’s going to feel like you’ll never drag yourself out of the hole that you’re in.
But there’ll be brighter days too. You’ll go to Ireland, just as you’ve been dreaming of doing for years already. Multiple times, in fact! You’ll meet Kate Thompson. Maggie Stiefvater, too. You’ll do a degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and get really, weirdly into medieval Irish literature. You’ll start learning Irish, properly this time. You’ll get a job as a trainee librarian and move to Cambridge. You’ll go to conferences, turn your dissertation into an academic article, and start thinking about doing a master’s. You’ll become a Quaker (you don’t even know what a Quaker is yet), after years of struggling with and losing your faith. You’ll love and be loved and there will be people who understand you, eventually.
Right now, you can’t see any of that coming. But I promise that it is.
Graduation. Cambridge, June 2018.
And no, you won’t be published before you’re eighteen, or even before the end of the decade. And a lot of what you thought might happen won’t happen. In fact, the vast majority of what went down in the past ten years isn’t what you might be expecting. (Did I mention the fact that you’re queer? You’re… super queer.)
Will you have regrets? Absolutely. Will you mourn missed turnings, abandoned paths, lost opportunities? Of course. Will you find yourself wishing you could turn back time and go back to who you were at the start of the decade?
No.
You’re not me yet. You’re not even you yet. And I’m not sure I’m me now, but I’m a lot closer to it than when I was standing where you are. These ten years haven’t always been kind, but we’ve grown up, younger me, and we’re almost ourselves now. I don’t know who we’ll be in ten years time, but at least nowadays I’m confident I want to stick around to find out.
So hang in there, younger me. You’ve got a long decade ahead of you, but the only way out is through.
With love and in friendship,
Finn*
Boxing Day 2019, with my sister’s cat, Tyler.
*Oh yeah, you’re going to change your name. It’s a short form of delorfinde, so really, it’s not so strange to you; you’ve yet to start using your legal name online. Anyway hi. This is me. You. Us. <3 Wait ’til you find out about pronouns…
So, as most of you are probably aware, in September I started a year-long post as a graduate trainee librarian at Christ’s College, Cambridge. The aim of the role is that I get to learn the ins and outs of academic librarianship, gain experience across all the varied requirements of the role, and work out if I want to go on to library school (and if so, what kind of a focus I’d like to take with that).
The trainees have a blog, CaTaLOG (Cambridge Trainee Librarian’s Online Group), and a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about my experiences of returning to an institution I knew as a student. I thought now that it’s been up there a while, I’d cross-post it here, so that those of you who have been wondering what I’m up to can read it too.
(Although of course, feel free to go and follow the trainee blog too.)
I was a student at Cambridge before I was a trainee — I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNaC) at Newnham College (my focus was very much on the Celtic; I specialised in medieval Irish). It’s been an interesting experience to return to a university I already know well, and experience it from a different angle: a different role, a different college, an entirely different experience.
Now and again I find myself retracing my steps and visiting familiar
haunts like the UL or Newnham, but as a trainee, I see an entirely
different side of them. Part of that is the opportunity to go behind the
scenes — the UL seems intimidatingly huge as a student, but through a
door or up a different set of stairs it’s like an entirely different
building contained within it, a labyrinth of staff-only corridors and
rooms. Part of it, though, is realising how much is available to
students that I didn’t take advantage of as an undergraduate,
and with that realisation comes a pang of regret for all the
opportunities I feel like I wasted.
Our first visit of the year was to the UL.
Due to a prior commitment I was only able to come for half of the trip,
so I missed the opportunity to see Rare Books and Digital Services. I
did, however, manage to join the group for the visit to the Manuscripts
Room.
Now, as a medievalist, I tend to get overly excited about manuscripts anyway,
but to have them up close in front of me was… something else. There, in
front of me, was a Book of Hours, liberally decorated with gold leaf.
There, in front of me, was a little marginal drawing of the sort I might
have retweeted on Twitter from one of the many medievalist accounts I
follow. Right there. Not behind a glass case, not in an exhibition, but inches away from me.
And what really struck me was that it had never occurred to me, in my
four years as a student, that I could have come to the Manuscripts Room
at any time. I didn’t know that I was allowed. I didn’t know that I
could request to see certain medieval texts simply for the joy of seeing
them (and not because I was some high-flying researcher with a
monograph to write).
I think, probably, that this is something a lot of undergraduates
don’t realise — and of course, for those outside of subjects like ASNaC,
there’s probably limited appeal in the opportunity to stare at some old
books. But I’m glad to see that some are taking the chance that I
failed to realise I had — a group of first year ASNaCs went to the UL to see their copy of Bede recently, and I admire them for that.
More recently, we visited Newnham for some training in how to use
this website, and afterwards received a tour of the library. Having had a
number of late-night essay crises in the Newnham library, I assumed I
knew it well enough that there’d be little to surprise me on the tour,
and it’s true that most of the Working Library was familiar to me.
(Although it’s only since graduating and having the opportunity to
visit lots of other college libraries that I’ve realised how lovely
Newnham’s is, and how completely spoiled I was as a student there to
have access to that.)
But then we had the opportunity to visit the Archives, the closed
stacks in the basement, and the Rare Books Room — a room I didn’t even
know they had. If you’d said to me a week ago, “What does
Newnham have in the way of special collections?” I’d probably have given
some answer about some old children’s books (true) and some interesting
material objects (also true); I didn’t know that they had 6,000 early
printed books and a handful of medieval manuscripts, all stored
beautifully in a dedicated room built in a style in line with the rest
of the library’s architecture while suiting the unique needs of old
books.
I walked in and all I could think was, “Why didn’t I know about this?”
And the answer, I guess, is that I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me
that I could. I knew that the UL had manuscripts, but I assumed that you
had to be a Serious Researcher doing Serious Research to be able to
look at them; I guess there was some impostor syndrome at work, that I
wasn’t ‘good enough’ to access that material.
I’ve been thinking, also, about how it took me until final year to
ever request a book from my college library, and how I think I only
spoke to library staff on two or three occasions (I generally went to
the library late at night, when the desk was unstaffed). Now that I’m on
the other side of the desk, I realise how much I missed out on by being
too worried about being annoying or presumptuous.
Christ’s College Working Library
It’s made me realise that we, as libraries, can do more to make
students aware of those materials, to do more to encourage students that
they can access special collections if they need or even want to. To make it feel safe to ask those
kinds of questions — “Can I see some old books?” “Will you buy this
obscure text?” “What kind of archives does the library keep?” — without
feeling embarrassed or ashamed.
The fault here is not on the librarians; I’m an anxious person, and
I’m fairly sure that was a major part in my failure to ever approach the
library desk unless completely unavoidable. But at the same time, if
somebody had reached out to me as an undergrad and told me what I was allowed to do… maybe things would have gone differently.
I’m grateful, at least, that I get a second chance now to experience
what I missed the first time around. To have spent four years in
Cambridge, of all places, and never to have looked at any special
collections material whatsoever, is a crying shame — but I’ve got no
intention of making it five. And if I can convince one student to take
advantage of this opportunity, to go and ask their librarians about their college’s archives or rare books, then I’ll feel like I’ve achieved something.
