Ten thousand hours

I wonder what I was playing?

I was six in that photo and I'm fifty-two now. Pause while I scream quietly to myself. Cut to a shot of the last fast-running grains of sand in the hourglass. So much to do. So little ( sob) time. I wonder if I'm anywhere close to having put in the necessary ten thousand hours of practice yet?

Although I love my fiddle now, I absolutely detested it when I was wee. Back then I had a succession of tetchy old men as teachers, a weekly lesson, and no desire whatsoever to practice in between. In my own defence, I have to say that the fiddle is pretty unrewarding at first. Every bowstroke sounds ugly. People wince when you play to them. It's completely un-natural , not to mention painful, to clasp the buggar in your arm and twist your wrist round its stalk and somehow, sans frets, find where your fingers are supposed to fall in order to make a sweet, true note. And don't get me started on the utter horror for a beginner when your strings go out of tune and you have to turn the utterly disobedient and bloodyminded pegs all by yourself. All I can say is thank heavens for fine malt whisky - although perhaps not when one is still a primary school pupil. Meanwhile, some old tweedy grump is breathing his stale pipebreath all over you and chastising you for not slogging away and becoming note perfect on some hideous bit of monotonous musical juvenalia like three blind mice three times a day seven days a week in between lesson days.

Now if they'd only started us all off on fingermangle or any number of basic Shetland reels, I have the sneaking suspicion that I'd have enjoyed my fiddle a whole lot sooner than I did. Considering how I feel about my fiddle now, the word 'enjoy' doesn't even come close. But then...I was taught by fear and shouting. Nobody ever said 'that sounds good', undoubtedly because it didn't, but children learn best if they're encouraged. I associated music with embarassment, with exams, with never quite measuring up, with something taught by brilliant but unpleasant old men to this particularly stupid and incompetent girl. It's no surprise I couldn't wait to escape that particular tyranny.

If I could turn my personal clock back to 1974, this is the only thing I'd change. I wouldn't give up my fiddle at fifteen, thinking it was part of what I needed to run away from. With hindsight, I've realised that you can run, but you can't hide. I ran for a long time. Thirty two years it took until a fiddle found me. My partner bought me one, an electric s-shaped seriously cool beast, and I fell upon it with cries of delight. Couldn't draw a note from it at first, but I persevered. And the joy of an electric fiddle is that you can plug it into a pair of headphones and nobody else is forced to endure your early squawkings.

And now. On a different fiddle. One that my Dad made. A lovely, big blonde Strad copy that is almost too big for my left hand to span, but I love its sound, so I persevere. Every single day. Sometimes I manage to sneak in three practices a day. How long do my books take to write and illustrate? Hmmmm, that depends on whether I'm currently trying to nail a tune or not, but shhhhhh, don't tell my editor. Debi Gliori is playing truant on her fiddle. The long-dead old men would have been amazed at my diligence, but it's not diligence, it's love. I close my eyes most of the time when I play, all the better to hear where we're going, my fiddle and me.

A wolf in case

When I board the ferry to Shetland tomorrow night, I'll have a virtual wolf in my baggage ; undetectable by sniffer dogs, not requiring his own kennel in the animal enclosure, not really needing any care at all, just occasionally taken out, liberated from his digital billet and waved about a bit. Wolves just want to have fu-unn, you know?

Can't quite get my head around the fact that I've managed to dream him up so quickly. That's what happens when your publisher puts a rocket under your rear and invites you to light the blue touchpaper. Phwoarrrrrrr. We have ignition. We have lift-off.* We have...a sneak preview, without wolf, but with a fiddle because that, she said in a circular fashion, is why I'm going to Shetland tomorrow.

For a week of heaven. A week of learning fiddle tunes by 'ear', from a tribe of geniuses at Shetland's annual Fiddle Frenzy. Can't wait. All packed, me and my wolf, and rrrrrraring to go.

*We also have a decidedly sore derriere, but that's another story.

The lure of a good cake

Poor Mr Wolf. So hungry, he's been reduced to eating his hat. And then the very cake he had his eye on has been nabbed by that teeny wee sprite thingy - it's enough to make a grown wolf weep. Furry tears. Tears of furry. Oh, shut up, Gliori.

Even though this picture only exists in black and white, its overload of shweet shtuff still has the power to make me want to make a dash for the cake tins, only I happen to know that they're empty. Well, not quite empty, but the birthday cake tucked inside one of them isn't mine, it belongs to Michael, and it would be morally wrong of me to sneak into the house while he's out and nibble bits of his cake. Even if I did bake it. With my own hands. Sandwiching it together with my own greengage jam. From Michael's trees. Ah.

Sigh. Kitchen morality... Keeps you thin but boring.

Anyhoo - on another note, finally taught myself Bethany's Waltz (by Shetland fiddler and composer Jenna Reid) which I've been meaning to do for ages. Lovely, lovely, lovely tune. To add to the tottering pile of tunes that all vie for attention inside my head, some faded from disuse, some bright and shiny due to being taken out and polished frequently, and some, like fingermangle*, needing me to sprout five extra fingers and a whole new brain ( but where to put the extra appurtenances? And would my family still want to know me post-sprouting? Somehow, I doubt it) in order to even come close to being able to play the damn tune. In this lifetime.

*Mak a Kishie Needle, Dye. Well, you did ask.

A very Scottish wolf

...and then, on the next page, it rains.

Introducing Mr Wolf. Mr Wolf and basket. What d'you mean 'real wolves don't have baskets?' Jeez - do you have a lot to learn about real wolves. Come and see me later and we'll complete your education. Suffice to say, there's no room for anything as prissy as an umbrella in that bijou little shopping basket, so Mr Wolf is going to get wet. Actually, there's no room for anything in there. Whisper it, but I think it's an accessory. And he hasn't got an i-phone. Probably hasn't heard of FurBook. Or Tweeter. And he hasn't straightened his fur. Or shaved his furry little - oh, that's quite enough of that, I think. An unreconstructed Celtic wolf, then.

Savage. A little bit of RRRRRrrrrrrrrrrufff. Mmmm.

Bless. I'll have a dozen, thanks.

Hack, cough, sheesh what a mess.

Dusty in here, or what? How long has it been? Two years? Oh my gorrrrd. How time flies when you're having a horrible time.

Right. First things first. A troll to evict. ExCUSE me. Just why exactly it had to post its illiterate yibblings in triplicate, I have no idea, but anyway, out. Bin. Forever cast into the Outer Darkness, but thanks for letting me know that I need to go back to Woodstock in my Prius. Oh wot laffs. And all for writing a book about climate change. Let's hope that particular troll gets a job insulating attics in the Nu Economy. With Itchwool. *

Next. Some redecoration. New pictures on the wall. From my new book called 'The Scariest Thing of All' and trust me, it's autobiographical. Oh, what a time we've had. Oh, the thinks you can think. In the middle of the night.

Anyhoo. Laters. Miles to go. Promises to keep and roughs for a new book to do and tunes to learn. The days are just packed.

*Troll beware - it has the documented side-effect of causing vascular torpor. But you've probably got that already. In spades. And other parts.

please, somebody, plug me in

I'm imagining a crash team breaking down the door and dashing inside to find me, wan and limp, flopped in a corner of my studio, index fingers still twitching feebly in a rictus-like attempt to air-type out one last post before I flatline.

One... last...post....say, didn't Ry Cooder sing that once? Or was it a meatball? Or have all the songs I've ever listened to while I work and work and work all run together into song-soup? And do I even care?

The crash team are distracted by the studio. I'm making landed-fish gaspy sounds and needing their immediate attention, but they're too busy pulling books off the shelf and exclaiming - wow - I had that when I was a kid. Jeez, did she write that too? Oh, my, I loved that one. Mum used to read me that at bedtime. And that one too. Just how many books has she written?

Seventy six...I gasp, but my voice is fainter than a line writ small in 8H pencil.

They peer down at me, and they all look so young, and far away. They don't read books made of paper now, d'you know? What I do, in the writing and illustrating of books on paper - well, that's kind of quaint and dinosaurish. I knew if I lived long enough this would happen. I have become a living curiosity. I still, dammit, prefer pens and paper to just about any other recording medium.

I'm lying there, gasping pathetically and hoping they might be able to use the USB slot at the back of my neck or the Firewire TM connection in my ear to connect me to the grid, otherwise my hard drive is going to dump all my remaining data onto the rug. Via my nostrils. And that won't be a good look.

Or maybe they'll use a Stryker saw to unzip me from sternum to pubes and peel me back to reveal a smaller, younger, fresher version of the me that is draped, like a strand of overcooked linguine, across the sofa that I used to take afternoon naps on, back when I was trying to write six linked novels in six years followed by four linked younger novels in three years topped off with five hundred line drawings in three months. Or was that three blinks? Or was it forty younger novels? Or.

I forget. Unsurprisingly, memory, then eyesight go first.

Maybe - and this is the kindest scenario of all - just maybe they'll unscrew me at the waist, and lift my top half off my bottom half, and inside, there'll be another me that looks just like the one that's been unscrewed. And inside that one, there'll be another, and another, and another, and another, right down to what, when our girls were little, we were pleased to call 'the bean'. The smallest matrushchka of all, the core dolly, the girl in the middle of the woman in the centre of the lady. The one where you can barely make out her features, since they were painted by an underpaid woman with a one eyelash brush. Core dolly. Babeheart. She is so very small, and so very well guarded. Was so very well guarded.

And then our puppy will nudge past the crash team and stick out her long, long tongue ( you would not believe how long that dog's tongue is) and, schloooop. I'd be gone.

putting my witch to bed

Can't quite believe I've finished the illustrations for Witch Baby and Me After Dark, and not only finished them, but parcelled them up and posted them to London. 

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow morning and automatically think - what am I going to draw today?- and the answer comes - the artwork for a new Mr Bear book, maybe then I'll believe I've done it. Or maybe when I see the hole on my drawing board where WB&MeAD used to be, I'll feel bereft, anti-climatic and flatter than a flat thing.

I tell you, though, WB&MeAD ( as she is known) was a labour of love. One hundred and eighty seven illustrations in all. One hundred and eighty seven? Somebody shut me up.

Here's one of them, fresh out the oven.