No money, no way
I am out of money and out of words.
I am stuck with my writing. There are still three deadlines outstanding:
- an anthology by ‘Professional Wilderness Women’ (15th Dec.). I want to submit two stories: one about being lost in the floodplains in the Parque Nacional Aguaro-Guariquito, Venezuela while studying river dolphins and another about surveying great crested newts (Triturus vulgaris) in clay ponds at brickworks in Peterborough. That story is especially poignant as the site was so desolate, yet the ecosystem was so precious: ranging from recently excavated ponds among naked clay slopes only just colonised by the first green rash of fescues and waterweeds to ponds that have been there for 50 years. It was without a doubt the best site for the endangered (by habitat depletion) great crested newt and is now all buried under new housing development, of course. I was going to call this story ‘Panda of the Ponds’.
- A bus-tale for windowseat press(31st Dec.). Along the lines of Sri Lanka by Bus, but from their introduction I feel it needs some work.
- Last but not least the long awaited Lonely Planet humour competition (30th Nov.). Laughtears actually put it up in September with an October posting date!. Such is the reputation of LP that nobody can afford to pass this up, no matter how slim the chances of getting in or how paltry (or non-existent) the pay for published stories — but they are not interested in stuff that happened 20 years ago and I just had an excerpt of The Whales of Trincomalee turned down for a Seal Press anthology. No, I must do better and this requires fresh input.
However, I am fresh out of inspiration. The trip to Sri Lanka and the brief interlude in Ireland trying to cover the Celtic Challenge have maintained me so far, and have allowed me to translate and edit my old Cairo to Capetown journal and write a number of stories about Taiwan, Venezuela, Africa, Dahab, Amsterdam etc; as well as the Sri Lanka travelogue, but now I’m out of puff. The words have all dried up. My recent attempt at writing stories have failed — there is no atmosphere just dry notes about adventures which I can no longer relate. And there is still more to write. In my illustrious youth I have (briefly) studied river dolphins (Platanista gangetica) in the Ganges in Bihar, Northern India (bandit territory). I have investigated (more or less) the pilot whale (Globicephala melaena) hunt in the Faroe islands (and discover that they used to catch bigger whales, too). I have lived in Denmark for several years. And I have spent millenium eve on a baseball court in Taiwan. Plenty of tales in there, but no more inspiration. I have to get back on the road to get back into the vibe, if only for a measly 15 days to Portugal by EasyJet.
And there is the problem. We don’t have enough money, not even if I sleep in my creaky tent and don’t eat in restaurants, or even coffee shops. — Not even 10£ a day.
With immaculate (as per usual) timing, this trip coincides with a work trial by John in Reading, meaning we have to scrape together his travel and living expenses too, until he gets paid (which will hopefully be by Christmas). If his trial is successful, that will be followed by a relocation of the entire houshold, the financial implications of which I don’t even want to consider yet; let’s just say that Christmas dinner will probably consist of beans on toast. The very day John starts his worktrial, our benefits will be stopped and I am faced with nearly 700 quid worth of monthly bills which doesn’t bear thinking about. Really, running off to Portugal is a wise move — but with whose cash?
At moments like these I hate the fat-cat travel writers that moan if they are not flown around in business class and insist on freebie dinners in Michelin-starred restaurants (when I worked at Gleneagles these freeloaders gave me the creeps: I would have loved to drag them down the kitchens to work the 3am to noon breakfast shift (often followed by overtime) or keep up with the dishwashing during dinner service for the minimum wage — the kitchen porters didn’t even work for the company and so had none of the perks the chefs had, let alone tips!). All that would be forgiven if they could at least write, but their copy is so atrocious that I no longer buy the ‘Independent on Saturday’ because their travel supplement irritates me. Yeah, I admit it, it is a case of the green-eyed monster, but all the same I fail to understand why editors who print copy so poor that I won’t keep it in the bathroom by ‘established’ writers sneer at the much superior writing that can be found on the web. When I started in this game (a whole 9 months ago) the advise was to get published on free websites ‘for exposure’ — now it is common knowlege that web-articles don’t count as clips. Why? Not because the editor is too lazy to click on a link (that too), but because writers who have not produced hard copy are not ‘proper’ writers in the eyes of the editor; as if their rag was some sort of arcane journal only the chosen get published in.
The worst is that I could have become part of that crowd by now if I lived in the US of A. Travelprwire has inundated me with e-mail spam ever since I signed up to the bulletin boards at Travelwriters.com, although I do not subscribe to either site’s services. What good are press trip invites to watch killer whales in Vancouver (yeah, I know!) to someone based in the UK who can’t afford the air fare? Besides, all this sounds much too good to be true. There are so many money-grabbing websites out there that I don’t trust any. No, the only way to get there is by hard slog. By the time I make it (if I make it), I’ll be burned out, of course, and only capable of producing the sort of drivel which I come across in weekend supplements.
Tags: publishing, Tag Index
Denni