If it’s Friday, then it’s time to confess. Thus: this week I wrote 3,000 words, bringing the total achingly close to 60,000. I imagine the final total of this first draft will be somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 words. I am without doubt in the last third of the story.

I am reading Anne Lamott’s superb Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. One of her chapters is entitled Shitty First Drafts, and here she says:

Very few writers know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies in the snow … We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid.

Well said, Anne. This week, my writing didn’t bound like a husky; it plodded like a tortoise.

Another useful thing I found in this chapter, is this:

Almost all writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

A third tip in the chapter is about quelling the voices. I’ve been doing that, shutting out the “How can you presume?” and the “This is shit” and the “Who wants to read that?”. I’ve been ignoring them and plodding onwards.

My goal for this week is to finish Chapter Nine - whatever it takes, husky or tortoise.

Addendum: Two important birthdays today - my stepbrother M, and Madiba. Happy birthday to both of you! M, you don’t appear in my novel, but Madiba you do. Thank you for being an inspiration to millions - you are definitely a husky.

Photo from AFP

If you want to be green but can’t face wearing hemp, if you get frozen in the supermarket deciding whether to buy the organic Italian apples wrapped in plastic or the non-organic apples that are loose and local, and if you feel guilty every time you let the tap run but still have to bath now and again, then Christie Matheson’s book Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style is the book for you.

As Matheson says in the introduction, ” … we need to embrace the fabulousness of green living. And it is fabulous. Being green can help you look gorgeous, have a killer wardrobe, feel amazing, travel in style, create a home that’s an oasis, host fun parties, eat incredible food, and drink phenomenal wine, all while feeling more connected to your friends, family and nature.” She says that while buying an eco-friendly cashmere jersey will not stop global warming, it is the change in mindset, in starting to become conscious consumers, that will help us to reduce our individual contributions and encourage systemic change.

This week I bought some clothes for my kid, who needed shorts and T-shirts for summer. I have heard that you should wash new clothes before wearing them because of the chemicals shops spray on them to make them hang nicely, but I had never believed it until now. He put on one of his new T-shirts and within an hour had a rash across his neck. Cue parental guilt and vows only to purchase organic cotton tees from now on. Green is clearly not only good for the planet, but good for our health too.

Matheson’s book is clearly divided into useful chapters, from being green at home, to eating and drinking green, beauty, fashion, transportation and travel. There’s even a chapter on how to throw a green party. When I read blogs on the environment, like the No Impact Man or wonderful books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, my main reaction - apart from being grateful that there are people out there who are actually doing something about the environment - is to be intimidated and then feel guilty. Although in many ways we are a fairly green household, there is still room for improvement: we run two cars, still sometimes buy food in plastic wrapping, drink bottled water, forget to switch our computers off, even (aargh, pains me to admit) use paper napkins sometimes. Once I feel guilty, I get overwhelmed and can’t imagine how I could even start to change these things that prey on my conscience.

What Matheson does so well is to praise the baby steps. She’s not saying we all need to get solar panels tomorrow, but she is saying that we should be aware and start to make small changes in our lives. Very kindly, like a lovely big sister, she points out the small changes we can make. Here are some that resonated with me:

* Time how long your standard shower takes and then challenge yourself to cut it down

* Keep a full fridge (if you don’t have a large family like mine, fill it with organic wine instead of food) and only run a full dishwasher

* Avoid PVC in any form - it is evil

* Choose local and non-organic over organic food that has travelled a long distance (but long-distance organic is better than long-distance non-organic)

* Eat more whole food - it puts less strain on the environment than processed food (bye-bye chilli rice cakes … sniff)

* Cut back on meat - it is also a strain on the environment

* Use chemical-free lipsticks - the chemical ones contain a long list of hideous ingredients which we eat since they are on our lips. Yuck!

* Edit your closet so that you only shop for clothes you need

* Buy organic rather than conventional cotton, which is the most pesticide-intensive farming in the world

* Drive smoothly (no abrupt braking) and stick to the speed limit

* Switch the car’s air conditioning off and open a window

* Use the car wash instead of washing it yourself (or you could leave it dirty, like mine)

I have cherry-picked (ahem, nature pun alert) the tips that I can actually imagine myself doing, but there are many more which might resonate with you in this excellent book. For US readers, Matheson includes a long list at the end of her favourite eco-friendly retailers, many of whom have websites.

To celebrate all that is green, I would like to offer Green Chic to one of my fabulous readers. Just put your name in the comments if you’re interested, and in the course of this week I will draw a winner.

Now I’m off to town (on foot) to return some books to the library (borrowing, not consuming)!

Germans love their clubs. If you want to play football, raise canaries or walk Nordically, and you live in Germany, you automatically join a club, known as a Verein. That gives you instant friends, a place to go on a Saturday night if you’re feeling lonely, and it adds meaning and purpose to your life.

As parents, we have already joined an athletics club so that our children can run around a track with other kids and attend gymnastics classes. We believe that we will be joining a football club in the next year so that our small fellow can run aimlessly after a ball with others of his ilk. If any of our kids wanted to play tennis, hockey, rugby or netball we would have to join a club. This means paying a modest yearly fee, and getting involved on some level, whether it’s tending the herbaceous borders at the tennis club, lift-clubbing small hockey players to away games or turning up at various fests and ordering alcohol (my speciality).

We are broken, though, that there are no cricket clubs in Germany, except the casual one that takes place in our garden most weekends. It’s fairly relaxed, and closely tied to our regular weekend barbeque. There is no joining fee, no pruning involved and the requirement is the ability to hold a bat, however badly, and occasionally make contact with a ball. We are a small island of cricket in the large German sea of football.

Today, after a long bike ride, we stopped at a restaurant for a bit of lunch. We were lucky enough to be sitting next to the Sunday meeting of an unusual club.

The facial hair Verein. Twirly moustaches everywhere. We giggled, tried not to stare or do this:

We have to be careful. People take their clubs - and their facial hair - very seriously here.

One of the posts that consistently gets hits here is 10 Things I Love About Germany. It contains reference to cake, walking, coffee shops and great holidays. Today, while sitting in a coffee shop and eating Schwaebsiche Apfelkuchen, I asked my children what they love about Germany, and this is what they came up with:

1. Berlin. The best city in the world, even better and prettier than London (where two of them were born).

2. Swimming in the summer and skiing in the winter.

3. The coffee shops serve very LARGE slices of cake.

4. Being able to speak two languages.

5. Lots of Italians live in Germany, so you get really good pizza and extra good ice-cream.

6. Having lots of friends who speak different languages (English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Greek).

7. Going ice-skating in winter.

8. Our friends P and M who are kind and funny and let us sleep over at their house.

(Please note that the grown-ups love P and M too, for exactly the same reason.)

9. Kika - the children’s TV channel.

(The grown-ups love Kika too. It is advert-free and age-appropriate.)

10. There are lots of different sports you can do - cycling, walking, skiing, swimming, gymnastics.

Germany - the land of outdoor living, great food, wonderful friends and big cake. How can you not love it?

Last night, I watched eight episodes of Sex and the City back-to-back, ending at Charlotte’s marriage to Harry. I also ate three packets of chilli rice cakes, one packet of chocolate rice cakes and a helping of choc chip ice-cream.

Sorry, wrong kind of confession.

I wrote the first 1000 words of Chapter Nine this week, as well as a whole lot of free-writing trying to get into the head of the narrator whose chapter this is. Last night in the haze of telly and food-that-comes-from-packets, I decided that the scene with which I began Chapter Nine is not far enough down the action timeline and will have to parked in the “Extra Stuff” file for use at a later date (how did writers manage before word processors?). I am heading into the last third of the novel now and am looking for big, dramatic, climatic scenes that beg for resolution.

Part of the problem is that I don’t have a story outline, so each chapter has evolved rather than been written from plan. I am starting to realise that this first draft is the outline, albeit one that has taken six months to write. When I start the second draft, I will be in a much stronger place, ready to polish, intensify and clarify. I am looking forward to that.

Other things I have done this week:

1. Made a shortlist of agents to approach once I have finished

2. Had a blogger date with the lovely Ms Martini

3. Almost managed a free-standing headstand in yoga

4. Made basil and lavender ice-cream, which was oddly good

5. Ran three kilometres in 20 minutes (my goal is 10kms in an hour)

6. Imagined myself tottering around Manhattan delivering bon mots when I visit New York in November. “I am a lady!”

My goals for the coming week:

1. Establish the appropriate action for Chapter Nine, and write it!

2. Exercise, exercise, exercise

And that’s all, folks.

Eve has asked her readers to write about their childhood. I thought I would give it a try, because I can’t resist a challenge that is as well-written as this:

If you read here regularly, I wonder if you’d indulge me by thinking about your own childhoods, going back to the flow of days during which nothing much happened, but when the passing of time nurtured and fed you. You’ll know which days I mean by finding strings of days, days on end, whose memory causes a wave of nostalgia to overcome you. Days that now fill you with longing, or a pang of loss, deep joy, or deep gratitude. Sometimes you may think of them and feel great sorrow over something you’ve lost. Maybe it was days you spent with your grandparents, or days you spent at home doing nothing; a day with your brother or sister, a family vacation. Think back to the hours or days when life felt like an afternoon in a hammock, or time on a quilt under a tree with your very best friend.

Think about it, or feel your way back to it, and write it out for yourself. I don’t mean you have to write about it here, as a comment, or even on your own blog; but I do want you to write about it. Get it down somehow when your level of feeling or emotion (affect) rises up and squeezes you in the middle of your chest, right around your heart, and you begin to feel a little weepy or giddy. Right . . . there. That’s the part we want. Catch it like a firefly in a jar, and get very close to that feeling, and then write about it. Write it all out, the memories surrounding it: where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, what it smelled, tasted, and sounded like there; how long did it last?

The Angel in the Garden

When my father left in a storm of self-justification and golf clubs, my grandmother moved into the cottage at the bottom of our garden. It was like having an angel of our own living there. My brother and I would wake in the morning and race our beaten path to her front door, where she would open up, catch us in her arms and breathe, “Hello my darlings!” as if she hadn’t seen us for a month. While my mother was dealing with her own pain and sorrow, and gradually finding her way back to herself, my grandmother gathered us into a gentle place of wonder that offered us refuge from our pain. She had a naivete that spoke to my child’s heart, and taught us how to be silent and listen to the self within, how to shape clouds, how to appreciate an egg sandwich, to believe in fairies. Under her guidance, I developed an interest in other realms and soon our garden became, for me, a magical fairyland that was bustling with activity and solace from the pain of my parent’s separation.

This fairyland was closely tied with the plant life in the garden, starting with the enormous camphor tree that towered over us like a gentle giant. I climbed into his arms, and found comfort there, staring at the leaf patterns and imagining myself on a ship sailing across oceans, or in a palace, or in village of busy elves. I lost time there as I watched ants trace paths across the tree’s rippled bark, or listened to the doves high above, or felt the wind sough mournfully in the branches. The tree reflected my mood: he was sad if I was sad, content if I was so, but his depth of feeling was so great that after a while I could bear his compassion no longer and had to seek more light-hearted magic elsewhere.

Ivy covered the camphor tree’s earthbound roots - the perfect place for fairies to cavort. I imagined them climbing the roots and chasing each other under the green pointed umbrellas of ivy leaves. The Japanese anenomes planted nearby were special since they flowered around my mother’s birthday, and their ivory petals and fluffy yellow centres brought to mind elegant fairy princesses, wafting through my fairyland in white gowns with golden crowns. They were beautiful, and slightly removed, rather like my mother, and I couldn’t spend too much time with them without the sadness edging in.

Following the path of the anenomes, I would arrive at a bed of flowers planted by my mother that curved out into the garden like a headland or peninsula. This buttress was seldom shadowed by the tree, so it was a sunny place for both children and fairies. Roses encouraged the arrival of pink and white fairies, bold and laughing. They were enticed by the dripping tap that stood in the flower-bed, and would recline underneath the tiny waterfall and catch drips directly into their mouths. The tap also attracted an old fat frog, who croaked grumpily as dusk fell. Here in this sunny bed, I created fairy gardens, small flat patches of earth, surrounded by stone walls and decorated with flower furniture. I knew that when the moon rose and I was in bed, the fairies would be sleeping on an azalea or camellia petal and thanking me for their comfort.

Following the bed, I came up against a wooden fence, behind which lived our mad and muttering neighbour and her barking dog. If I came too close to the fence, the dog would unleash its volley of angry remarks and I would have to retreat to underneath the lemon tree for safety. It was fragrant and citrussy there, but the ground beneath was littered with rotting lemons which were revolting if I stood on them with bare feet.

Behind the lemon tree was a green wire fence covered with jasmine, and behind that a lowered area where our maid washed and hung the washing to dry. I would climb the fence, sit on the hot and crumbling stairs and watch in a dream as the washing swirled on the windy drier. The maid lived there too, in a room that smelled of soap, sweat and putu - the porridge that she liked to eat and sometimes shared with me, if I was lucky. There weren’t fairies here - it was somehow too jagged a place - but her bed was on bricks in case of the tokoloshe. There was mystery in the bamboo fence below her khaya that separated our house from those neighbours. I could walk between the tall bamboo and the fence, and be transported to a world where plants were huge and people tiny.

Following this fence, I would come upon a green patch of lawn where our jungle gym had once stood, before it grew rickety and dangerous and had to be taken away. There was my grandmother’s cottage, with the door always open. She would be reading, or painting, or gently napping, but was always welcoming to her small visitors and would find us a piece of hazelnut chocolate from her secret stash. In front of the cottage stood a bank of strelitzias, flowers which my mother dismissed as ugly and African, but which were fascinatingly bird-like. I could crawl under the bushes and hide there, enjoying the feeling of separate nearness to my family. Usually the corgi, Muffin, would snuffle me out or my little brother would crash in, demanding that I play a game with him.

Sometimes my grandmother would get a blanket and we would lie on the sunny grass, looking up at the clouds. She would show us how to shape clouds, and we would get lost in the mystery of the sky. I think both my brother and I learnt early, and from her, to take responsibility for the shape of our lives. We were taught not to feel buffetted by fate, but that our thoughts could shape our lives and that every event, no matter how sad or sick inside it made us feel, happened for a reason. Then our mother would bring out a tray of a tea and biscuits, I would put the tea cosy on my head to make everyone laugh and my brother would run off to hit a tennis ball against the wall, all life’s lessons forgotten.

Bishop Desmond Tutu is one of the few South African leaders who is strongly condemning the insanity in Zimbabwe. He says that we cannot stand by watching a tragedy unfold without becoming complicit in our apathy. Tutu is the patron of the Zimbabwe Benefit Foundation, which, according to its website, seeks to relieve poverty and sickness and advance education in Zimbabwe.

Now my dear husband likes to ride up mountains in the company of very fit cyclists. This summer he is riding from the Italian Riviera, over some Alps, to Nice. He has dedicated his ride to the ZBF and is seeking donations. If you would like to support his cause, you can read his blog post about it here, or head straight to his Justgiving site here.

Many thanks to anyone who decides to help.

Being back in the riches of my family life has meant my writing output has slowed down again. Having a monster migraine didn’t help either (have scheduled visit to Frauenarzt to talk about the headaches because, frankly, they are getting old). This week has not been so successful in terms of writing, but what I have managed is this:

1. I plugged the gap in Chapter 8, using some material I wrote three years ago. This new scene contains a character who might not make the second draft, because she’s kind of light and funny, but I like how her lightness contrasts with all the Sturm und Drang that the other characters are suffering. This character makes me think I should be writing chick lit, or farces, because her throwaway lines came easily to me.

2. I have acted on my idea for my second novel, which is going to be a historical novel set in Kimberley, South Africa, during the diamond rush, and wrote to some people about how to go about researching it. Both my contacts came back with brilliant ideas and I am suffused with energy for this second project. One of them suggested rereading The Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner, just to get a feel for the period, and this weekend I am going to brave the Keller (which is undergoing a renovation project, turning two storage rooms into two offices, one for me and one for my husband) and seek it out.

So my writing goals for this week are:

a. Get seriously stuck into Chapter 9.

b. Source and read the Olive Schreiner.

c. Do more sport! Sport = energy = creativity = words on the page. This week I ran 8kms for the first time. It took 65 minutes. As a non-sporty person who had asthma as a child and couldn’t run 300 metres without wheezing, this was a huge achievement for me. Any accolades you feel like sharing will be warmly welcomed, since my husband is getting tired of telling me how wonderful I am. My goal is to run 10kms in an hour so that I can participate in a local fun-run in October.

What are your writing goals for the week? (Feel free to share any exercise goals you may have too - I’m keen on those!)

Französiche Dom, Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin

I love Berlin. It is so fresh, vibrant and exciting that you feel you are soaking up innovation, ideas and history through your pores as you walk the streets. Berlin has not papered over its cracks, so you see remnants of the Second World War (the bombed-out carcass of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche) and the Cold War (the long, chilly footprint of the Wall) everywhere. I learned that none of the trees in the Tiergarten are more than sixty years old, because the previous forest was razed for firewood in the dying days of the war, and in the freezing winters afterwards.

But this is not about me. During my last visit, I fell upon an amazing book - A Woman in Berlin - a diary of a woman who details her life in the falling city as it was sacked by the Russian army. It starts on 20 April 1945 and ends on 22 June 1945. The writer, who has recently died, chose to remain anonymous when it was published, and the book received controversy, especially in Germany where it was accused of “besmirching the honour of German women.” As you read, you understand why the book might have been hard to swallow in the 1960s. Not only does she describes in exact and excruciating detail what it is like to live in a city under attack: the scrabbling for food, the nauseating fear of being bombed, the chilling anxiety of waiting for the Russians to arrive, but she deals very frankly with the mass rapes that took place, saying that the women began to ask each other not “Were you … ?” but “How many times … ?”.

According to the introduction, over 160 000 Berlin women were raped as the Russians swept through the city. They were considered an acceptable booty for the travails of being a soldier, and all women of all ages are targetted. People in the writer’s apartment building spirited their daughters away in crawl spaces, while only the oldest women ventured out into the streets to fetch water. The writer herself is not spared, and she finally makes a Faustian pact, singling out the most senior - and potentially most cultured and gentlemanly - Russian officer she can find to act as protector. In exchange for sexual favours, she receives food which she shares with the elderly and ailing residents of the building. What Berlin’s liberators come to call “forced intercourse” becomes her only method of survival.

The writer is a journalist and photographer, and her prose builds unforgettable images of war. This means the book can be hard going, since the subject matter is almost unbearable, but it is leavened with her salty sense of humour and astonishing courage.

Here is one excerpt that moved me with its prescience:

I barely glanced at the news from the western front. What does it matter to us now? Our fate is rolling in from the east and it will transfer the climate, like another Ice Age.

On hunger:

I found a letter wedged inside a drawer, addressed to the real tenant. I felt ashamed for reading it, but I read it all the same. A passionate love letter, which I flushed down the toilet. (Most of the time we still have water.) Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now. Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food.

On the futility of technology:

Our radio’s been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age - they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. At the moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.

This is a powerful and heart-rending book. It’s also an amazing piece of social history and now that Germany has learnt to be more open about its past, now that other countries have faced up to their roles in the making of war, this is a good time time to be reading this book. It may deal with a very short and very specific period in German history, but it talks to all of us about how far we will go when we are starving, about the bleak impact war has on civilians and about the small sparks of humanity that help people to survive when that seems impossible.

I went on a writing retreat and wrote 12,000 words.

But you already know that.

Instead of reflecting this Friday, I am going to state my goals for the coming week. These are:

1. Plug the gap in Chapter 8 and send it to the cheerleaders

2. Start Chapter 9

3. Refrain from indulging in negative thinking

4. Keep exercising

Simple isn’t it?

So while I don’t have anything more to say about the writing process, I do have something to say about reading. Writing fulltime (or as fulltime as a mother-of-three with freelance writing gigs and a gym habit can be) has turned me into a Very Intolerant Reader. A book that I would usually persevere with gets tossed aside if it doesn’t hit buttons in the first few paragraphs.

The books that have hit buttons this week:

1. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg

A poetically-told tale of two sisters growing up on a Rhodesian farm at the height of the bush war. Funny observations of adults by children. Ends with a dark twist. Beautiful.

2. The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters

A return to form from this writer of superb psychological thrillers. A soldier disfigured by a bomb in Iraq returns to London and is under suspicion for a number of violent rage-filled crimes.

3. The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

Reading popcorn that provoked the question, am I a slummy mummy? Are any of my friends? And if so, do we care?

Books that have failed to push buttons:

1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This has been given to me twice by people whose reading tastes coincide with mine, and both times I couldn’t get beyond the first paragraph. For another day, no doubt.

2. Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

The story of a little Scottish girl with a big voice who goes on the talent circuit and finds fame. The premise doesn’t really interest me, but I picked it up at book-club and am persevering with it out of literary interest. O’Hagan uses a variety of perspectives to tell his story: first person, third person, letters, screenplay-style dialogue. It has not caught me emotionally and if the person I borrowed it from wanted it back tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel deprived, but I am studying his shifting perspectives to see if the novel works as a whole.

3. Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

I lasted about 40 pages. This is another exercise in ego from McCourt - his third book All About Himself, with frequent faux-modest references to his own fame. If you’d like to read the “Irish yokel done good in NYC thanks to naked talent” story all over again, then read this book. If you want insights into the teaching process and sensitive remarks on the making of teenage minds, then don’t.

Good luck with your writing week, dear writer friends. I will be trolling past, via the lovely Literate Kitten, to see how you have been doing.