It was in the shower today, at roughly around half 3 in the afternoon, that I realised I wanted to start this blog. I had all these wild words and opinions pinging through my mind at like, 5 bazillion miles per hour, and I decided I needed a platform to bring these musings and thoughts on to. It has been something I have not felt truly “ready” to start yet, due to lack of inspiration (for months I have not known what to call this blog or how to design it) but I’ve come to the decision that I’m just going to, in the words of my dad “get on with it.”
My writing CV is a colourful one, beginning my writings at the tender age of four, my first publication being a short novella named “Dog in a box” or more precisely, “Bog in a box” (I always confused Ds and Bs) a cheery semi-biographical tale of my Granny and her dog, who one day discover a magical box in the local park (Somewhere in Crouch End, Haringey) which shrinks the dog and causes him to hang out with all these talking insects. It was highly plagiaristic of James and The Giant Peach, so never reached the critical acclaim it should have received (sadface). Other writing feats included an actual novel I penned when I was eleven, an epic story of four orphaned siblings who are trying to find their parents on some corrupt planet in the future. It was highly inspired by Star Wars and Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, and again, I broke the writers code by “borrowing” some elements of these two original creations… Unfortunately my Dad ended up deleting this accidentally. But maybe it was meant to be, maybe it was a punishment, karma, for my ruthless stealing of other’s storylines and writing styles. Fortunately now, I can draw inspiration from other things, without blatant copying or duplicating.
Anyway, you are all probably wondering why this post is called “The Writer’s Lump” if you’re thinking “gosh the title for this is like, so irrelevant and has nothing to do with what the author is babbling on about.” You are wrong. The sentimental, thoughtful moment of pensiveness is coming up.
I was watching Little Women with my Mum the other evening, spending some last minute mum-daughter time before I flee the nest to University in three weeks time. And there was a part in it in which protagonist Jo meets the hot French lecturer guy (p.s. my mum: “He wasn’t French, he was German wasn’t he?”) and hes all like “oh you’re a writer aren’t you?” and shes like “yeah” and he goes “I can tell by your hands.” And I turn to my mum with a sort of puzzled look on my face in which she explains about the writer’s lump. A lump on the ring finger of the hand you write with, sometimes hardly noticeable, a small bump formed from too much pen holding. My mum held up hers to show me, a bump created over the years from excessive writing and marking school books (my mum is a French and Spanish teacher). And then she holds my hand up in front of my eyes, and there it is; the tiniest protuberance on my right ring finger. From all the years of book making, doodling, scratching, painting, scribing, mark making, a tiny writer’s bump has been weathered into the bone. It was in that moment that I realised that writing has always been there with me.
