Herbs, Hobbies and what you should be doing at 8:30am on Tuesday 6th October

Published: Sat, 08/22/20

Heide and Iain’s Newsletter

Comedy fiction and general silliness

Iain: Hello {{ subscriber.first_name | capitalize() or "friend" }} do you have a desert island herb?

Heide: I do.

Iain: I know you do. We talked about it the other day. I’d like to talk about it now.

Heide: Do you think our readers are interested in what our desert island herbs are?

Iain: No, but I do think they would be interested in the fact that we were talking about our desert island herbs at all.

Heide: We were sat under the gazebo in my garden. It was tipping it down with rain.

Iain: Hang on. I’ve got a picture somewhere.

Heide: And my husband brought out some potted herbs for you to take home to your wife and I happened to mention that tarragon would be my desert island herb.

Iain: By which you meant (for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs) that if you were stranded on a desert island, the one herb you would take with you would be tarragon.

Heide: Because it’s delicious with anything chickeny or eggy. And you said your desert island herb would be coriander.

Iain: Carrot and coriander soup. It goes great in curries. I love it. The point I want to raise was what should we have been doing while we were discussing herbs?

Heide: We should have been planning our comedy crime novel.

Iain: We should have been but we weren’t. In fact, during the course of that planning meeting we also discussed the Scarlet Pimpernel (and the Black Fingernail), the works of Alexandre Dumas, my mother-in-law’s souvenir cereal bowls, you dreaming that you had your arms chopped off and whether your gazebo was going to collapse under the weight of all the rain on it.

Heide: I sense a rebuke.

Iain: Not at all. I just thought it might be worth having a chat about the things we do when we really should be writing.

Heide: And when we should be writing to maximise our productivity.

Iain: Did you know, according to a survey last year, Tuesdays are the most productive days of the week? https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tuesday-most-productive-day-of-the-week-1.5260091

Heide: And most people are at their productive peak between 8:30am and 12 noon. https://www.womanandhome.com/health-and-wellbeing/time-day-most-productive-264446/

Iain: Although I think you and I are a little earlier. We’re both up at dawn much of the time.

Heide: AND October is allegedly the month when people get most big tasks done.

Iain: So, 8:30am on Tuesday 6^th October. That should be a bumper work day.

Heide: IF we can avoid distractions.

Iain: Obviously, we distract each other when we’re working together, planning.

Heide: And I think the silly chat is one of the things that inspires our story planning. But we probably also get distracted from work when we’re alone.

Iain: Definitely. And my top three are, without question, Facebook, Twitter and the BBC news website. (In fact, I went to check the BBC news site after writing this sentence and, no, no new news has occurred since the last time I looked). Do you have those immediate distractions, Heide?

Heide: Facebook sucks me in every time. Or the dog does something cute and I need to tell the family in our group chat.

Here he is refusing to go in his bed because we washed it.

Heide: There’s also the things that we do during times when we could be writing but choose not. Once upon a time, writing was a hobby, for you and for me. Now it’s work.

Iain: But we still enjoy it!

Heide: Crikey, yes. But I mean that we have other hobbies and activities that we do.

Iain: We’ve always subscribed to the belief that different activities use different parts of your brain and when you’re tired of doing one activity, you might still have the mental energy to do something different.

Heide: It could be other forms of work.

Iain: For me, once my creative writing brain has given up, I’m still able to do work on spreadsheets.

Heide: You and your ?$%&! spreadsheets.

Iain: Spreadsheets are wonderful. As you know, I plan most of our novels and even chapters using spreadsheets.

Heide: I hold spreadsheets responsible for killing my love of numbers. I will write about this at some point because it’s been niggling away at me ever since I read about sequence space synesthesia and realised that it exactly described how I relate to numbers. For me, numbers exist in space and to perform mental arithmetic is to zoom around a kind of map. I used to have an awesome command of (and love of) numbers until spreadsheets came along and put them in their horrid meaningless little cells. Or it could be that I just got old. There are lots of non-writing activities that I can do with a tired brain. There’s always book ads to tinker with, promotions to set up or world domination to plan.

Iain: And what about when you want to step away from writing all together?

Heide: I have been enjoying sewing again, since the pandemic created a scrubs crisis in the UK and lots of people sewed them at home. Our local group has kept going, sewing other useful things for charities and schools. I made myself a groovy new peg bag. Behold its awesomeness!

Iain: By the way, I must share that all those times you've written on social media about spending time with sewers, as in people who sew, my wife genuinely thought you were spending time in drainage tunnels. Hobby-wise, personally, I have the very intermittent hobby of painting. I’m not very good at it at all but I do enjoy messing about with colours and there’s something very contemplative about an unhurried creative process.

Iain: The art world has nothing to fear from me but it’s quite meditative. On that point, you do yoga, don’t you?

Heide: Yes, yoga is brilliant. It used to be about not making a fool of myself in the yoga studio, but now it’s on Zoom it’s more about checking that the microphone is muted before swearing at the moves. Very Zen.

Iain: In terms of exercise and well-being, one of the tensions in my life is that my ideal time to write is also my ideal time to go for a jog or a cycle. I feel like almost everything that requires effort and will needs to happen in the early morning.

Heide: Time does seem to have become a different sort of commodity since we were in lockdown. How we spend it is different, and I’ve heard lots of people wondering where that extra chunk went, the part where we would have been commuting to our jobs. I would love to hear our readers’ thoughts on this, and how they spend (or fritter) their time.

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