Dissolving into words

I don’t know how writing affects anybody else – but when I’m writing and it’s going well I vanish inside the piece I’m working on. It’s great, because the dialogue of my characters is more interesting than my own, and their situations are generally much more fascinating (and perilous) than mine. But it does mean that I have very little to say for myself when the writing is good.

So … I’ve sent off a sample – four chapters, a chapter by chapter outline, a very short synopsis of how the individual novel might become a series of four books and now it’s more or less out of my hands. I’ve done the best I can and what happens next depends on all kinds of things: whether the editor likes the work; whether it fits with her view of how the material should have been developed; how the market is looking; what her colleagues think of the idea – a lot of things that are little or nothing to do with how well I’ve written my requested material.

And yet, in my head, it’s all about me. It’s all about the words that I’ve put one next to another and whether they could have been better chosen, better placed. So I’m off to focus on my crochet as a bit of a break before heading back to completely revising the wolf novel, and if I vanish inside that one, you’ll know it’s going well.

Distractions from being a writer …

… are numerous. Few though, are as enticing as this vixen and her four cubs. They live on an allotment site near us and are remarkably unfazed about visitors, although they have a definite flight distance and are only around in the early evening, which can make getting good photos rather difficult, as the light is just that bit too low to work with – the vulpine equivalent of Marlene Deitrich/Greta Garbo?

Anyway, foxes are not wolves, but vulpine behaviour in urban settings is fascinating and watching how the vixen adapts to her environment with the four undisciplined cubs to supervise is an interesting sidelight on how the alpha female wolf in my novel might manage to cope with her own cubs as they begin to explore their less urban, but still man-made, home.

What writers need and what they want (again)

So the things that I want are an iPhone, so that I can download the Ether Books app, not because I have stories on it (although I do) but because, having seen it, I would love to have essays and stories downloaded to my mobile that way – it’s like having a portable literary sweetshop!

And the other think I want is Jill Tattersall’s painting of Hove Seafront which I saw at The Wolf At The Door open house last week – it was so exactly like Hove on the cold still days that are the best days of winter that I could almost feel the champagne sting of the air as I breathed it in.

But …

I am the kind of writer who has to work in a corner of the room, with no pictures on the walls. Above my desk I have a bookshelf. On it are my backup files, my accounts files and some dictionaries. There used to be novels there, and a thesaurus, but I just keep taking them down and reading them instead of working. If I had pictures in my sightline I would spend all my time gazing at them instead of writing. And if my phone had predictive text (let alone apps) I’d probably create longer texts than I would sentences in my work in progress.

So while I want these things, I shall not have them, because however lovely they are (and they are lovely) I am the kind of writer who can’t be trusted with even the tiniest distraction, let alone great big gorgeous ones!

The photo is lavender lemon cupcakes, just to prove that my procrastination is also creative ...