Hello and welcome to the week ahead. I was just looking through the photos I took over the weekend (there were only three, it didn’t take long), and thought I’d share them this morning because they sum up what I have recently been about. A corner, dustbins and a view.
The corner is my writing station, an Ikea arrangement that has useful shelves and space for my laptop, and where I can arrange my notes. As you’ll see, it doesn’t allow room for any extras like research books, and in this case, I had to bring in the music stand. I was referring to a book of maps from 1888, a London A to Z, in effect, and there is no space to lay it open. The music stand came in very handy.
If you were wondering what I was writing, it was/is the second part of a new Victorian mystery series. Part one has been out for a week now; a full-length novel set in 1892 concerning a London cabbie and his quest for a better life. Finding a Way is available here.
So far this summer on Symi I’ve come up against various polite enquiries from new friends and old: What do you do? Are you the one that writes the books? What have you been working on? Still writing? There are other versions of the same thing, and I don’t mind any of them, then there’s the: I hear you’re a writer. (Not a question as such but a statement designed to prompt a reply other than a simple ‘Yes.’) There are also comments such as, ‘You have been prolific,’ to which I usually reply, I still am, because writing is my full-time job. By full-time, I mean six to eight our per day, with a long lunch break and time off when I feel like it. Not the full-on 16 + hours a day some people around here put in to make ends meet through the summer, nor the 10-hour days of the labourers and others who work all year round.
When I am not full-time writing in my cosy corner, I try and go for a stroll to stretch the legs and let the mind adjust from fiction world to real – or, more usually, the other way around as I plot as I walk. I tell myself the next chapter in the story and then head home and regurgitate it as a first draft. Sometimes, I wander up the hill as far as I can bear, as I did on Friday…
Other times, I take a shorter walk around the village just to get my steps in, and on other days, I walk as far as the sitting room and collapse on the sofa with a game of ‘Sherlock’ on my tablet. Most afternoons I call down to the bar to see Neil and whoever is there, as a way of taking a break from the house, and on other more productive afternoons, after pottering with words some more, I might set about one of those tasks I was telling you about the other day. Tasks that have waited months or years to get done which, when finally seen to, take no time at all. The other day I cleaned out the saucepan cupboard. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
There is no photo of the cupboard activity because, let’s face it, it’d be pretty dull. Instead, the stray cats who live up the road with the chickens.
