Authorial Gestation

Progress with my storyline has come rushing through the open sash window of my protagonist's bedroom and sent her old essays flying like a cloud of words. Her ailing bird in its delicate cage has had its decrepit feathers ruffled by the speed of the inspiration rattling its bars.

Characterisation was giving me some headaches, mostly on the problematic nature of my head being full of a million and one other things. How to love a murderer? I want her fall from grace to be shocking, but believable. Viewpoint, and how to approach her depiction has consumed me since the last blog.

I just didn't want to kick of by misreading her too soon. Reading up on serial killers was getting me down, and then I read The Collector, by J Fowles, remembered In God's Own Country by Ross Raisin, and that's really helped a lot, to see how it can work without being sensational and in this way, more dark for its innocence.

And here I am staring across a sea of possibilities, finally understanding that sometimes, you have to let the crap out in order to get at the nuts and bolts - the carcass of the thing. People tell you this all the time and then, wham! it hits you like a bloody great brick in the face. You know it, because you can physically feel it.

I have let some mini-metaphors in too because I needed some kind of allowance to play. Lots of little ones embroidered together are fast becoming the dream catcher in which the bigger narrative is growing.

After a week in which my laptop was invaded by spyware, then rescued by wonderful tech assistants at Southampton Solent University, the idea that I had almost lost EVERYTHING I have been working on for six months was, in one moment, terrifying.

Nothing like a shake up, and a reminder that other people have bigger problems than a laptop going on the blink, to put things in perspective.