Lynne Patrick
Once upon a time I was a writer.
That’s how I started out on an eclectic career involving words, stories and books. If you don’t count running the junior library when I was at high school.
Then, when I returned to the fiction mines after seven years over in that dark and mysterious place on the other side, I found the ideas weren’t flowing as freely as they once had. Putting words together in a moderately entertaining way still happened (well, they entertained me some of the time, and other people still liked the way I did it to pay me for it occasionally); but the more or less steady stream of what Terry Pratchett calls narrativium that resulted, years ago, in nine unpublished novels and quite a lot of published short stories just wasn’t coming my way any more.
But as any writer knows, by the time you’ve been doing it for a few years, there’s a box in the cupboard/stack of folders in the drawer/directory on the computer (delete as appropriate, or add own storage facility) which contains the ideas that, for some reason, didn’t get developed. This can include anything from a scrap of paper with six words on it to a whole novel that never made it past first base with a publisher because of some fundamental flaw which you knew was there but couldn’t quite put your finger on. And all points between.
And sometimes there’s some useful stuff in there.
So far I’ve found a novel I still believe in, a lot, though I’m having difficulty convincing publishers that it’s a bestseller waiting to happen. (You have to admire the girl’s optimism, don’t you?). There’s another too, which, now I’ve given it a thorough overhaul, doesn’t look at all bad; a third which looked as if it might turn into a murder mystery, but in the end... didn’t; and a fourth which...
No, I’m not going to say any more. I might jinx it. Suffice to say I began to feel quite excited when I opened it up earlier this week, and more excited still when new words began to appear on the screen as I read. And when I opened it up again earlier today, the feeling was still there.
In fact, I know it must be starting to stir some creative juices because so far this week I’ve picked about twenty-five pounds of fruit from a pick-your-own farm, used it to make twenty pounds of jam, and mended some curtains which have been falling to pieces for about six years. That’s something else any writer will understand: the inexorable attraction of displacement activity when a project is going well.
So, having successfully displaced for most of the day, I suppose I’d better (mutter, grumble, exasperated sigh) go and write the damn thing...
Which is my excuse for a post four hours later than my customary posting time and not much more than half its usual length.
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