Your Messages & Silence

Posted a second Message (20:30), and am really pleased with it. Words came as quickly as yesterday, and more or less in the right order. Very satisfying.

Also, I've done lots of editing today. Among other things, I have finally found the solution for a Problem Paragraph. I've been staring at it for over a month (in between eating, sleeping, and taking various children to various hospitals), and suddenly it clicked!

This revelation might have had something to do with himself being airborne somewhere over southern England, the small boy being at school, the small girl being at Jane's, and the baby being asleep. I could actually hear the cogs going round, which was good - although the graunching might not have been...

Drowning in New Ideas

While barely treading water in the swamp of editing, I am being deluged with ideas for new stories. I have thought up five new plots in the last three days alone. They're not just snippets, to go in the anecdotes file, but fully-fledged plots with characters, dialogue and satisfying endings.

Unfortunately, they have appeared to me at the most inconvenient moments (as though wallowing in a swamp of mucky grammar wasn't bad enough) and I've had to carry them round in my, already overwhelmed brain, until I could reach the computer.

Lunchtime today was a good example: I was just stirring the milk into some cheese sauce, when this great story-line appeared before me; the action danced before my eyes, and the dialogue sang in my ears (poetic, huh?). Now, I have a certain pride when it comes to making cheese sauce, so I had to wait until it was simmering before I could make a dash for the study, and get out as many words as possible (368) before the beeper went off.

Then, while we were eating lunch, I had an idea for a story about cheese sauce...