Hot weekend at the hot keys...

Boy, it’s hot. Yesterday was apparently the hottest day of the year so far – I see that today is officially one degree Celsius cooler. It’s a pity it’s so hard to get any air-flow through the office; it’s sweltering in here, and has got increasingly muggy as the day went on. It’s the humidity that gets to me, far more than the heat.

Had a busy weekend; doing all my boring but useful jobs like grocery shopping and washing clothes, and then writing. That slightly weird dream last week, the one that I thought had the germ of an idea in it, has stuck in my brain and got me buzzing a bit; it ties up terribly neatly with an idea I had years ago, and I suddenly want to take it further. I’m making notes and lists, trying to sort out time-scale problems, and working out what research I need to do and what the main problem areas are (the bad guys are cardboard cut-outs at present, one of the male characters is lamentably wet, there are too many identikit tough women, and there’s a vital plot line that doesn’t mesh properly with another vital plotline… oh yes, I’m going to have fun with this one).

I do mean years ago, by the way; I was a teenager sitting on the school bus, drawing maps of imaginary lands… Suddenly one of those imaginary lands has come back to me, and the muse has asked me to look into it a bit more. She's eliminated the dragons, the elves and the wizardry, and the result looks like it is going to be a rather dark non-sorcery fantasy. God know what genre that is officially. Who writes fantasy without any magic at all in it? Is that still fantasy?

I must be mad embarking on notes for another story – I have two things on the go already, and am still tweaking “The Eternal Love of Gabriel Yeats”. Perhaps I am one of those tyro writers who’ll never be ready to show her work to anyone; I’ll just keep writing away and piling up manuscripts in my shed - or in the nook between the hi-fi and the nick-nacks drawers, which is where they’ve all gone so far (apart, that is, from the ones stuck on my ancient laptop, where the revised “Gabriel Yeats” is currently sitting).

Ah, but I love it. I love it as the only end of my life. Making something where nothing was before – whether it be lines on paper where no drawing was, or a story where no story was. It’s the magic of creating.