Notebooks and Things

 It's been quite a long, hard week.  Ask any teacher - online teaching is no fun at all and requires a lot more work than normal teaching does. Throw in the stress over having no power and I was almost a gibbering wreck. 

My release this week has been starting to write a new crime novel. I have all the details worked out this time and feel frustrated that I can't just connect my brain to my laptop and download the story.  I have been writing in bed just before going to sleep.  I was not sure that this would be the best time to write as my brain is quite tired and I also feared it might stop me from going to sleep as I would be thinking about the next bit.  However, it has proved the opposite.  I go to sleep with a sense of fulfillment as I have done something I really enjoy. Until I earn millions as a writer, I will always have to fit it in around everything else, so it is important to do a little bit every day.

People often ask me how I have time to write.  I have quite a busy life with a full time job as a teacher, a family, including an elderly father, to look after and all the other things I do, such as extra lessons and helping run our B&B, to fit in.

Time, I have discovered, is a very strange thing: the more you have of it, the more you waste it.  When I was young and single, I used to lament that I didn't have time to write, but when Sian was born, I realised just how much time I had had.  She did not sleep well until she was about six and so I learnt to grab the twenty minutes she took as a nap as a baby to quickly write as much as I could get in before she woke again.  Most of This September Sun was written this way.

   I have since learnt to carry my notebook everywhere.  Inspiration doesn't just come when you are comfortably seated at your desk, laptop open - and you don't have to write everything within a neat time frame.  I am always surprised by writers who claim to only write between the hours of six and eight in the morning, or eleven o'clock at night, or whatever it may be.  These are obviously people who don't have jobs or families to think about.  For me personally, there is no real right time and if I was to wait until I have a couple of hours completely free to dedicate to writing, I would be waiting a long time.  Sometimes I write while I am waiting for something to cook in the oven or while I am sitting in the car waiting to pick up one of my daughters from an activity.

I like to think of my notebooks as an eclectic mix, proof of my undiscovered genius.  Every time I have bought one, I have promised to dedicate it totally to the pursuit of writing.  When my children were much younger, they were used to occupy them during long car journeys and the like, and so detailed descriptions of what a body would look like if someone was poisoned or stabbed is alternated with pictures of  a stick family having a picnic or fairy houses. Add in shopping lists, scraps of conversation, directions to various places, descriptions of someone's shoes, and recipes jotted down from magazines in doctors' waiting rooms, and they make for interesting reading.

I am hoping that one day they will fetch millions at auction.  The problem is I will probably be long dead before they do!