I’m having a gingerbread latte for my breakfast because I’m a grown-up and I can do what I please – and because I’ve been up since 5am; been awake since four. I find the joys (and they are many) of lying in the dark, in a large, comfortable bed with my pup at my side (she always gets into the bed at night and we’ve given up trying to stop her. Why would we? She’s a delicious, if not always considerate, bed-companion) are soon outweighed by a chattering mind and the need to get up and do something, even if it’s only meandering through blogs and trying to get Twitter to work again on Firefox (a lost cause).
Soon I shall be wending my way upstairs to work on Chaos – which I’m still plotting, but doing a lot of writing as well, because characters keep chatting to me, and because I can’t seem to help it. There are a lot of new characters in this one, some of them living, most of them not. My favourite is Luke. In the film of the book he’ll be played by Benedict Cumberbatch or Patterson Joseph (yes, he’s that amorphous. It’s part of his charm).
Progress is Good, if slow – which has more to do with a paucity of time than lack of ideas, ideas are flowing nicely. My notes are getting confusing, of course – par for the course on the first draft. An idea arises, I can’t see where on earth it will go, so I open a new doc and stick it in my ‘Chaos’ file, and soon I have hundreds of unconnected, collected thoughts on separate pages, some of them just a sentence or two, others many pages in length. I wish I could work out a better way to organise my ideas – I’ve tried many things, but it always ends up the same way. I’d be grateful for any advice (unless your advice is to use a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets depress me).
I should take Poppy out, get some air. The weather here has turned windy and grey. It might even rain. It seems an age since it last rained…
Gillian Walker 