I consider myself very fortunate to have a husband who genuinely believes that it is just as good to come home to a couple of thousand words of story as it is to come home to a tray full of newly-baked cakes.
This is what he tells me, anyway, and today I have managed both, so I am feeling very pleased with myself. I have made chocolate coated fruit-and-almond squares, bread rolls, and extricated my characters from an unpleasantly tricky situation. Also I have made an appointment with the hairdresser, collected my prescription toothpaste and posted my expenses form for the recent court case. What a busy bee I have become.
I completely forgot to do the washing, but you can’t have everything.
We have had to go out to work tonight because of the hairdresser tomorrow and the ongoing financial embarrassment verging on humiliation. I don’t mind this because it is simply a change of venue for the story-composing activities, and at this time of year I don’t get interrupted very often.
I am having to try very hard indeed not to fill this with boring waffle about my writing adventures. I have written and then deleted two paragraphs already because they were so tedious they even irritated me. The thing is that I have become completely enthralled by the whole thing and it is now occupying the central position of my activities.
It is like living inside another world in my head. I have written forty thousand words now, which feels like about the halfway mark, and I am dreaming and waking and living to the drumbeat of the story. Even if nobody ever wants to publish it I shall have had such an adventure writing it that it won’t have been wasted time.
Fortunately Mark does not mind this. His own thoughts are filled with an axle at the moment. He has been telling me all about it, and does not seem to have noticed that I do not even have the first glimmering of an idea what a prop shaft might be, or whether four revolutions is a good thing. I sit there saying things like ‘goodness’, or ‘dearie me’, whichever seems to be most appropriate, and this seems to do the job.
I feel a bit guilty about this because he is perfectly capable of entering into very spirited discussion about whether the owner of a castle would have made his money by taking income from shipping goods upriver, or whether he might be paid for hiring out a mercenary army, which is the sort of question which has been plaguing me lately. Just how on earth did people afford to go to war? If my castellan decides to raise an army, how exactly would he fund it? It would cost an absolute fortune, and it is entirely plain that he would think jolly carefully about it first.
Almost slipped into boring waffle for a minute there.
I am going to cut this entry short because of being completely incapable of entering into sensible thought. I am going to go away and consider my romantic hero’s progress instead.
I hope I will have recovered my descriptive powers a little by tomorrow. Also I have attached a picture of the chocolate squares by way of convincing myself that am not a total underachiever. Mark took a picture of his axle to show me this evening, and I gave my ignorance away by asking what it was. I almost attached that picture but wasn’t quite sure which was the dullest.
Tomorrow will be better. Probably.
