Chaotic head; adolescent fluency

Sunday, 12 October 2003

But first things first: happy birthday, Melusina! (And also to my friend Dreamvirus, who may read this at some point.)

Again, I have allowed the days to slip by, the weeks mount up. I have a fierce habit of letting tasks (e.g. updating my journal) build and burgeon in my mind until they become unfeasibly daunting.

My mind is a chaotic place at the moment, and I find that when people ask me for my "news" I am unable to distill a digestible story from the storm of thoughts and experiences through which I've been whizzing. (Which is ironic, really, considering my chosen calling, but there you go.)

I've been writing. I've been working (my big work deadline is tomorrow week - wish me luck). I've been planning. I've been thinking. The Main Novel has thickened, in terms both of its word count and of its palpability in my head. I know more about what I want to do with it - what I want to "achieve". Who the characters really are, why they do what they do, how the story plays out.

(Yes, I should have worked all of this out much earlier. I realise that. I'll know better next time.)

Also, I know more about how much work will be involved in getting the draft to a stage where I'll be prepared to ask people to read it.

I've been writing almost every day (although not this weekend, which has seen a Social Whirl the mere contemplation of which would freeze the blood of any self-respecting hermit), and in those spare moments in which I have not been emitting gelatinous chunks of the Main Novel, I have been feverishly scribbling notes for my NaNoWriMo attempt.

I'm like the proverbial kid in a sweet shop. It's so long since I was this excited about a story, I'd forgotten what it felt like. Even my feminist sci-fi story (which may be the next novel I write after these two are done - did you hear that? Did you hear what I just said? "After these two are done"! How cool is that?), which I am undoubtedly deeply excited about, hasn't so far come to such fizzing life.

I'll tell you what it's like. It's like the summer I was fourteen, lying on my front on the beach in Italy, under the sun-umbrella, scribbling as fast as I could into a copybook with a ten-colour biro, just trying to get the stuff down before the next idea arrived.

I was drafting then, of course, not planning, as I am now. But the feeling is similar - the sense that I'm taking dictation from the part of my brain that knows it all. Imagining details on the spur of the moment. Realising that what I thought was a problem is actually a way to make the story even stronger. It seems that I need only write down a question to have the answer come flowing out of my pen. Like one of those colouring books where you rub with a pencil to reveal the picture that's already there. It's magic.

Of course, I know enough about the way I operate to be aware that it's unlikely to last - this ease, this fluency of invention. But while it's here, I'm damn well taking advantage of it!

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