About writing
I am currently working on a novella called “The Day It Rained”, which has been sometime in the making - I have notes on the piece dating back to 2002. It has been “my next project” on a lot of occasions, always usurped by something else, but the story kept nagging at me. I make no fight about being a great artist (though I always do my very best), but I always knew that this was a good idea and that if I did it right, it could be quite a powerful piece. Maybe, in fact, that knowledge has always been what’s scared me away in the past - that it could be good but I’d screw it up somehow.

I saw a post, on the Net, from a publishing house that I like and an editor that I respect, looking for projects. Realising, in some dim and distant part of my brain, that this could be it, I wrote a teaser synopsis of the plot and sent it away and got a nibble back.

Great, now I just have to write the thing.

I didn’t refer back to the 18,000 words of notes that I’d already made, because most of the pertinent points were burned in already. As I began work, I remembered how far the gap is sometimes between what you plan and what actually comes out in the writing, but the characters were working, the situations were working and I was over-writing like mad (it’s a novella, to be about 30k words or so and I’m almost at 20k now and they haven’t even reached the smithy, where the bulk of the action takes place!).

I hadn’t realised it in the planning, but as I was writing, I could see that I needed another character. I’d already had a strong image of how this person would die, but for some reason, the words weren’t coming. I tried it from one angle, then another and I haven’t written anything since Thursday on it. But this morning, it came to me that the injuries this person receives, whilst extremely life-threatening and potentially fatal, wouldn’t mean instant death. Which would mean this character would survive for a while, in tremendous pain - what would that do to the psyche of the other siege-sufferers (is that how you say it? Or should it be siege-ees)? And that gave me the opening, for the antagonist who is already worried about his wife - this new characters cries and screams would unnerve anyone.

And so I’m off again, but this is yet another valuable lesson that I’ll doubtless forget very quickly: sometimes, if the words don’t come easily, it’s because you haven’t figured out the story turns yet. I should have learned it with “Conjure” (coming this August, just in case you’d forgotten!) - Steve, the JCB driver, just had a cameo in the notes but ended up being the third lead in the finished book.