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I’ve had two very productive days, and it feels quite good. Yesterday afternoon, after a morning spent trying - in vain - to coax some life into the weather station’s Internet connection, I sat down and started to write. Old fashioned writing: pen in hand, paper on lap. It was something I’d wanted to do since the last day of the working year and, with all the fun of Christmas behind me, it felt good.

I didn’t pick up my half-finished book manuscript; instead, I just thought about my characters: who they were, what they did, what they were like, and I started to describe them, returning to them after an absence of almost two years and doing my best to get to know them again.

It’s been quite an eye-opener, and today’s installment, which ran to 11 handwritten sides of A4, has proved to me that my secondary and tertiary characters are far more interesting than my lead. They have more history, they lived through more exciting times, there is more in their past that affects their present and impacts on the futures of the other people in the book. It’s made me think again, quite seriously, about the direction my existing 114,000 words have so far taken.

Hmmm.

Well, I have a long train journey ahead of me tomorrow, which gives plenty of time for thinking. In fact, it could give a lot more than I’d expected, as the snow is still lingering, despite the promises of warmer fronts moving in, and nasty, unwelcome rain on the way. I rode the bus into town this morning, and had the place almost to myself. The streets were buried under a soft inch of pure white drift, and it all looked very nice.

I’d much rather have that than rain, any day.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.