In the Downtime

Hi Everyone

So, a bit of a pause from me but I’ve been struggling to get back to where I was before being ill. (My GP now thinks it very likely I’ve had Covid, though of course there’s no telling for sure)

I know I’m not on my own in finding it hard to get over the relentless fatigue and of course there are many who have had much worse to contend with. And I have a garden, and new garden furniture! (for my birthday ) which has made June a happy month, despite it all.

As for the writing – it continues to grow and fill my mind, though slower than it might have in other times. You know you are deep into something when you wake, as I have recently, in the middle of the night with the sudden realisation that one of your characters would have done something differently – eg Sunyin would have wiped down all those items in the carrier bag. You tell yourself tomorrow you must go back and alter the text. You tell yourself you need to keep a notebook by your bed!

You know you’re even deeper in when its happens not once but twice – I have to stress the claustrophobia in the house… revelations come spinning out of the dark at you. Your mind is working overtime, even in sleep, solving problems. My brother who is a mathematician tells me this is how the big mathematical breakthroughs often happen – out of the blue, in the downtime.

The best of all of this, is knowing there is a book, however slim, there’s no stopping it now. You have to make it to the end, even if you’re not sure what that end is.

‘This thing you have built in the dark, that has felt so many times like it might be your undoing, is now leading you along like a gentle giant…’ Dani Shapiro, Still Writing – one of the best books on writing out there, I can’t recommend it highly enough

The foxgloves have been glorious this year –

thick fleshy leaves, folding like soft tongues you come – you come of your own bidding, a pattern of seeding know only to you, tall attendant, swaying in the breeze with the weight of your freckled cups, pollen funnelled bells, into which the bees crawl helpless, for honey, apricot, fuchsia, palest of pink, you disappear from the bottom upwards to pyramid, to neck craning, garden periscope…