Early in December I caught some bug that laid me so low I spent most of the month in bed watching TV. I got to watch all those episodes of Lewis, Inspector Morse, Waking The Dead, DCI Banks, Midsomer Murders, Miss Marple, Columbo, Death In Paradise etc - spot a pattern? - I've seen a dozen times before. I can speak along with most of them. I've also become re-addicted to game shows - what pedant isn't? - though I'm proud I've resisted the allure of the soaps, which I abandoned entirely about twenty years ago. More or less recovered now, from the bug, I'm doing my best to break the TV Box Set/Morning-Afternoon-Late Night broadcast repeats cycle. I didn't write a word for four or five weeks, but I'm back at it now.
It's hard work. Not the writing as such, especially when I do eventually get going, but the effort of mentally steeling myself for the task. The PC is perfectly designed to exploit the lazy, passive side of my nature. Another episode of Lewis is only a few clicks of the mouse away, to say nothing of the time I can spend idly wasting hours on Facebook, with which I have a love-hate relationship. And there are other distractions of course, of the routine, everyday domestic variety. Still, I've braced myself and got going to some degree.
I'm grateful for my writing group, Biggar Writers. We've managed to keep going through the pandemic restrictions using ZOOM. And we've kept up our regular writing challenges, which are responsible for most of the short stories I've posted on my website to date. Our last challenge, set at our final "Christmas" meeting of 2020, was to write an "optimistic" piece. I will be posting my effort - a little ditty on adolescent love and aspirations - just as soon as my fellow writers have had a chance to read and comment. And I've written another short-story, a macabre revenge tale, which I'm going to submit to a writing competition, so I won't be posting that one any time soon.
I have two novels in development, both resurrected old ideas. One is a fantasy thriller I began over 30 years ago, the other is a farce/comedy of roughly the same vintage. Going back over the old, unfinished manuscript for the thriller, I notice much is dated, and now I shall have to be careful to write it consciously as a period piece. (I cannot shift the action to modern day because then the central plot doesn't work.) The comedy does not suffer the same problem; I don't have the original manuscript (completed) and I'm rewriting the whole thing from scratch.
I'm concentrating on the comedy at the moment, I'm having to read everything I've written to date as I've rather lost the thread of things. I hear about these writers who have the whole thing plotted out in minute detail and only have to worry about putting the words down to match their detailed sketches. I don't work like that. I don't think I can. I have an idea and I have to run with it, and I'm never certain of - until the last quarter of the story, say - where the characters and plot are going. I create the characters and kick off the plot, but to a large degree, after that, I'm not entirely sure if I'm writing the story or the story is taking me along with it. It's a strange feeling. Of course, there's nothing supernatural going on here, it's merely a function of my perceptions, my own particular, mild psychosis.
So I'm trying to get on with it, I am getting on with it. In these troubled times we all need something to comfort and soothe us. My writing fits the bill, at least to the degree I can immerse myself in it and stop thinking about all the shit that's going down. My advice to everyone is go find a smidgen of solace in a soupcon of escapism. It's what I do, and it works. Get on with it.
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