Thursday 12 November 2015

Space to breathe, space to work

The cottage is progressing gently, surveys have come back (not falling down), money has been collected and a million forms filled in. We will have a cottage by the sea hopefully by the end of December. the idea makes us both more imaginative, walking along the seafront makes us feel like children. This is a dream come true for us - who thought we would ever be able to afford to live in such a nice place, just for fun? OK, it's our entire pension fund as well - worth having anyway. 

Planning a space only nine feet wide is fun too -   it does make you think carefully about what can go where, how wide everything is. My parents live on a narrowboat so are experts in narrow living, nearly nine feet seems capacious beside a boat. Hopefully a lot of our spare stuff can go to the cottage, including the odd spare offspring. 

The Twins book is almost finished, I'm onto a third draft, just a run through to fix a big plot twist that didn't work. Going through the second draft I found a much better one. I think some writers struggle to do a first draft, think they can tidy up the language and the grammar a bit, and it's done. Maybe it is for some people, but I'm not one of them. Mine evolves between and during drafts. I know my characters so much better now, I know the sub-plots, I can see where a character came in and then just disappeared. More work, more time but I want to get it right.

Meanwhile, I'm making linocuts and these are drawing out strange poetry. All inspired by Appledore.

Octopus