Last four days I’ve had a cold. Started Sunday and then shifted between suddenly feeling better and just as suddenly feeling quite unwell. Monday, for instance, after expecting to have a runny nose and cough, I had next to nothing, and I thought maybe what started on Sunday evening wasn’t going to amount to much.
And then Tuesday arrived and I wasn’t well at all – yup,
just a cold. I know.
And Wednesday (yesterday) came and I started cancelling
things I had to do yesterday as well as today.
And of course, just to keep me on the hop, I’ve felt
really well today. Could have done all the things I’d cancelled.
So I did some pruning of a rose that had gone crazy and
thinks reaching for the sky is a good look for roses. Helped my wife clean up
the remaining tomato plants – which have done their dash – and deposited the
used soil and dying plants in the compost. (Yes, you can compost tomato
plants, as I discovered at the age of 78. Also potato plants. My mother, who
did the garden in our previous house, mostly, had always said this was a no-no.
Watered the plants in the garden. So far the Council
hasn’t imposed any water restrictions, which is a bit of a surprise because we’re
having a kind of drought - in the sense that we haven’t had any substantial
rain for some weeks. Our plants have been okay, but the grass has turned a
strange shade of yellowy-brown.
In the Botanic Gardens, the duck pond has been reduced
to half its size. The little stream that seems to run out of nowhere has stopped.
I’m told it’s been turned off in the meantime because it’s actually a man-made
tributary running off the Oamaru Creek, as I discovered today. I’d been wondering
what its origin was in the three years we’ve lived here.
The gardeners in the Gardens are watering the grass,
because it’s going the same colour as ours, and everyone else’s.
And I’m not doing much on furthering the book. Yet,
during the course of the week, I did come up with an interesting name
for my main villain. I won’t share it with you at this point, because I’m not convinced
it’s the right name. A bit too fancy, perhaps.
I did some more thinking about why the calamity that
happens at the beginning of the book comes about. Still haven’t decided on
this, though I did have fun reading up on some possible things that could have
happened. Actual scientific or practical things; not just magical ones.
And I looked further into whether my current narrator
has any reason to be the main character. At this point he’s not giving
it much get up and go – apart from rescuing another character in spite of his lack of bravery. But he’s a
bit too much of an observer. This is obviously going to have to change, or he
may find himself in a minor role.
And I made a kind of timeline of events that mostly
happen before the book begins. These needed to be in my head, even if
they don’t make it into the book itself.
All this stuff is important. The book can’t move forward
without a good deal of thinking at this stage. Having given myself a number of
problems to solve I have to solve them. Keeping on writing in a pantser sort of
way may bring solutions to light. Or it may just leave me with a flabby draft.
In my last book, after three false starts involving a
number of chapters that either got dumped or transmogrified in some way into
the book that eventually got published, I found that there were always points
where the creative writing had to stop, or else a lot more digital paper would
be wasted.
And even though writing on its own is enjoyable, it’s equally
possible to get enjoyment out of thinking about how to get your characters out
of tricky spots, or to find out why they’ve done what they’ve done, or what the
history of certain events is, and much more.
It’s not as ‘easy’ as writing scintillating dialogue and
dramatic description, but it gives an underpinning to the work that will stand
it in good stead.
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I had a cold for the last couple of days. Now my nose is running and I have a bit of a cough. I've been going to work spreading my germs and now I'm going to get the blame when every one else gets the cold. The cough medicine is not mine - I just found it on top of the fridge and thought I'd throw it in the picture.
Photo: Jason Rogers
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