I remember as a child being bored… there were a lot fewer options to be entertained then, and often when waiting for something, a journey to end, a queue to end, a visit to an elderly relation to end, the only thing to do was to think about stuff… I also didn’t need much sleep as a child, but bedtimes were strict and I would be in bed and awake for what seemed like hours despite my parents’ best attempts – they took me for long walks, read to me, let me read, let me listen to the radio, but night after night, I would lie wide awake in the dark… thinking about stuff.
I did think about all sorts of stuff, considering my age I thought a lot about things like the universe, religion, whether there were really fairies and magic (much as I wanted there to be, I concluded that no, they didn’t exist, any more than God and angels did…)
However, the main stuff I thought about were the stories running in my head, even from being small I had stories there – a vivid imagination to say the least! Because of this, I did have something to do when I was bored, I could think about things and think about my stories. This happens today; when I’m doing something boring, washing up, driving along motorways, sitting on a train in the dark with my book finished and nothing to write on, then I think about my stories.
So today, as I was driving to my writing group, behind a ponderous lorry, my mind drifted to a story in my head – not actually the latest Radwinter story I am in the middle of writing, or the autobiographical work I am doing for the National Novel Writing Month (an online challenge to write 50,000 in November) but I was following the storyline of some of my characters from my most recently published book, Lucky Portbraddon.
When a novel is finished and published, the characters continue their lives in my head for a while; sometimes the story-line reappears in a new novel with different characters in a different situation, sometime they just lie dormant, and once, with the Radwinters, they continued not only into a sequel but into a third, fourth and now three-quarter written fifth volume!
So I was driving along behind the lorry, half my mind concentrating on driving safely, the other half on Alex Portbraddon and his son, Noah, and a friend Ismène Veraney, with whom they are both half in love…
… and then I realised I had driven right past the turning I was supposed to take!!! Annoyed with myself, I abandoned the Portbraddons, turned off, turned round and headed back to the writing group, this time concentrating on driving and getting there!
Wasn’t it you that kept telling your students to PAY ATTENTION !!!
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Except when I drifted off, looking out the window, thinking of something else… My dad used to call me ‘Dilly-dream’!
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