This week, I have been in a little bubble. I’ve read a lot, thought about poetry themes, and planned and discussed my follow-up ideas to the family tree novel. I can hear some of the conversations my beloved characters have already!
It’s been a delight to recharge myself a little. I’ve been living in Botswana in my books, in miniscule moments in my poetry, and have zipped through time with my characters. I haven’t sat, unblinking, willing the page to fill in front of me, and I haven’t worried about work counts or technical details.
I think I am happiest when my research is character-driven, not process driven – trying to think about a legal process as I wrote had me on edge. Despite some good advice not to get bogged down in this detail in the first draft, passed to me by a fellow writer (and picked up from Ian Rankin, who should know!) it does define the order things happen, if nothing else. If that’s wrong, the whole pack of cards might fall!
But here I am, thinking about the whodunnit as a first draft, so I obviously plan to do something more with it – which I didn’t know last week, so that’s something else this break has given me.
Next week I’ll be back to fitting my life together like a jigsaw but, just until the end of today, I’m going to relax and let myself just be.
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
Sounds like a wonderful bubble to be in!
Absolutely! I managed a lot of reading, which was great, and I really do feel better for a week without word count targets! 🙂