Removing Stress through Writing

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Corporate Sarcasm
No blog post yesterday because I’m pretty sure the last thing you want to be reading about in any detail are the trials and tribulations of my working life at the day job. Corporate I.T. challenges are only interesting for very few of us, and even that interest is limited to low level, heavily sarcastic jokes. So I’ll leave that one where it is.

So, accepting that Monday and Tuesday were both wash outs as far as anything literary went, yesterday proved to be much better indeed. The day job was pretty intense—my boss is off so my workload tends to increase as I stand in for him on certain things—so when I left the office I decided on a pit-stop on the way home: Costa Coffee.

Coffee Shop Creativity
My timing was spot on again as I walked in shortly after someone had placed an order for 12 carry out drinks, but eventually I got my cappuccino and took it over to one of the window stools overlooking Princes Street.

It’s a great view. To the right you can see the Scott Monument towering dark and high, and beyond that, Edinburgh Castle sits proud and stoic against the sky. Straight ahead is the National Gallery complex, and down below, a zebra crossing that is the route for people travelling on foot to Waverley Station and between the Old and New Towns.

In short, it’s perfect for people-watching and there’s not a session when I’m in that seat watching that view, that I ever walk away without having written at least one brand new poem.

As it turned out, I wrote nine fresh poems to draft: several based on my London notes, a couple based on the coffee shop itself, and one on something I witnessed out of the window. By the time I left, I’d made the shift from corporate I.T. worker to creative writer, and my day-job stresses had all but gone.

A Novel Grows
Work on the novel continued into the evening. It’s at a stage where it’s as complicated as any crime story I’ve written before: interesting, with a couple of strong characters and some nice twists and turns. This new novel though, is about to take a leap forward in the demands it will place on its structure and on my writing skills. How far have I come since my last fresh written novel? The answer to that will soon become obvious.

But why will it be so challenging? It’s simply because it will shortly have five strong characters in it instead of two, each with very strong life forces and each with their own unique story. All of this is about to come clashing to a head, which if that is not exciting enough, is also to disperse wider geographically. The novel is set in Edinburgh, but is about to shift to Cumbria.

Today
Another full day at the office lies ahead but another full evening of work will follow it. Also, I must wrap-up last month’s work list before I do much else. It wasn’t the best of months mainly down to the couple of weeks I lost with my dental surgery, but there was London, a new chapbook, travel writing, kids’ illustrations, a novella completion and a novel start.

Can’t be that bad, can it?

SPRING BARGAIN