To Catch a Creative Fire

Image: DemonMuse.com

A lazy(ish) start to yesterday, but hey, I had a day away from the day job so I was going to do it all my way. And that meant lying in! Remember though, a lie in for me means 8:30 in the morning not lunchtime like some folk I know.

And so, yes, I lazily kicked the day off: slow breakfast, shave of one’s head, wrote up the blog, and then went out for coffee. And a very productive coffee it was indeed.

Trees for Life
I worked on my ideas for the Trees for Life project I mentioned yesterday. They’re coming to fruition nicely and I wrote out 11 poems, most of them haiku. I figured that since it was a form of poetry that is directly related to nature that might be where I could take it. I could explore what nature means to me through haiku and it seems to be working. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed writing poetry so much in a long time as I did yesterday morning in that coffee shop.

I’ll select one haiku for each season that is the strongest in tune to what nature means to me and send it in. Even if they weren’t to be used, I’m already going places with them in the back of my mind.

Story Shop
Back home and after some lunch, I settled down in my office to work for the day. I worked through my emails, sent in a package to an organisation that has approached me about something—I’ll announce more details on this in a few days—and worked on drafting my pitch for the Story Shop programme at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August.

The 2011 programme for the book festival comes out on Thursday and I am very excited already about seeing who’s coming this year. It’s an important time for me, the book festival, and even more so this year with so much going on.

New Fiction
I wrote up a new flash fiction piece from notebook into my computer, as I did a new short story. The flash piece is particularly good. I sometimes struggle to say what I want in shorter pieces but it worked with this one, which I find interesting given that is exactly what haiku is also about; I must be in tune with something minimalist at the moment.

Gatecrash
The bulk of the day was spent on writing my new novel, GATECRASH. It’s now up to 40,400 words and still going strong. It’s a world apart from its first incarnation when it was drafted for NaNoWriMo, this brand new version takes the original idea and actually runs with it properly instead of banging out a lot of nonsense purely for word count. There’s a structure to it now and properly fleshed out characters—though not enough but that’ll come.

I think in the end I got just under 7k down on paper again. To say that I am creatively on fire at the moment would be an understatement.

Reading
To end the day I sank into my friend Annabel’s new book, ASSUMPTION OF RIGHT. I want to finish it before I have her onto the blog, but let me just say this: I could read this author’s work every day and never want to put her books down.

And so to Tuesday…