The abbey’s soaring barrel-vaulted roof and its handsome wooden pews should have sustained me but as I knelt for what seemed hours, my hands knotted together, no vestige of relief came. Only a biting cold that soon had me shivering. As well that I shiver, I thought. It approximated the incipient fear that was beginning to stir. How dangerous it would be to work in a house that would entertain the high-born of far and wide. Prudence, you place yourself in peril.
Brevity: Things that are brief can be appreciated or they can be a vast disappointment.
Eating a block of chocolate is too brief. Chatzy to America is too brief. The series of Return to Cranford and Doc Martin likewise. Sunny warmth on a winters day: all too brief. The scallop season. The dog’ s good behaviour. Exercises for a damaged ankle are not brief enough so perhaps they should go into the longevity category. The current flood of political mind-bending should be so brief as to be non-existent. In fact politics as a career should be non-existent.
Bit slow on the blog at the minute. Doing rehab for leg and it hurts.
Have 6 weeks of this yet. But will work on a Sheriff and a Pillow Book over the next few days. Stick with me!
Last week I was confined firmly to a couch with an injury. My world narrowed and my focus by consequence narrowed with it. Apart from forays into Blogland and Ebay, there was little to divert me and the consequence was that the latest manuscript began to assert itself in living breathing colour. I began to mesh with the characters again, to see the setting, to move faster along the plot-line.
I love attending blog events and in the short time I’ve been a part of the blog world, I have found the absolute doyen of such things. Her name is vvb32 and what drew me to her initially were the most consummate affairs from elegant balls at Pemberley, through picnics with Mr.Knightly, to events with vampires. These events are well-planned throughout and everyone gets so much involvement, so much fun. The management and creative mind that goes into them is awe-inspiring. It was vvb32‘s Pemberley Ball that prompted me to decide on my own Masked Ball and when I realised I didn’t have the skill or knowledge of someone like Velvet, that’s when I begged Pat and Rebecca to help me.
Rumour in the house was as rife as on the road, only in this instance I was impelled to believe every word – almost the horse’s mouth as it were. I was glad Sir Guy was gone frequently because when he was around, it was like a threatening thunderstorm and the house whispers elucidated on the damage such storms could cause.
Recently my friend Lua, from Bowl of Oranges, did the most extraordinary interview on her blog between herself and one of her characters. I thought it would be a really hard thing to do and wanted to have a go. The difficulty is that with the book Paperweights/Glass Flowers at the submission stage, I had to be careful just how much of the story and the character was revealed, which makes an interview really hard. In this instance however I was really lucky because Finnian is like a closed shop.
I’m sure that somewhere, just as there are the Fates, so there is a God of Small Things and today I learned that I should have reason to thank him.
Recently my world became circumscribed by the amount of energy it takes to limp from A to B on crutches. This somewhat short distance has shown me that there are many small things for which one can be thankful. For example today I accompanied my husband whilst he fed out to the farmstock. He dropped me close-by the horse-paddock fence whilst he fetched a feed of grains and organic hay for my horse and the eight rams.
‘The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.’ (Garrett Fort)
When I was writing the first draft of Paperweights/Glass Flowers two years ago, I had constructed a crucial scene where the protagonists are chased through a forest at the risk of death.
This man had elevated me to a position of mild authority in a heartbeart. That he had no thought for anyone’s interests but his own was a surety. I knew of his lineage. Son of a Crusader and that father subsequently a leper. Son of a noble whose heritage was subsumed by greedier nobles and whose mother died when she should not have. A bitter man.
