Digging…
I get inspired by the oddest things – I’ve said before that it can be as simple as an ancient dye, a splinter of wood, a fragment of cloth and so on.
I say to myself, ‘There’s a story in that…’
concatenation; plural noun: concatenations a series of interconnected things.
‘A series of interconnected things…’ If you’re a writer, it’s most likely that someone at some time has said: ‘It would be great as a series.’
And the truth is that many writers write copious series. Myself? I’ve written three series and am now in the middle of the fourth.
Why you may ask?
‘A sequence of polished little gems that offer tantalizing keyholes to the past…’
The inspiration for my latest book, Reliquary, originally came from the research I carried out for the previous trilogy called The Triptych Chronicle. In the process of seeking facts on rare and valuable merchandise that may have been traded in the twelfth century, I came across mention of a silk called byssus and which is still harvested in the Mediterranean from a species of shellfish.
And so, after a mammoth amount of time, I’ve finally finished writing my fourteenth book – Reliquary.
Seven of the those are historical fictions, a genre which is my first love.
Yesterday, I looked at the word count of Reliquary, my current manuscript, and realised I had passed the 100,000 mark. I was surprised. It seemed only a short time ago that I watched 50,000 tick over and then time just slowed and it seemed no matter how often I wrote, the numbers barely changed. Some days, I would delete a page or a paragraph. And at one point, I accidentally opened the file at the very beginning and decided I wanted to hit the readers pretty hard from the get-go and so added a kind of prologue to set the scene.
I have still to get the editor’s approval on that one but it works for me…
Life has a way of intruding upon one’s best intentions.
Sometimes, like birthdays and babysitting, those occasions are craved and enjoyed. Or farm and garden times, when the seasons demand one’s presence.
But then there are other times.
