Danger, writer at work - possibly.

At long last spring cleaning down on the farm is coming to an end. Soon I will be able to get back to work on the second book, tuck myself up in my dining room and get on with things. But first I will have to make the place my own again.

I turfed myself out of my nest so that we could have a special Pentecost dinner with friends. It was lovely - well, the company was, I could take a rain-check on my cooking but we're all still upright and walking about. But now 'my room' doesn't look like mine. I know every stick of furniture, every book in the bookcase, every quirky ornament and all the pieces of china on the dresser and yet  somehow it has a strangely impersonal feel to it. We have had countless dinners in this room with all manner of folk and conversations going on, wonderful evenings,but it is not 'my room.'

It's a bit like moving house. It's all new and unfamiliar. everything is clean and tidy. I need to mess it up a bit, ruffle its feathers and strew my writing paraphernalia about and then it will perhaps feel right again and I can sit down and think myself back into my plot, pick up the threads.

Thinking of my plot, does art reflect life? I was out shopping with my other half last week and he grabbed my arm as we tried to cross a busy road. 'You have to be careful,' he told me. 'The traffic goes much faster now than in the days of the stagecoach.' Ouch! Was this my quiet, laid-back husband speaking? Jekyll and Hyde???

I have two characters in this new novel that are not all that they seem and in due course their deceptions will have to be revealed. I have no idea how I will do this. I like to plot a book only so far and then enjoy the journey, which means leaving myself a few surprises along the way - a carrot before the donkey. Now there's a funny thing, my mother's favorite expression for me was 'you donkey!'  Did she know a thing or two?