I've been in the French Alps for two weeks holiday, but it didn't seem sensible to announce that on the internet. Hence the pause in the Quarantine Project. Anyway I'm sort of sick of thundering down the black slopes trying to keep up with the savages so I'm quite happy to get back to the sedate business of writing.
Something mildly alarming does happen when I stop writing. I get odd, dislocating moments of random character rush. At unpredictable times I'm likely to become an ebullient Greek or a bitter Mancunian or a parsimonious Yorkshireman in a short, semi-comic flight of improvised ranting. Black slope? Call that a black slope? Why when I were a lad we'd slide down slag heaps steeper than that etc. I don't know where it comes from but it's an affliction that tends to swell in direct relationship to the number of days taken off from the word-mines. It annoys the hell out of the savages, which is a positive, but it does take even me by surprise occasionally.
Everyone, then, is sort of relieved when I get back to work and this multiple-personality-disorder begins to subside.
Though the break did have me rethinking one or two things about the work-in-progress. I was half way down an icy mogul-mangled black run in Les Arcs when I decided to drop a particular plot point (a pregnancy, since you ask, which was rather too similar to a situation I used in the soon-to-be published The Silent Land.) It was a bit of a sudden body swerve. (In the plot, not the skiing.) Anyway I'm not going to tinker with earlier pages. I intend to press on and discard all that now redundant stuff in Draft 2.
Look, don't think for one second I'm going to discard the word-count for those previous pages. Oh no. You don't get away with that, dear reader.
And as for the word-count, today's waxed and edged skis carve out a trim 1969. Hey! Moon landings! Erm.
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