I think I'm alive now...

Apologies for chaos of last week... it's another example of what I was going to talk about... not just real life intervening (which is this trying thing that happens to all authors. tch. Shouldn't be allowed.) It was the intersection between life, observation, empathy and experience -- and the inner world of the writer. Now there is no 'right' point here. In some of us the inner world is so complex and rich anyway that we can come up with Heathcliffe. In others... well, if we haven't been there... we can't write it. Of course in some way everything is derivative, shaped by experience or something we've read or overheard, or even -- bizarre possibility -- been told or taught. That doesn't make it any less original. Everything is derived from sub-atomic particles, and probably the same primal energy some-once. It's how they combine that makes things new. Anyway... my inner world might be complicated but my writing comes from the intersection with that and the outer world - and observaion of it and empathy with the people in it. I know a selection of writers... and I can usually tell a lot about them by their writing and oddly the other way around. Having 'met' Sarah Hoyt (on e-mail) I knew exactly what her writing was going to be like before I read it. I'd never read anything by Rowena before I met her either - and yet I could hear her voice in her writing. The observation of detail in the behaviour of others, intelligent and insightful comes out in the way they write characters. As I liked the people, I knew I'd like the books.

So... I've had a full, fraught two weeks. Let's see, a robbery, getting stuck in a mud-hole, a cop trying a shake-down, a midnight call to say "don't worry, your son James is fine, on his way back from hospital.", wild seas, climbing, the delightful frustrations of beaurocracy, a crashed computer...

It'll all come together, along with the people and inner world in a strange book sometime.
See you there.