Lost Apostrophe – the Diary of a Writing Group
by Rosalie Warren
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE SEVENTEEN: February 2015 – Helen
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE SEVENTEEN: February 2015 – Helen
One thing is for sure – I’m not going on any weekend retreat or whatever ridiculous plan the new woman suggested last night.
She has no idea. I uttered a mild protest. ‘I’m much too old, my dear, for that sort of thing,’ and she wafted it away. She doesn’t understand the effort I would have to make to pack up all my medications and… all the other things I need. Nor does she understand that I need a special bed and that I never get up in the morning before ten, and I certainly wouldn’t be presentable to other human beings until at least eleven. Or that I always start my day, once breakfast, washing and medications are out of the way, with an hour’s work. Always. No exceptions made for anyone or anything.
Not that it does me much good. It was a habit I developed many years ago… make work the first activity of any day. Not always in my place of employment. Sometimes at home, or on the train if I managed to get a seat. But always, always, work before anything else – and I mean real, creative work. In order to allow my brain’s night-time musings to emerge. It sounds a little presumptuous, a little precious, written down, but that’s not the way it is. I don’t have any illusions that my dreams will be a source of deep inspiration… I just like to give them a chance. And I have to say that some of my best ideas, back in my research days, presented themselves to me in the early part of the day, often as I watched the green fields swim by on either side of me, from the train.
Ah, I long for those days, when an idea would take hold and demand all my attention until I’d wrung it out for all it was worth, tested it to the point of disintegration (occasionally finding that it withstood all my squeezing and, later, that of others too). The pure joy of discovery! Of programming a new idea, debugging and watching it run… back in the days when programs ran slow and you had whole minutes to sip your coffee and – well, almost to pray, though I never believed anyone was listening. Those wonderful languages, Prolog, LISP, what was the other one? Dear me, my mind really is going. And, later, the refining, the trimming, the rethinking… I miss it all so much.
The closest I get to all that is when I wake up with a new plot buzzing in my head, and start to scribble before getting out of bed. My diagrams, my plans… how I love making sense of it, finding the natural shape, and eventually writing out my full synopsis, confident that this time, at last, I have a book I can truly write.
Before the inevitable disappointment of… no, no, don’t think of that. This latest one, I really do believe will work. My characters are bouncing off the page. I haven’t been too careful to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ – instead, I’ve allowed myself some leeway.
Yes, this will be the one, I’m sure.
I don’t need weekend retreats – all I need is the determination to stick to it. Let me just see to my teeth and then I’ll get started.
She has no idea. I uttered a mild protest. ‘I’m much too old, my dear, for that sort of thing,’ and she wafted it away. She doesn’t understand the effort I would have to make to pack up all my medications and… all the other things I need. Nor does she understand that I need a special bed and that I never get up in the morning before ten, and I certainly wouldn’t be presentable to other human beings until at least eleven. Or that I always start my day, once breakfast, washing and medications are out of the way, with an hour’s work. Always. No exceptions made for anyone or anything.
Not that it does me much good. It was a habit I developed many years ago… make work the first activity of any day. Not always in my place of employment. Sometimes at home, or on the train if I managed to get a seat. But always, always, work before anything else – and I mean real, creative work. In order to allow my brain’s night-time musings to emerge. It sounds a little presumptuous, a little precious, written down, but that’s not the way it is. I don’t have any illusions that my dreams will be a source of deep inspiration… I just like to give them a chance. And I have to say that some of my best ideas, back in my research days, presented themselves to me in the early part of the day, often as I watched the green fields swim by on either side of me, from the train.
Ah, I long for those days, when an idea would take hold and demand all my attention until I’d wrung it out for all it was worth, tested it to the point of disintegration (occasionally finding that it withstood all my squeezing and, later, that of others too). The pure joy of discovery! Of programming a new idea, debugging and watching it run… back in the days when programs ran slow and you had whole minutes to sip your coffee and – well, almost to pray, though I never believed anyone was listening. Those wonderful languages, Prolog, LISP, what was the other one? Dear me, my mind really is going. And, later, the refining, the trimming, the rethinking… I miss it all so much.
The closest I get to all that is when I wake up with a new plot buzzing in my head, and start to scribble before getting out of bed. My diagrams, my plans… how I love making sense of it, finding the natural shape, and eventually writing out my full synopsis, confident that this time, at last, I have a book I can truly write.
Before the inevitable disappointment of… no, no, don’t think of that. This latest one, I really do believe will work. My characters are bouncing off the page. I haven’t been too careful to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ – instead, I’ve allowed myself some leeway.
Yes, this will be the one, I’m sure.
I don’t need weekend retreats – all I need is the determination to stick to it. Let me just see to my teeth and then I’ll get started.
About the Author
Rosalie Warren was once a university lecturer, specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. But her earliest love was books and stories, and since taking early retirement ten years ago she has been following her dream of writing and publishing. For details of her publications for adults and children, including science fiction and romantic suspense, see http://srg521.wix.com/mybooks and https://www.facebook.com/RosalieWarrenAuthor/
Rosalie has been an exile from Scotland for the past fourteen years, but still has many happy memories of the wonderful city of Edinburgh, where her children were born and raised, and of the equally amazing Dundee, where she worked for a further three years. Going back even further, she was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and regularly returns there to visit a seaside place not so very different from the town of Castlehaven in her serial.
Rosalie is also a qualified proofreader and editor and (under the name Sheila Glasbey) her editing services can be found at http://www.affordable-editing.com/
Rosalie has been an exile from Scotland for the past fourteen years, but still has many happy memories of the wonderful city of Edinburgh, where her children were born and raised, and of the equally amazing Dundee, where she worked for a further three years. Going back even further, she was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and regularly returns there to visit a seaside place not so very different from the town of Castlehaven in her serial.
Rosalie is also a qualified proofreader and editor and (under the name Sheila Glasbey) her editing services can be found at http://www.affordable-editing.com/