It’s starting to feel like autumn here in Melbourne, Australia. The other night, coming home, I smelled wood smoke for the first time. The nights are cool, even if the days are hot. We’ve started to turn the heater on more regularly. Not that we didn’t turn it on earlier this year, but that was irregularly. Last month there was one week where it was so hot we turned cooler on, two days after that it was so cold we turned the heater on, and two days after that we turned the cooler on again.
Daylight saving is over. We’re going home in the dark.
Now that we’ve sent the next draft of Confluence away, we’re both reading books. Lots and lots of books.
Binge-reading is fun, but you get to a stage where you read so much you become picky about the books you read. I set aside two good books part-way through because I wasn’t in the mood for them. I hope I go back to them, because both of them were good, they just didn’t interest me at the time.
Writing’s a bit the same. How you receive one of your own stories depends on your mood at the time.
Right now, we’re looking at old stories. At times we think, “Oh, I love this story. This character is so great, and it’s a neat story idea.” Other times we read the same story and all we can think of is, “This story needs so much work.”
Luckily for us, we tend to go through these stages at different times, so when I like a story, all Sherylyn can think about is the rewrites, and vice versa.
It’s fun, looking at the old ideas though. So many ideas already, so many new ideas. Waiting for the little spark that tells you this is the story you can live with for the months of writing it.