After a brief hiatus...

I've been AWOL for a while, from both the novel & the blog ~ there's been a deluge of interesting, time-consuming & amazing personal stuff happening over the last few months, and I don't really see my feet touching the ground till after Christmas & the New Year.

I think I've also hit a secondary gestational period with the book: there's a fair bit written, and a fair bit mapped out, but I still don't quite know what's going to happen with some key points and some character relationships. I'm letting it all casserole slowly in my head, so hopefully there'll be some tender meat & rich gravy to feast on in the end.

In the meantime I am reading this: Writing in Flow, Susan K Perry. I bought it a couple of years back (along with the plethora of other writing books which are sucking up space & gathering dust in my house), but I'm working through it steadily and making notes as I go. I'm finding the psychology foundation of it very reassuring (especially as I studied Csikszentmihalyi and "flow" in great depth in the social psychology section of my Bsc, even going so far as to learn the spelling of his name for the exam ~ which I subsequently never used!). I crave the escapism of flow, and get into it so very rarely, but for me it is one of the fundamentals of writing: writing myself into that parallel world where everything is possible if you're brave enough to take the first step and write the first word.

Anyway, normal writing procedure should be resumed soon ~ I'm itching to get back on the page and getting frustrated that the last few months have been too chaotic to allow for much writing. Nice to be back in the blogging saddle, though.