Friday, hooray. The weeks have gone by with yet more excuses not to write, the latest is a house move which bleeds time and cleaning fluid in equal measures. From this experience I add resource to a novel idea about people that hoard, because generally, when people hoard eventually there is only room left for grime, vermin and dark uninhabited corners, analogous to the protagonists’ mind perhaps.
So now that hideous experience over with I look forward to the sometimes weekly visit to the department of my favourite man that tells me stories! Some people can be quite giving with their conversation, some will just talk about the daily grind or complain about transport and the failure of the social services. But others will draw on memory and experience (this is exponential with age I am sure…so if you want good material for stories/characters/plots etc, then go out and find yourself an old (er) person. My man, following a life changing experience, decided to up and leave Blighty to travel the world seeking out nature. Every week there is a different story, and sometimes if I am lucky he will bring me a book to read. Combining two stories he has told me, one about what happens to dead bodies – casualties of war (first hand) and secondly the climate of Borneo, and how quickly things decompose in the tropics, have given me the critical scene in the novel upon which everything radiates from. So, it’s set in Borneo, and there is a dead body involved; oh and some beetles…
