I had a very interesting experience last night in bed. No, nothing like that, get you minds out of the gutter you dirty lot. No, this was to do with the voices in my head. You know, the voices of my characters from A Tortured Soul – those voices. They wouldn’t shut up. And worse, two of them were having, shall we call it a ‘difference of opinion’ about the next scene in the book.
Let me explain.
First and foremost, after spending a couple of weeks writing, editing and polishing The Big Four Ohhh! then almost losing myself in making some website changes, I sat back down yesterday afternoon after work and started on that next chapter of A Tortured Soul which had been giving me problems and prompted me to step away to write The Big Four Ohhh! in the first place.
I’m at a crucial point in the story. If you like, I’m just about to turn the corner on to the home stretch and it’s important to ‘get it right’ to set things up for the conclusion. I’d written about five hundred words of the chapter, but it didn’t feel as if it was going in the right direction. But during my self imposed break, as so often happens, I had a flash of inspiration and worked out a way to get the story where I wanted it to go. More importantly, it would give the characters something to do while I skip the time scale forward to a more logical point for that conclusion – without the time jump feeling forced or ‘skipped’.
But that’s really all by-the-by. The important thing here is that the thing I’d found for my characters to do – a day trip to London – led to two of them having a disagreement in my head over the best way to do the ‘tourist thing’ in London, WHILE I WAS TRYING TO GO TO SLEEP!
Vanessa, who is a new character to the series introduced in this book, was adamant that the best way to see the sights in the area around Westminster, Whitehall and Kensington – which if you don’t know London terribly well is where you’ll find a good deal of the famous landmarks – was to start at Marble Arch on the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park, walk through Hyde Park to see the Princess Diana Memorial, then through Green Park to Buckingham Palace then up The Mall towards Trafalgar Square.
Paul, on the other hand, who is of course, the main character of the Tutelam Ventit series, butted in at that point, insisting that was the wrong way to walk along The Mall. He said that one should always walk down The Mall, towards The Palace, not away from it. And besides, what was the point of the seeing the Diana Memorial, it was a waste of time when there was so much else to see.
And, like all good characters, both knew that they were right. And neither was about to give in to the other.
And this was all happening in my damn head when all I wanted was to sleep.
Bastards.
Of course, that means that today, my job is to get that rather interesting scene out of my head and into words on the page (or screen) so that everyone can ‘enjoy’ it. Maybe then they will shut up and let me sleep tonight.
