Visuals

Took a few photos yesterday as research for a new novel. These shots will be printed and maybe put up on a notice board, maybe tossed in a drawer. either way, they will probably never be looked at again. I don't need photographs for reference, only for inspiration. I kind of believe that the mere act of pointing a camera at a thing and capturing it in pixels will turn a switch somewhere in my mind. Sometimes it's an image from a newspaper or google. Either way, you print it and file it.

Same with notes. I've kept notebooks for years, jotting down whatever piece of crap of an idea takes my fancy. I do look back over those notebooks sometimes but it's a cringe-inducing experience. You have to brace yourself for the discovery you are about to make: that you are actually a bit thick. But there, in amongst all the detritus of the modern, overstimulated and undernourished mind, you find that piece of gold that you might be able to fashion into something really quite passable. And that one nugget makes it all worthwhile. You're a genius after all! OK, maybe not a genius. You're not a complete moron after all!

This is the kind of stuff that happens for me at the start of something new. Right now, hopefully, it's a novel. Characters, premises, plots and even set pieces are running around up there in the old swede, jostling for position like sperm that don't know which direction they're supposed to be swimming in. One of them will find the exit and fertilise the golden ovary of the blank Word document.

That, right there, is either the most awful metaphor in history.

Or the finest.