A few brief things

I have been working at DifTW.  I've been trying to include more of the voice of the narrator near the beginning because in the finale the narrator is actually going to enter the story as a character so I need to foreshadow him sufficiently.  At first I wanted to just pluck him out of thin air which would have been very satisfying to me but I think would have confused a casual audience.  I want this story to be multi-layered and I want one of those layers to be a straight reading which is accessible to all (for example children or even watchers of soap operas).  I also want to be sophisticated with it, but the more complex layers cannot be allowed to upset the straight reading.  For this reason, the audience needs to be expecting a narrator.

In general, I don't like it when an author seems to think that a narrator needs a name and a character ("I'll tell you a story from when I was a boy...") but I've got something clever to do with this formula so I've gone for it.  I hope it doesn't turn people off.

I've been sticking the bits together and trying to make everything more explicit without dumbing down.  There's hugely complex layers of nuance in what I've written but most of it is undecipherable to anyone but me.  She's wearing a green dress.  Why?  I know what that means, and most of you probably do too, but it doesn't hurt to spend a couple of paragraphs talking about grass stains.  I've used plants throughout as motifs.  Some are self explanatory: you get the right feeling from a hedgerow with sweet cicely in it, even if you're not too sure exactly what sweet cicely is.  But still it doesn't hurt to describe the smell.  I've found myself experiencing this forest world very strongly through imagined smells as I've been writing.  O, I wish it was spring.

Music helps me write.  It keeps me alert and helps keep emotions closer to the surface.  But I can't write to anything with words.  So I find myself using post rock and certain prog and classical to keep me going.  I've tried listening to music in European languages like German but it's still too close to English and every now and again I understand a  phrase and it throws me.  Something that works well is Gaelic lyrics.  I've found myself listening to all sorts of awful music (and some good stuff) I would normally be embarrassed to admit to listening to, but it's been helping me along so I'm happy with the result.

There's a certain mood I have to get into for the words to flow.  I can write any time, but it usually only comes out good if I'm in the zone.  I've noticed recently that this mood (which I have understood intellectually for some time) is accompanied by a feeling of warmth in my chest.  Very strange.