The rain-forest is creeping closer to the conservatory where I usually do my writing. However there is nothing tropical about the temperatures around here, and I am still not sure if it’s really spring or not. It would be nice if I could spend the whole day sitting here watching the rain on the roof and the trees bending lower and lower with the weight of water on their leaves and branches, and the magpies and occasional fox appearing to give the illusion that my garden is a wild remote place and not a suburban rectangle. Just as I wrote these words, in fact, I saw a fox emerging from the undergrowth.
Although I would love to spend the day here, writing the occasional hundred words or so that may lead eventually to the end of ‘The Coronation Quest’, I do have to go out later to move some props into the theatre ready for the next show to be performed by my theatre group. It won’t be much fun moving in today in this weather, but it just has to be done.
A sign that I’m nearing the end of the novel is that I’ve now started to think about what to write next. I do have a vague idea in my head for ‘Pitkirtly VIII’ which I hope to start in July, but I also have two Edwardian novellas (sort of very long short stories) in mind, which is slightly annoying as they are quite a bit more difficult to write, what with research and everything. One of them, as I’ve already mentioned, is ‘Adventure at the Zoological Gardens’, but the other, which sprang into my head while I was researching a previous one, is ‘Adventure at the Palace of Varieties’, and that’s the one that is really jumping up and down shouting ‘Me, me, me!’ at the moment!
[goes off to review writing plan yet again]
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 