When I’m not in Pitkirtly

I would quite like to spend all my time in Pitkirtly. It seems a pleasant enough place, apart from all the suspicious deaths and the weather, and once you get used to the people they are fairly friendly. I’ve always wanted to live by the sea as well, at least when I haven’t wanted to live in the hills or in town.

Mostly when not in Pitkirtly I don’t go too far away from it – not as far as Brighton, pictured here for no particular reason. For example, I am currently writing a sequel to my dystopian novel of Scottish independence for National Novel Writing Month. Somehow this has managed to involve people messing about in boats on the Forth and other people trying to find their way around in the Cairngorms. Sadly the plot is too long for November so I may have to summarise the last part in order to get to the end of this first draft. Even more sadly, this situation isn’t unprecedented. In fact I can reveal that I did the same thing while I was writing ‘Frozen in Crime’. Towards the end I wrote something like ‘But they didn’t know what really happened until much later’, and filled in the details during the first edit.

Occasionally I do stray quite far from Pitkirtly, either geographically or in time. I plan to do this again around Christmas, when I will have two weeks off work, only one of which is taken up with helping with pantomime props, i.e. hanging around back-stage at the theatre for hours on end and springing into action every half hour or so to make sure something gets on to the stage. Or, in the case of a football that once had to be carried by a very forgetful actor, sprinting down to the dressing-room to fetch it.

Anyway, after all the props are packed away for the next time, I will be either still researching or actually writing a new novella in my ‘Edwardian’ series. I was very tempted to write this for NaNoWriMo as I thought it would be more fun than the grim dystopian future, although in fact the grim etc etc has turned out to be a bit lighter-weight than I thought and may turn out to be the only comic grim dystopian sci-fi novel ever written.

But if you’re now wondering why I haven’t plunged into ‘Pitkirtly IX’ yet, I want to get to the stage where I am really looking forward to visiting the place and the people again before starting on it. I haven’t made my 2015 writing plan yet but I’m guessing this will probably happen round about February or March. A more complete 2015 writing plan will follow later.