Anyway, I am on the second day of a long weekend – I wouldn’t usually choose to have one in January but I have a couple of days’ holiday to use up – and I am not planning to do any of these tourist things. Well, I might go for a walk later, either at the Zoo or somewhere nearby, but only if the temperature rises above -7C.

Instead this is the weekend for tidying things up and getting things done. A doctor’s appointment. Ringing the tax people. Deep-cleaning the conservatory because I seem to have inadvertently invited someone to the house – I usually avoid doing this because it makes me uneasily aware of the chaos I live in, which I can happily ignore for most of the time. Tidying up paperwork. Trying to get the director of a play to agree the colour for the set. Perhaps starting to set up a website for the local community centre.

And writing! I almost forgot. This makes it seem as if writing is something of an afterthought, to be fitted in around everything else. The truth is more complicated than that. I sometimes like to imagine how wonderful my life would be if only I had more time to write. What vast masterpieces I could produce or (more likely) how lengthy a series of quirky mysteries I could release. The truth is that my writing and the rest of my life depend on each other: without writing, I wouldn’t have an outlet for the creativity that is sometimes stifled by my day job, domestic tasks and committee work, and my life would seem very dreary and boring. Without these other things that I often grumble about, I wouldn’t have nearly so much material for my writing and it wouldn’t have that essential grounding in reality.

I don’t usually mention politics here on this blog, so I will just point out that I have ranted about the Scottish referendum on one of my other blogs (see link at right hand side to Sheila Perry Predicts Scotland’s Future’).

A wet and breezy morning in Edinburgh is turning into a sunny day with a blue sky. One of the cats is darting in and out, but another has still not forgotten that there were a few flakes of snow on Thursday and he hasn’t risked going out much since then. If I had time today I would go over to the Zoo for its Chinese weekend, but I’m actually going out to dinner - or possibly a late late lunch – this afternoon with my writers’ group, a spin-off from NaNoWriMo. I was at the Zoo last weekend and noticed they now have a Chinese arch near the Giant Panda enclosure. Presumably they’re holding this Chinese weekend to make the pandas feel at home. A joke that has circulated round Scotland is that there are now more Giant Pandas here than Conservative MPs.

The red folder mentioned in my previous post is now more or less full of my scribblings, and I really should have started to apply changes to my Word file by now. As usual I’m finding it harder to get motivated to do editing than to write the original novel. I can’t even complete the final part of the re-plotting until I’ve worked some of the changes into the earlier part of the novel. So this is the weekend when I am determined to make some headway with it. In self-defence I should say that I’ve been distracted by activities in my theatre group, where two plays are production at once. Just as well I’ve got over that stressful first week back at my day job! I’m even starting to think about summer holidays – but that’s another story.

I can now report, for the benefit of anyone who has been worrying about the loose roof tile, that a builder sneaked round one day and fixed it while I was at work. Actually today is the first time I’ve seen it in daylight since it was mended. It doesn’t look very different but at least we can now sit in the conservatory without worrying that the slightest breeze will result in disaster. It’s quite chilly out here today, as my son has decided the heater is about to explode so we haven’t been using it. But I can always put on another cardigan, as we Scots are trained to do almost from birth.

I’m taking with me everywhere a red folder which contains the latest printed copy of ‘Death at the Happiness Club’ – already the text has almost disappeared under all the annotations. In some ways I find this reassuring. The basic story is still there somewhere but now I’ve started to tidy up people’s timelines, fill in some of the gaping plot holes and make sure people have motivations for everything they do. Sometimes I’ve known the solutions to these problems all along and just haven’t spelled them out for other people who don’t live inside my head to understand, but more often than not I have to work them out at this stage. After that I have to weave them into the novel, tucking in the loose ends so that it looks as if they have always been there.

Sunrise in Edinburgh

Nearly time to go back to work. How can I possibly have had 2 1/2 weeks away from it? It seems like no time at all since I had the final meeting of 2011 and skipped off gaily into the sunset without a care in the world.

The weather is now cold and calm, which is good news for us as we now have a large roof tile hanging over the conservatory roof like the sword of Damocles, and we are still waiting for a builder to come and secure it under what is laughingly known as ‘home emergency cover’. We had a lovely red sunrise yesterday which seemed ominous, but the day that followed wasn’t at all dramatic.

It’s been hard to get round to writing, probably because the days are so shapeless and I can easily while away a few hours in the morning sitting at my computer [stern editor's note: so that's where the time has gone!], do a little light housework, have some lunch, read a book, pop out to the shops etc. I often dream of retiring and being able to write all day, but of course that wouldn’t happen. However, I have forced myself to re-visit November’s NaNoWriMo novel and to try and sort out a few anomalies. When I write as fast as I did in November, timescales go out the window, and I lose track of details such as whether I’ve given someone a last name in a previous novel in the series, or how many times someone has been married. At the moment I’m wrestling with the fact that someone has to be at the murder scene at a certain time even though he or she is seen rushing towards it about fifteen minutes later – does he/she go away and come back again, and if so, why? was he/she never there in the first place? why did he/she go there anyway?

The Mountain and the Flood

My sci-fi novel set in Scotland in the not-too-distant future is now available for free download for Amazon Kindle for a limited time, from 29th December to 2nd January.
Let me know if you enjoy being battered by gales, lashed by the rain and hiding out in the hills!