Wednesday’s picture…I have two postage-stamp sized front gardens that we created from a rubble and gravel pull-in for a car. And I do mean postage-stamp – they’re about ten feet by fifteen – that lawn is about big enough to sit cross-legged in.

What the previous owners were thinking, creating that space, I don’t know – it wasn’t even big enough to fit a whole car in it, and to make it they demolished a lovely old half-height sandstone wall.

Which we then had to dig out of the ground in pieces. It’s the first time I’ve ever dug a garden with a crowbar. Then we threw bag after bag of well-rotted farmyard manure at the impoverished ground and went mad with the planting. Believe it or not, this garden plays home to fifteen different herbs, six climbing plants, six different aquilegias, three types of crocosmia, rosa ‘maiden’s blush’, lupins, allium, delphiniums, hostas and rudbekia. And more.

Planting distance rules are for wimps.

The picture here is of one of the gardens – the other one is still knee-high in weeds and debris. That’s my project for later this year. I’ll be going for a cobble circle, larger than the lawn in this picture, with blue irises growing through it, and a yellow rose climbing an obelisk in the centre. Slate paths around the cobble circle, and small borders in blues, yellows, and some whites will be a rather more ordered reflection of the other garden’s eclectic, crammed, cottage garden style planting.

This is only the second summer for this first garden.

In an English Country… Ga..aa…rden 

And so, since I missed Monday, you can have another one today…

This is Piggy.

So far today (and it’s only lunchtime) Piggy has accounted for six – count them, SIX – assorted mice and voles.

When not single-pawedly controlling the rodent population of our village, Piggy can be found sleeping in shoes or savaging cat mint.

Ruthless killing machine? Moi? 

Yes, I’m back. Refreshed, relaxed, and utterly daunted by my last few days of mad activity before we go away on holiday proper this weekend. Thank you for your good wishes!

I’ve been thinking I’d do a week of pictures for you – they say a picture paints a thousand words. (Mostly words like, “No, I look awful on film… No, no, stop that… don’t you point that camera at ME!“)

This is Pippi, one of a pair of sisters I brought back from a rescue centre the week we got back from honeymoon. Piggy and Pippi were my ‘Bride’s gift to the Groom’. Piggy is the huntress, Pippi is the princess…

Am I not GORGEOUS? 

I’m off on a short trip until Monday – so I’ll catchup with that tag and other things after then!

Where am I going and why? I’m going to a bead shop in Lichfield with my Mum, to buy some bits and pieces to embellish my favourite skirt with.

Why not?

Once, I drew a dragon.

He was immense, seven foot tall, with glittering scales and sinuous tail. His claws were three inches long and razor sharp. His angular snout hissed vapour, and the muscles in his hind quarters were bunched and powerful.

I drew him in pencil, on the back of a door, and one wing and his tail spread out onto the wall beside.

He was beautiful.

Right now, you’re probably smiling, but also thinking, “uh, where’s she going with this one?”

Here’s where I’m going: I can’t draw.

I can’t paint. I can’t sketch. I have no artistic ability unless it be in words. And I’m serious, here – I’m not one of those people who creates lovely watercolours and goes, “oh, I have no talent really… but I’m rather proud of the dappled light under the beeches.”

I really can’t draw.

So how come I could create my wonderful, glorious, mythical beast?

For two reasons:- I was running a very high temperature, and I was Thinking Big.

That fever made me believe I could do it. And somehow, somehow, Thinking Big –
physically working to large scale – made that seven-foot-beast come to life on that door, and that wall.

So when I plot, notebooks ain’t gonna cut the mustard. I have to go to the wall.

A nice dose of flu would help, too. But one can’t have everything…

(I was musing on why I plot on walls, instead of on the Post Its Beth mentioned – this is the result!)

. 

Are you scared? I’m scared…

Follow the bouncing scene… 

The Suck Monster Liveth. And It dwells in Chapter One.

Well, the first few pages of the Chapter One.

I had an attack of The Rules, you see. And since the setting wasn’t the US, and the hero, whose POV the story opens in, wasn’t American, and the heroine wasn’t with him, I was struggling to pack location, nationality, immediacy into the first page, and shied back from my original idea of a prologue in omnipresent POV describing a photograph of the heroine.

You see, the spectre of McWife is going to haunt me with this book. I have put the heroine (Emily) in the hero (Tristan)’s power, he’s whisked her away to a remote ‘cottage’ (in Mcwife it was a Scottish longhouse, this time a Pyrenean mill)… you get the picture?

And Mcwife opened with an omni prologe of CCTV footage.

Hmmm.

So I edited out the prologue for Frenchman and tried to make the opening more ‘conventional’ for a SIM. I’m sitting here shaking my head at my own stupidity.

I have resolved, therefore, to be brave and do with this book what I originally intended to do. This will never be a contest winner. The H/h will not meet on the first page, it’s going to take us a while to work out who the H is and what’s his game. And when they do meet… he’s going to throw her off a train.

Cool.

The one concession to conventionality I may have to make is in the character of Emily herself.

This is a book about fear, and control. It’s about accepting the things you can’t control, controlling fear, living with fear, acknowledging what it is you REALLY fear and finding the courage to love in spite of it. And Emily is a very scared young lady, bless her heart. She has good reason, but she’s a very damaged character, fighting for what she wants which is AT THE SAME TIME what she won’t admit she fears.

All of which leads her to fight her battles in some very dark and desperate ways.

And I’m not sure how well a reader will take a twenty-six year old heroine who hacks off her hair as an act of rebellion and defiance.

Her body is about all she has left to rebel with, so maybe it will work. I’m going to write it in, but accept that I may have to rip it out again.

I’ve written more independent, self-sufficient characters before. But these two hurt and they need each other.

Consider the architectural purity of an arch, a perfect arc made from blocks of dressed stone. While those two curving columns touch each other, lean on each other, share the weight and the burden, they become one of the strongest structures known to man. If they try to stand alone, they’re nothing but a pile of broken stones.