And on the fifth day…

…she wrote again.  Yes, it’s day five in the house of retreat, and I can report that yesterday I wrote a wonderful 2,257 words (the words themselves might not be wonderful, but the total is) and today it was 2,016.

I am finally starting to reap the benefits of retreat.  Because I am thinking so intensively about “Plank 3” and not interspersing it with other work, ideas are starting to bubble up.  I was on a short perambulation yesterday afternoon when I had a Big Realisation about Sam’s take on the crimes in “Plank 3”.  Then last night I went to sleep with the thought that I need a bit more humour in this book (it’s a dark subject, child prostitution and blackmail) and this morning a whole comic scene came out, involving a character and a location that I had not even thought of yesterday.  It’s a terrific computer, the brain, when not overloaded.

Thank you for the new title votes.  Current favourite is “The Worm in the Blossom”, which could become “A Worm in the Blossom”, or just “Worm in the Blossom”.  I’ve checked Amazon, and surprisingly there are no other books with this title – the search just throws up a few tomes on plant diseases.  Despite their longer published titles, I refer to book one as “Forgery” and book two as “Canary”, so I suppose this might end up as “Worm”.  But there’s still plenty to play for – I don’t need to make a final decision for another three or four weeks.