It's falling-in-love-with-my-heroes day

I’ve been invited to write for the Carina Press Christmas anthology again this year, which is a great honour. I’m putting together the outline for a novella called Hallow Hill. This mostly came into being during our wonderful stay in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, which is odd because the story will be set in a much less luxurious part of the world, the bleak Northumbrian hills near my home. Perhaps it was just being isolated from my usual duties and distractions that allowed me to take such a good creative flyer at the plot. 

But at this stage, all I’ve got is a plot. A building site covered with scaffold, and flickering about, difficult to see as windblown ghosts, my protags. I can say that Gavin is a novelist struggling to finish his first serious book about the King Arthur legend in northeast England. I know he’s waiting for his lover Piers in a chilly backpacker’s hostel on a snowy Christmas Eve, and Piers is a postgrad theology student, shy, gorgeous, terribly trammelled by his Catholic background, and this first holiday together is make-or-break for them. But something else has to happen. To me, I mean, not to them! (That’s not the whole of the plot!)

And today for some reason it has. Maybe the sunshine, maybe because I’ve got so much other work I should be doing that my rebel brain has slipped off about its own devices. Suddenly I can feel Piers and Gavin as real. I meet them inwardly; I have flashing inward encounters with them as I wash the dishes, make the bed. Suddenly I know that Gavin is loving but imperious, a vigorous freethinker who for years has been giving poor Piers hell about his religious scruples and inability to tell his family about their relationship. I’m suddenly aware that Piers has thick dark hair that flops charmingly when he takes off his glasses; that Gavin wants him to get contact lenses to show off his beautiful eyes. That Piers is tall and thin and has sensitive, large-knuckled hands. In the course of an afternoon I go from knowing these men exist to knowing them inside out, and I’m quite at a loss to know what the process is or how it works.

I should just be happy it happens at all, and I am. It’s the difference between having a proposal in mind which more or less works for me, and being ready to start writing the book. And I am.

So now off to cancel all engagements, assignments, housework and visits to relatives – not you, dear Wend and Jayne! – for the next three months of my life. Hmmm, that’s not going to happen, is it? But I’ll get it done somehow. Yes, I’ve fallen in love with my heroes...