Trying (and failing) to gather energy ...

Well the Spring Equinox is upon us, and here in the Northern Hemisphere this moment of balance between day and night, before the daylight hours begin to get the upper hand over the hours of darkness, is supposed to generate a great gathering and pooling of energies, all milling about and waiting to be directed towards the high point of Summer. New life is pushing forth from earth, egg and womb all around us (our racing pigeons are laying eggs like nobody's business, and we're letting each pair raise one chick), and here in the UK we're all getting vaccinated and the end of lock down is in sight - so why, with all this upsurge of vitality and positive expectation, do I feel absolutely stumped when it comes to my latest writing project?

I never have been able to write fast, or to write long. I do it in dribs and drabs and take frequent rests - nothing wrong with that, I tell myself, Jane Austen wrote that way after all - but right now I'm finding that even a couple of hours at the PC leaves me with brain fry, neck and shoulder tension, and an unpleasant sense of defeat. The project in hand is a Mrs Danvers' eye view of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca - working title 'The Most Beautiful Room In The House' - and I'm hoping it'll flow more easily when I get parallel with the events described in the original book. That is what I do, after all - I pinch other people's stories, and write them from a different point of view. But it should and does involve a certain amount of original material, and Mrs Danvers' back story, set in the second decade of the twentieth century (a period of history I know little about except that it was dominated by WWI, so am having to research) is being coaxed onto the page sentence by reluctant sentence, even though it's fully formed in my mind! To add insult to injury, the first two chapters flowed beautifully from imagination to page, I felt the Muse at my shoulder, and then - she left.

Ah well, I'll keep plodding along, and hopefully get through this dry bit (which can always be reworked) and out onto open water and plain sailing again! In the meantime, here's something I wrote earlier - over thirty years earlier, in fact - the Weird Sisters have kindly featured My Dearest Holmes on their blog this week:
https://weirdsistersink.blogspot.com/
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Published on March 21, 2021 08:52
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message 1: by Charlie (new)

Charlie Raven Keep at it, Rohase! Can't wait to see what you do with Mrs Danvers and Rebecca. Brilliant idea!


message 2: by Rohase (new)

Rohase Piercy Brilliant ideas are one thing, squeezing a story out of them is another! But it seems to be flowing a bit easier now, I can see light at the end of the tunnel and I'm getting there xx


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