Holiday reading

Even this far north ‘Midnight sun’ a misnomer, its vermilion orb already dipped below the horizon as the haar comes in on the tide, thickening a silence broken only by the gentle huff of foam rearranging stones; the melancholy piping of invisible oyster-catchers.

Then your voice, inappropriate as a cockatoo, ‘Wanna halfa orange?’ You divide one then hand me both knife and dripping semi-sphere, turn your half inside-out and begin slurping at its pulp.

The knife is sharper than the orange flesh, but sweeter still the thought that Ann Cleeve’s Jimmy Perez is about to have another murder to solve. 

Surrounded by chaos

Yesterday slight niggly feelings about my finished Bloody Scotland Crime story, partly engendered by reading Ann Cleeves, spurred to greater dissatisfaction by Peter Temple.  Not that I'd even dream about attempting his wonderful, laconic Australian bloke dialogue.
But something of the sort would make a difference.  When I write DI John Pettinger [Change of Focus] I can do dialogue that sparks ... I just needed another tale to tell.
On waking this morning I realised I had a story.  Wondered about telling it from Pettinger's point of view.  The cop rather than the culprit.  Try, for veracity's sake to stick to the same end result.
On my way to buy a paper I got the opening lines.

The carpet fitters arrived before nine.   Hall, stairs and landing.  I got marooned upstairs while they chatted, about girls and restaurants, while they knifed and peeled and pulled and unrolled and hammered and nail-punched stuff in place.   While they hoovered and hoovered all the bits up.
Nearly three in the afternoon before I could get downstairs again.   But I had two thousand of three thousand words written.  Nowhere near the denouement, but I prefer to prune rather than pad.
A good day's work!

Orcrime festival 2012

Just returned from our second visit to Orkney this year, this time staying in Kirkwall to go to the first  Orcrime festival.   I didn't get to 'Bloody Scotland' (we were on our way to Orkney for an earlier holiday) so finding out about this was an unexpected treat.

And treat it was - Ann Cleeves, whose Shetland novels I'd read three of, before moving on to the Vera Stanhope novels - The Glass Room being especially interesting and useful to me dealing as it does with a writer's conference -  Lin Anderson, who I'd only discovered after booking tickets but had found the fast pace of her Rhona MacLeod, forensic scientist, novels unputdownable, and Denise Mina whose 'Garnethill' I bought in February and was so astonished and admiring of I subsequently went and bought the rest in the Maureen O'Donnell series and the first of the Paddy Meehan and Alex Morrow books too.

All were vivid and entertaining speakers, all gave insights into their writing processes and all said that they did not plot ther novels so much as let their characters dictate direction.
My husband admitted that I am not the only one to 'do it wrong.'