You may remember me telling you how we
came to find the location for The Sea Garden. If you want to
refresh your memory, click here. All the photographs below (apart
from the blog dog) were taken while Marcia was researching in the
area and I was just sitting there enjoying this extraordinarily
atmospheric place where the light conditions change minute by minute,
the tide surges in and out and, of course, weather and time of day
all combine to ensure that it is never the same twice. Most do not
have a caption as I think these speak for themselves. I suspect I have allowed myself to get carried away. You could just look the other way.
So we had a location but no characters
other than the fact that Marcia was sure this would be a book in
which Cass and Kate would find their lifelong relationship at risk
when it looked as though the marriage between Cass’s daughter,
Gemma, and Kate’s son, Guy, was on the rocks. That, however was not
the main thrust of this book although at that stage Marcia had no
idea what was.
Then one character stepped out of the
shadows. A girl, really a young woman, on a train from Bristol to
London and almost beside herself with joy. Who? Why Bristol to
London? Why joyful? What has this to do with a book that is to be set
on the banks of the River Tamar? Well, we lived with those questions
for a week or so as we talked through all the options. As always,
this became easier (or at least clearer) when the girl had a name:
Joss. Marcia feels that names are so
important: how can you give a baby a name before it is born, before
you know what he or she is like? Perhaps this is why so many children
end up with nicknames – their given names are all wrong. It’s the
same with dogs – Kit was always the member of the Chadwick family
to name the dogs at the Keep and this aspect of her character she
shares with Marcia (or should that be the other way around?).
We are now back in that sort of
situation as Marcia begins to fumble towards the next novel whilst
trying to keep the characters of the last one in her head in case her
editor wants some changes made. Today, however, it is not a location
but no characters nor all the main characters and no location (and
that has happened quite often) but an odd combination of the two:
fleeting glimpses of shadowing people standing in the wings, odd
senses of resonance when in certain places but nothing definite at
all. We shall have to wait and see and, for now, spend time pottering
around a wide area of moorland and coastal Devon hoping that as we do
so everything will fall into place. They always have in the past so
no reason why they shouldn’t again.
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| This is one of the racing gigs famous in the west country. |
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| Marcia showing berries from the spindle tree |
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| "Time for bed," said Zebedee and it was. |
Meanwhile I am driving myself mad
trying to sort out some of the thousands of photographs that I have
on my computer or waiting to be scanned in and making some sense of
them on my own web site. At the moment I am trying to add at least
six different species of bird each week. At the same time, I am working on a few
video projects. (Yes, quite right: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad) Putting video on this blog makes it rather clunky and
some people I know can’t actually see them because not all devices
support that format. So, I have put a couple of snippets up on
YouTube which you can look at or not as the mood takes you. Here are
the links.
Then, of course, there is the blog dog of the week: Bosca by name.
