Extending the search for inspiration

I printed out my novel when I finished writing last night. It’s quite a major investment in paper given the word count, so it’s not something I do very often. In fact, it’s the first print-out I’ve done for years, and it’s great to see it on paper again as well as being reassuring to know that there’s a hard copy backup of the edits I’ve made during the past month. Luckily I have a laser printer that can do double-sided prints, so that helps keep the pile of paper manageable.

Years ago I used to print out what I’d written every day, no matter where I was. Whilst on a trip to India in 2000 I took a suitcase containing an inkjet printer in its original packaging, a laptop, charger, some floppy disks (remember them?) and very little else. When you’re writing several thousand words a day you get rather possessive over your creation. I was so paranoid that the laptop and floppies I was using would get damaged by the humidity, airport scanners, theft or the general abuse they experience when travelling that I printed two copies of everything I wrote, put one copy in my baggage and posted the other copy back to my home address via airmail. That all seems a bit quaint now that we have the option of ‘cloud storage’, whatever that is.

So, having printed out the entire novel I put it in my laptop bag along with my laptop, charger and some research books. Then I weighed the bulging bag on my postal scales, was relieved to see that it weighed less than ten kilos, and went to bed.

Skip ahead to today, which has been weird in a good way. It all started off normally, half and hour or so on the treadmill with unimpressive results. Catching up with e-mails, raw vegetable juice for breakfast (yum, yum). Did the washing-up, stuck some bags in the car, and drove to Bournemouth with ‘Er Indoors, hopped on a Boeing 737-800 with curiously bent wing tips, and landed four hours later on a volcanic island off the African coast.

It’s now almost midnight, I’m writing this blog in a slightly drunken haze (the obliging barman didn’t feel the need to use measures when serving spirits) sitting on the balcony of a Lanzarote villa with a panoramic sea view. If inspiration doesn’t flow here, it won’t flow anywhere. But to be honest, I didn’t come here for inspiration. I’m enjoying the rewrites and I wasn’t stuck anyway. Britain is suffering from blizzards this week, and I’ll be suffering from beaches, sunshine and sangria while I rewrite the next chapters. How awful.