Starting Afresh

Hello and welcome to my new blog

For Christmas, a very special friend gave me a notebook. As it came from her (Waves to Anna) it was never going to be any ordinary sort of notebook – no – in fact it is, like her, very special too. It is a spectacular notebook – quite, quite beautiful. (again, like the giver). It is the perfect size to fit in a handbag (90x40mm if you want specifics) and it has a wonderful cover that is decorated with stylised cats in blue and gold on a gold and bronze background.

You can see this notebook here -

http://www.laurelburch.com/Journals/Felines.html

My notebook is the first design – Mediterranean Cats and as you can see, it’s quite stunning. Which gives me a problem.

I love cats – Anna, who gave me this notebook knows that - I also love notebooks (I suspect she knows that too) I am always looking for the perfect notebook to carry with me in which to jot down the fly-by thoughts and inspirations that zip into my head at odd moments in the day and very often zip right out again if I’m not careful. These sort of inspirations – an explanation for exactly why a hero did this or why a heroine asked that – the perfect line that takes a scene from point A to point Z without any hesitation or forcing . . . All writers should always have a notebook with them at all times. But a working notebook is a very different thing from a special notebook.

My working notebooks are quite simply a Mess. They are so much of a Mess that the word really does need a capital M. When I’m struck by inspiration, I don’t pause to think very hard, I rush for pen and paper and I scribble hard and fast. I write down snatches of words as they come to me, disjointed sentences, words abbreviated, dialogue put in the wrong order, Anything and everything in order just to get the idea, the mood, the feel of it all recorded before it escapes me again. For that I need a rough, scribbly, messy sort of notebook, Not a glorious, spectacular notebook.

The Mediterranean Cats notebook begs me to record something special. And it asks to be written in in at least a neat hand. I haven’t had a neat hand - for writing anyway – in my life. I can be pretty spectacularly neat with embroidery, but that’s a very different skill. My appalling scrawl of handwriting is why I will always be eternally grateful to the inventors of computers and programmes like Word with their endless variety of fonts and the ability to make even my messy thoughts and words and scribble look brilliantly neat and legible.

Which is at least what I can do here. I can make this Blog neat and readable – my computer will do that for me. But then there’s this other thing – I want to try and make it interesting as well. Which is why, at the start of this, I was thinking of Anna’s notebook and the verbal paralysis it induced in me.

Here I am with a brand new blog, a pristine, clear, clean page – and I have to post something. Something I hope others will want to read. Something that I hope will bring you back again and again to read more. So the result is the same – I’ve been wondering and thinking and trying to decide what to say.

So perhaps some of you can help? If you’ve followed me over from the blog I had on eHarlequin then thank you and welcome back. When I wrote that blog I had a purpose – I was supposed to write about the trilogy (The Alcolar Family) that was a being published in the months I wrote the blog. So I had a reason to write and a topic to start me off on. Now I have a wide open space, words to find, posts to create – and I want to do more than just advertise my books.

So does anyone have anything they want to suggest? Topics you’d like me to discuss? Questions you want me to answer? I don’t know how often I’ll get back to post but when I do, I’d like to cover some of the topics you as readers want to know about.
So any suggestions are welcome – and at least just asking about them has got me over the fear of the pristine posting space. I’ve overcome the verbal paralysis and I’m launched . . . This blog is now open for business

If only I could decide what I want to use that spectacular Mediterranean Cats notebook for . . .