Stuff I do

I’ve taken to walking around the park in the morning – in the interests of removing (in a non-surgical manner) the 20kg I managed to put on during 2011 whilst finishing the PhDoom. Also, to simply get some degree of fitness back and to fit into the clothes in my wardrobe that aren’t yoga pants and t-shirts with amusing and nerdy slogans.

But that’s by the by. The point is when I’m walking, I’m thinking. I’m thinking about the stories I’m working on. I’m thinking about how characters do stuff – by which I mean the actual physical mechanics of shaking imaginary jars, opening chests, rolling beneath the wheels of wagons, killing other characters – because I want to get it right. There’s no point writing a great long description of a physical action if a reader is going to pause after getting through it and say “Errr, bollocks, that’s not physically possible.”

On more than one occasion, my long-suffering Significant Other has been made to sit/stand/lie/hover while I check the physics of what I’m trying to get my characters to do. Sometimes I forget I’ve left him with arms outstretched at 2 and 10, one leg raised, standing on the edge of a chair, until I hear “Can I move now, please?” in a quite reasonably tetchy tone.

Which brings me, at long last, to my other point: this morning I was wandering around the park, doing laps, and gesticulating wildly as I tried to work out how someone would move a jar with a swirling motion and how someone would describe said motion. For all intents and purposes, I look like an escapee from Bedlam. So, if you see someone wandering about doing a kind of crazed waltz around the park, think twice before you call the Crazy People Pound – it may just be a relatively harmless writer, trying to deal with mechanics.

At least I wasn’t actually dancing.