There's a Sandman story about a mediocre writer who enslaves a Muse and forces her to provide him with the ideas he fears he cannot come up with on his own. When his treatment of her becomes intolerable, she calls on the Sandman, her ex, to help. The Sandman, appalled by the writer's actions and his attempts to justify them, serves up a horribly ironic punishment: he gives the writer enough ideas to break his brain.

I'm pretty sure I haven't tried enslaving any Muses, but for some reason I'm suffering the same punishment. So many seductive ideas drift through my brain, and many of them stick, insisting that I need to attend to them or regret it for the rest of my pitiful life. Well, I'm attending to them, but possibly not in the way they were hoping.

At the present time, I do not want to write any more Left Behind fanfic¹. I do not want to write any more chapters of Smut. I do not want to write the beginning and continuation of Revenge Erotica. I do not want to write a novel where the heroes are all girly-men. I do not want to write a novel about a vampire draining the vitality from LGBT youth under the guise of "reprogramming". I do not want to write the novel I didn't get round to planning for NaNo last year. I do not want to explore the gendered assumptions underpinning the "Boom de yada" advert. I do not want to write about how reality should properly be called complexity.

I also do not want to make my leftover chip oil into soap. I think it would probably smell of chips, which is not an entirely positive quality for soap to possess. I do not want to buy a bottle of fresh, unused sunflower oil for the purposes of making soap. I do not want to try rendering down any kind of animal fat for the purposes of making soap. I do not, at this stage of my life, want anything to do with soap beyond buying it in the supermarket and washing my damn hands with it.

I do not want to make a knife out of a tin can and a piece of scrap leather to see how hard it is. I do not want to write a novel about people who make knives out of tin cans and scrap leather. I do not want to write a novel about generational conflict and folk beliefs in the Isle of Axholme. I do not want to write a novel about vampires living rough in Scunthorpe.

Now that I've made all that clear, perhaps whatever is tormenting me with these ideas will leave me alone.

¹Nor do I want to write an essay explaining why I feel "fanfic" is the appropriate term.

Early in Dragon007, Reilane and Belkerwin make a long journey across Rikcoevhal by mule cart. I wondered whether a cart was really appropriate technology - perhaps a travois would be more in keeping with the world - but I had no doubts about the mules pulling it.

Until yesterday, when Andrea brought me her Farm Songs book and pointed to a picture of a donkey. "Horsie," she said. I explained that it was a donkey, a different kind of animal from a horsie, although sufficiently close that horses and donkeys can interbreed, and the dreadful realisation struck.

Mules are the offspring of horse and donkey, and like most hybrids, they're sterile. (According to Wikipedia, there are occasionally fertile mules, but it's not something you'd want to rely on.)

In the world of Dragon007, genetic engineering is the hammer to which all technological needs are the nail. Reilane sneers at Belkerwin for growing his own cabbages because they cannot possibly be a patch on the genetically engineered ones. But who would go to the trouble of genetically engineering a creature that can't pass on its painstakingly modified genes to another generation?

I'm coming up with a few possible explanations. It could be that "mule" refers to a donkey that's been genetically modified to be more like a horse (or indeed vice versa). It could be that Rikcoevhal has been pouring so many resources into military research for so long that transport companies have been forced back onto old-fashioned methods of improving their beasts of burden. It could be that no reader apart from me will even see genetically engineered mules as a worldbuilding flaw.

Or maybe I need to err on the side of safety and just change all the mules to donkeys.

There's a very popular series of novels called Left Behind, which dramatise one sect's idea of the end of the world. I've got a copy of the first book: it's a moderately readable thriller, if you overlook little things like the way no-one reacts to the disappearance of all the children in the world. Fred Clark at slacktivist has been patiently dissecting it to bring the flaws into sharper relief for those of us who miss the finer details in our rush to find out who dies.

Some fans of Fred's work set up a blog called Right Behind, using the basic premise of Left Behind and dealing with some aspects that the original authors didn't really give much consideration to. I asked for posting rights many months ago, but never got anything into postable shape because ... yeah.

This week, I finally wrote something. It was supposed to scratch one very specific itch - people who know me reasonably well can probably figure out who these slightly-disguised characters are based on - and it wasn't supposed to go anywhere. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought there should be more to the story. Assuming Clare gets what she wants, what then?

I doubt the people who have lost children will be all that happy for her. Even Clare herself is going to have some rough times as she comes to terms with the fact that her baby has three siblings sie will probably never get to meet. Doctors are going to want to monitor the hell out of her to make sure whatever caused the disappearances (fetuses vanished along with children) doesn't happen again, and there will very likely be some media coverage of the "Human race rests on your shoulders - how do you feel about that?" variety. Plenty of interesting stories in that, even without getting into the idea that the world will end before the poor kid turns seven.

Let's recap. I've reached the very toughest part of Dragon007, I've got no shortage of Jaybook essays in need of serious fixing up, I've offered to write for the Scunthorpe United programme, and now I'm being seduced by fanfic. (Is it still fanfic if we're not keen on the original work?) On the positive side, at least my mind is still capable of having new ideas.

I wrote the bulk of Dragon007 for NaNo 2003. During the climactic fight scene, I got horribly bogged down, which wasn't helped by crying over the imminent departure of Alex Calvo-Garcia and getting into a little fight scene of my own. I'd just about hit 50k for the month, and I couldn't find much incentive to carry on. In May 2004, I decided that since I was updating my profile to say I'd achieved my football-watching ambition, I ought to update the number of novels I'd written as well. I picked up Dragon007 again, wrote a couple more pages to finish the fight and get the characters on their way home, and declared the snake-spliced thing finished.

So it's not really surprising that the ending is currently embarrassingly bad. The bogged-down fight scene can be salvaged if I go through it with a magnifying glass and sacrifice some of the POV trickery that seemed utterly essential for some reason I can no longer remember, but chapter 20 is 768 words of pure, unadulterated fail. The story isn't finished when the fight finishes. Rei and Bel are still in the heart of enemy territory, and although they can transmit their information home, they also have blood samples that really need delivering. Not to mention the fact that I hope the reader cares whether they make it home safely themselves.

I've been reading novels that I think handle the escape-as-part-of-the-action well. It's fun, but I can't see how to make it work in Dragon007. There's always some kind of terrain, like a mountain pass or a stretch of frozen sea, that the characters have to cross to reach friendly territory. But Rei and Bel travelled for three days from the nearest neutral (read: occupied) territory to reach their current location. The return journey is going to take approximately as long; perhaps they could do it faster with something that travels quicker than a mule, but it's still going to take a while. If they lose their pursuers altogether, the story fizzles out and the ending is unsatisfying, but I can't see them staying just one step ahead all the way to the border. It can probably be done, but not by me.

Reilane and Belkerwin arrive in Pasellee on Snakeday feast, which is held on the night of the full moon. After a whole chunk of plot has taken place, Reilane sneaks into the hatcheries under cover of darkness and finds enough moonlight coming through the light-slits to tell her there's no-one about. At this point, I realised that I had no idea what the moon was doing, since I'd lost count of the number of days that had passed.

A quick reread, marking each new morning, convinced me that this was the sixth full day since their arrival. Googling "Phases of the moon" convinced me that the moon would be coming up for its last quarter - still providing plenty of light to see by.

I think when I wrote the first draft, I imagined Reilane seeing everything crystal clear in the moonlight. But I'd forgotten about that, so it seemed to make more sense to have her feeling her way in gloomy twilight, until I came to the moonlight reference. Could the moon be just rising, hidden from Reilane's approach by the tunnels, but providing light through the light-slits?

No. Another judicious Google proved that the last-quarter moon doesn't rise until very late. By the time the moon comes up, Reilane and Belkerwin need to be out of there. Whatever Reilane uses to figure out that the hatcheries are empty, it's not going to be moonlight.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between the Rikseillonnat and the Rikcoevhalat. They're two distinct countries, as evidenced by the bloody war they're fighting, but Reilane and Belkerwin can pass for Rikcoevhalat with nothing more complicated than a forged ident, so there can't be any obvious physical or linguistic differences. I suppose there are plenty of examples from the real world of bloody wars fought over tiny differences, so maybe I shouldn't sweat that part too much.

The big problem is Rikazbak. This used to be another country until, at some point before the bloody war began, Rikcoevhal conquered it. The Rikazbakat have a few distinctive features (dark skin and angular features), although some natives have enough of a Rikazbakat look about them to suggest that at least some interbreeding has taken place.

The conquered Rikazbakat are supposed to be Rikcoevhalat citizens - in fact, it's technically a crime to suggest that Rikazbak exists as a country - but they're excluded from at least some forms of military service, not to mention the casual comments. It's almost a given among Rikcoevhalat that Rikazbakat drink human blood in their Snakeday fast rituals. Characters keep saying it, and the only Rikcoevhalat character who objects seems to be thinking more about harmony among his staff than about the inherent wrongness of throwing slurs like that around.

Someone asked me this weekend why, if I wanted to be a writer from the age of 14, I didn't do an English degree. It's not as bad as That Question, but only because it isn't so maddeningly Frequently Asked. It's got the same mass of assumptions that need unpicking before I can offer a proper answer.

The first assumption is that an English degree is good preparation for being a writer. I'm not convinced it is. English degrees seem to this physics student to be good preparation for studying the works of other writers, but not much preparation for producing your own. Reading critically is a skill writers need, but an English degree is far from the only way to learn that. I learned it by reading lots - and if you need to do an English degree before you read lots, you're probably not cut out to be a writer. As for all the rest of the skills that writers need, most of them can only be learned by experience.

The next assumption is that there is some degree, even if it's not English, that prepares you for a writing career. I'm still not buying it. You learn to write by writing; I suppose a course that required you to write a lot and gave you some kind of useful critical feedback might help, but I'm not sure what you would learn that you couldn't learn elsewhere without paying tuition.

That's not to say there's no point in doing a degree. The life of the average university student is a fairly good dry run for the life of a freelance writer as far as I can see: you have to plan your own working time to a large extent, with no immediate external pressure to work and plenty of shiny distractions. But that would be true whatever subject you studied - so it makes more sense to study a science, have one essay to write per term, and use the rest of your time for writing. Or, in all seriousness, study something that interests you without worrying how good it would be as preparation. If it fires your imagination, it'll enrich your writing somehow.

The underlying assumption is that there's some kind of route into a writing career analogous to other routes into employment that people have heard of. You do a degree in the subject you're interested in and then you look for graduate jobs. Or you start at the bottom and work your way up with successive promotions. But becoming a novelist doesn't really match up. The nearest approach that fits is sending out dozens of spec letters to different firms - only instead of a CV you enclose a synopsis. You're not asking for a job so much as a partnership, so very little of the jobsearch stuff is applicable.

But there are routes like that into other kinds of writing career, such as journalism. And the assumption is that writing is writing is writing, and that I'd be happy to work as a journalist until the novel-writing thing takes off. Unfortunately, it isn't, so I most definitely would not. A career in journalism takes effort beyond just being a good writer, and the effort I hypothetically put into journalism is effort I wouldn't be putting into novel writing. I'd end up putting the novels on hold, maybe forever, and doing something I didn't much want to do in the interests of paying the bills. And if I have to do a job I don't much want to do, I'd far rather stack boxes or clean tampon bins and still have plenty of energy left for writing.

Having cleared all those assumptions out of the way, I can finally get to the other reasons I didn't do an English degree. My decision was more or less made when I was 16, because A-levels in maths and physics aren't a lot of help with an English degree, and at 16 I was both sentimental and depressed. Sentiment made me choose physics to honour the teacher who most inspired me; depression kept any consideration of future employment prospects out of my mind entirely. A degree in something I enjoyed was one way to put off the evil hour when I would have to face the fact that I would never have a job, and writing was the only remaining way to keep the bills paid.

My trusty laptop ksejarbarbsdafpnffj hasn't been well. Symptoms include high temperature, lethargy and occasionally complete loss of consciousness, and I suspect the cure involves surgery. Since I needed a computer for the Summer Spell, I put off this drastic step and nursed her along by reducing what I asked of her: some word processing and solitaire, but no internet, hence my absence from the online world. Now that I no longer need a computer so urgently, she seems to have made a partial recovery, although I still think she'll need opening up some time soon.

Meanwhile, TherapyWIP has grown and grown. I'm getting slightly worried because it's now around 92k and I'm still introducing new characters - most of them called [firstname] [lastname] - and complicating factors, and I'm still not quite sure how the story should end. I know who's been getting mages killed, and I know how Foven's going to find out, but I have no idea what he'll do when he does find out.

Andrea gets more interesting with every passing day - and more annoying. She can do three-piece jigsaws and say half a dozen words so people other than me can understand them, but she can't seem to grasp the fact that when I say, "Stop that," I don't mean she can start doing it again as soon as my back's turned. She's got her first pair of shoes ("shoe" is one of her best words) and she loves to run around outside in them, but getting her to hold my hand when we're by a busy road often leads to tears for both of us. And she seems to think that mummy exists purely for her convenience - a delusion I've been assured will persist for at least the next eighteen years.

Now, if anyone's still reading after my long absence, what have I missed?

I started thinking while I was giving Andrea tonight's bedtime milk about Paul&Karen: whether I could ever revise it for submission (maybe), whether I should (doubtful) and the idea for a sequel that keeps going round and round my head despite being completely unworkable.

Said idea involves Paul's attempts to come to grips with magic while raising Karen's baby, now a toddler with a boundless interest in what grown-ups are doing. And what's annoying enough when I'm trying to write or make a phone call would surely be several orders of magnitude worse when it involves magic and portals between worlds. Also, the dead bad guy from the first novel spawned before it died, just in case things weren't stressful enough.

The unworkable thing is that Karen has to be around for Paul to learn magic from her, which means they're going to be co-parenting. And really, I don't have the first idea how co-parenting looks from the inside. I don't remember the first nine years of my life well enough to try to draw on them, and the only co-parenting Lindsay did was getting on my case a couple of times about drinking while I was pregnant. I hear people talking about joint parenting, and it's as if they're describing another world.

But I ought to be used to other worlds by now. I specialise in them, after all. A world where 11-year-olds can sign binding contracts. A world where people have psychic powers they can use for genetic engineering. A world where there's a community of elves living in West Yorkshire. A world where Grantham lies on a dimensional fault line. Whatever isn't up to the task of depicting co-parenting, it's certainly not my imagination.

And it's not because co-parenting is a real-world thing that I could get wrong. That's the risk I take every time I write a character who's more than a fictionalised version of me. It's why writers need empathy, and research, not to mention beta readers with relevent experience. Since I don't put a lot of stuff in front of betas, I don't know how good my research and empathy skills are, but I've never let it stop me trying.

It's hard to put into words just what it is about co-parenting that scares me off. The nearest I can come is to say that despite being as foreign a world as any I've created, it manages to look accessible. As if I made such a good job of describing Paul's house that I started believing I could just stroll over there tomorrow afternoon and ring his doorbell. As if I located the elves' hidden settlement so precisely that I convinced myself I could just catch a train and be there in a couple of hours.

I've screwed up that way before now. Convinced myself things happened for a reason, because they always do in novels. Convinced myself I knew and understood people, because I knew and understood my characters. And every time I did, sure as night follows day, I ended up getting burned¹. My life's biggest ambition now is to avoid going down that path again.

Whenever I try to think it through, my head runs round and round. "I can't" becomes "I don't know how" becomes "I can't justify taking that risk" until I don't know whether I'm looking at an honest-to-god limitation that I need to work with or an excuse for letting fear hold me back.

¹Figuratively. Except in October 2004, when only dumb luck stopped it from being literal.

Since late last week, I've been frustrated with my limitations as a writer. Specifically, all the things I'd like to be able to write and can't carry off.

I keep thinking "Someone ought to write a story where..." (...the heroine is a lusty fighter and the villainess is a delicate little thing, for example.) And for about five minutes, I entertain the possibility that the someone in question could be me before realising that I have no idea for a story and no interest in trying to generate one.

The latest one was brought on by reading Courage of Falcons and musing that whenever the heroes of a fantasy novel stake everything to save the world and the people they love, they always succeed. Horrible, cynical person that I am, I find that pretty unrealistic. You stake everything, you usually lose, in my experience.

So, naturally, "Someone ought to write the story of one of the losers." Except that how would it work? Narrative conventions almost demand that the hero who stakes everything will win, and I can't see any way to make losing a satisfying ending. I'm sure it's possible, but I'm also sure it's beyond me.

Which means that, much as I'd love to write something with epic scope, I don't have the capability to do it. In that respect, as in so many others, I'm remarkably like Foven, and living in his bitterness only serves to amplify my own.

When I first started TherapyWIP, two years ago come August, I invented the character that I've just named Kelon Tessar, a weaver who lives with his daughter. I didn't know I was ever going to bring him onstage, which explains why I put no thought into the logistics of his life until this week.

Unlike Foven, Kelon has been blind for most of his life. He could see as a boy, but was blind by the time he began his apprenticeship. So he was blind when he met and fell in love with the woman who became his daughter's mother. He tells Foven, "I heard other men talk about seeing their match in the depths of their lover's eyes, and until I met Elisse I wondered how a blind man could know. But I knew."

In one way, this works nicely to show how different Kelon is from Foven, but it's also opening the catering-size can of worms. There's nothing so far to suggest Foven has ever had, or indeed wanted, any sort of romantic relationship. He had friends, but he doesn't talk about anything more.¹

I don't want him to be the sexless mage or the sexless cripple, but he has enough problems at the moment without my leading the reader to expect a romantic interest as well. But now that Kelon has laid the subject on the table, I don't know how to get away from it.

One day, I'm going to try this advance outlining thing and see how it goes.

¹Although he presumably has normal sexual desires. I wonder how he manages to masturbate now that he has an almost permanent roommate?

Among the good things last week's goal list was responsible for¹, perhaps the biggest is the TherapyWIP is back on my writing radar. I sweat and strain to finish a 1500 word essay in five days, then knock out 2k of novel in a couple of hours on a Thursday evening - not sure what's going on there.

It might just be the break, but I think I'm seeing some faint signs of Foven not just wanting to lie down and die. He's still having no truck with the idea that he'll find some useful station in life, and the idea of spending time with his former friends brings him out in a rash, but investigating what's going on with these incinerated mages is fast becoming a goal he's actually interested in.

Coming back from the gym today, it occurred to me that he's following a similar arc to the one I'm on, with the truth about the mages standing in the role that a 24th-from-bottom finish for Scunthorpe United fills for me. If he gets there, he'll be as happy as I'm sure I would be, but all the same, it doesn't solve the problem I presented on page one.

That's my big sticking point, the horrible problem I'm hoping I can push past if I write long and hard enough. At the moment, I can't see any solution to the problem. Foven is a mage; he's defined himself since age eleven through his magehood; he is permanently physically incapable of working magic. Those are my parameters, and I'm as stuck with them as he is.

This wasn't supposed to be an easy task - the working title is an ongoing reminder of that fact. It was supposed to be the kind of novel that would teach me Deep and Meaningful Truths in the writing, so I can hardly be surprised that the solution isn't leaping off the page with barely 30k down. I'm just wondering whether I maybe needed an easier project to restore my faith in writing before I went looking for DMTs.

¹Like a nice clean bathroom, a kitchen finally free of unsorted boxes, and Scunthorpe 2 Bradford 0, although the causal connection to that last one is admittedly unproven.

This absence was deliberate. I unplugged my modem cable and moved my computer out of reach of the telephone socket so I would have one distraction less, in the hope that this would bring the words more quickly. It didn't work: I'd have to uninstall every form of solitaire as well to have any effect. And even then, I'd probably get distracted by windows explorer or something. It's that kind of block.

( Or blocks, even )

If I didn't have that lot hanging over me, things would be pretty cheerful. Andrea stands up without support every chance she gets now, lays down the law in babble to everyone and can identify (when she feels like it) the window, door, ceiling, light, Andrea's bed, computer, television, Mummy's nose, Mummy's ear, Mummy's other ear, Andrea's nose, Andrea's ear and the Mighty Iron. She's also taken to putting her arms round me and resting her head against my body, which is so unutterably sweet it nearly makes me cry.

And to further take my mind off writing, there's always Scunthorpe. Having set a new club record for consecutive wins, we went on to set a record for games undefeated as well, and it's got to the point where two successive draws looks enough like a blip to get the pessimistic fans (ie ksej) panicking. I have to keep reminding myself how easy it is for us to screw it up, even at this late stage, otherwise I'd be tempting fate by planning the celebrations already.

Goals have gone well so far this week - I've baked a banana cake, assembled an Ikea bookshelf and written an essay about names - but I think progress is about to come to a screeching half. The next item on the list is to rewrite Love Affair for my Homofactus collection, and I'm having trouble getting into an appropriate frame of mind.

This week, the love affair seems more like a failing marriage. The kind where the husband chases everything in a skirt, spends the housekeeping money on poker nights with the boys and periodically tells the wife that if she only supported him a little more he wouldn't "have to" do any of that. At the moment, the sex is good, but if things continue along these lines for much longer he'll soon be too drunk to get it up.

The difference is, if it was really a marriage we could get divorced. But I doubt if even the most fundamentalist of Prairie Muffin wives makes "I am Bob the Slob's wife" as much a part of who she is as I make "I am a Scunthorpe United fan". I can leave, but I'll always be back. I can't help myself.

We sing a song that goes "I know I am, I'm sure I am, I'm Scunthorpe till I die". Sometimes it's not so much a proud boast as a rueful acknowledgement of a life sentence.

My tarot cards arrived today, so approximately a month after deciding I needed a set, I finally have them in my hands. I'm going to do a reading for Foven, but to warm me up and get me used to the cards, I counted them, shuffled them and laid out three cards for myself.

Past: Page of Wands. A traveller (a hopeful one, perhaps). An adaptable, hard-working and enthusiastic young person with an impulsive nature. With a faint question mark over hard-working, that seems like a fair description of the person I used to be.

Present: Six of Pentacles. Help from someone else, charity, gifts and benevolence. Someone sees hidden talents in you. Considering that ten minutes before I laid the cards out, I was complaining that I physically cannot get myself and Andrea home from the shops without someone lending a hand, the first sentence has got to ring true. As for the second, people are always commenting on talents that I either can't see as talents or can't see myself as possessing. Do they count as hidden talents?

Future: The Hermit (reversed). Impatience, loneliness, obstinacy and a failure to learn from the past. In other words, the very fate I worry is in store for me. However long I fight my cravings, they will get the better of me eventually, and I'll slide into the old rut that leads downhill to the loss of everything I value. It might fit, but it's not exactly cheerful.

I think I'll stick to readings for fictional characters.

My final NaNo count was 53472. I fell off badly towards the end of the week, but it's a lot of words even so, and two novels completed that were pending during October. I'm hoping I'll pick things up again next week and work on Therapy at a decent pace, even if I can't manage the feverish NaNo pace.

As well as Therapy, I'm trying to work on some essays for Homofactus Press (publishers of Self-Organizing Men, which I forgot to mention is now out). I worked on the first one this evening, and feel as if I've overdosed on words. My non-fiction voice is nothing like my fiction voice, so getting back into essay writing after the fiction orgy of November took several tries, but I think I've got into the swing of it now.

I may end up having to put Therapy on standby again, since I've committed to a March deadline on the as-yet-untitled essays. Poor Foven will be hanging around in limbo again, and no doubt he'll hate me even more than he already does. (Actually, I'm not sure he does hate me, but he calls me Sod. In an oddly endearing way, of course.)

I'm toying with the idea of putting my essays up on a filter so anyone who's interested can give me feedback on them. If you would like to read a bunch of first-draft essays about the state of my life, say the word.

If I manage to finish Therapy, 2007 looks like being the Year of the Edit. Dice and SotB can probably only be edited with a rather large magnet, but Dragon007, Alex McQueen and Revenge are promising in their various ways. Of course, sending them out would require me to edit, not just the words but my attitude to them; I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I talked once about minor characters that take over because they're just such fun to write. TherapyWIP is developing just such a character.

He's nameless so far. He's the author of a book in Hembrai about the legends surrounding the temple of Ersh at Andar, already featured as the source of some very disturbing carvings that have been known to give people nightmares. There's probably going to be some useful information in this book, but the hard part will be extracting it from our thus-far anonymous writer's prose style. Foven, never the most forgiving of characters, is heartily sick of the writer's style after only a chapter and a bit.

( Here's why )

Strangers is done.

I'm not sighing over Frankie and David the way I sighed over James, probably because I hardly had time to get to know them before I sent them on their way. I'm just reeling from the shock of having finished two novels within a fortnight of each other.

Therapy is now my only WIP. For the first time in two years, I haven't got a bunch of unfinished projects hanging around making me look like a quitter. I'm back on the straight and narrow, ready to put in some sustained but sane work on Therapy to get it (and myself) into a good place.

In last year's NaNo, Frankie came to a sort of temple, lit by an oil lamp whose flame burned without a flicker, where she saw a young child asleep, comatose or dead beneath a mysterious glass dome on an altar. I knew vaguely what the temple was about, but I didn't work it out in much detail. When I abandoned the novel, the characters were planning a return visit to the temple, but I had no idea what they would find there. The day Andrea was born, I opened the document and stared at it for an hour or so without writing anything. Not so much because of the contractions, which were still fairly well spaced, as because I didn't have a clue what should happen next.

Last night, after a couple of days of NaNoWaffle, I got the characters into the temple. I wanted Frankie to notice something different, so I had the oil lamp burnt out, giving it an even gloomier feeling than the child already provided.

The only problem then was that, between the overcast snowy sky and a dark suspicion that I'd neglected to provide windows in this temple, I couldn't work out how our intrepid heroes would avoid tripping over each other, let alone learn anything plot-advancing.

Luckily, I'd just provided them with a book of matches. I considered having them make a torch, but I couldn't think of anything that might be lying around a temple that would make even a halfway useful torch, and I didn't want to spin the scene out with extraneous searching-for-materials pseudo-conflict that would only need editing out later on. I decided instead that the match should be suitable for their needs.

Obviously they wouldn't see a lot by the light of a single match, and I'd already established that they only had five in all. So I arranged for the match to burn long after the point where it should have gone out. (It's not an unfair helping hand when it freaks the characters right out.)

The really great thing is that this makes sense. Supposing something about the temple is causing time to slow down. Where better to keep a child who is on the point of death, but whom you want to keep alive until you can cure him?

It's done!

I don't have anything cool to say, because I'm too busy sniffling. I always get sentimental when I have to watch characters I love heading off into the metaphorical sunset to start the rest of their lives, and James is no exception.