Seven things I can’t write without
This week sees my return to the Xchyler blog, my return and yet I have complete writers block. I stare at the laptop, watch a little TV, ring my mum. In the end, I have to put fingers to keys and write something.
Firstly, I start to write ‘my story’, the tale of how I got Elora’s story from my head into an actual proper book. I wrote around four hundred words and then began to doze off. A reset was needed, a change of tack, a new approach. So I began to work through my process, to get into my ‘writing’ frame of mind.
1. Chocolate
Or chewy sweets, or biscuits, or crisps. I’m not fussy! Any snack food will do, but it seems that the only way to keep my mind turning over is to feed it. My waistline complains occasionally but mostly the partnership is a happy one. As I type these very words my hand is dipping in and out of a bowl of Smarties.
2. Coffee
Decaffeinated only, unfortunately, as caffeine gives me migraines. Milk, one sugar, and in a large mug.
3. Music
I have over three hundred albums stored on my laptop. This is fantastic as I have plenty of choice, and this is miserable as I have plenty of choice. It may take a good hour or so for me to find the particular album I want to write to. The dulcet tones of Dido are currently wafting around me. Our rather impatient cat, Dipstick, seems to be enjoying it too. She is currently hanging out of her basket and drooling (though this is mostly because she has only three teeth left and it seems to prevent her mouth from forming a water tight seal).
4. Mobile phone
For no reason other than I feel absolutely lost when I don’t have it right next to me. I don’t need it, I can check facebook and twitter online so my mobile phone is just a comfort blanket really.
5. Water
See, by now, I have run out of coffee and so I need water. Honestly, by the time I start writing I’ve wasted a good hour. How anything ever gets finished is still a surprise to me.
6. Notebook
The book of ideas that I like to have to hand. It will probably be no surprise to any writers currently reading this that I rarely look in it when I get started. I do write down things though, things that won’t fit in the sequence I’m writing at the time. Or I doodle, when I am utterly blocked.
7. Flash drive
I keep all of my writing on one flash drive. So I need it. That’s about it.
Well, I’ve eaten my chocolate and drunk my coffee and spent forty minutes picking an album and checked my phone for messages at least twelve times and drunk my water and flipped through my notebook and plugged in my flash drive.
Best get started really.
Joanne Kershaw lives, works in West Yorkshire, England, with her husband and four children. Her first book with XP, Vanguard Legacy: Foretold, a paranormal fantasy, is available now.
