daydreaming around town

inside I'm often elsewhere

Hello sequelators, it’s another quick writing update from me. I’ve finished off chapter 10, which was originally going to include the first rave the characters go to, but it took me until the end of the chapter to get them there, so I’m going to continue the scene in chapter 11 from the other character’s point of view (since PoV alternates between odd and even numbered chapters). It’s the first time I’ve continued the same scene from the other PoV in the sequel, but I did it several times in Parallel Lines so I know it’s not difficult, and has possibilities for showing how differently characters see the same events.

Since then I’ve been working on the plot, mapping out the road ahead so that I can get some momentum going in my summer holidays. As I mentioned last time, for me, making decisions about plot involves a lot of daydreaming. While Parallel Lines was set in the place and time where I grew up, I could visualise it all easily, but the sequel is set in the Ouseburn valley, at a time when I lived a couple of miles away, but I had no idea what it was like down there. So I’ve been out for lots of walks around the Ouseburn recently, looking at the surviving architecture and picturing what it used to be like from all the old maps and photographs I’ve dug up. I do look where I’m putting my feet, but most of my mind is dreaming up stories that might happen in, or pass through, the streets and chares I’m labouring up or strolling down (almost none of it is flat, except for the riverside path, which wasn’t there 30 years ago).

And whenever my brain has spare bandwidth, like when I’m washing up or commuting, in that time too I’m coming up with story ideas and thinking about whether they’re any good. It’s a mental habit, and something I’ve been doing (both when walking around and in odd moments every day) since I was very young, 7 or less. I was very into scifi, so in my mind’s eye I could transform a steep, narrow footpath between high walls into a tunnel from a planet’s surface into a hidden base, or the clean, organised lines of a fitted kitchen (not a thing we had at home) as a spaceship’s bridge. I’d invent a fragment of story for a few minutes, then go about my day, and if it stayed with me I would sometimes incorporate it into games with friends or into my written storytelling: in comic form at first, and then mostly in novela/novel format from about the age of 9.

I largely lost the habit during adult life, but since the age of 50, when I started my MA and rediscovered how important storytelling has always been to me, I’ve revived the habit and I’m happier for it. If you see me walking around Newcastle, don’t assume I’ve seen you, because in my mind’s eye I may be inhabiting a character walking along that street thirty or forty years ago, and seeing what they might have seen. You may say I’m a dreamer, but dreaming is free, and I look forward to sharing some of my best ones in due course.