The thing about writing contemporaries – the thing that I found, anyway – is that the main characters stick around in one’s head and continue to have opinions about what’s going on in the world. Particularly General Synod (Stancester) and professional cycling (A Spoke in the Wheel). Every election result, doping scandal, every disappointing decision, every too-good-to-be-true stage win, I’d know what they thought of it. More generally, I tended to have a good idea of what they were up to now, where life had taken them. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it (probably; you never know) but if I asked myself what so-and-so was doing I’d just know.
And then the next project happened to be a historical novel, and the one after that was far future sci-fi*, and nobody in either of those would understand what’s going on in the world today, beyond the very generic ‘ugh, human nature’. And then I stopped writing altogether, more or less, and didn’t have time to follow cycling any more, and Twitter became unreadable, and everybody went away. It wasn’t quite as definite as that. They just weren’t there any more. Last year Issues in Human Sexuality was binned (not before time), and neither Lydia nor Colette had a thing to say about it, never mind the fact that they both had very strong opinions on it in The Real World and I, personally, cried.
The other week, though, just after I’d got going again, I was at a parent-and-toddler group, and there was Lydia – at least, not there, but very definitely knee deep in small children, in some other church hall. She isn’t even in this new book, I don’t think. Not outside the chapter headings. Probably. Anyway, it was very nice to see her. I’d missed her.
*Does this mean that I have three novels on the go at the moment? Yes, I’m afraid it does. Is that slowing up progress on all of them? I’m honestly not sure. What seems to be happening in practice is that the Shiny New Novel is getting most of the attention, but the others are getting a sentence a day**, and you know, that’s more than anything was getting before, so we’ll go with that.
**Assuming I get any writing time at the computer. If not, Shiny New Novel might get something in a notebook if it’s lucky, and the rest of them take their chances.
Kathleen Jowitt 