This computer, nobody knows why and I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth because it was given to me by Nick Urwin, has a tendency to switch itself off and on again whenever it feels like it and it can be extremely annoying. Consequently I don’t trust it and save work every few sentences in order not to lose anything. Even though there is automatic saving to a point if I haven’t done it manually when suddenly whoops! The screen goes blank it can then result in going through a whole rigmarole to get back on track which, when one is writing and the ideas are flowing, can be very grrrr making.
Way way back, more’n fifty years, 1957 to be exact when I was working in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight I decided to write a play the sole object of which was for it to be commercial. The result of course was crap. I don’t know where I found the time anyway to write a full length play being engaged in weekly rep, playing major parts and stage managing though I even managed some time to go to the beach. When I was young, I was a water baby. If the sea was there the sea was there to be swum in and you couldn’t keep me out of it, but I digress. Maybe I magically crammed forty-eight hours into each twenty-four. The play was called ENTER ANTHONY; the dialogue was pretty putrid, the characters two-dimensional cardboard figures but the plot … well the plot was good. So a year or so back, maybe more, one loses track of time here on Crete, I pulled out the old script and did some rewrites but you can’t, as they say, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and it still wasn’t very good as a play. So, mainly because of the plot, I decided to rewrite it as a novel where I could flesh out the characters and make them more than two-dimensional, hopefully make them real people, and am now over 95000 words along the way. Actually I had hoped to finish it a month or two ago but evidently that was not to be so I am still ploughing ahead. I stopped yesterday when I came up with a major problem but lo and behold, the brain works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. I woke up at about one thirty and in my head I wrote the whole necessary scene that solves the problem. I did think of getting up and actually writing it then and there but decided it could wait for morning. Often one gets ideas in the night that in the morning are forgotten no matter how much one wracks one’s brains trying to remember them but this was too major to forget and now that I have written to-days blog and wished the world a jolly good morning, I shall write the new scene into ENTER ANTHONY and hope I can get through it without this machine having one of its megrims.