Monty Python and the Holy Grail

…Bring out yer dead!

Image: fishandbicycles.com

I’m never going to take being able to swallow without pain for granted again. This morning the glands in my neck are so swollen that I look like I’ve had my head inflated with a foot-pump, and every movement from the shoulders up has to be conducted with extreme care. I’ve had more paracetamol in the last three days than ever in my life before, and I’ve spent most of the past 48 hours feeling dizzy, and I hate every irritating second of it.

Also, I am the worst patient in the world. Fact.

This is a pretty accurate representation of me right now…
Image: krank.ie

Plus, my house looks like it’s been ripped out of the ground, shaken around a bit and replaced upside-down, and there’s three days of dishes to be done, and a pile of laundry as tall as myself…

Sigh.

But it will all get done, eventually. I have to keep reminding myself that you don’t have to do all the things, all the time, but somehow I find myself trying, anyway. Since I got sick I have proofread two chapters of a thesis (which was very interesting, and satisfied my inner pedant so much), and written nearly 3,000 words of a new novel idea – and all this on top of trying to keep this blog going as best I can.

Yes. Yes, I am insane.

I probably shouldn’t have started working on a new book idea, really – I still have work that needs to be completed on ‘Eldritch’. In fact, who am I kidding; I have loads of work still to do on that story. But, for whatever reason, an idea I’d had years ago, which I’d shelved, popped back into my fevered head the other day, and – strangely – a character came with it, and a backstory, and a suitably intriguing supernatural/creep-tinged motivation for the baddie, and a complicated relationship between my character and her mother, and I just had to try to pin it down on paper.

Now, I haven’t re-read my work yet. It may be that I’ve written 3,000 words of garbled nonsense, which will leave nobody in any doubt that they burst forth from the brain of a person with an elevated temperature. At least I was ‘with-it’ enough to make notes on my new plot and story arc, and with any luck they’ll be workable. It’s exciting – I haven’t worked on something new for a while, now.

But, as many before me (whose shoes I am not fit to untie, or whatever that saying is) have said, the first rule of creating art is: Finish It.

Run, Bilbo! Run!
Image: lvl1.org

So, perhaps what I should do is make some notes on the new project and leave it be for a while, until I’ve had a chance to redraft ‘Eldritch.’ Then, when that’s done, it’ll be time for the new, shiny project again. And the one after it, which is already taking shape in my brain. And after that – who knows?

Right now, though, I think it’s time for dishes and laundry. Oh, what a glamorous life we writers lead, eh? Yeah.

So, send me all your good-health vibes. Force my throat to shrink by sheer power of will. Meditate upon my plight and pray for my shakes to dissipate.

And, if you fancy dropping over and giving me a hand with the housework, that’d be awesome.

Yuck.
Image: commons.wikimedia.org

Recently, I’ve been looking over some of my old notes from university and some of my old teaching material from when I was a tutor of Medieval English Language and Literature. I sometimes wonder whether I was a good tutor, and whether any of my old students remember me. I think the most noteworthy thing I ever did in a class was fall off the edge of a podium mid-speech, but I hope some of the people I was lucky enough to teach will remember enjoying their course, even if they don’t remember me.

I’d say this is how most of my old students remember their years of Medieval Lit…
Image: tek-lado.com

One student once told me that I had singlehandedly made her love Chaucer, and I lived off that praise for a couple of years. It still remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid.

Anyway. Amid all the nostalgia, I’ve realised a couple of things: one, I still love anything to do with the Middle Ages, and two, I remember more about it than I thought I did. It’s like muscle memory, perhaps; the stuff that I spent so many years learning is still there, deep down. Even if I never use it again professionally, it’s great to have that fund of knowledge and folklore, that familiarity with a lost world, that facility with a written language that very few people – sadly – are bothered with these days.

The same goes for all of us. No matter what your background is, what you studied at school or college, what you’re interested in, what you’ve done for a living, what you do for a living, what makes you happy – all of that stuff can be used to fuel your writing and feed your imagination. It can all be mined for inspiration. The more you have in your ‘tank’, the better equipped you’ll be to stretch your writing muscles, and the more agile your ideas are likely to be. I’ve worked as a butcher’s apprentice, as a lecturer and as a bookseller, among lots of other things. So, my imagination-pot is fully stocked.

But my heart will always belong to the Middle Ages.

And – since I’ve done nothing of note since yesterday besides hack away at ‘Eldritch’ and drink at least a litre of decaf, I’m going to leave you with my favourite clip from one of my favourite films – and, it must be said, a clip to which I often referred in my classes, back in the day.

Oh, how many poor classes of students had to sit through my ‘John-Cleese-doing-a-French-accent’ impression…

Work is going reasonably well on ‘Eldritch.’ It’s hard to unpick a plot with which you’ve been intimately familiar for years, only to recreate it slightly differently, but I’m managing. It’s slow, but it’s steady. I’ll get there.

Good luck with all your endeavours today – particularly if it’s repelling the English with flying bovine missiles.