Dreaming is easier than writing.

I’ve started writing again and it’s a struggle at the moment. I seem to have found myself writing three books at once – which is just plain greedy. There are three nice ideas, not fully formed but formed as much as I would like them to be at this stage. I like to allow room for manoeuvre so that my characters can get out of hand a bit, rather than planning everything at the beginning. It’s all going swimmingly, except for one thing. They don’t want to be written down. I have pages of notes and every night as I get into bed the books become alive. The characters talk to me and plot problems resolve themselves and I feel all happy and content. I write it all down as notes when I wake up, or turn on my phone in the middle of the night and stab at the keys to get a few notes down before they are whisked away by the vagaries of night. Then I come to my desk the next day and I can’t get it down, it’s slow, so slow.

Please can someone invent a computer that taps into your thoughts and just types away for you, that would be the best machine ever – well apart from a TARDIS but I don’t think the invention of that is just around the corner. When I was a child I used to watch Tomorrow’s World on TV and I just assumed by the time I got to the age I am now we’d have all these fab gadgets. And we do have fab gadgets now, just not the ones I really wanted. That’s just not fair, I feel cheated that all the promises of flying cars, and dream machines, and the aforementioned thing that can type your thoughts as you think them, just haven’t materialised yet. 

Then I realise that I’ve written quite happily about all that but still haven’t added more words to my novel, or novella or whatever it might be when it finally gets written. I should get back to work. Bother! Time for more coffee then. I raise my cup to all other writers out there struggling with the same thing.