It might seem odd to resurrect my blog when I haven’t had the time or concentration to work on my books as often as I’d like. But in the past blogging has been a way to get me to the computer, an exercise in helping me organise my thoughts a little, like warming up for a run. And sometimes, fingers crossed, it has served as a way to access the writing of my novels.
No summaries are needed for the last month. April has been a blur of getting through one day and stumbling into the next, watching the news through fingers and grieving for normality. For schedules and friends and plans and restaurants and hugs and the school run and casual, carefree grocery shopping. When I sit to write, I can grasp the thread of the story for a half hour maybe then it’s wiped out by the magnitude of what’s happening. I can rattle around our home, keep on keeping on and for moments at a time forget entirely, for a second, an hour or a lunchtime perhaps then I’ll catch sight of it, out of the corner of my eye, and I’m hypnotised once more by the quiet shock of it all. The thump of helicopter blades in the evening and through the night, the trail-free blue skies, the images of empty cities with the odd person or person’s searching through them, faces frozen, looking out over masks, eyes knowing, they’ve seen, are seeing and still can’t take it in, even though it is happening and has happened. Then pressed up against it all: the trees popping bright greens and buds peeling open, dots of white fluff passing through the clean spring air and the thick perfume of lilac rising from the hedgerows. And I can breathe it in and it makes me smile and want to cry at the same time.
The time for creative thinking has shrunk. How are days shorter when the skies are lighter for longer? Time has contracted, weeks sifting on through the hourglass but here I am, here are words and I am writing.
x
Follow on Twitter: @LivKiernan
The next in the DCS Frankie Sheehan series publishes on 23rd July. Available to pre-order here: IF LOOKS COULD KILL
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OliviaKiernanAuthor/