Sounds vaguely perverse, doesn’t it?

Well, if that’s how you got here, hello and make yourself at home.  New friends are always welcome.  Feel free to poke around.  The main website www.elspethcooper.com has more about me and my writing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband dearly.  In fact, if I loved him any more, it would be downright unhealthy.  But I can’t write whilst he’s in the house.

He’s had a week off work, and it’s a miracle I’ve got any writing done at all.  He’s trying not to interrupt me, bless him, but just having someone else in the house creeping about trying not to be a nuisance is driving me up the wall.

Part of it is my fault.  I’m very conscious that he works hard and he’s having some time off and deserves to be able to relax, but I’m sitting here at my desk worrying that he’s feeling bored/under-appreciated/neglected in some way, instead of what I should be doing.

When he goes out to the gym, it’s fine.  I can’t hear him, and don’t need to worry about him.  But when he’s here…

If he’s watching TV, I can hear it up here in the office.  Even if he turns it down, it’s audible above the volume of my music, which lately I’ve taken to listening to at incredibly low levels so it drowns out the silence without distracting me too much.

If he goes for a soak in the bath, I can hear *his* music over mine.  If he’s using his computer in the study along the hall, I can hear him watching music videos, typing, or God help me, farting.

Of course, I could shut my office door, but then the cats can’t get in and will sit outside crying and pulling at the carpet, making me feel a heel for ignoring them.  I’ll feel twice the heel for only communicating with my husband when he brings me a fresh cup of tea.

The other alternative is to take a break from writing, and go curl up on the sofa with him.  But if I do that, I start worrying about deadlines, and whether I’m neglecting my book, and I’m unable to relax.  I can’t win.

Noise-cancelling headphones.  It’s the only solution.  That, or divorce.

It’s one of those cringe-worthy pieces of corporate management-speak that should have passed its best before date long before now, but which you still hear trotted out by the same people who think it’s cool to say “That’s blue-sky thinking!  Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”  Urgh.

But as it happens, I have one.  An idea shower, not a flagpole, in case you were wondering.  It’s also the place where I go every day to get clean, but the washing part seems to be a side-effect of its true purpose, which is to shower me with inspiration.

Inspiration is a funny thing.  It can’t be bottled, pinned down, put under a microscope.  It’s powerful enough to kick-start 20-year, 12-volume fantasy series, yet as transient and ephemeral as a waft of perfume from someone in the crowd around you on the Tube.  Writers can spend days–years–searching for it in vain, surviving on sheer perspiration instead, then when they least expect it, they wake up in the middle of the night with their brains fizzing.

Lately all my best ideas have come to me whilst I’m in the shower.  It might be the warm water and suds putting me into a Zen-like state where my mind is wide open to the random inspiration particles sleeting through the universe, or it might be that I’m only half awake and therefore unable to dodge the hefty kick my subconscious has just delivered like an eight-inch-thick printout from the batch job that was running on the server overnight.  I really don’t know where they come from, or how they get into my brain, but answers to persistent problems always seem to arrive whilst I’m showering.

Like this morning.  There I am, soaping myself and hoping I’ll be done before the milkman arrives for his money (like ideas, telephones and doorbells always ring whilst the water’s running), when I suddenly realise *why* Character A has to be where he is and what he has to do whilst he’s there, after he’s been trailing across the landscape for two-thirds of the book without a clear purpose that I could identify other than that I just *knew* he had to be there.  Now I know why, and it all makes sense.  Pieces of the story are dropping into place so seamlessly that I can no longer see the joins.

By ‘eck, I don’t know what they’re putting in that Palmolive sea minerals shower gel, but it’s good stuff.

Regular readers will know (don’t try to hide behind the sofa; I know there’s at least four of you) that I am busy finishing Book 2 of The Wild Hunt, Trinity Moon.

What you may not know is that as if MS wasn’t enough fun by itself, I’ve also been diagnosed with gallstones. Honking great gallstones, measuring 1.5cm across. The surgeon I saw at the hospital last Tuesday was quite impressed. I assured him that I do not do things by halves. Neither, it seems, does he.

He wants me to have an MRI scan to check that there’s no small stones (the technical term is gravel, seriously) in my bile duct, before he whips my gall bladder out. Ultrasound, like the one I had a couple of months ago that revealed the pesky stones in the first place, isn’t very good for looking at this because the bile duct lurks behind the bowel, and there’s air in the gut which doesn’t transmit the ultrasound very well. MRI, of course, is like one of Her Majesty’s VAT inspectors: it goes everywhere and sees everything.

Lovely chap, the surgeon. Warm hands, which is always a good sign, and a dry sense of humour. I am not in the least freaked-out by the prospect of any of the upcoming procedures–even if they can’t do a keyhole cholecystectomy and have to do a traditional large-incision, in-up-to-the-elbows job. My heart is plodding along at its regular resting rate of 59bpm and if I was any more laid back I’d be horizontal. So why am I finding it so hard to empty my head of all this health-related stuff and get back to the business of writing?

I’m staring down the barrel of a deadline. I’ve had the first instalment of my advance, so I’m on the company dime, as it were. I want to finish this book so I can make a start on the next one, because I want to find out what happens next. Powerful motivators all. So why can’t I write the last five chapters?

After a bit of a sticky patch I’d been going great guns again, and then WHAM! Straight into a brick wall. I was washing my hair in the shower, like you do, brain idling, and suddenly realised that the last chapter and a half had gone in completely the wrong direction and I didn’t know how to fix it.

Four days later, I still don’t. It’s not writer’s block, because I don’t believe in it, and we all know that stuff we don’t believe in doesn’t exist, like the monster under the bed. It’s an inability to focus.

I’ve turned off my music. I’ve taken myself out into the garden with the laptop, where the wireless doesn’t work reliably enough to allow me to get distracted by email or Facebook or reading other people’s blogs. I’ve even tried going back to pencil and paper to slow my thoughts down, let ideas take root. Nothing doing. Every time I sit down to sort this out my mind is flittering around like a butterfly in a meadow, never settling for more than a few seconds before it’s off to the next flower.

Argh.

The fact that I’m even blogging about it, instead of solving the problem, is just another example of my distraction. Why find answers when you can futz around talking about the question instead?

Double argh.

This is not a familiar place in which to find myself. I don’t like it. It smells strange and the people talk funny. Get me out of here!