If True

May 2, 2020 Longrider Fiction, General News, Health and Fitness, Personal Stuff, Political, Writing & Language 16

Yes, if true, this could be good news.

Boris Johnson is sketching out a blueprint which enables Britons to go back to work by May 26 while stopping a second spike in coronavirus infections, government sources revealed last night.

A loosening of certain restrictions designed to fire up the flagging economy will be accompanied with a roll-out of revamped social distancing guidelines, particularly on public transport.

Government insiders claimed that under the plans commuters will be instructed to check their temperature before travelling into work to stop train carriages becoming contamination hotbeds.

I am a hostage to fortune given that the DVSA needs to start testing again before I can resume. I can deliver the enhanced rider scheme, but this is a very small market and I only ever intended to do it as an occasional sideline anyway. But it won’t stop me marketing it. You never know, there might be odd bits of work.

That said, work or not, I’ll be out on the bike just to clear my head.

One outcome of the isolation of the past few weeks is that my current novel, Reiver is now complete and out for proof reading. My normal approach to writing a novel is to work as and when the muse takes me. Being stuck on my own, I took a different approach and just sat at the keyboard and battered away at it. I rattled off about 50,000 words in the space of a couple of weeks. This is the Terry Pratchett approach to writing. Just sit and write – even if it is rubbish and you do cut it out later. Just write and the muse will flow. It certainly did.

16 Comments

  1. Our local waste recycling centre is re-opening. I expect it to be busy to begin with so I will give it a few days.

  2. My approach to writing is to sit and think about writing. I do a lot of sitting and thinking, I might start writing one of these days. 😉

      • I can write the most wonderful things in my head, if only there was a way to direct dump it onto the page. By the time I’ve got down a sentence or two the rest of that beautiful composition has evaporated.

        • You have to keep a notebook. I’ve got one by the bed in case I wake up with something on my mind. I once woke up from a dream and had to get up and write it down before it evaporated. It became a short story published in one of Leggy’s anthologies and eventually found its way into one of my novels as part of the character’s story arc.

          • But even with a notebook ever to hand I still can’t write as fast as I think. My handwriting: even I can’t read it after a few hours, look at the scrawl, use it as a reminder of what I think I thought when I wrote it.
            On your second point, I once woke up with a phrase running through my head, lay abed until it had become two lines, thought —I must write this down— I’ll finish this couplet and then have breakfast — by evening I had still not had breakfast but had had managed to write a sonnet, one of the best things I’ve ever wrote.

  3. I have some outstanding non-urgent warranty work on my car, and the dealership have told me they’re re-opening their workshop from 11 May. But I’ll hold off for a couple of weeks until they’ve dealt with other people’s urgent issues. After the initial panic people are starting to work out what they can actually do under the current regulations.

    The report sounds a bit half a loaf, but at least it’s a small sign of some improvement.

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