A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.