Words

Being a writer is a strange thing.

Words, thought, spoken, written are always tumbling around in my head. 

There are professional words: press releases created and/or condensed, news letters, marketing.

There are poetic words expressed in a rare haiku that leave my fingers tapping out the syllables---5,7,5.

I see a tree and it becomes something else depending on its shape and colour.

I watch people and their actions become mini stories that may or may not have reality other than in my own head.

Colours such as purple must be lilac, lavender, mauve, aubergine...

Fictional stories pop into my head. When I'm working on a novel my characters may walk to the bus with me, telling me what they want to do next. They will chide me as I drink a cup of tea, that I am not giving this or that one enough space.

Right now the characters in Murder in Schwyz are waiting to be formatted and sent to my editor. Those in Murder in Edinburgh are complaining that I've ignored them too long while I've done newsletter after newsletter.

Words for blogs, my warm up for other writing, dribble out of my fingers and onto the keyboard.

One of the frustrations I have with French, and I do find myself thinking in French depending on the situation, is that although my vocabulary is functional for day-to-day living, the exact nuance often hides from me. I knock at the door, it opens but I'm not allowed into the beautiful house. On the other hand, French has given me a whole new stable of words to ride.

I did not decide to be a writer. I think I was born that way. From scribbling stories as a child before I could write (problem was that I couldn't reread the scribbles) to being able to read them after I learned to write, to starting a newspaper at school in fourth grade and being a cub reporter at 16, writing was part of my life.

Only in my 40s did I turn the barrage of words into a disciplined fiction mode. 

It's too late to change...and I have no desire to.