Confessions of an Author

Listen With Your Eyes Listening with your eyes When you are an author, you are, in effect, a parasite of life. Every experience, every glimpse of people, is stored up, ready to use in a novel. Sometimes, when there’s time, it’s good to be able to simply notice. To walk through a crowd and store up memories. You don’t consciously decide that a stranger will be a psychopath, or that a young man will be a jilted lover, or the grandmother will be the wise woman in a story. But you notice, you listen with your eyes, and add to the store in your mind. So that when you are writing, perhaps months later, and you need a character, you have a whole bank of them, waiting, ready to be fleshed out with a personality and a backstory. It helps if you are alone, as chatty husbands can be something of a distraction. So when the family decided to build a sandcastle (yes, they are all adults) I didn’t object, and was happy to walk along the beach for a while. Walk along a beach in the A...

Lisbon to the Algarve 1 Breakfast. Boys only 10 minutes late. We did a quick trip to the supermarket. After the trip to E.coli Service Station, everyone is a bit sensitive about where our food is from. Bought a range of breads and crisps and plastic looking cheese slices. My bread rolls have a use-by date of Jan 2019, so I’m not convinced they have much that’s natural in them. But hopefully that includes bacteria. Left the Sheraton, Lisbon, at 11:30. The resort in the Algarve only had a P.O. box address, so Husband looked on their website and entered the town name—Praia da Falesia—into the SatNav. All seemed fine. After driving for about an hour, the SatNav directed us off the motorway. J checked, and said he thought it was probably avoiding the traffic queues which were ahead. The roads grew smaller and smaller. When we were directed down an unpaved road, we began to suspect something was wrong. Could the SatNav have been tampered with by a gang of criminals, who w...