A heart of stone will never reveal the heart that beats within the stone

Whenever I see a sculptor, a construction site or guys/gals building an airplane or ship I wonder how the hell they’re gonna pull it all together into something that works, looks great or maybe at least something they can sell. Whenever I read curvy twisty tales I wonder how the writer thought it all up and then made it fit. It must be crazy standing on a piece of soil and looking up into an open sky and say “That’s where my skyscraper’s gonna go.”

So, at the first encounter with a new novel I’m too hare-brained to set out a plan like some writers. Once the characters have got a name they kinda resent being pushed around by some  office worker waving a blueprint. No, what I need is a flavor – maybe some little piece of dialogue that may come up on page 174. If it does it often goes out at the purple prose edit stage.

Somewhere in Passion Patrol Four a character is gonna say ” You can’t really really cry while your heart is still broken. The person who knows how to fix it will take your tears as a gift of love.”

There it is: the secret source of my work. That’s ahead of me now like a distant cloud on a sunny day. It’ll kinda move about, collect more woolly  sheep, morph into cauliflower or a stringy mustache;  but – it’s there.

Emma Thinx: Don’t trip on a milestone on the way to the horizon.