Yesterday was a fun day. Despite waking up at 4.30 like the good old days, I was bright and dandy in the morning and managed to get a few thousand words written for the next Delamere book. I am currently tied up in a mystery to which I know the ending, but not the path to reach it. That’s a job for the characters who discover things as they go, which means, I discover things as I go and I never quite know where the mystery is going to lead next. This, I find is more natural than plotting every single clue and stage, because, after all, if I were the detectives, I wouldn’t know what was coming next. I have to know how to end things, who, where, why and so on, and I do, but how my characters discover the facts? That’s as mysterious to me until it’s written as it is to them. Anyway, that’s what I was up to yesterday morning.
The afternoon saw my piano student do a grand job on his scales, and I can now safely say, if he was sitting a grade four exam tomorrow, he would pass his scales and arpeggios, and if you’ve wondering what’s involved with that, basically it means knowing and playing smoothly the scales of: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, Bb, Eb, Ab, Cm – all major, and Dm, Em, Fm, Gm Am, Bm (minors both harmonic and melodic), plus the same in arpeggios – all two octaves, hands together. We’re also getting to the point now when, for example, we reach the end of Chopin’s Prelude in e Minor and there are three great big chords, I can say, ‘It’s B dominant seventh followed by E minor’, and he knows what I’m talking about. So, that lesson put me right in the mood for sitting at the kitchen table for two hours…
That’s the ‘Big Boy’ which is a locomotive on my side of the table, and an even bigger boy that’s the Titanic on the other. I’m not sure what breed of locomotive ‘Big Boy’ is, I just know he’s going to take a lot of close painting work before I get to the easy job of sticking it together. We’d just finished for the day when Yiannis phoned and said, ‘Come and have a drink’, and as we’d been in for so many days, we thought we would. It started to rain just as we left home, and by the time we did the 100 yards to the bar, all three of us were sheltering under the one umbrella. It was too wet and dangerous to travel on, so we entertained the new pianist for a coke while we waited for the rain to ease.
It did, eventually, and all’s well that ends well. There’s a video of the rain passing the village square on the Symi Dream Facebook page (reels section) if you’ve a mind to view it. I’m off into a weekend of writing and keeping my fingers crossed (because the rent is due on Monday and my pension hasn’t arrived yet…), so I’ll see you next week.
