Blood Harmonies

Another Sleepless Night

For months now I’ve not been sleeping. I spend my days yawning and dreaming of an early night, and most nights lying awake worrying about everything I didn’t get done during the day. Well it ends here. As of tonight, I’ve decided to use this time-out-of-time to offload my pre-occupations about work-in-progress. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about locations, locations, locations, and how much easier it is to render places if you can hold them in your heart.

Tonight’s pre-occupation was brought to me care of Audrey Niffenegger who I had the good fortune to hear speaking at an event Foyle’s put on at the Bloomsbury Theatre here in London. At one point she was talking about how crucial the Chicago setting of The Time Traveller’s Wife was to her, and how heartbreaking it had been to learn that the screen adaptation was filmed in Toronto. Then shortly after this she mentioned the way the fact that her new book contains twins allowed her extensive scope for pairings throughout the novel, although she is conscious that perhaps no one else will ever notice them, she knows they are there.

This had a certain resonance for me in terms of the locations in my own novel, This He Did Without Remorse. For while, should I ever be so lucky as to have it adapted for screen in completely the wrong city, I can well imagine that I might be the only person who feels the loss in the locations I chose. Or rather, I know why these choices were important to me, but since I rarely make it explicit in the text, the fabric of the setting is just one among a myriad decisions in the book that probably really only matter to me.

As a corollary to this, on the train home I was trying to pinpoint why it is I find everything in London such a grind by comparison, and hoping that at least part of why I feel more alive in Paris is because I’ve spent so much imaginary, idealised time there, whereas in London it’s all been more drudgingly real. With a bit of luck, this is all about to change, as I have started work researching the next book, which will be set in London.

We’re off to Paris for a few days soon (see how I snuck that in there?!) And so when sleep eludes me in coming weeks, I’ll be sifting through whatever photos we take, and trying explain why these locations clamoured at me to be included in the novel. At the same time, I’ll be working on building the sets for my Londres imaginaire, seeking out locations to ingest for the new book, and posting my findings.

But for now the black and white cat I share a desk with has just twigged that an extra early breakfast just might be possible. So I’ll close here. If you don’t hear from me soon, it’s hopefully because I’m also curled up in a drawer somewhere snoring…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 01:08 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.