Storm

Working title: Your Vora; but it changes almost daily. So does the prose itself, because I have reason to believe it's not good enough yet. Although how writers know when it is good enough is beyond me.

The first hours of Casa Luna are heavenly, always. The beds more crisp and cool than they will seem tomorrow, tomatoes sweeter, fresh bread, water from the well. Sunset like a split pomegranate, river murmur, loud in the valley.

Why should the storm be different, normal or tame? When it finally strikes, after an evening of plum-coloured clouds and rumblings, sweltering heat, spitting skies, it is apocalyptic. Walls, shutters, blankets, eyelids: nothing keeps out the blinding light or the roar of the thunder.

I'm awake at the first bolt of lightning; before the second, I'm curled up and shivering like a kicked dog.  What a terrible title for a book, I think as the rain raps, grows and hurls itself, gallops on the roof. I could drink for a week from one of those drops, by the sounds of it. What shall I call it then? Can't think, can't think.

I wake up unwilling at 03:03; sweating, at 07:07; blearily again, at 08:08; finally arise at 09:09. They must be significant, these numbers - but why? and how? and is thinking this (writing about it now) just another way to procrastinate?

No way. Look, the first thing I did was print the draft I have written - 263 pages, 111,000 words exactly; more numbers, and how significant are they? The moment I start editing, they will mean nothing. They march on and on, the clock, the words, the drops of rain.

Why

So I ran away from home.

Three airports later, I sat on a bus to Valença do Minho. I looked - and felt - like a crumpled old coat discarded on the back of a chair.

I couldn't be happier.

I've arrived and here it is, my view for the coming month. Casa Luna, or Vora-city if you want, or the rabbit hole into which I am about to dive. To explain: I have escaped to Casa Luna to work, while builders rip apart the Scotland house.

A writing retreat. The writing retreat I have been dreaming of for 20 years. I loved a man (I love him still) and had two children while waiting for this writing retreat: I had a dozen jobs or more, and bought two flats and sold them, and built Casa Luna and left it behind and found it again, and travelled here and there and finally I am having it: one month of writing about an imaginary world called Vora.

So, not a big deal.

I will be writing Vora, and writing about writing Vora.  Maybe it's the literary equivalent of a selfie, although writers have been recording their shufflings and visions and agonies for aeons. I want to spend a moment on this journal, and share it with my darling (see? I am working, I am, I am...); with friends who, more even than coffee, keep me writing; with strangers who might be curious; with someday-readers, some day.

Look in, if you have come this far.