"Where do you get your ideas?" is a common question posed to writers and artists. I find the best ones are the ideas that seemingly pop into my head from nowhere. In Glister: The House Hunt (out July 6th alongside Glister: The Haunted Teapot) the heroine of the story, Glister (to whom strange things always happen) finds her eccentric home, Chilblain Hall, takes off on a world tour without telling her. You see, the Lord Lieutenant of Whixleyshire considers ramshackle Chilblain to be a blot on his bid for winning the Bonny Village CompetitionTM and the sensitive home takes offence and flounces off in a huff. Can rickety country houses flounce? Well, Chilblain can out-flounce the best of them. So off goes Chilblain, hither and yon, to the four corners of the globe leaving Glister Butterworth and her father without a home.
It was a blast to write, everything just seemed to slot into place and I was thoroughly enjoying the process. Usually there's all manner of head scratching and procrastination involved in my writing process. How many cups of tea can one person drink in a day? Dozens when the only alternative to putting the kettle on is wrestling with an unwieldy plot point or watching the baleful blink of the cursor on a blank screen. Curse you...you...you blinking cursor! I often shout before shuffling off to make another cup of tea. This is frowned upon, especially when you're in a cafe and not allowed to make your own hot beverages.
So, Glister: The House Hunt was coming along swimmingly, I bathed in the warm glow of the good fortune of a creative type who's been gifted a neat idea without even breaking into a sweat. It was the equivalent of a total stranger giving me a crisp twenty pound note and encouraging me to run along and spend it on whatever I wanted. Sweets, books, more sweets. Enjoy!
Best not to look a gift muse in the mouth, I thought. Best not question why I can't get this kind of good luck all of the time, I thought. But it began to occur to me that while working on the book my family and I had been in the middle of selling our home and moving to a completely new city. And that my daughter would be moving to a new school where she didn't know anyone and neither did I, for that matter. And yeah, my better-half and I were looking to buy a new home in our new city when our landlord suddenly decided to sell the place we were renting and we'd be out on the streets within a matter of weeks. It was quite a stressful time, all in all.
Fortunately none of that had anything to do with Glister: The House Hunt. As far as my work was concerned I was one lucky fella. What did that chap Socrates say about life, "...a glorious cycle of song?" Oh, I don't know, something like that.
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Check out Andi's blog about Glister at http://glisterbook.blogspot.com/