Nocturnes

Have you made a Bucket List? All those things you want to do before you kick yours? I had a look at mine yesterday because I was able to tick one thing off - I've been accepted to do my Masters in Creative Writing which I'm relieved and over the moon about. I was really nervous before the interview - maybe you always are when it's something you really care about. It was an interesting conversation, more about what I'm reading than writing, the writers I love like Anne Tyler. If the course gets me one step closer to being anywhere near as good as she is it will be three years well spent. She is wickedly good, weaving convincing lies, holding a mirror up to everyday home life. I don't know if 'writing as well as Anne Tyler' can be added to a bucket list, but it's something to aim for.

I'm not much use for anything at the moment, 40,000 words into the new book and my head is there with the characters (put it this way there's not a lot of dusting going on). This week I've done a review for Bookbag, and a short piece for the Bookseller, but apart from that I'm 100% with the new work (so we will probably be eating rice and beans for the summer - poor long-suffering pilot). I really, really like this new book so far - the true stories that have inspired it are staggering, and as the characters are rising up, slotting in with the real people and events in the novel I'm hoping they're going to be half as inspiring, brave and downright sexy as the men and women I've been researching.

It's made me think about the people I've known who lived through World War II. My grandfather gave me an ivory elephant pendent a 'friend' gave him in France during the war (obviously a love affair), and by coincidence my old piano teacher left me a matching brooch when she died. Mrs Day was a concert pianist in her time - incredibly beautiful (I remember elegant studio portraits of her in an evening gown at the keyboard of a gleaming grand piano). She told wonderful stories about performing, beating off ardent suitors in open top sports cars. When I knew her, she was frail and in her seventies, but when she talked of those years they were clearly the best in her life, and her eyes were like a young girl's. A lot of the biographies I've been reading over the last few weeks say the same - these were ordinary people living through extraordinary times. There was an urgency to love, loss - a sense that they were really living everyday. I've pinned the little elephants up on the storyboard of the new novel next to the rather lovely pic of Mr Firth - they're a link to a different time which is still in touching distance.

TODAY'S PROMPT: The Arthur Rubenstein recording of Chopin's Nocturnes is my default work music - it's perfect, sublime. What do you write to - if you've got any recommendations do share them. Something about Chopin makes it the ideal music to write to (for me at least), and people I've recommended it to have found it helpful - why not give it a go? I tried playing it on the piano at my parents house recently and found I couldn't any more - it sounded awful, ten years of lessons as a child had left me. Once we're settled, piano lessons and a piano are up there on the bucket list. What skills do you have that are a bit rusty? Things that make you happy, but you haven't done for a long time? If you haven't made one, maybe start your own bucket list. Or if you're looking for inspiration for a new story, why not have a root around in your jewellery box or desk drawers, find a keepsake you haven't thought about for a while, tell its tale? It's not only psychics who hold rings and intimate objects to uncover the story - for writers they can be channels to whole new worlds.

and PS: Happy 4th July to all WKDN's American readers x