Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "cottages"

What does a writer take on holiday? Some might say nothing to do with writing, if it is supposed to be a holiday. Away for nearly a month, driving around the north of England and Scotland, the first essentials were clothes of every description to cater for any kind of weather. Then the other essentials, cameras to record our travels, including card readers and battery chargers, kindle, knitting and a bag of toys (electronic) to keep the rest of the party occupied while I wrote.
Fresh air, walking, seeing new cites and remote rural areas, meeting interesting people and getting inspiration for settings and characters, all important ingredients of a trip.
At a secluded cottage one can pretend to be a writer who has cut themselves off from the world. But with the right equipment an author can write anywhere.
Take a clockwork lap top and at least one memory stick with the current novel and all other writing. If wi fi is available the blog can also be kept up to date.
Always have a notebook handy for those pleasant times when the sun shines as you sit by the river with your coffee, or on the cathedral green with afternoon tea.
Take the paper manuscript of the novel in progress; if the electronics fail you can read, edit, check the plot lines…
Did I do all these things? Yes.
I downloaded photographs every day onto the lap top ready for my website and Facebook and when rain or mist descended I typed up the notes scribbled in the sunshine.
I’ve edited my novel and knitted a scarf for a family member visited on the way home.
Of course the other advantage of taking manuscripts, paper and electronic... if one should arrive home to discover the house blown up in a gas leak or flattened by a meteorite, at least the writing has been preserved.
Luckily our house was still standing when we returned.
And did the driver complain that I had taken too many bags on holiday? Yes.

You can see some pictures of places visited on my website; in the picture quiz and in Beachwriter’s Blog.

http://www.ccsidewriter.co.uk/chapter...

Where would writers be without Aunts who leave cottages in their wills? I don’t mean writers who are left thatched country cottages by their aunties and are delighted to have somewhere peaceful to write. That would be very nice, but I don’t know how often it happens to real writers.
When a story was read out at our writers’ group about the main character inheriting an aunt’s cottage, I remarked how often authors use this scenario. In one of my favourite novels, the L Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, the heroine, Jane, does not stay in the L shaped room because she inherits a lovely country cottage from an aunt. In the sequel, ‘The Backward Shadow’ she is living in the cottage with her baby – what would have happened to them without the aunt?
In my anthology ‘Hallows and Heretics’ the short story ‘Jerusalem Journal’ is about a young wife who inherits a cottage from an aunt she has never met and there are dark surprises in store. Inheriting from parents will not do for fiction; it is bound to be the house one grew up in with no secrets. Fictional aunts and great aunts inevitably live somewhere unknown to the hero or heroine and have been estranged from the rest of the family for decades.
In my novel ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’, Holly Tree Farm is left to one of the main characters by his great aunt and I was just as surprised as he was when this country home became an essential part of the plot in the whole trilogy.