Vast expanses of blank paper

Okay, here's the thing...I've been through a very, very dry spell writing wise - huge arid desert thing if you like - Sahara sized even. I like to put it down to pigs - I had Swine 'flu during October/November and until recently I could use that as an extremely effective excuse against writing or even thinking. "Sorry I couldn't go to the gym - still 'fluey", "Party you say? Hmm, shall have to see how I feel - recovering from the 'flu", "Gosh, was that conversation really last week? I'm still recovering from 'flu you know" I could have committed crimes during that period and blamed Swine 'flu...except I was too tired/weak/lazy to do that because of the 'flu.

Anyway, enough of the excuses.

Yesterday I tried to shove my lazy non-'flu infected, ever-expanding rear into the writing world again. I've been slowly working up to this by reconnecting with Twitter - this is most effective as the guilt kicks in as I read about other people succeeding with their blog posts, short stories, poetry and novels. Gits. I did consider calling them bastards but I thought that would be a tad too harsh.

So, Catholic Guilt duly engaged a week or so ago. A fortnight prior to that I'd taken up with a book again - my dirty little secret - I read anything and everything and seem to spend half my daydreaming hours inside the pages of worlds created by less lazy people than myself. All this has tipped me back onto the slippery slope of fiction.

Yes, I have (temporarily) turned my back on poetry on the grounds that it's just too damned hard for me at the moment and I want some personal entertainment that I can partake of in public. So it's back to fiction for me.

Yesterday I wrote a paragraph of nothing - just thoughts as they passed through my mind rather like short-tempered commuters waiting for the next Network SouthEastern train. There maybe something in there which can be fashioned into the poetry equivalent of a rain hat made from yesterday's copy of The Times - lots of lovely words but ultimately it'll keep you dry for only five minutes before it becomes papier mache.

Today I wrote more nothing but this nothing wandered off on its own and found a half-hidden memory of a priest I once met when I was thirteen. My parents took me and my sister to Lourdes - yes, Scots/Irish Catholic family. I didn't want to go but actually when I got there I loved it - it's the Margate of the Roman Catholic world - couldn't get enough of glow in the dark Virgins - now there's a term I never thought I'd use....
Anyway, there was a young Yugoslavian priest in the hotel that we got to know, Father Stan, a lovely gentle man who played an intelligent but almost Father Dougal character to an elderly Irish priest's slightly more sober Father Jack - Father Ted didn't make an appearance.

All of these memories made me wonder what happened to Father Stan - we'd met him back in the mid 1980s and now nearly thirty years later I wonder what became of him. Did he stay in Yugoslavia during the war? Did he leave for Rome or the UK? If he stayed then what did he see, what did he do?

And very quickly the ideas began to arrive in my head....

Now I have an outline for what could end up being a novel, or at the very least a longish short story.