every day,

it seems, brings a new idea. A week ago, after Friday’s painting and talking, I lay sleepless in the dark. An idea, Beatrice, was sitting and jiggling her feet in my imagination, refusing to rest until I got her down on paper – stumbling around the house in the dark because my bedside pen was missing. The next day I began a dummy book in the back rows of an auditorium… The idea grew on the Sunday while I manned the Convent market, doppelgänging into a series. But it was replaced when I heard Neil Gaiman read from a wonderful new book at the State Library on Monday. It brought back a story I wanted to write in 2004 when we were living in Paris for 2 months.

Distracted on Wednesday, stately tall people willowed across my mind, clothed in furs and silks and headdresses defying description. They crossed between boats in another book I’m doing and I ran to draw them before they disappeared. Thursday rekindled some peculiar fish. On Friday I began a story I had absolutely no intention of beginning – but it tickled the ends of my fingers until it was done. And today a new idea. A big idea. I think. One of shadows and depth and small small things that are very important.

On one of those nights I remember sleeping very badly although I was quite exhausted. I was wandering through the backlog of ideas in my mind. Not the tiny fragments sidling around in my brain’s wunderkammer awaiting their moment – but the full stories that run like old silent newsreels. There are characters there too, patient ones, luckily. There are novels and short stories, a few series, picture books and chapter books and books with no words at all. Some ask that I please make them into animations or films because their images don’t want to be static. They move in their frames, flooded with colour and light. Others are single images that no matter how long I stare at them and how much they evoke a sense of vast story, I can’t quite see what came before them and what comes next. Not yet.

I’ll have time for them one day. I’m not sure how. And in the meantime there’s jotting and sketching and putting them somewhere safe. And trying to get some work done before tomorrow.