How Morwenna Happened

I'm sitting here trying not to look at the screen I'm typing onto because my head decided half way through my lecture this morning that it wanted to have a migraine, but then my head was too alive to sleep and so I'm sat here typing.

I've put together a playlist with the songs I listened to one spring, round about Easter, March 2003, David Bowie, Daniel Bedingfield and Alanis Morisette, these songs aren't about how good or bad the music is, but about the memories that flood back. I sat curled up in the corner of my bedroom, this CD playing reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry and after three days of reading I walked down to Angie's bookshop and looked through the shelves for something I wanted to read and found nothing. What I needed was something that would jump into my hand and keep me gripped hour after hour. So I sat down and looked through University and College websites, deciding on where I wanted to go. Then with nothing else to do an idea came to mind.

An idea that changed my life.

"I've been writing short stories, but I'm tired of these short stories, they don't go anywhere, and I can't find anything I want to read. Why don't I write something? More than a short story? A story that I want to read. What's stopping me? All these ideas running through my head. Right, okay, I'll write a book."

I thought of names, I thought of places, I couldn't work out surnames so I opened the phonebook at random pages and used the names that stood out. I set it in Cambridge and on the Cornish coast, and an island and... started with seven characters and now have over thirty....

There were two people I told about the stories that I wrote, as I sat day after day with a pen and a book and then a computer and pages and pages and files and files and all of this. Two people I would share those stories with as they sat with me. One has been suffering from ME for 7 years, the other is dead.

My manuscript exists, the story unreadable because of the parts that I knew and forgot to write, the writing terrible and in need of rewriting, but the ideas are wonderful and fill me with joy, there are parts of it I cannot read without crying both with sadness and happiness. It is a wonderful story, and I want to finish it, to give to Tamsin and in memory of Adam. I want it written perfectly, beautiful and printed, bound, I want it like that. For them and for myself, to remind me of what I have done with this life, what I am capable of and the things that I truly love.