Between me and my husband - well, when we got married we both brought baggage into the relationship. Books. Thousands of books. I honestly think that when we combined our libraries as we started married life we had six thousand books between us. In the seven years that we’ve been married, we’ve filled up a room NEWLY designated as our library, with virgin shelves. Chalk up another 1500 - 2000 books. In the last week - doing research for my latest novel - I’ve read four books; in the last month, keeping to the research theme, I’ve read nearly 20, and those are sometimes SLOW reading, historical tomes where I take actual notes as I read and take pauses to digest individual nuggets of information. And that’s just the non-fiction. We read CONSTANTLY.

And yes, the writing - the constant and ongoing writing - that’s an essential part of the covenant.

And I wish I could tell you that it’s ONLY practice. But there are many kinds of writers. There are those who sit down and write and produce perfect fifth-draft quality prose at first sitting, damn them, and make it look like it was never hard at all. There are those who have doggedly practiced for years, and are finally starting to see the light and recognise that there IS a difference between their early work and the stuff they’re doing now. There are even those who practice and practice and practice and NEVER learn that difference because they lak the eye or the ear for it. But practice, for all but those few, those gifted few at the very top of the pyramid, is an essential building block for all of us.

There really ARE no short cuts in this game. You learn. You work. You read. You write. You pay your dues.

You slowly learn what comes close to perfect. And how - with great care and sneakiness, sometimes - you approach perfection.

And yes, I know this doesn’t really help [wry grin]

Because just simply writing doesn’t seem to do much if all one writes is … garbage. How does one change that ‘garbage’ into an ‘art form’? I can already hear someone replying “through practice”

Bran Fan: indeed! What you said!

I sometimes think about this when I watch Michael Jordan play basketball. He makes it look effortless. But of course, he’s practicing every single day.

It isn’t easy, not for any of us, and the story never comes out whole the first time. The trick is, by the final draft, to make it look as if it did.