Hibernating in my mind
By Jeremy Duns - December 15, 2009
I live in Stockholm, where the summer days stretch late into the night, but where in winter it starts to get dark at around 3 pm. Some days, it never seems to get light at all. I wake to take my children to school and it's pitch black, and over the course of the day the sky slowly turns to a twilight shade of dark grey, which it stays before turning black again.
How depressing, I hear you cry! Well, yes and no. In a way, I prefer winters to summers, because I can get a lot of work done. In summer, it's very hard to motivate yourself to sit indoors and write when it's gorgeous out, everyone's gone swimming and all you have is a computer screen to stare at and your own mad thoughts running around your brain. In winter, I feel my thoughts stop me from going mad. Between 8 and 5 today I didn't leave the house, and was surprised to see that it had snowed and dropped a few degrees when I eventually did. But cooped up indoors all day, I travelled back in time to 1969, writing a chase scene for the final part of my Cold War spy trilogy. The hours flew by, and while the snow fell I was creating my own snowfall of thoughts, and trying to grab every flake as it rushed past.
Perhaps it also helps that the novel I'm writing is set in a cold climate, so I feel like I'm researching simply by popping out to buy some milk. ('Chapped lips,' I note down. 'Tears that freeze on the cheek. Toes of my boots wet.') But for me, winter is a great time to write, and I'm enjoying every moment of it.
How depressing, I hear you cry! Well, yes and no. In a way, I prefer winters to summers, because I can get a lot of work done. In summer, it's very hard to motivate yourself to sit indoors and write when it's gorgeous out, everyone's gone swimming and all you have is a computer screen to stare at and your own mad thoughts running around your brain. In winter, I feel my thoughts stop me from going mad. Between 8 and 5 today I didn't leave the house, and was surprised to see that it had snowed and dropped a few degrees when I eventually did. But cooped up indoors all day, I travelled back in time to 1969, writing a chase scene for the final part of my Cold War spy trilogy. The hours flew by, and while the snow fell I was creating my own snowfall of thoughts, and trying to grab every flake as it rushed past.
Perhaps it also helps that the novel I'm writing is set in a cold climate, so I feel like I'm researching simply by popping out to buy some milk. ('Chapped lips,' I note down. 'Tears that freeze on the cheek. Toes of my boots wet.') But for me, winter is a great time to write, and I'm enjoying every moment of it.
