Oh, that was nice.

I just had to get some time away – from the computer, from people, from work and noise and just about everything else that makes up my complicated twenty first century life.

I promised myself a few days away to work on my book, uninterrupted by anything else, and that then turned into a short holiday for the two of us, in a small quiet town in Shropshire, close to the Welsh Borders, in a small self-catering apartment. It was perfect. We went for a few walks together, and at other times I wrote and thought over parts of the book, whilst my wife went off and walked and mooched on her own.

From a writing point of view, it was a most successful trip; I developed a few of the main characters in a satisfactory way, I developed my primary and secondary plot lines, and I wrote a goodly amount of pieces to work together at various points in the book. The ideal, naturally, would have been a trip to the Indian Himalaya, since that is the location of the story, but failing that, then a hilly location with a lot of wooded parts and old houses and a feel of times past, is certainly the next best thing.

And it was a great break for us both. Just to have a break from day to day life, of course, is priceless, but in a quiet, peaceful small town is even better.

Naturally, back to normal life means dealing with stuff that wasn’t dealt with over the last week, amongst other things. So, online to sort out a bill payment, and…I notice by looking in my diary that I have passwords for forty seven separate sites. Is this unusual? Probably not. But, conventional wisdom says you should never write down passwords. So, who could possibly remember forty seven of the wretched things? And even I know that using the same password for different sites is foolishness beyond forgiveness.

More ruddy hassle. All of this is meant to make life easier, isn’t it? Yet my idea of making life easier is to make it simpler and less complicated. This just doesn’t seem to happen, though.

Ah, this is a bit of a diversion that I hadn’t planned for this post to take. It reminds me, though, that I must write a post on anxiety, at some time.

What I was intending to write, was that I now have plenty of material for the book, and so, as time permits, it’s Full Steam Ahead!

Now, then, back to these tasks…