I haven't posted for a couple of days because I assume you don't want to know what I did at the weekend. (If you do want to read about me cutting the grass or taking my son to his karate lesson, then please comment and let me know!)
Back to work today though. I've been toying for a while now with a couple of writing projects - one a straight adventure story about Robert Clive [of India], of which more anon I expect, and one a thriller set during the Winter of 1963, when Britain experimented with being Siberia for a while. (I like the idea of putting a bunch of ordinary characters in a drastically transformed landscape and then seeing how they cope when something really bad happens). I decided to have a go at writing some of the latter, and straightaway, I found I'd hit a snag.
My wife once said I couldn't write a book with a contemporary setting because I don't know anything about contemporary life. Well, there's an element of truth in that (comes of not having a television, I suppose) but I thought I could cope with the recent past easily enough. But it's damned complicated, I've found.
The Aztecs are easy. There isn't so much material available that you can't grasp most of it pretty confidently, at least for the purposes of writing fiction, and there are plenty of gaps that a novelist can fill in using his imagination (so long as you own up to it afterwards, as I did in "City of Spies"). And you can create the illusion of a detailed background with real depth just by dropping the few known facts in in their appropriate contexts. After all, you're not writing a textbook.
With the recent past, of course, the known facts are legion. There are whole websites devoted to telling you, day to day, what the weather was doing. There are all the details of daily life. Here's an example: one thing that will happen to my characters is that the power goes off, and stays off throughout the story. Some of the characters are children. OK, I can write about a power cut from my recollections of the miners' strikes and the three day week (British readers of a certain age will remember this!) It meant candles and no telly. I found myself looking for old TV schedules simply to find out what my younger characters would complain about having to miss, and then found myself wondering whether it matter so much to a child of 1963 as it did to us in 1973.... Knowing that I probably won't even use the information when I've found it!
Of course it's fun, but at this rate, it could take forever to write a chapter. Maybe I'll do India after all!