I must have gone through many reams of paper and pints of ink before I started to use the PC - a typewriter doesn't work for me, - well it does, for business letters factual essays etc., but it seems to shut down the creative area.

On the PC I can simply write - most of the stories I have put into this forum have been spontaneously enworded into Reply. The idea is there, the words just arrive. Even entirely new ones.

I have used Word on a couple of occasions when the connection has been a bit iffy and I was concerned that the direct route might result in chunks of the story vanishing into the aether never to be seen again.

If I had to map out the story before I started to write I would never even start.

I am probably as surprised as anybody when something happens.

The destabilising of the Fashion Furs Homeworld and its descent into anarchy due to the death of Ivana Rulitall was possibly inevitable, but her appearance was originally intended just to cause mischief in Paris, and her arrival and demise in the House and the consequences for that continuum and the visitors to it, just suddenly occurred to me, was written a little later, and then the consequences seemed logical though not essential to the narrative, so they are not there in their own right - but they might be mentioned, to explain something else.

The trick is to try not to explain too much, real life is not a series of explainations but of chance discoveries, casual remarks, going to make a cup of tea and turning on the radio to hear something that makes sense of something holding up the narrative.

All a bit Zen.

It just happens.

We are aware of so little of our brain's activity, but that is no reason not to pass it the bits of intercepted messages and allow the process of decryption to go on in our own personal Bletchley Park.

Anne the Pleater.