I’ve spent half of today asleep and the rest in a sort of stupor. The cold is getting better, thank goodness. I’ve been writing. I always knew the castle in Horn was called Castle Orpheus. I didn’t know why, but after searching for a plot I’ve realised there’s a door to an underground realm in the slug’s grotto, so now it makes perfect sense. The word is thought to come from the same root as ‘orphan’, which also makes sense in the context of the characters who live there. Have I mentioned the slug? Slugs are actually hermaphrodites, but since ‘it’ is an awkward pronoun for a character I’m making it female. Her name is Rootmold. I didn’t know whether this moniker, which snuck up on me quietly after I’d toyed with things like Hieronymus and Ulysee, was a real word, but it is. Rootmold is a brown stain left in the ground after a root has rotted away.

I just know someone is going to savage me for having a talking slug in this book. And other people are going to savage me for how quiet and gentle and slow it all is (a few violent moments aside). But that doesn’t seem to matter, at least not tonight. If someone were to ask me, today, why I took to writing, I think the answer would be something like ‘To create obituaries for nonexistent beings’.

In some ways flashy writing is harder than sincere writing. It is difficult to write with the direct voice of the heart - or a character’s heart - and make it sound grown up and polished. The heart doesn’t speak with polish, and the writer has to translate its raw language very delicately in order to avoid either leaving too many rough corners on or smoothing too many off. When I’m uncertain about a corner I tend to smooth it. Maybe I should try leaving it there more often…