This is what my bedside table looks like normally. A collection of the current library books, resident novel and short story collection, Kindle, current novel notebook, general notebook for morning pages and late-night or early morning exercises, and my journal. Actually, there's a bit more on the floor as well.
When I went camping around France on my bike for two months earlier this summer, I had to rationalise. I always keep my travelling journals separate from my bedside journal, so I brought two fat little notebooks, a bit smaller and squarer than A6 (I had to buy a third towards the end), a floppy leather covered A5-ish sized notebook for notes on possible articles, ideas for stories, notes on stern emails I intended to write to the authors of the guidebooks we were using. Of which there were three. Apart from the travel guides we carried guides to wild flowers, birds and butterflies, and our bible to eating on the move, Moveable Feasts. And my Kindle, loaded with fiction and French for Dummies and an assortment of kick-up-the-bum writing exercises from a variety of sources, all pdf'd and ready to use in free moments.This all added up to nearly two kilos of weight, which I can tell you is significant when you are pedalling up one of those endless gradual slopes that French road engineers are so fond of and the sun is burning down, splitting you into a mind overloaded at the beauty of the scenery and a body that is near-liquid between the heat of the sun and the baking tarmac.
I wouldn't have changed a second of that journey or shortened it by a single day, but it's true that by the time we arrived home I was ready and eager to transfer my journal onto my laptop, follow up some of the ideas I'd had for articles, and - strange to say - start writing fiction again. For not once in the course of nine weeks did I write any fiction at all. Nothing. Not even the shortest of exercises. My journals took all my writing time. The day-to-day routine of moving on almost every day under our own steam - finding campsites, bakeries (pause while my mouth waters), food shops and markets, tourist offices, stuff to see, deciding where to go to the following day, making food and getting enough sleep to do it all again the next day - occupied almost all of our time. Back home typing up my journal, it's funny to see how much of it was scrawled outside shops while Himself purchased the necessaries and I was minding the bikes outside, or when it was his turn to go into the tourist office, or after our picnic lunch by the side of the road, or snatched in the quarter of an hour between my vegetable-chopping duties and the dinner being ready, or in my sleeping bag by the light of my headtorch.
Perhaps the dearth of creative writing was because I wasn't reading much fiction. I'm more inclined to think that it was because I was living utterly in the moment. I had expected that I'd write at least a couple of stories with ideas for loads more while I was on the road, but my attention was wholly in the present. Now that I'm home ideas for stories are flying around in my head, informed and inspired by my experiences whilst away, and what's more, some of them are actually being written! I'm enjoying a particularly creative time and have turned into a total home-body, loving being in my home, at my desk and chasing some of those ideas onto the page, just as much as I enjoyed living under canvas and carrying my worldly goods around on my lovely uncomplaining bike.
The muse doesn't always behave. She went on holiday when I did, and left me alone to come back with journals loaded with experience and memories. Now she's back, sitting knees-crossed on the back of the sofa and smoking an elegant cigarette while I scribble and type and grin. I knew you'd be okay, she says. Just as long as you were writing something.
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