Plans are plots and plots are plans, by Catriona

 What inspires you in your day-to-day life, something that influences your writing?

What a great question. (Isn't it strange how we employ the same true-but-handy ways to gain thinking time even when we're composing a written answer?)

Intrigued? Keep reading

If I chose to deliberately misunderstand the question, my answer would be: the great outdoors. Whether I'm walking, cycling, gardening, sitting on a rock staring into space, or lying on a beach staring at the sky, I do all my best day-dreaming (the kind that turns into stories) outside. And, unless I'm outside for a couple of hours a day, my mind gets clogged up and the stories stop running freely. 

It's lucky I've always lived in temperate climates: first in Scotland, where you're laughing as long as you've got waterproofs, and now in California, where it does get kinda hot but cycling causes a draft that cools you. If I lived in Chicago (where breathing in can freeze your nostrils shut) or Bangladesh (where the humidity means that drafts are just a differnt kind of problem) I'd be stuffed.

But that's not what the question was asking, right? Its not where does inspiration come; it's where does inspiration come from. Apart from deadlines.

For me, it's floorplans. Specific, eh? I mean, I like a map as much as the next reader of golden-age mysteries. I think I've said before that when I read Charlaine Harris's first Midnight, Texas novel I drew my own map. The second in the series had a map on the fly-leaf. It was almost as good. But, as much as I like a map of a village, a garden, or a city, I love a floorplan of a house. I drew my own for Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, and attempted my own for Christie's Sleeping Murder. The bedooms were not accurate, though.

The garden in Trish Ashley's
THE GARDEN OF FORGOTTEN WISHES

It occurs to me as I write that this is not inspiration from life. These are books. (I don't think I've got a strict division between reading and living, mind you.) Slightly more like life then, is the inspiration I draw from property websites, where you get to nosey around houses for sale, but I only look if there's a floorplan and the lack of floorplans on most US property sites was a great disappointment (Halstead was a wonderful exception before they closed). I find I can't really bring a story to life - not one with a house in it anyway (and I write domestic noir, ya know?) - until I know where the doors and cupboards are and whether you can see into the kitchen from the landing.

And another one!

At this point, I need to pause and curtsy to one of the good things to come out of the misery of the pandemic. Matterport. (If you don't know what this is, and you are one of the people who doesn't already think there's something wrong with me on account of what's in this blog, click here. You're welcome.)

But I'm still not really talking about inspiration, am I? This is more like filling an existing hole in my head. No, the houses that truly inspire me are ones I know in real life. Some I know extremely well, like the farmhouse I lived in for ten years before I put it in THE CHILD GARDEN. Others I am only in for a weekend, like the house my best friend Catherine hired for a party one time. It had two staircases, which got me thinking, and I spent quite a bit of time working out whether you could hear the front door opening from the butler's pantry, or see the billiards room door opening from the staircase. It ended up in GO TO MY GRAVE. And the only reason Lexy Campbell inherited a houseboat instead of a house at the end of SCOT FREE is because of how much I love the historic houseboat on the Hyde Street pier in San Francisco.

Worth a visit. Details here

I'm aware that not everyone who reads a book will care as much as I do about the lay-out of the houses, so I don't necesarily describe them in exhaustive detail. It's enough to know that I could and it stops me making mistakes to have it clear in my head. And it really is clear. I've just finished a book set partly in a converted version of my old primary school and partly in an fictional version of a house I once looked at but didn't buy. I spent years of my life in one of these buildings and an hour in the other, but both mental floorplans are equally accessible.

And writing this blog has given me an idea. I need to be thinking about a new story some time soon. But my dad just died. And, between nursing him, the shock, the funeral plans, and the admin, wherever the stories come from has been pretty shrivelled recently. I wonder if I should go and look round some preposterous houses, to see if one kickstarts the plot fairies. It couldn't hurt. I might have to pretend I'm going to buy one, but it won't be the first time.

All three of these houses are real
and all three are in the book I'm editing now.