Writing in a Winter Wonderland, by Catriona

 How does winter affect you and your writing?

Could be either - but it's CA

Scottish Me: I love winter. It's my favourite season. The light is beautiful. The shrubs in flower are all scented - daphne, witchhazel, forsythia . . . There's not a lot to do in the garden, so you never feel like you're scrambling. 

California Me: I love winter. It's my favorite season. The light is beautiful. How the frilly hat can there be flowers on lavendar and rosemary and gerbera and pelargonium and snapdragons . . . ? It's January! Where am I? Oh my God, I need to cut the grass.

But the nights are still dark. I can feel cold by being outside on frosty mornings and sparkling nights (and by not putting the heating on: it's 57F in my house right now). I can light the fire and read, eat soup, wear an extra jumper, wake up with my breath clouding and the tip of my nose pink. (What a failure of an immigrant, eh?)

As far as writing goes, winter has been my easiest and best time for the last sevenish years. I started doing Nanowrimo because 50K words in November left three weeks of December to bang out another 30K and get to Christmas with a first draft of a 80K Last Ditch Motel novel. Then two weeks' holiday, which you hard-working Americans can pry out of my slightly-greasy-from-all-the-turkey-leftovers hand (but know that you made Baby Jesus cry), and I've got about the same amount of time to knock it into shape for an end of February hand-in.

Baby Neil at Christmas back in Scotland,
where our house was proper cold

I couldn't write anything else in my oeuvre like that, but the Last Ditch books are contemporary (no research to speak of), largely peopled by characters I already know (fewer names to make up) and, also, because they're fast and funny*, they suit being written at breakneck speed while I go "Wheeeeeee!" and being edited in a tsunami of post-it notes while I go "Whoaaaaaaa!" 

*Don't take my word for it. SCOTZILLA just got the series's fifth nomination for the Lefty award for best humorous mystery.

And I don't even have that late November stick in the spokes that uses up a working weekend. No, my fork in the socket doesn't come till late January.  There's a Scottish holiday on the 25th, that has heretofore taken up a lot of editing time. Burns Night is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, our national bard, and we get together to eat haggis, drink whisky and claret, read poems and make toasts. (It's a bit like a Passover Seder, with haggis as the gefilte fish and 18thC Scots poetry as the Haggadah.)

One night? you say. That doesn't seem like much time. Huh. Well, the thing is . . . for the last fifteen years I've had to make my own haggis, over the course of two days, three if you count the roundtrip to Corti Brothers in Scaramento to get suet and a big chunk of lamb's liver. I can't tell you how bonkers it is to make your own haggis. No one in Scotland makes their own haggis. It's like making your own cornflakes. But one of the traditional ingredients is illegal here. (I'm not telling you. Suet and liver are in there. Do you really want to know?)

All set for the supper last weekend

However, my mum told me on the phone yesterday that Macsween's - haggis makers to the stars - have announced a USA-compliant haggis for January 2026. Gentle Reader, I have grated my last lump of boiled lamb's liver. 

I mean, food regulations might a quaint memory by then but otherwise, next winter, I'll be picking up a haggis in a shop and throwing it casually into a pot to steam like the rest of civilised society, freeing up hours of editing time for Last Ditch Book 9. My only reservation is . . . imagine if my US pals don't like Macsween's haggis and demand a return to home-made? If that happens, I'll tell them the tale of meeting Jo Macsween out for dinner one night just up the road from a bookshop where I was doing an event. I told her about my yeartly woes and, after one of the booksellers nipped back to pickup a copy of The Macsween Haggis Bible, she wrote this in it:

 

just like Mr Kellog would have done in similar circs. Truly, no one makes their own haggis, including from next year - me.

Cx