Inspiration in the sunshine

Today was sunny - actually, North Devon has been sunny for a few days now. My mood has lifted, the garden has sprung into life and an ending for the book just leaped into my head while I was plodding through the edits. A real fireworks and cliffhanger style ending, complete with twists and turns. Why can't we just turn a mental knob and drop those out intentionally? Why do they leap into my head only when we're in the car or I'm in the bath or out shopping? It would be so convenient to have the 'eureka' moments when I need them! Not that I'm ungrateful, but I'd managed to get quite down waiting for idea lightning to strike. So, that's book 2. I'm so grateful it's chugging along and now all I have to do is work on all those silly mistakes and edits.

The sunshine has inspired my gardening-phobic husband into the garden, not to slash and burn (the only garden task he normally tolerates) but to prune and hedge and strim and even help empty and fill planters. The garden is looking rather lovely, still jungly and overgrown but almost as if we planned it like that. Due to my very dodgy back I've put more vegetables in pots this year - I have a whole pot full of rocket  to harvest, and we're doing well with spinach and lettuce for salads as well. Tomatoes and chillies are still waiting to be potted on - it was so cold I didn't want to stress them. Growing food, even if just a few leaves for a salad, cheers me up. The chickens are still laying, so we can have rhubarb and real custard, all from the garden.    

I feel the urge to sit in the garden and scribble in notebooks, but it's as if I'm a  different writer with a pen in my hand. Illegible, for one. I type all the time and my handwriting has gone from poorly formed and scruffy to random scribbles. Maybe I do write poetry first drafts better with a pen...I'll never know, since I can't then type it up. Maybe I should practice writing more. I find handwriting often produces better work, more literary-style writing and definitely more descriptions and settings (one of my weak points). I wonder if we access different parts of our brains when we type?