I've lived most of my life in rural Warwickshire, England, with a few years near the county of Northumberland, and cram my writing around work on a dairy sheep farm. Long hours in the milking parlour offer much scope for thinking up story ideas, and I do a lot of my writing in my head this way. I love rural history, mythology and the paranormal, which form the basis for most of my writing, and after so many years working with sheep, they too often seem to find their way into my work!
People often wonder how I manage to combine the two jobs. This is an article about my writing day, first published in Scribble magazine, Spring 2015.
Trying to write in the company of several hundred sheep is not ideal. Or on second thoughts, perhaps it is.
My writing fits round my day job on a dairy sheep farm, where I spend several hours each day milking my woolly charges. And it's during this time that most of my characters, story ideas and plot revisions are developed. There's something about the endless, repetitive nature of the milking process that induces that meditative state, with stories visualising themselves in my mind and characters speaking as clearly as if they were standing next to me. And no, not all my characters say 'baa'.
It's an early autumn morning, and the sun is just showing over the horizon, its pink-orange glow dancing over the early morning mist, when I open the gate and wait. A sound like distant thunder, and a moment later the sheep appear, racing down the track at a determined, hard-eyed gallop. It's like the finishing line at the Grand National. Paula, a ewe named after Paula Radcliffe, is as usual in the lead. The front runners disappear into the building. The rest of the group follow on at a more leisurely trot, a never-ending woolly river. Then the stragglers amble down, browsing at grass, chestnut leaves and anything else they can reach. Paula starts kicking the parlour gate, annoyed to be kept waiting.
I watch one ewe eyeing up a cow parsley plant in the hedge. She balances on the ditch bank, stretches across and delicately bites through one of the stems. She chews happily for a moment, a green stalk and a mass of white flowers protruding from her mouth. She swallows it and nips off the other stem, leaving a sadly denuded stalk behind. It's such a lovely detail of sheep behaviour, I wonder where I can use it in a story.
The sheep come into the parlour twelve at a time, and under the constant appraisal of those still waiting, I clean udders and put the milking cups on. This is coupled with the frantic scribbling of notes before the dialogue and actions playing out in my mind fade away forever. Hands, paper towels, Kitkat wrappers, cardboard boxes, are all frequently pressed into use to record these flashes of inspiration. It's not just milking that inspires me. I wrote an entire story in my head last year while weeding thistles from a hay field, with nothing but the skylarks and hares for company. That setting really influenced the tone and feel of the piece. And writing up scenes while sitting in hay racks, amongst grazing sheep, beside streams, also adds a certain something. A few sentences of perfect dialogue come to me, and when I reach the last of the twelve ewes, I start scribbling. Three or four sheep are trying to read over my shoulder. Next thing they'll be nicking my ideas. Or perhaps I'm spending too much time with them...?
Halfway down my strip of cornflakes packet I'm hindered by an inquisitive and very persistent ewe lamb who is determined to poke her nose into my eye. Trying to fend her off without losing my pencil or dropping my notes into a puddle is no easy task, but somehow I manage to get all my lines written down. And it's even legible. Well, almost. I get another two dozen sheep done and then an idea pops into my head of where I can use that cow parsley incident from earlier. It would make a great filler for another story I'm working on. The character's a country dweller, in love with a shepherd lad, so it would fit perfectly. I see the new scene in my mind, my peckish dairy ewe superimposed into 19th century Wales, and now I have to get it noted down. I check round for the ewe lamb, but she seems to have disappeared. I choose the opposite side of the parlour anyway, pull out the piece of cardboard and start writing. This time I manage almost eight lines before I'm hindered by a nose in my eye. Yes, it's her again...