Once Upon a Time, in Times Past, or was it The Days of Yore? I didn’t have a child then, so I now call them The Days of Mine. It was 2016. I have no idea what Yore were doing. Anyway, I went to France for a month with my friend to write. I had recently been signed to a literary agency and wanted to take some time away from Bookshop Life to concentrate on The Future Version of Me, who wrote the books. I had pitched a young fiction series idea to my agent, who encouraged me to spend some time working on it. I’m telling you about this for three reasons; the first being that I used something that happened on this trip as an example of ‘The Scariest Thing That’s Ever Happened To Me’ the other day in a writing workshop, so it’s recently resurfaced in my thoughts, the second being, I want to say something about the nature of ideas, even though I find myself genuinely haunted by some, and the third being, I want to talk about BEEF on Netflix.
Do these things have any relevance to each other? Only time and paying subscribers will tell.
If there’s a Japanese word for easily haunted or susceptible to hauntings, then that word is me. I’m very suggestible, and I seem to store nightmarish images in the part of my brain that could be keeping hold of useful data, like that conversation about that thing that we JUST talked about.1
Here are some things I am haunted by: