Finding inspiration in a Covid world

Lack of travel = lack of ideas?

I’m not an especially confident traveller. I’m the sort of person who obsesesses over when the plane is taking off and wants to arrive at the airport 48 hours earlier. I catastrophise about traffic jams and trains getting stuck due to a leaf on the track. When my wife drags me out of Norfolk, though, I always appreciate it and find the change of scenery refreshing, not least with regard to my writing.

Covid-19 has messed that up, in the way that it has spread around the globe messing everything else up as well. Not being able to travel for leisure is a piffling inconvenience compared to the difficulties and pain the diseases has inflicted on others, I’m well aware, but for this newsletter I wanted to muse on how travel, and physical locations, feed into our work.

I’d also love to know what places have influenced your work, so let me know down in the comments.

When the real world is as good as a fantasy world

I lived in Hong Kong for a few years when I was very young, in the early 80s. Though I don’t recall much of it directly, it’s still embedded in my brain through family photos and reminiscing, and I returned with my dad in 1999 to visit just before the handover. The island showed up in A Day of Faces, which surprised me as much as anyone, given that the story is set in a (very) alternate universe. Hong Kong wasn’t planned to be in the book, but when I needed my characters to go on a serious road trip it surfaced as an exciting destination. I probably wouldn’t have considered Hong Kong as an option if I hadn’t been there myself.

My honeymoon in 2011 took me to southern Spain, where we toured around Andalusia. One of the places we stayed was Ronda, a mountaintop city that is spread across a gorge on two raised mesas, overlooking a relatively arid landscape.

It’s proper Lord of the Rings. I mean, look at this place: