The novel- Purchas- has been running a week.

I started off with a single idea. I wanted to explore the life of an Immortal. I decided that my hero(ine) would be a child who swallows the elixir of life by accident.

And that's all I knew when I started to write.

I set myself the task of posting it in daily installments on LJ. The first week's worth are on display now at purchas. I'm afraid the format dictates that one has to read from the bottom up. Sorry about that. It's rather jerky, but there you go....

The novel is part fantasy, part history. The year is 1482 and all the details are, so far as I can make them (thank you, thank you, Google!) historically accurate.

I know what happens next. Just about. At present I have two or three installments in hand. What happens further on is very, very cloudy. But I trust my characters. They will tell me how their story is meant to go. I have the feeling that the entire saga already exists, in some form, somewhere, and that it's being unveiled to me bit by bit.

I don't know how long I'll keep it up. I envisage the present novel running for 60,000+ words and after that there'll still be 500 years to go. But whether I write the sequels is hardly up to me. If Purchas wants to tell me about her post-medieval adventures she will, and if she doesn't she won't. But I've let her know that I'm very, very eager to learn about her meetings with Cagliostro and the Count de St Germain in Paris in the 1770s...

Well I never, I think I may have a project for 2006. Yesterday lunchtime we watched a movie about a family who drank from a magic spring in an American wood and were thereafter cursed with immortality. Great idea, poorly developed and explored- but it was a Disney movie so what can you expect? Anyway, it left me wanting to tell the true story- and by nightfall I'd written the first page. This could turn into a novel or even a series of novels. Or it could dribble on for a few more pages and die. I don't know, but right now it feels like fun.

The guys in the movie took their fateful draught in the late 18th century. My character does it sometime during the middle ages. I want to have lots and lots of hstory to play around with.

The working title is Purchas.

We all want to leave something behind when we die- a name, a family, a book. For much of my life my ambition was to write at least one poem that would find its way into the anthologies.
I realize now that this is unlikely to happen.

"To invoke posterity is to weep on one's own grave." It's ridiculous to want to live on after death, so what atavism is at work here? Is there some evolutionary imperative being served?