And although I know looking forward is better than looking back, sometimes a glance over the shoulder can be illuminating.

( So here is my 2011 in a brief montage... )

( A kind of temperature chart of my fiction... )

( That's the second time I've written that today... )

( Definitely not... )

I really am running out of steam tonight. So I am going to try thinking aloud. In my 'how to write a novel' book it says something about the ideas coming from the writing and not necessarily the other way round. Let's see whether that works, shall we?

( I have no more idea what's coming next than you do... )

No, really. It's not.

( Honestly... )

TV joined literature as a source of fictional ideas when I was in my early teens.

( Just occasionally I am unfaithful to my OTP... )

Enter the school librarian.

Who was either sweetly innocent or wickedly subversive.

( Oh, I do hope it was the latter... )

... to find out why I write slash.

( Read this instead... )

Latin is a language as dead as dead can be
It killed the bleedin' Romans, and now it's killing me...

It does help a lot with spelling English words, though.

But this is not a benefits-of-a-classical-education rant; it's more 'What have the Romans done for us?'

( Apart from roads, aqueducts, public toilets, otters' noses and so on... )