Book | Author, Jane Lark's stories

I have been very quiet on here and on my Facebook pages for a few months. I’ve also been struggling with writing for the same months. I caught COVID-19 way back at the beginning of all this, in March. You could say I’ve had the long version but what that means for me is a bit different. Fatigue is nothing new. Most of you, if you’ve followed me for awhile, know I already had chronic fatigue. My life was already managed by that not me. I kept a seperate blog years ago about my progression into illness and disability and learning to live with constant pain and illness https://battlingankylosingspondylitis.wordpress.com/ .

Catching COVID-19, but also locking down for weeks because of it, has made my health and my fatige worse, though. I am still doing my day job, which now means sitting in one chair for 7.5 hours plus most days, working at home, instead of working on a large site that involved walking to and from offices regularly. And the thing about fatigue is the less you do the less you can do. So I am much tireder in the evenings, therefore, the number of hours my mind feels capable of writing for has narrowed down to none – two hours a day, from the four – five hours I used to write around my day job.

But this blog post isn’t really about the fatigue, I wanted to share another consequence of working at home that I hadn’t recognised until today. The other thing I’ve noticed is that my inspiration has been drying up. When I do write the ideas for scene development have been coming very slowly. Writing has become harder. I’ve put it down to the fatigue, to my mind being out of energy and not functioning effectively – it does stop the electrical charges in your motor neaurons functioning effectively. I’ve also thought that maybe because I have not been excersizing the creative side of my brain as much, a bit like a muscle, it’s lost some of its strength.

But no, I don’t think that is what the reduced creativity is about.

I am now back in the office generally one or two days a week and on the way home tonight I realised how something else that has changed in the last six months has been effecting my creativity. A lack of music. Before lock down I was probably in my car for ten hours a week, and my commute to work is almost an hour. In the morning, on my way into work, I listened to the radio, on the way home I listened to songs on my Itunes account. As I drove home in the dark tonight my car full of Taylor Swift, my mind started popping like fireworks with ideas. Again if you followed me for awhile you’ll know all my books have a connection with a song that was released at the time I started writing. Including the historical books (if they are ever made into period dramas, I’d love them to sensitively and creatively use modern songs in the background to set the tempo). The muscial connections that really stand out in my mind still are The Illicit Love of a Courtesan and Ne Yo’s song Let me love you, The Passionate Love of a Rake and John Newman’s song Love me Again , The Dangerous Love of Rogue and Jeremih’s song Don’t tell ’em if you know the stories, you’ll be spotting the link to the fact that the plot lines have a real connection with the songs. I need songs, or rather music, because it’s the emotion in the sound not just the words themselves, to generate and inspire my creativity.

In my contemporary books you’ll see the songs that influenced my ideas and emotions are sometimes even written into the stories. In Free Me an Ed Sheeran album becomes the characters’ soundtrack in the book (without breaking copyright rules), and the song One was the major inspiration. Ed’s song writing has inspired several books of mine, though. One song particularly Photograph inspired the novel I published at the beginning of the summer. I didn’t blog about it because I was quite ill still at the time. But the last book in my second historical series, Entangled, features the far more painful aspects of love and a locket. 😉 Mmm spot the link. Although, obviously, the locket doesn’t contain a photograph in the historical story. There are also two contemporary stories to come with locket connections. I just love the emotion of holding on to love in a secret captured way in that song.

So that is why my creativity has dried up … Not because I’m tired but because I only listen to music for about an hour a week while I’m working in the garden or in the house and don’t even have a free mind! It feels so obvious to me now I’ve finally realised that. And I will be putting some time into my day to listen to music. I’m sure I will feel happier for it and the hour or so my mind is able to work well enough to write in a day will be far more productive.

I’ll also spend one of my hours tomorrow telling you about the music that inspired my second psychological thriller.

The Twins

Available in ebook and audiobook on

20 November 2020

If you liked Blood Orange, The Perfect Couple and The House Guest you will love this!

Susan and Sarah. Sisters. Best friends.
Together…forever?

Nothing could break them apart.

Until they meet him.

And he can only choose one…

Now Susan is back. Determined to reclaim everything Sarah has taken from her.

Her home, her husband…her life?

Like the last house that I wrote about, Chastleton House, Swarthmoor Hall has a particular charm.

When you look at the front door that you walk up to now, Swarthmoor Hall does not look at all grand. It just looks like a large house. But this large house was originally an Elizabethan Manor and it has a very special story and a wonderful atmosphere.

It has changed a lot since the picture on the lower left side, above. But the setting of the property, on the top of a hill in northern England, near the coast on the edge of the Lake District, gives it a very Brontë Sisters feel.

But it is not only the position of Swarthmoor Hall, it is also the stone flags on the floors and the dark wood panelled walls. It has the look of a set from a Brontë Sisters story. A middle class home. With large drafty, cold rooms. With dark corners, and flickering candle flames.

But unlike a Brontë Sisters story, this house has a wonderful sense of peace. When I say Swarthmoor Hall has a special story, it has a claim to an important step in history. The Quaker movement began at Swarthmoor, and the family took their religious beliefs to Pennsylvania and began the Quaker movement there too. Perhaps that is why it feels so peaceful.

Compared to Chastleton House, Swarthmoor Hall has a sense of being a home. A peaceful welcoming home. So, when I walked around Swarthmoor Hall, in my head the lost-in-time house for my character, that had first come to my mind at Chastleton (in a stark, almost lost, property that reminded me of Miss Havisham’s home) became a quiet peaceful place that oozed love from its dark panelling. Every room became a room that my character would think was precious.

You will spot some direct reflections in Treacle Moon, for instance, the Porter’s Chair. The hooded chair in the top left picture. I sat in the chair, and it had a very different feeling sitting in a enclosed chair that protected you from the drafts and felt like it hugged you.

I love old staircases too. The shallowness and width of the steps. The way that steps have been worn down by use, and the imperfections of staircases in the oldest houses. The number of times I try to capture what old staircases look and feel like in books, and yet I never feel as though I quite express it for someone who has never walked up them. But, hey, stairs do not play much of a part really.

The hallways, though, and the transfer from room to room, express a very different atmosphere from the atmosphere in a stately, grand, home. The halls and stairs I usually depict are lined by echoing marble and polished stone or wooden cantilever staircases wrapping around walls in large rooms.

Jacobean and Elizabethan stairs, creep through the house. Georgian staircases stride.

Of course Swarthmoor has another special point of interest in the hall, graffiti on the wall. Graffiti that has no story behind it, anymore than any other name that has been carved into a wall. Except that this was carved in the wall of the hall, in a period when the property was lived in.

So this is the property that turned my character’s house into a home. A place that is loved and kept locked in one point in time because they could not bear to change a thing, not just because of poverty.

Just one more house to tell you about, next week.