Just back from New York, I go upstairs to the spare room and retrieve a huge dusty rucksack that contains all the notebooks from my Cuban project*. Plus a fireproof box. Before going away, I got really scared my house might burn down and tried to scan them all. Realising it was a losing battle, with 48 hours to go before the flight, and 24 packed handwritten books, I did second best: stashed some in the rucksack, and crammed as many as possible into an Argos fireproof box.

So I take my notebook – the large A3 one that I’m charting the process of this collection in – and get back to the project, which has been on hold for a month since I submitted my Arts Council grant application and went away. This large one is the master-notebook. I have so much material from those six years to fashion into stories, half-made, or just dreamed, that I can no longer see their shapes. I need an overview.

And, time has passed. The original material is vivid – lived. The stories have percolated, though, and they come out better now. I’m distilling fiction from real life.

After I’ve written a bit, I sit here in my kitchen and think, which story is the next? How am I going to know?

Tomorrow, I will thread my way back – from 24 to one – and find out where it is.

* I am writing a collection of short stories set in Cuba, where I spent time between 1999 and 2006. Nii Parkes, of Flipped Eye, is my publisher and editor – we’re preparing the book for print later this year.

Tags: Cuba, Leila Segal, short stories

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