Trouble and strife

There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people, surfing the net, idly contemplating, searching Amazon to see whether there are any more relevant research books you haven’t yet bought.