Today is grey. Grey is the sky, the mood, the words that trickle across this page.

It’s an eternal question to a writer: does the weather affect your creativity? Does your imagination thrive on sunlight-fuelled oxygen or do the brightest summer days entice you away from indoor productivity, leaving your writings in the dust?

Perhaps, like me, the grey days offer a tale of two pithies: either the output at your keyboard is full of substance or you’re writing in your head while hunkering under a quilt. It’s a toss-up.

Moods. We all have them: the ones that swing, the stagnant ones encased in cement shoes.

On this very dull-weather afternoon, my mind is sharp but contemplative.

A few days ago, the sun singeing my patio herbs, I buzzed around my desk with writing ideas pinging directly from my noggin to Mac. Short stories flowed at a pace, intricate novel plots were hatched and developed, and I mastered two pieces of creative non-fiction. By the late-hour my cool cotton duvet was beckoning me to cling to it, I had produced a mighty fine portfolio of writing, a balance of both humorous and literary prose.

Today, the heavy air, void of sun, has multiplied the gravitational force at my desk, welding my body to the chair and my fingers poke the alphabet in slow-motion. Shake it off, I command myself, but the pep-talk doesn’t work.

Is this the day, that kind of day, that kind of day that says go lie down and contemplate the universe? Mentally plot a thriller, rattle off six Haikus about love and lavender and the hole in one’s heart?

My thoughts now shift to the overcrowded stockpot of writers around the world, all of us cooking up ideas together under a giant lid, willing our best writing to simmer to the top.

What we wish for is to invent the most delicious recipe. Adding the hearty, vitamin-rich ingredients to one large vat where, after it is mixed and integrated and peppered with spice, what results is a gourmet soup to be savoured on a grey day like today. Or even on a bright, sun-shiny day.

That’s where this ten-minute keyboard rambling has gotten me–that writing is like soup. Succulent or bland, bisque or consommé…it feels comforting to consider my writing today like a sumptuous invention to be devoured. Even if I am the only person eating it, I shall enjoy the fruits of my labour. Either on this grey afternoon or tomorrow’s.

Bon Appétit!