Permission to form fanciful theories, sir or madam?

I call them theories, but in honesty of course they're superstitions; and what they boil down to is "I can only work this way, with the planets in such-and-such an alignment and a tisane to my left hand side, sharpened pencils to my right and the other cat in my lap, because this is My Process and I durst not change it for fear that the Muse abandon me entirely."

Yeah, right. I have changed My Process time and again, in the course of thirty-five years. I have written all night, and first thing in the very early morning; by hand, by typewriter, by computer; at home, at work, in coffee-shops and pubs and libraries and other people's houses; fuelled on tea, on coffee, on lemonade, on alcohol, on cigarettes; with sweet snacks, and savoury snacks, and no snacks at all; in company and alone; in silence and with background music and foreground music and in the midst of chatter.

And yet, like every writer I know, I'm still prone to superstitions theories.

I have a new one!

As we know, Bob, these last weeks I haven't been writing much.

As we know, Bob, yesterday I made a chilli. Karen couldn't eat it, but I liked it quite a lot.

This morning? I have written three hundred words of a novella and the opening of a steampunk story by request, and it's only eleven o'clock.

Clearly I am fuelled by capseicin, and need to eat chilli on a daily basis. As I pretty much used to do, which is what lends credence to this absurd notion: in the last years, I have eaten a lot of chilli and written a lot of words. QED, and post hoc propter hoc, and who can argue with that?

I offer you the first line of the steampunk story, because I adore it, for reasons that some of you will know:

“Fuel my steam-camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this machine on her return from High Mass.

Ah, the Airship Towers of Trebizond: what could be more perfect?