Skip to main content

The Novel: A Love-Hate Relationship

So I started writing this novel. Well, probably a novella. I come up with titles quite early and I decided to call this one "The Fourdrinier Operator". I'm 400 words in and I synchronise it to my Palm Pilot so that I can write it on the train, even when it's overcrowded on the morning commute. That was how I wrote "Spireclaw".

I'm having a real burst of creativity on this one and I'm knocking out a respectable 2000 words a day. After just over a week I've written 16000 words and the juices were showing no signs of drying up. I think you might know where this is going.

I'm thinking I ought to backup the file. So I sit down in front of my laptop on a Sunday afternoon and sync it back to the computer. Does it sync the right way? Does it buffalo!

I'll never forget that moment, and the way I felt; the moment I overwrote a 16000 word document with a 400 word document. It was one of those moments like where you're trying to open a bag of rice in the kitchen and the bag splits and rice goes everywhere. It's beyond tragic and beyond funny, and it steals any coherent reaction from you. So I sat there tutting. Tutting at my rotten luck. Even now I have no idea how I managed to delete my burgeoning chick-lit tale of a meet-cute on Waterloo Station that descends into something a bit more sinister... a suburban haunted house story. I don't think I'll ever find out.

"Re-write it straight away," said my friends and family. "Do it now before you forget." But somehow I couldn't face it. I wanted to be telling the NEW bits, not re-hashing stuff I'd already done. It felt like too much bloody hard work.

That was four years ago. A year later I was in Malta running a conference (as part of my real job) and I was drunkenly recounting this story to a colleague at dinner, who then asked me to tell her the actual story of "The Fourdrinier Operator". I don't normally do that, as telling the story can often remove the desire to TELL the story. But I did, and she openly admitted to having goosebumps on her arms when I dealt out the twist ending.

This spurred me on to having another go at getting back to where I was with the story. I knew it could be good. I'm now at 24000 words and I think I'll end up somewhere near 40000, at the rate I'm consuming the plot.

I've run some of the early chapters through my writing group and the response has been positive and helpful. I have re-worked my meet-cute to give it better dimension, to put a few more obstacles in the way of this couple who are about to fall in love.

I want to finish the story by the summer. So I'm going to try and tackle it through this winter and spring. By the time summer comes around my life is going to get an awful lot busier and more wonderful, and who knows how much time I'll be able to put aside for writing. Fingers crossed that I can tap once more into the creativity that got "The Fourdrinier Operator" so quickly to where it did in the first place. I think I'll start by printing it off...

You may be interested to know that I got three-quarters of the way through writing this blog entry, when my browser window closed for no reason. Had it saved a draft? Had it buffalo! I almost couldn't bring myself to re-write it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Turning Fifty

I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer. Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me. The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative. Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of

The Path Behind the House - a two minute ghost story

So eager was I to get home to my wife and child, that I drove a little carelessly. It was Friday evening, and I was at the end of another long working week in the city. A weekend at home was exactly what I needed. When I was only a few roads away I rang Juliette. I was sitting in traffic waiting to join a roundabout and she told me she had lit the fire to make the house cosy for my return. She was bathing little Elliott and had allowed him to stay up late to see me. I was concerned when she hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Perhaps she had needed to urgently attend to our boy's regular antics of tipping water out of the bath.      I pulled up the gravel driveway and swung the car in front of the house, noticing that the front door was ajar and all the lights in the house were on. I got out and stepped across the threshold, calling out to Juliette. She didn't answer. From the kitchen a beautiful smell of cooking. The carpeted stairs were peppered with dark drips. The lig

My books are now in Prestatyn and Rhyl Libraries in North Wales

  Four of my books are now available in Prestatyn and Rhyl Libraries. Being an indie author I wasn't sure that they would accept book donations as they might have had a computer system on which they may have needed to be discoverable. Either that wasn't a thing and my concerns were unfounded, or they were actually discoverable on said computer system. Anyway, they have taken copies for both libraries. If you happen to be in the area, the books they have available are: The Tolworth Beacon The Axiom Few The Sapling Method (set in Prestatyn!) The Train Set So basically, and this was definiitely not intentional, they have all my "The Something Something" books. Does this mean my titles are becoming as cliche'd as "A Something of Something" or even "The Girl Something Something"? Maybe I need to find a new title format... Except I am writing a sequel to The Tolworth Beacon which is going to be titled "The Tolworth Something". (I do know wh