Something to Do

I’ve noticed that the posts of the last few months have all been book club related, and whilst my focus has been on catching up with my reading, the time period hasn’t been completely fallow. After a bit of a break post-Gaslight, I spent a few weeks doing a first draft of my fourth novel State Line. I approached the manuscript with the usual amount of trepidation after not looking at it for a couple of months, but thankfully it read back quite well. I really like the narrative voice, I think it’s quite strong, and the atmosphere of the piece is at least in the ballpark of what I was aiming for. We’re right around the 50,000 word mark after the re-write, and as I was finishing up I came to a decision to market the novel on Amazon again, in exactly the same way I did with Momentum. I’m going to be more ruthless with giving copies away this time as well, no more freebies! If I want to be taken more seriously as a writer I need to be more professional about it myself. So after a few deep breaths I sent it off to my friend who designed the cover for Momentum to read and start thinking about cover ideas, and that’s where we are. He’s had the novel for over a month and I haven’t heard anything at all yet, other than he had started reading it. Don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing…

And tonight I’ve started on something new. I’m not going to make any predictions on where it’s going to go or how long, as I’ve been hopelessly inaccurate on this sort of thing in the past. I only wrote 350 words but quite quickly, and already the first character introduced has hinted at her back story and given me some insight into what she is about. I can already feel that fizz in my fingers, that sense of excitement at the beginning of another adventure.

It’s surprising, that feeling. Because in the last couple of weeks I’ve felt anything but creative. I’ve been reading a fair bit, but I do that every day of my life so that’s nothing unusual. Otherwise I’ve been a little bored. The whole coronavirus restrictions are stop and start, so it’s not like my social life has been raucous debauchery either. To be honest, I almost thought I would write because I didn’t have anything else to do. The idea had been flickering for a day or two but sometimes they just drift into the ether and fade away. Its only when something is persistently nagging at me that I tend to put pen to paper. I guess I can be indulgent in that way – I”m single, childless, introverted and quiet by nature, and like my solitude. So I can be selfish when I want to be, and don’t have anything else to think about or distract me when the Muse starts whispering. So I can focus all my attention on what’s about to come.

Whatever. Everyone comes to the page with their own circumstances, their own hopes and dreams. You’ve just got to get there.