Armageddon outta here

After all my talk of doomsday films yesterday I saw on the news that Western Australia has experienced a storm of Biblical proportions with hailstones the size of tennis balls and considerably more rain than they are accustomed to. I was concerned for the safety of the lovely people who run eBooks.com in Perth, which suffered the worst of the weather’s aberration. At least their website was still up and running, which was a good sign. Some of my books are available as eBooks on their website, so while I was there I took a quick peek at how my writing guides were doing and was delighted to see that How to be a Writer is the number one bestseller in the Language Arts section: www.ebooks.com/subjects/language-arts-disciplines/. Cool. I hope my novel can achieve that kind of success when it eventually sees the light of day.

I reached a small milestone towards that goal today. I’m now at page 100 (A4, single spaced) in this editing sweep. Just 176 to go, and then it’s back to the beginning to work on specific aspects of the book such as character vocabularies, subplot, tension etc. Today I worked on another fun scene involving the old Volkswagen camper van: it runs out of fuel and gets pushed down a hill into the jungle so that two characters can hide out in it for a while. They figure that with the engine, fuel tank and gearbox at the back it should still be a runner even if it hits a tree.

As I go through this edit there are times when I think a new chapter is needed to break up the ongoing main plot with a peek at what’s happening in the subplot, but I’ve reached a stage where I can’t write those subplot scenes because the detailed sequence of clues, their meanings, and the way the characters interpret and act upon them have all still to be decided. So for now I’m putting in notes such as ‘SCENE WITH RATTY IN HIS HOUSE?’ or ‘ANOTHER RATTY OR ORLANDO/OTTO CHAPTER?’ where I think such a scene would be appropriate, and I’ll pick up on those loose ends in the next edit. Hopefully by then I’ll have all the intricacies of the interweaving plots worked out.

It might be necessary to storyboard the plot on postcards so that I can get a visual impression of how everything fits together. I also have some novel writing software somewhere that’s supposed to help with that sort of thing. I’ve not used it before, but I might give it a go if I can find it.

By way of a change I started work on a couple of non fiction projects today. I have a series of guides for writers planned, and today wrote a little about how to find time to write and about how to find a place to write. Both are very important topics for writers who also have to work for a living, and I think they’ll make great little books. I won’t progress very far with them until the novel is finished, though. I may be good at finding time to write, but I’m not that good.