From taxi to tuk-tuk

I'm keen to make everything in the novel as believable as possible. I want details to be based on reality, and today I thought about the small issue of what kind of car do taxi drivers use in rural Guatemala. I've been in one myself, but it was ten years ago and I was too fascinated by the Mayan pyramids to notice what kind of car I was travelling in from Flores to Tikal. So I looked it up on the web today and discovered that Flores is now full of delightful-looking tuk-tuks: hybrid vehicles in a more traditional sense of the word, being made from the front half of a motorbike welded to a rolling bench at the rear. Inserting this detail added a little colour to the chapter by making Matt Baker’s journey to the edge of the jungle all the more uncomfortable.

With all the little edits I've been doing this week the word count has crept up to 167,000. Then there's a new scene I need to weave in near the beginning to develop a subplot about Ratty's attempt to sell a priceless carved Mayan stele before realising its true significance and trying, too late, to back out of the dodgy deal. That will add another thousand words or so. Adding to the word count is not my goal, by any means, but I have to admit that it's more satisfying when the document grows than when it shrinks. I sometimes look back at the 50,000 words I cut from the story a few years ago and wonder if I made the right decision. Why can't a novel be like a DVD of a movie, with deleted scenes and bonus features at the end? I'm sure some people would be interested to read the sequences that ended up on whatever is the writer's equivalent of a cutting room floor. A waste paper basket, I suppose.

Matt Baker has a scene in today's chapter where he meets a dying man who has read his book. Matt is a kind of Andy McNab character, a war hero turned writer, and people in the remotest parts of the world all seem to have their opinions on his work, good or bad. Those opinions crop up at the most inconvenient times for him in the story, and it's fun to have someone tell him with their final, rasping breath that his book sucks.

I’m nearly a week into my edits and I’ve worked on about 10% of the book. I need to speed up, because this redraft is meant to be a relatively straightforward matter of re-familiarising myself with the text and the story, cleaning up the book a little here and there as I go. When I’ve got the whole book freshly ‘uploaded’ into the RAM of my brain I can then tackle the more interesting and challenging aspects of the redrafting process, such as exploring each character’s true motives, deciding how much of those motives to reveal to the reader and when, finishing the subplots and ensuring they interweave seamlessly. Plus a million other things that are needed to make this book as good as I know I can make it. It’s Sunday tomorrow – no days off for me. I’ll try to finish a couple of chapters before Monday.