Why I’m A Writer

It’s an odd calling. Frustrating at times. I’ve often thought it would be nice not to have a creative streak. I’d love to be able to spend a day doing nothing and not feel guilty about it. But I feel a deep, entrenched shame whenever a whole day passes without any words making it from my head to my word processor. For those fortunate enough not to be afflicted by this curse of creativity it’s probably hard to imagine what it feels like. Perhaps if you imagine you’re still at school and you go to bed having failed to finish your homework, and you know the teacher’s going to make you regret your laziness the next day. It’s a bit like that feeling. Conversely, at the end of a productive literary day the endorphin rush is immense. There’s no greater feeling than knowing your book has taken a giant leap towards completion. That’s the force that motivates me to write.

I’ve thought of myself as a writer since Lady Di haircuts and leg warmers were the height of fashion. I haven’t actually been a writer during every one of those intervening years. Some years would go by with no creative output at all. Others would see plays, books, songs, sitcoms, or other literary products taking shape. Some went nowhere other than the filing cabinet (and later, the virtual filing cabinet of the computer); others saw publication, production or recording. By the age of 15, I had a folder crammed full of ideas for books, plays and films that I wanted to write, and almost 30 years later I still have that folder and I still haven’t had time to work on them. It doesn’t really matter now: I think the time for topical satires about Thatcher’s Britain and sketches written for Frankie Howerd may have passed. But the failure to complete the unrealistic mountain of ideas for writing projects I had in my youth is yet another source of irrational regret.

Being a writer is emotionally tough. It’s a self-punishing existence that demands anti-social hours and which rarely pays a return that bears any relation to the number of hours worked. So why am I a writer? That’s not easy to answer with words, even for someone who thinks they’re a wordsmith. I think I can answer the question more fully with a photograph. Last Tuesday was Pancake Day. I’ve always loved pancakes, but this year was the first time I ever attempted to cook my own pancakes. They’re great, those little flat discs that flip so beautifully in the air and taste delicious with maple syrup. Here is a picture of the first pancake ever to come from my batterie of culinary skills:

And that is why I’m a writer. Nuff said.

4th July and nothing to celebrate?

June has come and gone with virtually no progress on my novel, and already it’s the 4th of July. So nothing to celebrate, then. Looking back over the past month my achievements seem mainly to reside in the garden: I built a log cabin for my mum (getting quite good at these things now) and planted some palm trees. And on one hot night we took my micro camper van to the New Forest and camped in it for the first time. It wasn’t a total success: I spent an hour inflating the airbed only for the valve to break just as I was ready to put it in the can, so we slept on the built-in rock’n’roll bed that came with it. The ‘double’ mattress was three feet wide and as soft as a slab of granite. Not exactly luxury.

Part of the reason for not writing anything last month:

buying, collecting and planting these two rather straggly trees on my front garden.

But the lack of writing during June meant that my brain recovered enough to find some inspiration again. I think I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the redrafting that still lay ahead, and one particular issue had prevented me from getting started: the flashbacks in the opening chapter.

It’s really important to start a novel well. We all know that. And that’s why I’ve rewritten the opening chapter to The Sphinx Scrolls many times. When I was working on the book back in 2001 I thought it would be cool to open the first chapter at the most dramatic point in the early part of the story – with the heroine facing execution. This inevitably necessitated a number of flashbacks to explain how she had come to be in this predicament, but the structure seemed to fit the situation because it was like her life was flashing before her eyes. So far, so good.

Things got messy during the more recent rewrites. I wanted to introduce a juicy subplot and add more depth to the novel, and this required more flashbacks in that opening chapter. Trouble was, the new scenes were jumping back all over the place in terms of location and chronology, and I had found myself with a first chapter that had become too long and too confusing.

The daunting prospect of fixing this chapter was the main reason for my literary procrastination for most of the last month. That, and the sheer exhaustion of building that log cabin under relentless and uncharacteristically blazing sunshine for two solid weeks.
 Today, however, I cracked it. I decided that I was not going to use my muscles today. No jogging, no construction work, and only minimal gardening. Today would be a brain day. It would have helped if Pooch hadn’t decided to wake me up at 6:20 am, but I compensated for my weary start to the day with a good dose of caffeine. My next trick was to allocate specific time to writing, and I scheduled three stints of two hours each, leaving time in between for essentials such as eating, watering the palm trees and watching Top Gear.

Having set out my plan for the day I decided it would be less overwhelming to extract the opening chapter and put it into a separate Word document. I knew it needed major surgery, but in case things went badly wrong I had the original version to return to. But if things went well I would be able to transplant the new, improved chapter in place of the old, rambling one.

The next step simply involved putting every jumbled up part of that chapter, flashbacks and all, into chronological order. I didn’t know if it would work that way, but at least it would tidy everything up and give me something easier to work with. That didn’t take long, just ten minutes or so, and as soon as I read the story in the correct order I realised how much the flashback technique had compromised essential detail. Parts of the story had been glossed over too quickly, creating a lack of credibility in places. Now I had a chance to build the story on stronger foundations. I decided to rewrite the first page entirely from scratch.

An hour passed. I had a sentence on the screen. Another hour: another sentence. Time for a break. Two sentences in one morning had exhausted me. Bearing in mind these were to be the first lines of the novel I didn’t feel that I’d wasted any time. It had been tough. I wanted my novel to open succinctly and memorably like The Day of the Triffids. I rejected line after line, word after word, until something started to emerge that I liked.

After lunch and a quick trip to the garden centre for fifteen bags of compost (so much for not using my muscles) I ploughed on with page one of the novel. Soon I had a whole paragraph. Wait – no, I had to scrub a line that didn’t work. The book went backwards for a while. Time passed while I researched the details of the scene on the Internet. I even watched clips of Guatemalan breakfast television to make sure I described everything correctly (I’ve never seen such a long-winded and pointless weather forecast for a country that’s always hot). Suddenly the lines were flowing again. I was achieving my goal of a more subtle, mature writing style. It was a huge improvement on the words I’d written ten or more years before. Into the third writing session of the day and I was getting a decent word count for this new chapter. By the time the electric guitar riffs of Top Gear dragged me away from my computer I had contributed almost a thousand words to the novel. No flashbacks so far, just an elegant introduction to the main character as she slowly becomes aware that all is not well in Guatemala City today.

So, after all, perhaps I do have something to celebrate today?

A new novel is born

A weird literary phenomenon happened yesterday. I got up fairly early to start work, about 7am, but ‘Er Indoors was sound asleep – as was Pooch on the end of the bed – so I left them in their slumber. Ordinarily I would go back an hour or so later, armed with a cup of coffee, to begin the slow process of bringing her back to consciousness. Only I didn’t. I left it until nearly 10am before putting the coffee next to the bed. Still she didn’t wake up, so I crept out and left her there. The day before she had been working incredibly hard restoring our house and I knew she needed to rest.

So there I was in my converted garage, tapping away on my computer and making hardly any progress at all on my novel, when at about 10:15 Katia showed up, barely awake, telling me she had just downloaded a future bestselling novel from the cosmos in her sleep. She knew the story in great detail and had even witnessed scenes from its movie adaptation. Apparently Einstein used this trick – he didn’t actually think up boffy stuff himself, he just downloaded it into his subconscious from the cosmic eBook library in the sky.

I’ve experienced useful and creative dreams too. When I was eleven years old I bought a bottle holder to put on my bicycle, but despite a whole day trying to fit it I couldn’t attach the components to frame of the bike. I went to sleep frustrated, but in my dream I solved the problem –the flat metal brackets needed to be bent backwards around the frame. In the morning I tried it out, and it was a perfect fit. More recently I’ve had dreams about movie plots which seemed totally logical and exciting whilst I was asleep, but the moment I woke up I would realise that the story was insane and full of holes.

Katia’s story, unlike my own dreams, was completely coherent from start to finish. It was also interesting and original, and not entirely unrelated to some of the themes in The Sphinx Scrolls. Probably wouldn’t be a sequel, but it could be an equal. She was convinced it was a bestseller because that was how it appeared in the dream. So I put my own writing to one side and opened a new Word document called ‘Katia’s Story’ and wrote down everything she told me. I then added details of my own which I thought would enhance the story, and now I have the basis of a plot for a new novel. I can’t give away the plot here, I’m afraid, but it’s going to make a really exciting book, believe me.

Having taken 14 years to get close to finishing my first novel, I hope that some shortcuts might be available if I write my next book based on her dream. Perhaps she can download a chapter at a time in future dreams, or dictate to me in her sleep? Perhaps I can stick a USB cable in her ear and download the whole thing straight into my laptop? I love the idea that this whole book is already sitting up there in the cosmos waiting to be downloaded. Maybe that’s how all inspiration occurs – we build a connection between our minds and a huge cosmic database of songs, poems, jokes, plays, sitcoms and novels? It’s a lovely idea, but it could prove complicated for intellectual property lawyers.

For now I just want to focus on finishing my book. It’s 173,000 words closer to being finished than Katia’s story, after all. But I am happy to interrupt that progress if the next book is handed to be on a cosmic USB stick…

Let the next draft begin...

Right. It’s been almost two weeks since I completed the previous draft of The Sphinx Scrolls, and I thought it was time to review my progress since then. Well that won’t take long, because there hasn’t been any. But I know from experience that each draft starts slowly and gathers momentum, and I’m at that daunting place I was at three months ago when I started the previous one.

During the last rewrite I kept a parallel Word document open as a ‘scratchpad’ for notes, ideas, and deleted passages that I might want to re-use sometime. That document in itself consists of over 3,000 words, so my first task was to sort the notes into categories: character notes, plot ideas, deleted text, general notes about sections that need improvement, research notes about Sphinx archaeology, ideas for a new ending and even notes about how I could take these characters into a sequel. So that’s given me a rough framework to guide the next draft. I thinking of picking some of the easier notes first and making sure the issues they raise are fully resolved before deleting them from the scratchpad document and moving onto the next one.

There’s a risk that I might make changes to the novel by following one suggestion from my notes only to find that those changes are then negated by following a later note. For example, one of my minor characters is rather too similar to a real, well known Egyptologist. When I first put this character into the story it was 1997 and no one had really heard of the person he was based on. But since then he’s become famous, in the D-list sense at least, and I need to make my character far more differentiated. Today I decided to change the sex and the age of the character, which will open up new opportunities to develop that person in an original way, and will require partial rewrites of a couple of chapters. However, I have to accept the risk that I might change part of the plot afterwards, and may end up deleting or changing again the lines that I’ve recently written. But hey, that’s novel writing. In fact, that’s all kinds of writing. You have to keep on rewriting until it’s right.

So with this great task still ahead of me I’ve spent the days since my return from Brazil last week catching up with e-mails to the point where my inbox is joyously empty. I love that feeling. I spent much of my online time in Brazil unsubscribing from just about every commercial e-mail that I received. I must have unsubscribed to almost a hundred e-mail alerts, services, newsletters and promotions, and that is finally helping to reduce the flow of timewasting and distracting messages to my inbox. Somehow an empty inbox gives me a clear head, and a clear head provides the space I need for my brain to focus once more on the creative process.

Let the next draft begin…

More volcanoes

Just when I thought I was safe from the threat of volcanoes (see my recent posts from Lanzarote), I come home to find that Iceland – not content with helping themselves to the savings of English charities – has the cheek to squirt a whole load of volcanic ash in Britain’s direction. I couldn’t actually see a single speck of the dust that is apparently up there somewhere, but it was sufficient to close all of Britain’s airports today. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to look at the sky without jet contrails streaking across it, so this afternoon was quite special in that respect. For producers of period dramas it was a great day.

It’s not been a great day for my writing, though. I ended up spending most of it catching up with e-mails and then visiting a garden centre to look at the prices of palm trees (I want some in my front garden and another one by the pool in the back garden to give it a tropical feel). A skanky, half dead tree with its fronds stuck on with Sellotape will set you back £600. Bargain. I wonder if they do them in plastic?

Next week is the London Book Fair, and I’ll be heading up that way on Monday. It’s my company’s 20^th anniversary party, so I’m really looking forward to an evening of nostalgia and being reminded of how old I am. I can still remember what it was like on the day the company was formed. I sat at the desk in my bedroom, told myself I was now a publisher, twiddled my thumbs, and wondered what to do.

Can’t say it’s all that different twenty years on, really.

The third day

Today is terça-feira, which I think means ‘third day’. That makes sense: it’s Tuesday, after all. For some reason in Brazil they think it’s appropriate to name some (not all) of their days sequentially by number, but they start with Monday as ‘second day’. There is no ‘first day’. This revelation was the gist of my Brazilian Portuguese lesson this morning, and it’s doing my head in. Why can’t they name their days after Roman and Norse gods like the rest of us? Naming them sequentially leans towards Esperanto in its lack of imagination, although starting with ‘second’ instead of ‘first’ shows a spark of originality. At least whoever thought of it must have had a sense of humour.

The same can’t really be said of the ancient Mayans, who cleverly decided upon having 260 different days of the ‘week’. That’s an awfully long time to have to wait for a weekend after spending all ‘week’ building pyramids and sacrificing people. Must have been exhausting. No wonder they died out. But I wasn’t studying their numbering system today – I was still working out the details of the Sunseeker yacht that gets stolen in the novel, which involved yet more drooling over luscious photos of how the other half lives. Apparently they can hold three thousand litres of fuel (the yachts, not the rich people) which is enough to heat my house for a whole year (or for a fortnight in Mayan), and is more than enough to get from France to northern Italy.

The word count of The Sphinx Scrolls has now hit 171,000 as I continue to add more colour to the narrative here and there. On the next draft it will shoot up beyond 180,000 words because there are several new chapters to be written.

After lunch I printed out my pages relating to the helicopter ride in the previous chapter and posted them through my pilot neighbour’s letterbox for his perusal. He’s quite excited at the idea of doing some fact checking for my novel, and I’m looking forward to finding out how inaccurate my completely imaginary chopper flying techniques turn out to be. I found an old black and white clip of Whirlybirds online, and it looks pretty easy to me: just waggle a stick around between your legs and maintain a serious expression on your face whilst chasing bad guys.

Failing spectacularly

About ten years ago in a London basement Malcolm McLaren said to me, from behind a haze of his own cigarette smoke, that everything he had tried to do in his life had failed. He was referring mainly to the bands he had managed (which had broken up, usually acrimoniously), and to the shops he had run (which had eventually closed). But he explained that he had a knack of ‘failing spectacularly’. He was not a person to fail with a fizzle: he failed with an explosive bang that got him noticed every time. I think that was how he created success. Sadly today he achieved his final failure and he’ll be missed.

I had a small fizzle of a failure yesterday, which was that I didn’t post anything new on my blog for the first time since I started it at the beginning of March. This was because I normally write my blog entries in the evenings, and I spent that evening at 35,000 feet trying to sleep despite the baby screaming several rows behind me. I got home at 1:00 am today and decided I was too tired to bother writing anything. And I haven’t worked on my book at all since I got back, so I have nothing to say on the subject today. I didn’t go jogging today, I didn’t study Mayan or Portuguese languages. All I did was catch up with e-mails, get a flat ready for a new tenant and collect Pooch from his own little doggy holiday. I think he had a nice time and got more of a tan than I did.

I’ve been offered a year’s free membership of a swanky London club. That’s rather lovely, thank you very much. I won’t name it in case anyone reading this has just had to pay a fortune to join the same place, but the photos of its rooms look pretty amazing on their website. I think I’ll take them up on the offer and give the place a go. Might be a useful and inspiring retreat for getting on with writing when I have to be in London for the Book Fair and other events.

Tomorrow I shall try to get back into my routine of fitness, writing, learning and whatever else needs doing. Probably the washing-up. But it’s hard to jump straight back in at the deep end. I’m still trying to get used to a world without Malcolm McLaren, having a Duchess of Cornwall with a gammy leg, and driving in a country that has road signs.

Literary (hair) style

I had a haircut today, and then I took the dog to the groomers for his trim straight after. I had tried to negotiate a two-for-one deal with the dog groomers but they weren’t having any of it. They don’t know my breed very well. It all worked out for the best, since Pooch’s pruning session cost twice as much as my own anyway. I don’t tend to get many compliments after I’ve had a haircut, the best to date being, ‘Oh dear, you’ve had a haircut.’ It would have been slightly less insulting had it not been said with a tone of sympathy. Pooch looks a bit daft after his cut, but he’ll get used to it in a few days. So will I.

I hope to get a better response to the trims I’m making to my novel. Parts of it are a little dishevelled. They need a bit of a wash, a quick massage, and a short back and sides. But other parts need extensions (unlike this cringe worthy metaphor, which has already been extended more than I’m comfortable with). This evening I edited a sequence where the character Ruby is on the run in France. Step by step she needs to do various things to get money, food, shelter, and to stay hidden. I sometimes get a sense that writing this kind of chapter is like a school essay: ‘then she did this, then she did that, and then she did…’ Keeping a mature literary style when describing a sequence of events requires attention to the details of the scene. I have to remember to include the turmoil in the character’s mind and use all of the senses to create rich, evocative settings. But this kind of writing has to be balanced against the need to maintain the pace of the narrative. Phew… it’s not easy being a novelist.

What else is happening in the book? Matt, in Belize, gets a message from Ruby telling him that she’s been taken to France and that she fears for her life. Matt has to find a way to get to France without his money or his passport, and he has to try to get to Ruby before she tries something stupid like escaping on her own. Which is, of course, exactly what she has done.

I felt a little queasy this morning, so I didn’t break any new world records on the treadmill, just kept to a slow and dignified pace. The language lesson went well – I can now count up to 20, more or less. Took some furniture to a charity store, which has helped create space in my house. Now it’s time to go and rinse the loose hair clippings off my ears…

Counting words

Ever wondered how many words a professional writer produces in a working day? I’ve heard of one successful novelist who tootles down to his shed after breakfast, writes no more than 1,000 words in the morning, takes a leisurely lunch and then edits those same words in the afternoon. Hardly a punishing schedule, in my opinion. And yet working at that pace, five days a week, is enough to produce two novels, each of 130,000 words, every year. Redrafting many times in order to get it right can halve that output, of course, but if a novelist releases one book a year it is usually deemed to be a productive career.

That’s fine for full-time novelists who are fortunate enough to know that their words will be published when completed, but for amateur authors trying to squeeze writing time into their busy lives it’s another story altogether. Holding down a day job and a family and then trying to produce 1,000 more-or-less publishable words before bedtime is hugely challenging for anyone. My own novel progressed in fits and starts over many years. A typical day’s contribution, when I actually managed to write anything at all, was often around 500 words. Any movement in the right direction felt good, no matter how small. I found that the word count progressed faster during dialogue scenes, and things moved much more slowly during descriptive passages.

Actually, if I average out the total words written in my novel over the 7 year period in which they were produced, it only comes to 75 words a day. Not exactly blistering performance. Kids write more than that each day in their illiterate txt msgs.

There were times when I was able to take the novel on ‘holiday’ with me, and this was when the word count really started to fly. I discovered that I could comfortably manage 2-3,000 words a day, tucked in a Mediterranean villa with no other work to do apart from occasional sunbathing. One week I experimented to see how far I could push the limits of my creative output. The word count nudged upwards: 4,000 a day, 5,000 a day, 6,000 a day. Then I relaxed and dropped back to 3,000 for a couple of days. I had this section of The Sphinx Scrolls plot already mapped out and my characters were sufficiently developed to enable me to progress quickly.

Then, totally ‘in the zone’, I wrote a massive 7,000 words between sunrise and midnight. I know, you’re thinking quality not quantity. This was all first draft stuff, of course, so literary perfection wasn’t essential: getting the story completed was the goal. I knew I could then go back and tidying it all up (which is what I’m doing now). I think it’s more important to finish a very rough first draft than to have a few pages of exquisite English that never become a novel because the writer’s progress was so slow that they couldn’t maintain their motivation.

The level of concentration needed to write 7,000 words in a single day was phenomenal. Other people were staying at the villa too, but I barely noticed them even though I was working on the kitchen table and they were cooking and chatting around me. At the end of the day I felt as if I was punch drunk, my head throbbing from the marathon it had been asked to run. It was like being immersed in a virtual reality, living and breathing the story of the novel and the lives of the characters. My dreams were about the novel. My waking thoughts were about the novel. It was a great experience.

It takes a long time to warm up enough to be able to get the writing juices to flow so easily. You can’t do it from a cold start. You have to know your story, your characters, your style and your goals for the chapter. You also have to sleep well, be in a relaxed environment, and have people to feed you, water you, and even bathe you if necessary. You have to make sure your brain doesn’t need to think about anything except writing.

Getting all of these stars to align is a regrettably rare occurrence for most of us. The editing sweep I’m doing at the moment involves a mixture of reading, writing and rewriting. It’s been two weeks since I started this edit and my progress has averaged just under 3,000 words a day. The stars are not in their magical alignment yet. When they do, I’ll look forward to some amazing progress.

This blog is about 750 words, but that doesn’t count.

Writing at the beach

Well, the sun lived up to its part of the bargain so I lived up to mine. I said I’d write at the seaside if the weather was good, so earlier today Katia and I stepped out towards our micro camper van with our micro computers and our micro dog, and we headed off to do some work at the beach. After a journey of almost a mile (we’re pretty intrepid travellers) I parked on the shingle and sat on a little seat in the back of the van. The camper van has an overhead air conditioning unit that limits my headroom in this seat so I had to bend my neck and my back at weird angles. Also, the table was too small to handle two computers at the same time so Katia, sitting opposite me and with headroom to spare, worked on her lap. Pooch was happy to curl up on a cushion and dream about chasing chickens.

Outside, hardy people wrapped themselves up against the biting March wind and crunched their way along the stony beach. Noisy kids skateboarded in the adjacent park. Ferries chugged sedately through the chilly, green Solent. But inside the van we were cosy and warm, and were both feeling inspired to write. Katia was writing a film review, and I was rewriting a scene which, if it were a movie, would occur at the start of Act Two of the film.

The Matt Baker character has come through a situation from which there is no going back. That was the ‘turning point’, and he is now firmly set on his mission. In case you’re interested, the first act of a film usually takes half an hour of screen time, which is typically 7,000 words of script. The number of words taken up by my novel to reach the same turning point is about 40,000. That’s how far I am with this draft.

‘Act Two’ begins with Matt Baker’s chance encounter with some archaeology students having escaped from being in a bit of pickle (to use a phrase that he wouldn’t understand). One of the students mistakes Matt for Andy McNab, which really winds him up. In the original text I edited today Matt tries to persuade the students to help him rescue Ruby and get her out of Guatemala. I felt that this didn’t work because it seemed unlikely that he would ask strangers to do something so dangerous. It would be more convincing if the students’ enthusiasm for the idea of a rescue made them beg him to take them with him, despite his misgivings.

The best bit about this scene is that the students have a 1970s Volkswagen camper van (‘kombi’) which they have kitted out with secret compartments for smuggling Mayan relics. I’ve owned three of these Volkswagens in the past (minus the smuggling compartments), each van a historic relic in its own right. I know all the quirks and problems of trying to keep such a vehicle running. My first kombi broke down in the Dordogne: turning the ignition key failed to make any connection to the starter motor. As luck would have it, a kindly Welsh car thief happened to be taking a well-earned break on the same campsite. He helpfully by-passed the ignition lock with a nifty bit of hot-wiring. The van then started by means of touching two bare wires together behind the steering wheel (not the easiest thing to explain to a policeman when crossing international borders). Anyway, I thought this would be the perfect thing to put into the novel, so I made sure the student’s kombi suffered from the same problem, and this provides some useful plot devices later on.

Happily my current camper van, which is about half the size of a kombi, started up first time and brought us safely home. But I can’t help thinking it would be nice to have one of those old 1970s brick-shaped busses again. They make wonderful mobile offices for writers.

Day 1. The huge redrafting process begins.

Today is the day that I planned to restart work on my long neglected novel, The Sphinx Scrolls. Started way back in 1996, this writing project has involved research into ancient mysteries and histories, dozens of drafts and a research trip to the jungles of Guatemala that included taking part in an archaeological dig at an old Mayan temple with tarantulas under every rock. I stopped work on the book 7 years ago when my publishing business grew so fast that I didn't have time to complete the necessary final drafts. I estimated then that I would need 3 months' solid work to get the manuscript ready for publication. Those 3 months start now. Nothing is going to get in the way. Well, that's the theory at least.

In preparation for my grand revival as a novelist I cleared my e-mail backlog (which has the effect of clearing the equivalent amount of junk from my brain), tidied my desk, and opened the most recent version of the document ('The Sphinx Scrolls - 18 May 2009.doc' if you're interested - that's when I last looked at the file and maybe edited a couple of lines). This document contains 166,990 words and runs to 270 A4 pages, single spaced. It's not that I need to write more words: the story is finished. What I want to do is to make it sparkle and sizzle by weaving a new subplot, adding some deeper layers of meaning, giving some characters a twist, and generally polishing it to perfection.

However, having read a couple of lines from the first chapter to refresh my memory, I then closed the file. It's only a tentative start, but hey, I've still got most of those 3 months left. It's hard to dive straight into a complex manuscript after such a long gap. And it's not as if I wasted the day - I finished writing a book of Unusual Character Names for Writers in February, and I spent the rest of today turning it into an eBook and putting up on this site. I think my first job when I tackle the novel tomorrow will be to look at my character names and see if I can make them more interesting and symbolic using my new guide.