In the Thick of it
Goodness me, it’s been the best part of two months since my last post. In my defence, I did spend a little of the intervening time baking cookies.
I mentioned, last time, that I’d booked myself onto a hectic editing schedule. This is now more than half done, and I’m mentally exhausted and buzzing with creative energy at the same time. Editing is a wonderful thing (I’m referring to structural, or developmental, editing). After I wrote my first novel, I was well aware that nothing got published without being edited, and yet I was a little scared of it. I didn’t really understand how to begin. Those days are behind me, and it’s now clear, as many have said, that writing happens in the edit. I’ve also found that I unexpectedly enjoy the process. I’m in the middle of writing a series of blog posts about the similarities between writing and other creative pursuits – and editing is something I’m focussing on quite a lot. The biggest surprise of all was the moment when I realised how similar it was to software development (which has been my day job now for thirty years).
In other news, I never took the online climate science course I’d booked in September. I’m gutted about that. Unfortunately, too much other stuff was happening around that time. I have to put my family, health and career first, and after making time to write, there really wasn’t a lot left over. We all need a margin in which to absorb unexpected load, and I hadn’t left one. Since I live in England, I’m also currently coming to terms with the little matter of my country and its people being torn apart by modern politics. I don’t intend to go into all of the details of that on this blog, but it’s relevant here because that kind of thing takes its toll on one’s emotional state.
Anyway, things are going pretty well with the edits, although a couple of my chapters are rather quirky and require an unusually abstract approach, so there’s a lot of angsty hand-wringing going on. By the middle of November I should have finished discussing things with my editor, and certainly by December I hope to have processed and applied all the edits, to produce final drafts of The Nine (as I like fondly to refer to them – recalling Lord of the Rings, of course). At that point, I’ll be tackling the rather interesting challenge of the Tenth Chapter, which is the point where the stories converge and the real story begins. That will be tough, and what follows will be even tougher because I’m not yet sure what will happen! Yes, that’s right: not only am I editing a book before it’s finished, I’m editing it before it’s fully drafted, or even fully outlined. There are, as I have explained previously, reasons for this. This whole thing is bonkers. God, I hope it’s worth it.
Anyway, I’ll be back soon with my thoughts about the isomorphisms – I mean the similarities (sorry, once a maths grad…) between working in different creative media. I look forward to finishing those thoughts, although my current brain state will give them stiff competition. Be kind to each other, lovely people.
