After weeks and months of research and disinclination, mostly the latter, and displacement activities varying from tracking down the source of the snail trails that find their way across our carpet during the night [Ugh!] to reorganising my CDs for the umpteenth time, this Monday morning just gone, armed with a small but strong cup of coffee, and in the shadow of 6.30am, I finally settled at my desk to begin a new book. The new book. And way not before time, I hear you mutter.
It took something short of two hours before I was even close to satisfied with the first six or seven lines; satisfied enough to move on. Another hour before I had a paragraph.
Like falling off a bike, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?
By the end of the working day [that's the morning in anyone else's terms] I’d clocked 500 or so words. A little over 500 the second day, too. And this morning, a breakthrough: 720 reads the little red annotation in my diary. Right alongside Buy beetroot and celeriac. Broccoli. Onions. So, fine, just another twelve months or so to go …
Good news!
Will the Famous Five be featured in it?
AT last–a beginning!!! Thank you from the waiting reader and bookshelf inArizona!!!
Talking of the writing process – did you catch the recent Ian Rankin doc (I only saw part – a little Yentob goes a long,long way I find…. oh and it clashed with the “Homeland” repeat) and, if so, what did you think ?
Is this the novel about the miners’ strike?
good luck to you old chap
Thanks all round for the good wishes. And, yes, Jerard, it is the book partly set during the Miners’ Strike, and partly – mainly? – in the present, but dealing with events which have their genesis during the strike 30 years before. Resnick, not quite man and boy.
Tim, missed Ian’s programme, having noticed it was on, but, knowing him and his work quite well, decided to give it a miss.
Terrific news! I think some books – few books, but some – feel (even at the time) as though they are writing themselves with comparatively effortless pleasure. Others – most – not so much. But I am looking forward to living long enough to read your new one.
Belinda : Thanks for your remarks. I’m looking forward to living long enough to write it!
John
Yes!!!!