starting the hat
What a strange week.
As a friend or two noted: Who’d have guessed, this time last year, that Bankers would become the new Paedos. Least I haven’t come home to a burned out car and slogans daubed all over the house.
Yet…
I felt old and tired and fat, and a little sickly at the start, before deciding that, well, I am old(er) than I used to be - there’s no denying the fact; but I’m working on having my Birth Date recalculated by Darling Alistair, so I should come in at 19 by the summer - and I am tired - of not really knowing what to do in my professional life, other than survive, and of the fact that I don’t sleep enough; have been waking on average three times a night for the past few months - and I have put a little weight on, due to the fact that all the Christmas goodies kept on coming through January and Feb, and, coupled with the fact that I’ve been sickly for much of the start of this year, haven’t been exercising as enthusiastically as I did previously.
But it’s all good. You can’t start climb tge hill until you have your feet firmly on the ground. And I now have some Interesting objectives at work - realistic? Possibly not; but fun, nonetheless, and challenging, which is more important. I have a new haircut (see pic), and have made it back to the gym 4 times this past week, gradually increasing the intensity each time til it felt good, yesterday, to pound both the treadmill and the weights.
And sickly? Well, this morning I can feel a bit of a wheeze / sore throat. But fukkit! I am off to the gym this afternoon. I will not be sick in March; it is decided.
I haven’t been reading anything, because I’ve been writing during my commute. Five days, five thousand words (give or take). The new book. What I’m referring to as a ‘gay cosy,’ which is either a great marketing idea, or the worst made-up genre in history. We’ll see.
It’s at the planning stage at the moment, and I’d been killing myself with the usual “Well how long you gonna plan before you write” thing, but you know what? It’s been so worth it. I reckon another week, and we start writing (we being me and the muses - 9 rather buff Mediterraneans, who just fit into this rather tiny room with me. It’s a cramped space, but we’re managing).
6 of the muses. the other two are with me behind the camera
And the planning has taken me from a fairly linear mystery story I thought was fun and interesting and exciting to one which has at least two more subplots, a half dozen more layers of complexity, a handful of characters that didn’t exist a week ago, who are now fully formed with lives both within and outside of the story, including two that have made a vital change to the direction of the story, and one who will be a recurring character if the thing sells and becomes a series, a handful of (what I think) are funny lines, a plot idea for the second book in the series, and’ last night, an idea for a third.
And it all comes form, basically, not writing; from just letting ideas flow, writing them down, making a shape that look slike abook, then going back to each point, and asking “what would happen if, instead of doing this, they did that?” Or “How do we get from the rapidly flooding dungeon to the Papal Nuncio’s bedroom (there are, at the moment, neither flooding dungeons, Papal Nuncios, nor their sleeping accomodations in the book, and the foregoing is used for illiustrative purposes only).
Some writing courses will tell you that, before you do anything with story, you absolutely must have character 100% pinned down, and they’re probably right: I’ve spend months, in the past, perfecting character to the point where I knew the sort of baby food my 45 year old alcoholic detective had been fed back in 1963.
This time, I’ve got my detective fixed, and several of the principals; but there’s an equal number of principals that started this week as - so far as my conscious mind was concerned - vague, blurry, unformed. But by now some of them have mutated, via plot, via the need for me to explain why this would happen, into far more solid flesh and blood people. I think they’ll continue to develop (one of them has had three names and a nationality change in five days, but finally feels like a nasty thug I can do business with).
And, where a week ago I had a pile of ’stuff’ that sort of made a story, I feel, a the end of the week, closer to having a pile of stuff that makes a novel.
The only cloud: Yesterday my external hard drive died. Floral tributes are not required, although a way to replace the several thosand pounds worth of music, as well as three short stories I wanted to submit to a writing competition, would be appreciated (what, can someone tell me, is a back-up? Sounds very technical).
All may not be lost. We’ll see…