Posts filed under 'Writing'
I’ve been coming down after completing the final edit of the novel. It’s that strange period writers talk about, when space is needed between ending one project and beginning another. My mind is freewheeling in the same high gear as the end of the last novel, but it can’t yet be shifted into low gear to drive any new project, not until its idle speed falls back to neutral. You know what hopping from fourth to first gear does to your car - imagine what it could do to your mind!
It is time for an essential literary detox, a purging of the muse, a writing palate clensing sorbet, a crash from the creative high.
Eventually, my mind will turn again to the new project, but it normally has to do it in its own time. On this, it can’t be forced. But I’ll know when it is ready. Last week, after watching Spooks (one of my favourite shows), plot ideas for Zero Day started popping into my mind in the shower. It won’t be long now before I won’t be able to get the new story out of my mind.
In the mean time, I’m catching up on submissions and a pile of reading.
November 2nd, 2008
Apparently, it’s 10.04 pm, according to this bit of research.
I’ve heard most writers say they write either late at night or early morning, which tallys with the findings that afternoon is generally the least creative time of the day.
I shall make an appointment for 10.04 pm every night, to be out looking at the stars waiting for the next ingenius plot twist to strike!
October 21st, 2008
The re-write and edit of my novel Broken Evolution is over, and has been sent to an agent who requested it. I hope the improvements will work in my favour, and the five week delay in getting to the agent won’t be held against me!
An interesting little irony - on the week that I finished Broken Evolution, the geneticist Steve Jones gave a lecture, saying that human evolution is over. Am I tapping a vein in the zeitgeist here? I suppose the premise of my book is that, while natural selection might be over, we might be embarking on a lateral step in human evolution instead. The theme came through nicely in the re-write, this time via the plot - where all themes should.
There was also the minor matter of a global economic meltdown during the week.
Evolution is over. Capitalism is dead.
Maybe Douglas Adams was right; it was a bad idea coming down from the trees in the first place. Time to go back up.
I’ll fetch my hammock …
October 10th, 2008
I’ve been a bit quiet on my blog lately, but with reason. I’ve received a full manuscript request from an agent, so I’m busily tying up the last draft of Broken Evolution.
Normal service will resume shortly.
Fingers crossed!
September 15th, 2008
It’s the weekend and I feel the need the relax, to take time out from forums and writing and programming and phone calls. So I take up Karoo and start reading. I read this:
It is relaxing, playing the image Cromwell has given me to play.
I had forgotten the mindless comfort of being an image instead of a human being.
It’s not a lack of willpower that makes me go along with the charade of playing the image I’ve been given to play.
There are benefits.
I need a break from being.
Everyone, I think, needs an occasional break from being.
In those few sentances, the author captures how I feel at that very moment. Writing, I often think, is a form of displaced communication. The author is displaced from the reader in time and space, but the aim is to communicate emotion, fellowship, and solidarity with another human being. It is the great honour of being an author that you can never know who is reading your work, where, or when.
The author of Karoo is Steve Tesich. He died shortly after completing it. I am having displaced communication with a man who knows exactly how I feel at this moment in time, a man I have never met, a man I never will meet, a man who is dead. I understand and feel now what he knew and felt then. Our conversation goes beyond time and space, perhaps to another dimension beyond any scientific understanding. It is magical.
Writing is magic; that’s why I love it so.
August 30th, 2008
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