Blog
Save as... - 02 August 2011
I started a new novel back in March this year. I didn’t give it title, or even much thought, just started to write to see where it might go, because sometimes my beginnings of novels go all the way to the very end. More often they go for a couple of chapters or four and then something happens – (what though? I forget…) and they sit in My Documents titled something like new March, or even ‘So,’ Guy said, ‘at last one of us has made Dad proud,’ which is an opening line – something to get me started, having no idea who Guy really is or even if he wants to make his father proud. Saving a document without naming it, so the opening line is Word’s default title, is very lazy but it may also be a way of not taking a particular project seriously – I am, after all, just playing about; I am not really writing another novel. Besides if I got organised and opened proper files it would all turn to dust. Actually, it all turns to dust anyway, mostly, and being organised would certainly help me to find bits of stuff more easily and then I would be a Better Person.
Anyways, new March has been on my mind lately and I returned to it, read it through, moved a few commas about and tidied up a couple of sentences. After five months I still don’t know what to make of it or whether it has any legs. The only way to discover whether it has legs is to carry on where I left off at the end of chapter two. But perhaps I’ve left it too long and it can’t be helped – it is, perhaps, legless, abandoned like a meandering drunk because I realised I had no clue as to where the two of us might go together; I should plan more, and be a better person. Get more done.
(Another Word Doc. is saved as Detective Inspector Graham Carter thought how everyone should die like this, tucked up in their own bed. I was toying with writing a thriller. My husband would be very pleased. He likes books about murdering).
Speaking of the husband, (Husband husband as my brother calls him), he is working from home today and so I have to pretend to be busy so I don’t have to make him lunch. Have a banana, I say. He got our son to make him a corned beef sandwich. Husband husband is content.
In other news from the Husband house, Six Little Deaths has actually sold some copies in the US – hurrah. So, because I am reasonably proud of this here is the cover Husband husband and I designed, just to show if off again.
Also, a song for anyone who wished they’d run away from home at 17, thereby being excused corned beef duties forever. Click on the song's title below - it'll take you back...
