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I love being a writer, still walking up, ten years after I wrote my first short story, delighted to find I am published.
But, the last month has been fraught. So fraught that I offloaded my October blog, and forgot to do this one. It is 8:40 and I am about to share with you, as though it's Writers Anonymous.
In HACKED, the book published by Piccadilly Press yesterday, I casually mentioned, somewhere near the end, that the shadowy figure from the deep web responsible for the almost-tragedy was an eighteen-year old girl whose mother was Welsh and her father Yemeni. It was a whim, in that I could have picked anywhere that the US fly armed drones, so Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and any European country, as she needed to be of dual heritage.Anyway, that whim is now a second draft of TURNED, because the publisher was interested to hear her story. It should have been delivered seven days ago but is still a word doc on my computer, because I have been struggling.
TURNED is a circumquel, beginning before and ending after HACKED.
I am guilty of not planning, or planning in such a helicopter fashion that the detail is impossible to see. That has not helped me this time. I can normally wander off to wherever the moment takes me, but as the books are parallel I have to make certain elements fit. This has been tricky. But not the trickiest part.
Aaaarghhhh!
I was worried that going over the same period of time would be boring for those who had read the first book, so I decided to use a structure where the chapters alternated between the past and the present. All was going quite well until I read aloud to my writing group and watched their faces. I'd been doing that ostrich-thing, kidding myself that it worked when it was in fact confusing. It took a couple of days of riding my bike and baking to summon the courage to deconstruct my 45 000 words and put it back together chronologically. A short feeling of relief followed.
Oh no!
Naively I thought it would all flow, but of course you write differently if you're constantly switching time. The chapters didn't link.
I emailed the publisher, asking for an extension. The first deadline I've ever missed, and started to rewrite, in a panic.
Back at writing group the faces didn't look much more encouraging.
"Have you actually got to the end yet?" asked Eeyore.
"No," I said, fretfully.
"Just forget rewriting and do the end and come back," she ordered.
I obeyed.
I wrote, I hope, a scorching finale. Allowed myself a small smile.
Regroup.
I am back rewriting. I have three weeks to go. I am worried about the voice, still concerned that there is too much overlap between the books, and eating a gargantuan number of biscuits.
Help!
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