Twenty thousand, five hundred words and counting

The book is flowing well and the odd character of Emma is being stretched like an elastic band. I have to go back and read chapters one and two, because Lily and Emma have developed and I need to make sure they are still consistent. But this is only first draft so it's still all about the pacing and the story.

I can't draft something from a plan, the characters kind of write the story and then I loop back to the beginning and rewrite from the end, as if I were looking back, to make sure I set up the later chapters with the right foundations. Poetry wise, I have started looking at a series of autobiographical poems about the impact of losing a child for TMA 04. Hopefully the feedback from TMA03 will help, but I'm not expecting high marks. Just thinking about Leonie is hard, it's easier to write poetry about her than prose. She died so long ago, but it stays with you, like a scar. It's that scar I want to write about, how your life grows around this grief until you make it into something else. The novel is about losing a child, too, and about coming back from that long winter, and I think that's probably therapeutic anyway. It's sparking ideas for the life writing, anyway.