Saturday 3 December 2011

Back to work after a week off

I've had a great week organising Solstice/Christmas; travelling to the Isle of Wight where we used to live and catching up with friends and family; and enjoying reading. I can see the logic of treating reading as a part of the writing process, and prioritising it, but in practice I can only do one well, or the other! So, having enjoyed a few books for old times sake, and a couple of new ones for fun, I've really got to sit down and get back to editing. Since we had a plan to scale back Solstice and just have one tree, not go mad on presents and food etc. I can say we seem to have failed. Badly. The artificial tree wouldn't fit in our newly decorated living room so we went shopping for a new, more sensible sized one. The old one ended up in the dining room (because it's such a nice, if nine foot high, tree) and the old dining room one squeaked into my newly decorated, insulated and fixed up study. The kids wanted their little tree in the kitchen - we have four trees. We seemed to have missed downsizing the holidays by a mile. 


Meanwhile, I have been thinking about the sequel and how close I am to finishing (well, abandoning really) the first book. “Poems are never finished - just abandoned”,  Paul Valéry said, and he described how I see novels, too. There just comes a point when you can't polish any more, so you send it off, and the second you do you find a million mistakes. I think it's part of the process. The plan is to finish draft 4 by the end of December and start the new year with a round of submissions.  

4 comments:

  1. I think that I am on a similiar timescale to you. I have started a new book, am continually polishing the old one and have started the submission process.

    Have you seen this: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/good-housekeeping-launches-%C2%A325k-novel-competition.html

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  2. Thank you so much for the tip! It does sound like we're at the same place in the process, it does seem daunting, doesn't it? Good luck with yours, are you trying the competition?

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  3. I think so - although I haven't yet bought a copy of the magazine. I think the closing date is 31st March 2012 so there is plenty of time.

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