Back to work, whinge over. I've delivered book 2 - edited, read through a dozen times, tarted up and smoothed out. I'm sure it's still full of stuff I haven't seen or sorted, but someone's new eyes coming to it will find them.
Editing is so important. I'm sometimes sitting with other writers, and one will say: 'I never edit.' Well, you should. Even if you tidy up as you go along, even if every chapter and scene is plotted from the outset, when you look at the whole thing you need to go through and consider the reader. If they don't have your life experiences/sense of humour/values will they understand every line? If these characters are new to them, is there enough to make is easy to understand them? Do they know what you meant to say or are they dependant on what you actually said?
I'm doing a substantial re-write of book 3, too. More than an edit, I'm looking at whole threads which don't quite work, don't actually mesh together. Maybe I'll even lose a character or two, or make it less complex. As the final book of a whole trilogy, I'm trying to tie up a lot of loose threads, complete the journey of increasing numbers of characters. I've started by looking through the first six chapters and rearranged them into a much better order. Then I've printed them off and have worked through them, finding things that need to go in, changes that need to be made, backstory that can be managed better.
I'm also planning to go off to the Arvon centre in Devon on the 28th April to write some poetry. It might seem a bit strange that having spent so much time and effort (and having some success) in the arena of fiction that I might not bother with poetry, but I find poetry is the spring of inspiration where words are concerned. I'm more economical and precise with words in fiction when I've been writing poetry - and editing. Poetry IS editing. Even deciding to keep your first draft is a conscious decision. I can't wait, even when I'm terrified of going away for a week with strangers in the middle of nowhere... There's no internet, no phone, no nothing. Excellent.
Sometimes it all feels like every step is uphill. The book is out there in its paperback livery and doing OK, as far as I can tell. Not taking the High Street by storm, but selling. I did want to email everyone who bought it personally to say thank you, but once we got past the 1000 mark common sense starts to come in. I also wanted to thank everyone for writing reviews, which on the whole have been very lovely, and even the one person who reviewed it and didn't like it said it just wasn't their sort of thing, completely fair comment. But you can't do that. I'm so happy to be published, and I should be skipping, but real life is getting in the way at the moment.
I'm selling my much-loved house, largely because my husband's cancer diagnosis has made him want a fresh start somewhere else. But to do this we had to tidy up, sort out and de-clutter our house and now I'm showing strangers around. Some of them are less than complimentary. They are entitled to their point of view, of course, but can't they take a leaf out of the reviewer's book and understand it's a matter of taste? No, I don't have walls covered with trendy wallpaper with giant flowers, and I don't have laminate floors everywhere. I have no problem with people who do, but this is an old house. It just wouldn't go. I'm just hoping for a buyer soon, before I actually go crazy.
My husband is off to radiotherapy every day, having his pelvis microwaved or whatever they are doing, and being remarkably chilled about it. We follow all the side effects and discuss talk about everyday. But what we don't talk about is whether it will work. He's relentlessly positive about it, which I love, and need him to be otherwise he wouldn't do all the treatments. But it leaves me with my doubts, which rage through my nightmares every night. I'm actually going crazy.
I know other writers who believe if they could just sell a book and get published they would be happy - forever - but real life is so much bigger. Writing is my escape - I wrote before I got published and I will write afterwards too. But real life is hard to get away from at the moment. So I would like to sell my house, and move, and have the radiotherapy work. Please.
The paperback came out today!
And it's in Tesco's, which is unexpected and amazing. The big supermarkets like books that are either by established authors or non-fiction. Début authors are less represented, and fantasy is not very commonly sold by them. So it was a coup for the sales team - I can't imagine how they did it but I hope the book rewards their hard work! It's also in bookshops, apparently. I shall scour local shops anyway. Wow! It's hard to believe even though we talk about it with my agent and editor, and they talk as if it's all quite normal. It still seems strange to me!
We've found a lovely house in Torrington, which is sort of in the middle of Devon and the house is great. I don't know if we could sell quickly enough to secure it, but it gives me hope that the right sort of houses are out there. So much for downsizing though - moving this year we still need 5/6 bedrooms! The cats might find the road a bit busy but they aren't going out much now, and all the mouse/vole/sunshine action is definitely at the back - gardens south facing and overlooking fields. All cool.
I'm still working on book 2 - once I get into editing it's very satisfying, and thanks to all my beta readers and my editor, it's a straightforward process. I think I'm the one who wants to make the most changes, just because I want it as clean and coherent as possible but also because I know what happens in book 3!
...since I blogged. Life is massively complicated at the moment, but not necessarily bad. We've decluttered, painted, cleaned and packed our house up to within an inch of its life. We've viewed houses, had estate agents round, we're seriously moving. I'm editing, cooking, sorting, packing and keeping an eye on Rightmove. But there's a distracted part of me that is thinking what plants I ought to get in the garden, what seeds should have already gone in, the state of the raised beds and their weeds. I'm fretting that the poor chickens haven't been able to go out in the yard since the storms blew their fence to bits. I'm thinking about book 4 when I need to concentrate on book 2 and 3. I'm definitely distracted.
February blew through with such a drama I almost forgot March would follow behind. There are fat bumble bees feeding on the winter honeysuckle, a couple of butterflies have already wandered up to the spring flowers. The cats have spent time rolling around on the garden steps absorbing the energy. It is time to put the cancer drama behind us a bit and think of it as just another job. So I'm looking forward.
I've booked a course at Arvon to spend some time looking at poetry. I'm going to step out of the selling and buying a house/radiotherapy world to go and do something truly creative. I'm looking forward to it but I'm also terrified. Poetry is something I would love to do better but I think (for me) it's the hardest thing. I think I've spent longer on a single poem than on a whole chapter of a book. I've prepared by looking at Mimi Khalvati's poetry and love it. I'm sure I'm going to get loads out of the week, providing I'm not too stressed out to go! So we're renting a shipping container and moving most of our possessions there to make moving easier. I'm enjoying having a lot of the clutter out of the way - I'm wondering if we should just leave it all in the container...
After struggling to write with all the distractions of cancer in the family and trying to get the house ready to sell, book 3 is finally all in one place. It's also an unholy mess, as the longer I take to write a book the more room for mistakes there is, changes of heart, plot lines that peter out into nothing, characters that just wander off and I forget to explain or, you know, massacre. It's finally all in one place along with a few blank pages with 'Jack chapter - how does she get to Dartmoor???' at the top. So far, it's 87k of vaguely coherent story, but I'm worried that I've been accumulating characters as the story goes on in the series and now there's way too many. Time for a serious prune or even, when I rewrite book 2 next week, the necessary movement of some stuff into book 2 to take the pressure off book 3.
Life is strange without a phone, and very intermittent internet. In some ways it's more manageable and it's helped with the distraction of 'Oh My God It's Cancer' which still has the odd echo rippling through the family. I miss speaking to family, mostly, as the mobile option is a bit poor in our convoluted geography.
Next week I shall be ready to blitz book 2 into shape (hopefully) with possibly the odd addition from book 3. But my mind has already turned to the sequel to A Baby's Bones, an archaeological mystery. The sequel is set in Moretonhampstead and I'm looking into maybe sneaking away for a couple of days to go and see the site of a strange ghost sighting at Lustleigh Cleave. A servant girl, walking back over the moor to see her parents some miles away, saw a group of Neolithic hunters, and the description by Theo Brown, a folklorist, caught my interest. Great area for atmospheric locations for stories! After a sunny morning, it's started raining again. A half-drowned buzzard has just landed on the conservatory roof. Maybe he'll hold it down, because all the storms have played havoc with our roof!
For light relief I'm reading 'Longbourn', a charming retelling of the over-told Pride and Prejudice story - but from the servants' point of view. Loving it.
Now, I shouldn't have a problem with the complete absence of internet or phone. I was born in the sixties, and we didn't have a phone then, and the internet only existed in inventors' heads. So when a huge lightning flash and bang knocked out the power and the phone line, you'd think we would cope fine, wouldn't you?
A week later we had gone through withdrawal from the internet, and come out the other side. I must have picked up my tablet a thousand times, just going to look something up, check Facebook or emails, blog... it was a strange experience! I didn't realise how connected I was by the internet. This last week we have packed a thousand boxes (OK, probably 30 but they're really heavy), moved four bookcases into storage, kept husband company on his targeting CT scan for radiotherapy (which starts in March), thrown away oodles of clothes and other things to the dump, tidied and sorted and cleaned - Oh My. And I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't even phone (I still can't and BT have dug up the road to work on it) and our mobiles have very limited reception here in the valley.
I was reduced to writing without access to the internet for research. How would an Arab mathematician address an English mathematician? Would that be different if he had just bought him at auction? How far is Alexandria from Brindisi by sea (oh, I so wished I hadn't packed the atlas at this point!). I did do some words, and I'm coming into the very last stretch of book 3 - or I would be if I hadn't separated out the two strands and now have to reunite them as some point!
I'm also editing book 2 which came to a complete halt when I realised I couldn't access the notes my editor had painstakingly made for me to work from... I hate missing a deadline but it's never going to get done by the 28th. Crazy days. I'm going to enjoy the internet while I still have it though - I doubt I would have attempted a historical novel otherwise!
I'm also going to have a go at the Liebster award Teresa Stenson nominated me for - I loved her responses, check them out! Thanks, Teresa!
I had a bright idea: that I would be finished with book 3 at the end of January. Good idea but a bit unrealistic because I forgot how many things I had to do in January. I went down to Winchester to talk to some students on creative writing courses, and some other writers, and had a fantastic time. Looking over the seated people (a fellow student from my year in the front seat) it was lovely to be telling my story and encouraging fellow writers to push on, finish that book, get on with the next one. It's not a pipe dream, it's still very hard to get published, of course, but those writers who have stories they just have to write down would probably find readers just as enthralled by their characters. I followed that by a talk to creative writing students at Brockenhurst college. If my personal philosophy wasn't 'give back, give forward' I still would have got loads from addressing these different groups. Questions make you look at what you do and why. Sometimes it is the younger students at the beginning of their writing journey who make the biggest challenges, and gave me a chance to reflect on aspects of writing I hadn't considered consciously before. So, thank you for making me welcome and thank you for making me look at my writing practice and understand the process better.
Anyway, back to work. Book 3 is in its last stages of development then I can put it aside for a couple of months to work on book 2. Book 1 is in its paperback incarnation (which will, hopefully, sell well) and looking rather eye-catching, I think. It's embossed like the hardback, very glossy white writing, very smart.
Meanwhile, cancer-cat seems unbothered by her probable fate, despite being a bit lumpy around the neck. It has made me wonder what it would be like to be animal and child free at some point. Free to travel, maybe. I can't imagine writing without her, though. She sleeps in the study when I'm working, curled up on a blanket on a sling on the radiator, occasionally sitting on my lap and the keyboard for attention.
I am wrestling with the vagaries of sixteenth-century travel. Countries that we think of as Greek were under Venetian control but they must have had their own ideas about their identity. Venice wasn't part of 'Italy', which wouldn't exist for centuries. My characters are aliens, lost in a conflicted world of the Ottoman empire.
