Yes, you do have to blow your own trumpet - nobody does it for you. So I copying this from my other blog for a start. This afternoon I announced to the awaiting world the completion of Conscience vol 1 on Facebook this afternoon, and got a "like" from Finn - and the rest of my eager chums? nada, zilch, niente... I expect they were all busy, it is Hallowe'en after all, and I seem to be the only person who doesn't treat it as a lesser Christmas. I hope that's why no one noticed, or did they notice and think I was showing off... or are they all assuming I am about to fail. Perhaps I am.
Anyway, I finished Conscience today. This was an idea I have had for a while - and, sometime in 2003 I went up to London on a train with a small notebook and came back with the whole plot. I've never looked at that notebook since, it is probably full of gorgeous ideas which I would be kicking myself not to have used. I can't actually remember when I began to write it - when I started The Romantic Feminist I had already written about 20,00 words of it, and I wrote a little more on it after I'd completed the first few drafts of the RF. I wrote it so slowly and infrequently, it had taken me at least a year to write those first 20,000 words, perhaps two years. This afternoon I finished it. I decided this morning that Thursday and Friday were going to be busy days, so I should just go for it. The last chapter is just under 5,000 words, all written today. It will need considerable polishing, but I wanted to get some momentum back - the previous chapters had covered about 4 weeks in about 15,000 words. I didn't think my readers would want it to drag out, every painful conversation, every initiative. M of course wanted me to include a scene with a recruiting sergeant - I felt that had been "done" - I left it out, there is some anxiety about how the wife character changes - is it a but unrealistic, has she been subsumed to the plot in some way...
Some weeks ago it became apparent to me that the story, which I originally imagined as one big fat book, and then realised would make more money as two, might actually become three books. Currently this version is about 87,000 words - slimmer than TRF, but still a respectable size - about 220 pages... it may need some padding out - but there were a few ideas I had as I went along that perhaps need to be expanded a little - and maybe the last chapter would benefit from another couple of thousand words. I am desperately excited, and thrilled, and also a little deflated - what on earth will I do next? Some housework perhaps?
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