Keeping it Real

My new WiP is a beast unlike anything else I’ve written. It’s the first book I’ve tried to write which is entirely set in the contemporary world – so, I’m dealing with cars and houses and school and arguments and crushes on boys and temper tantrums and computers and mobile phones and friendship – and, because of that, it seems to be going more quickly than I’m used to.

I’m already at over 18,000 words with it. After less than a week!

Image: homealone.wikia.com

Now, of course, there’s an element of the otherworldly in it – the frightening stuff I was talking about the other day – but nevertheless this is, as far as I remember, the first book in which I’m not trying to invent an entirely new world and/or way of life as well as a plot and story arc. I must admit it’s a nice change.

It’s great to be able to describe my character standing in her mother’s brick-a-brack shop in a small town by the seaside, and not only to have a crystal-clear image of it in my own head but to know that when I describe a dusty old shelf or a grubby window or a beach-ball or a bucket-and-spade display, that people will know what I mean. They’ll be able to create a version of this rickety little shop that means something to them, and that, with any luck, it’ll seem as real to them as it does to me.

There were elements of ‘realism’ in the other stories I’ve written, too, but ‘Eldritch’, ‘Tider’ and the book I’m continuing to refer to as ‘Emmeline’ (even though that’s not the name I ended up giving it) all featured, to a large extent, made-up worlds with different political systems, histories, technologies, and conflicts. Of course, at their heart, all those stories are about people, same as my current WiP, and they’re all about children trying to save their loved ones from danger, overcome something they consider to be ‘evil’, and work out what they’re supposed to do in a challenging situation.

But writing a book set entirely in our own world feels completely different from writing a book which takes an imagined reality as its backdrop. In some ways it almost feels too easy, and I’m finding myself struggling not to over-explain things. I’m used to having to find ways to make the otherworldly seem real, and when I’m dealing with the familiar, it seems like cheating to just say something like: ‘She walked down the street and got into the car.’ It’s not a street that moves by itself, or an electric car, or one which has an engine powered by unicorn spit; no. It’s just an ordinary car, on an ordinary street.

This doesn’t mean the story isn’t interesting. It really is. (Well, I think so, at least.) The fact that the setting is so ordinary makes the scary elements more scary, if that makes sense; it’s the sort of world we can all imagine, and so having something vengeful and angry and powerful decide to rip it to pieces will, I hope, add to the impact of the tale.

With any luck.

Today, I’m hoping to break 20K, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the story will keep on revealing itself to me as I go, bit by tiny bit. Wish me luck!

Image: arifahnurshabrinap.blogspot.com

Happy Friday, and happy weekend. I hope all your writing goals are being knocked right out of the park (that’s good, isn’t it? I’m not too hot with sports metaphors), and that the words are flowing the way you want them to. Don’t forget to give Flash! Friday a try; they’re open for entries for several hours yet, and the prompts this week are doozies.

Write on, my friends. Write on.

Medieval Madness for the Middle-Aged

Recently, I’ve been looking over some of my old notes from university and some of my old teaching material from when I was a tutor of Medieval English Language and Literature. I sometimes wonder whether I was a good tutor, and whether any of my old students remember me. I think the most noteworthy thing I ever did in a class was fall off the edge of a podium mid-speech, but I hope some of the people I was lucky enough to teach will remember enjoying their course, even if they don’t remember me.

I’d say this is how most of my old students remember their years of Medieval Lit…
Image: tek-lado.com

One student once told me that I had singlehandedly made her love Chaucer, and I lived off that praise for a couple of years. It still remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid.

Anyway. Amid all the nostalgia, I’ve realised a couple of things: one, I still love anything to do with the Middle Ages, and two, I remember more about it than I thought I did. It’s like muscle memory, perhaps; the stuff that I spent so many years learning is still there, deep down. Even if I never use it again professionally, it’s great to have that fund of knowledge and folklore, that familiarity with a lost world, that facility with a written language that very few people – sadly – are bothered with these days.

The same goes for all of us. No matter what your background is, what you studied at school or college, what you’re interested in, what you’ve done for a living, what you do for a living, what makes you happy – all of that stuff can be used to fuel your writing and feed your imagination. It can all be mined for inspiration. The more you have in your ‘tank’, the better equipped you’ll be to stretch your writing muscles, and the more agile your ideas are likely to be. I’ve worked as a butcher’s apprentice, as a lecturer and as a bookseller, among lots of other things. So, my imagination-pot is fully stocked.

But my heart will always belong to the Middle Ages.

And – since I’ve done nothing of note since yesterday besides hack away at ‘Eldritch’ and drink at least a litre of decaf, I’m going to leave you with my favourite clip from one of my favourite films – and, it must be said, a clip to which I often referred in my classes, back in the day.

Oh, how many poor classes of students had to sit through my ‘John-Cleese-doing-a-French-accent’ impression…

Work is going reasonably well on ‘Eldritch.’ It’s hard to unpick a plot with which you’ve been intimately familiar for years, only to recreate it slightly differently, but I’m managing. It’s slow, but it’s steady. I’ll get there.

Good luck with all your endeavours today – particularly if it’s repelling the English with flying bovine missiles.

The Waiting Game

I have a pile of paper on my desk which is almost two inches tall. It’s neatly stacked and clearly laid out; it is double-spaced and indented for new paragraphs and dialogue; each chapter has its own new page. It is 254 pages of hard work and mental toil, and it is mine.

It looks a lot like this!
Image: hopeloverun.blogspot.com

‘Tider’ lives!

Yesterday, I did my ‘last’ edits (I say ‘last’, but of course I don’t mean it – I’m sure I’ll have filleted the whole thing and sewn it back together again before the year is out.) The book is now at a stage where I’m happy to leave it to one side for a few weeks, hopefully allowing me to come back to it with fresher eyes and a more acute editing brain. The entire ending has been restructured, which involved working back through the whole book in order to shift the plot around slightly, just enough to make room for a new dénouement, and almost 10,000 words have been sliced out of the MS in the process. It’s now at about 76,000 words, which is still a little on the long side, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.

Also, recall if you will that the word count for ‘Tider’, in its first incarnation, was 150,000. I think that deserves some sort of editing award, or something.

 

Annnnd the Oscar for most copious editing goes to….
Image: homespunscrap.blogspot.com

I have a huge amount of words in my Offcuts file, too – something in the region of 60,000 for this book alone. Many of my favourite scenes, including whole chunks of lovely, lovely dialogue which were funny and sweet and so wonderful to write have ended up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. Entire characters have fallen. As plotlines shifted, huge swathes of the book became redundant and could not be salvaged. I have to admit I find this merciless cutting a little bit easier now than I have done in the past, but it’s still not a lot of fun to realise, after you’ve been grappling with a beloved paragraph for a few hours, that it’s just not going to fit any more and needs to be retired to the scrap-heap.

Printing the MS has a few benefits. Mainly, it’s easier to read from paper than it is from a screen, and reading from a printed page makes you feel like it’s a ‘real book’; I’m still of the generation, I guess, who feels that when something’s down on paper it’s legitimised and made official. However, the most important benefit to printing, for me, is the fact that it serves to move me forward in the writing process. That might sound strange, because I now intend to leave the printout alone for as long as I can before continuing with the work, but what I mean is this: if I left ‘Tider’ on-screen, I could literally spend the rest of my life just tweaking and fiddling with it. When it’s on a computer screen, and saved in a file, it’s an amorphous, unfinished thing, malleable and never-ending; it’s all too easy to allow yourself to keep waiting for it to reach a certain, undefinable point before printing it. ‘I’ll just fix this bit… oh, and that bit… and maybe I’ll rewrite this paragraph… and, you know, perhaps I’ll just fidget with this character for a while…’ This sort of procrastination could go on forever, unless you pick a point and just print the thing, and so that’s what I’ve done. Now, finally, I can – with any luck – come to the final stage in the whole process, and get it ready to query.

Having said all that, my brain is still clanging with things I want to fix and change. Every few minutes I think of something else that needs to be altered. ‘This reaction here is unrealistic’, or ‘surely if event A has just happened, event B would unfold a bit more like this…’ – but I’m trying to quiet that inner voice, just for now. I’m certain those observations will occur to me as I read through the printed MS in a fortnight or three weeks, or however long I can force myself to leave it. Printing the book and then trying to come back to it with the eyes of a reader, instead of a writer, is a vital thing; it’s so hard to get a feel for the story overall when you’re stuck right in the middle of it. Getting a broad view is important in order to work out whether the story makes sense, has a logical progression to it and – most vitally – is interesting.

This is not the look I’m going for.
Image: igniteimagery.deviantart.com

So. While I’m waiting for ‘Tider’ to settle in my brain, my plan is to work on short stories for a little while. There are a few competitions I’d like to enter, including The Walking on Thin Ice Short Story Contest, which I can’t recommend any more highly, and I’m looking forward to changing ‘format’ for a while. Breaking away from writing a long-form novel and getting stuck back into short stories will, I hope, help me to forget about ‘Tider’ for the minute as well as enjoy the process of creating something new.

It’s all action over here this Thursday! Hope your day is going well. It’s almost the weekend, folks… hang in there.

The Creeping Dark

Don’t look now, but – it’s October.

Booo!
Image: nationalharbor.com

In a matter of weeks, we’ll be dressing up as ghouls and nasties in order to frighten away the real ghouls and nasties, and everywhere you look you’ll see happy, sugar-crazed children drifting about in giggling packs. We’re already in training for waking up, and coming back home, in darkness, and wardrobes are being raided for their stashes of waterproof coats and woolly scarves and funny bobbly hats knitted by someone’s granny. The world is yawning and stretching and plumping up its pillows, preparing for its long sleep.

As for me? Well. This is my time of year.

I love the changing seasons, and the blustery weather, and the cool air. I’m not crazy about the dark mornings, to be truthful, but they’re a small price to pay for all the other joys that the closing of the year brings. I love the feeling of turning, of transformation, that fills the air at this time of year. It reminds me that things are constantly in flux and that there’s a rhythm to everything; there’s a time for everything, and for everyone. It makes me feel like no matter how chaotic or frightening things might seem, that there is a natural progression in place. It makes me feel small – but I mean that in a good way. It makes me feel like I’m a very small part of a larger whole, one which will carry on with or without me, and that something a lot smarter than I am has everything under control.

Today, I’m feeling a little less frazzled about my work. Yesterday, I battled through and gamely worked away at my editing for as long as I possibly could; I found myself hitting a wall about six hours in, though, and instead of smashing my way through it and pushing on, I decided I was going to allow myself some downtime. I went for a short walk, and I did some baking (which, for some reason, was a disaster, but at least it was fun), and I read several chapters of one of the many books I have on the go. As a result, I am tired today but not completely exhausted, and I am looking forward to picking up where I left off yesterday. I think I’ll have to imagine my mental life as having its own rhythm, too, even on a micro, day-to-day level; mornings are like springtime, and when evening comes it’s fine to slow down and allow the darkness to start creeping in. The year needs its blanket of restful night, so why would I be any different?

Whatever season it is in Ireland, you can be sure you’ll need your umbrella…
Image: seasonsofireland.com

Having said this, I don’t always feel so positively inclined toward darkness and its inexorable creeping. Like most people I am, sometimes, afraid of the dark, and I don’t like being left alone in it. As a child in my parents’ house I used to get a fizzing thrill of terror when the hall light was turned out as we made our way up to bed. As I raced up the stairs, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something terrible was on my heels, making a scaly, taloned grab for my fleeing feet, preparing to suck me down into some horrible subterranean lair unless I reached a particular step by a particular time. Perhaps I was afraid not of the dark itself but of what the dark was concealing; it was fear of what was in the darkness, what the darkness meant. Fear of the dark is a fear of not being able to see, or of not understanding what you’re seeing, or of dealing with the unknown. It’s a fear that comes straight out of the core of my brain and being, and it’s one that haunted my early ancestors too, I’m sure.

Nestled beside this ancient fear is an appreciation of the darkness, though, and the peace and rest it can bring. Sometimes I like to think of the autumn as a blanket being pulled over the world, a comforting eiderdown settling us all into the slower months. Maybe it’s helpful to think of darkness as an opportunity – a chance to take a breath and check the relentless forwardness we are driven toward when the days are long. Modern life, of course, doesn’t always allow us to live in harmony with the rhythm of the seasons, but it helps me, a little, to remind myself that these rhythms exist, and that they have a use and a purpose.

Maybe the only unknowable thing in the darkness is ourselves, and our own minds; perhaps that is the monster we’re scared of, the one we fear will suck us down into the deeps if we let it catch us. It might be time to embrace the darkness, then, and search through it for the fearful thing we’ve spent so long running away from. We might be surprised by what we find. It might turn out that what we fear, and what we’ve shrouded in darkness, is the one thing we’ve been looking for all along.

And hey. Maybe it’ll just be a monster. I reckon it’s worth taking the chance, though.

Image: dailymail.co.uk

 

Home Keys

I’ve been sitting here for over two hours trying to write this morning’s blog post. The reason I’ve been finding it so hard is not that I have nothing to say or that I’ve forgotten how to use my words all of a sudden – it’s because my brain is flipping from one topic to another, zooming around faster than a speeding burrito (which is, of course, the fastest thing in the known universe), and finding it very difficult to settle.

Shall I write about the wonderful online writing workshop I watched at the weekend, I ask myself? Perhaps I should tackle the annoying fact that I can no longer watch a movie without anticipating the storyline and ruining it for myself and anyone who watches with me? Or maybe I should unpick some of my inner demons – the ongoing and ever-present fear of rejection; the difficulty of accepting (at times) the subjectivity of this business, and the fact that not everyone is going to like your work as much as you do; the almost superhuman challenge it is to just… keep… going – or perhaps I should just go back to bed and forget I started any of this.

Image: themumblog.com

I think this phenomenon – the zippy, flippy brain – is a common feature of Monday mornings, particularly Monday mornings which come after a weekend spent away from your WiP. My brain is like a particularly active toddler finally let loose in the playroom after a weekend spent wrapped up in a suit and bow tie and being warned, repeatedly and through gritted teeth, to be on his best behaviour. Right now, it’s running from one corner of the room to the other, screaming all the way.

Having said that, I had a wonderful weekend, spent with family; it feels really unfair of me to describe those happy days as being akin to being locked out of the toy box. I don’t mean to say that I’d rather have been working than having lunch with my parents, or helping my friend to bake a cake for her father’s birthday party, or watching a film with my husband, but when you’re working on something like a book, it feels a lot like your brain isn’t fully ‘there’, at any given moment. Inspiration, ideas, solutions to plot problems, bursts of clarity about your characters, realisations that one of your imaginary people is acting in an unnatural or ‘forced’ way, and the ever-present corrosion of doubt have a habit of exploding into your mind at the most unwelcome and unexpected moments. I’m pretty sure they wait until you’re at your most relaxed before they mount their attack, just to make a larger and more distinct impression upon you. Trying to keep these ‘attacks’ under control is a lot like trying to avoid the ministrations of a particularly energetic and affectionate puppy – you’re fighting off something you’re not sure you should be fighting off, and trying to quieten a voice you’re afraid will one day fall silent forever if you don’t pay it enough attention.

Throw the ball! Go on, throw it! Throw the ball! Throw the ball! Throw… *squirrel!*
Image: squidoo.com

Sometimes, though, it would be nice to take a rest and actually feel like you were taking a rest, to go home feeling, when you put the key in the door, like you were really going home, to a place where nothing can follow you. Even reading, these days, feels a lot like work (that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, though, of course.)

When you’re learning to type (or, at least, when I was learning to type, over twenty years ago now), you’re taught about the ‘home keys’, where you’re supposed to rest your fingers between words. I still do this, and I find I do my best thinking while my fingers are sitting on ‘ASDF’ and ‘JKL;.’ I spend a lot of time with my fingers on those keys; it looks like wasted time, but it’s the furthest thing from it. Sitting my fingers into those familiar grooves sends my brain into a spin of plotting and planning, almost like flicking a switch; it’s like there’s a direct correlation between ‘at rest’ and ‘thinking’. Perhaps, then, whenever I’m away from the computer and my brain tries to settle into ‘rest’, my writing brain thinks of it as another form of ‘settling onto the home keys’, and starts to rev up the plotting engines.

The main problem with that scenario is, of course, that I’m miles away from my keyboard when this happens, and can’t do anything with all this effort. I wish, in some ways, that I could just turn it off. I guess once you stoke up those fires, though, it’s a dangerous and difficult thing to dampen them again.

Over the weekend, whenever I had a moment where I wasn’t actively engaged in doing something else, my mind was on ‘Tider’. I was thinking about it, picking it apart, pulling its plot threads to see if they held, dissecting its characters, their actions and reactions, their relationships and motivations, and trying to think about ways to edit the word-count while adding layers of subplot and interest. The book is almost where I want it, but there’s still something not quite right. I’m hopeful draft 5, set to begin today, will help me polish this story until it gleams, and root out anything that’s pulling the book back from being as good as it can be.

I hope, when this draft is finished, that I can use my home keys to let myself into a place where my brain can have a rest, instead of where it does its most intense work. Here’s hoping, right?

Happy Monday – I hope you’re holding steady.

Take it From Me…

So, yesterday I had to cut over 6,000 words from the current draft of ‘Tider’. It caused me a whole lot of pain to do that, I can tell you. It took my word count right down from where it had been – up there in ‘almost finished, look at that!’ territory – to ‘wow, I have so much more work to do on this’-ville.

For once, Picasso explains exactly how I feel.
Image: inminds.com

I know it’s for the best, and all that; I know I was removing useless stuff, words that had blown in from somewhere far away and had taken root, and started to eat away at the foundations of the story like ivy on a wall. It didn’t make it any easier to hit the ‘cut’ button, though. I hope this affliction doesn’t burden everyone who writes, this ‘every word is sacred’ mentality; I guess it can’t, because if it did, nobody would ever write anything. Ever.

I thought today, then, I might blog about Things Wot I Have Learned as part of my writing process, in the hope that other people will learn from my colossal buffoonery.

Sometimes, no matter how much effort you make to force something to fit into a story, it’s just not going to work.

So, you’ve had a brilliant idea. A flash of inspiration brighter than Alpha Centauri. An image which, when it occurred to you, made your knees weak with the sheer beauty of it. A sentence – a Booker Prize winning sentence, you feel sure – has dropped into your head straight from the Muse’s fingers, fully formed. You love it more dearly than you love anything else in the world, and you must use it. There must be a place to display this evidence of your brilliant and inquiring mind.

Except there isn’t, because the idea you’ve had – when you really think about it – is completely off the wall, and just doesn’t fit with your current project.

Often, when I’m writing, I find my brain splaying out in all possible directions, soaking up information and ideas from everywhere but the page it’s supposed to be looking at. I catch myself thinking about details I’m planning to use in other books, or getting distracted by plotting a sequel to the book I’m currently working on. This is not because I’m some sort of writing genius, I hasten to clarify; it’s because I’m an easily-distracted flibbertigibbet. My brain sometimes gets a bit scared at the idea of being stuck into one idea for an extended period, and it feels the need to ‘stretch its legs’, a bit like a toddler who’s just learning to walk. And, like a toddler, on occasion it will get itself lost or tripped up. It will go foraging in the garden of my mind and come back, its hands full of worms and dirt, showing them to me as if to say ‘isn’t this a brilliant idea, huh, huh?’

Invariably, it’s not. But, my brain being what it is, sometimes I’ll look at this new idea and think it’s not half bad, and then I’ll try to incorporate it into whatever I’m working on. When it doesn’t work, instead of going ‘oh, well. That’s that, then,’ I can tend to get a bit anxious, and allow myself to slip into a panic-vortex. ‘Why isn’t this working?’ I’ll wail, tearing out my metaphorical hair. ‘I’m useless at this whole writing thing! I must go and become a plumber/sheep farmer/nuclear physicist instead!’

What I should do is this: Calm Down. It’s an idea, and there are ideas everywhere. There will be others. Put this one aside somewhere, carefully noted and prettily packaged, and come back to it another time. Then, get back to what you were doing before you were rudely interrupted. I’ve often sidetracked myself and written thousands of words on the back of a tangent which came to me in a panic, and all that happens to those words is that they get junked. This causes pain. You don’t want to do it more than once.

Oh, look, let’s leave a totally random ‘note to self’ somewhere on the manuscript, because of course when I come back to this in a week or two or ten, I’ll know exactly what I meant by it.

I actually find it hard to believe I do this, because I’d like to think I am in possession of a reasoned, logical mind most of the time. I know, for instance, that I have a pretty poor memory, and that leaving notes for myself is something I’ve done since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I also know that nothing is more confusing than navigating through the half-written carcass of a novel; it’s a bit like trying to find your way through a howling sandstorm on a planet with which you’re not familiar. The ground keeps shifting under your feet and you can’t see beyond the end of your nose a lot of the time. So, of course, the perfect thing to do is leave yourself a cryptic clue which you’re pretty sure was intended to flag a vital plot point, with absolutely no explanation of what you meant by it. When you come across it again, you might as well be faced with the Voynich Manuscript for all the sense it makes to you.

Normally, if you’re me, this triggers another panic-vortex: see above for hair-pulling, gnashing of teeth, and so forth. You convince yourself that without figuring out this note the whole book will fall apart in a world-rending schism, and the story will crumble in upon itself, and your life will end.

None of this is true.

What I should do is this: Calm Down. Keep writing. Finish The Book. When redrafting, revisit the note or the randomly-inserted sentence, or whatever it is, and see if you can remember what you meant. If you can’t, see if you can give it another meaning (usually, though you won’t realise it, this ‘new’ meaning is exactly the same as the original one); if you can’t do that, then consider removing it. The world won’t end. Trust me.

Ooh, look, I make *total* sense, of course…
Image: apod.nasa.gov

There are so many lessons you learn when trying to write a book. So far, I’ve learned more about myself and how I cope with the world than I’ve learned about writing, but perhaps that’s to be expected. If I could distil what I’ve learned, it would be something like this:

Calm Down

Finish the Book

Calm Down Again

I hope this helps. Have a great Friday, and take it from me – writing is easier if you remember these golden guidelines.

Image: healthsmart.ie

Slaying the Dragon*

It’s strange how significant everything becomes when you’re facing a mortal threat. Every step, every breath, every thought, every decision becomes invested with new importance. Everything seems slow. Your breathing sounds too loud, and the rushing of blood in your ears makes you light-headed. The morning breeze ripples through the flags overhead as you make your way into the courtyard, already covered with an inch of sawdust, and you feel the weight of your armour pulling on every muscle and sinew in your body. A few yards ahead of you, a sword is placed, point-first, in the hard earth.

Your guts turn to solid ice as you hear the beast’s first roar, loud as a gash being torn in the face of the earth itself. It makes your knees want to bend of their own accord, and it makes your head want to bow. You have to fight the urge to crumple before it. Inside your metal visor, nobody can see you weep, so you let the tears come. Then you remember there is nobody here to see you, anyway; no friendly faces, nobody to guard your sword-arm.

There is only you, and the dragon, and the dragon is coming fast.

Image: john-howe.com

 

Sometimes, in literature, dragon-slayers live; most of the time, however, they die. Dragons are the ultimate enemy, the one true test of a warrior’s prowess. So powerful that they get the better even of men like Beowulf, the greatest hero of his age (and ours, arguably), dragons are not to be trifled with. At all times, they are to be taken seriously, and they can never be underestimated. Waking one is a complicated business, and slaying one more complicated still. It’s best to leave them unroused altogether, and let them get on with slumbering and you on with living.

Sometimes, though, they wake of their own accord.

Facing doubt, in many ways, reminds me of dragon-slaying. It’s just you and the dragon, eyeballing one another over a sheaf of paper or the thin film of a computer screen; you hear its hissing voice in your mind, laughing at you for having the cheek to think you are worthy of putting words on paper and joining the ranks of ‘those who write’. The dragon is bigger than you, more powerful than you, and far more frightening than you can imagine. ‘I have slain mightier than you,’ it gurgles. ‘I have devoured warriors who could snap you like a twig!’ There’s nothing you can say to this, because you know it’s true.

It’s all too easy to back down from the doubt-dragon, and let it live inside your computer or – worse – inside your mind for the rest of your life. It seems like the simplest thing to just give in and turn away from its jeering, toothy grin, to walk away while doing your best to ignore its taunts of ‘I told you so!’ It can feel like doing anything else is the height of foolishness, like you’re risking your life by engaging with it. The only safe option, you convince yourself, is to give in and move on.

But if you do that, the dragon wins. It doesn’t even have to lift a claw to defeat you – you’ve defeated yourself.

I feel a little like I’ve been swallowed by the doubt-dragon at the moment. I feel like I’m stuck somewhere in its gullet, not quite inside its foul and noisome stomach (where I will surely perish, prithee), but not far off. Everywhere I look, all I see are dead ends, and there doesn’t appear to be a way out.

Instead of giving up and allowing myself to be swallowed, though, I’m really doing my best to understand that I need to make my own way out. If you don’t see a way to escape, then you need to make one.

St Margaret slaying the dragon by attacking it from within.
Image: greenwichworkshop.com

My attack of the doubts has come about because I have to do some unpicking of ‘Tider’. I’ve managed to write myself into a place where the story is no longer interesting or holding my attention; it seems too flabby and far-fetched. As well as this, the setting is poor, the character motivations are illogical, and the structure is wrong. I know I’m writing a first draft, which gives you a bit more leeway to make errors like this, but if it leads to you losing yourself in a morass of darkness, then something has to be done before you reach a point where you can’t find your way back. It’s important to complete the first draft, no matter how hard it is, which means I have to rescue myself from the dragon of doubt before I’m lost forever in the labyrinth of its infernal intestines.

So, there’s only one thing for it. I’m hefting my sword, and I’m picking what looks to be the most efficient way out of this mess, and I’m punching on through. See you on the other side, with any luck…

 

 

*All dragons used in the production of this blog post were unharmed, and all dragon involvement was monitored by the Geatish Dragon-Lovers’ Association. Any encouragement to harm, slay, maim or otherwise interfere with the lives of ordinary, law-abiding dragons inferred through reading this post is unintentional, and regrettable.