The writing or the life

This is what I feel a cross-section of my brain must have looked like while I was beginning work on the present novel. On my current visit to Nuala ni Chonchuir's blog for my virtual book tour, I explain how hard I find it to concentrate on anything else if I'm involved in a piece of work, and vice versa: once my attention is scattered by external things the spell of the novel/story/play is broken. My novel was increasingly gripping me (which of course I needed it to do), and it was a stage requiring especial concentration because I was working out a new structure and grappling with a new voice. I needed to sit and listen to that voice and watch the new structure taking place, but there were other calls on my attention. Flying with Magpies, the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies, was beginning, and I had to turn my mind to its organisation, and to think about that novel instead. It's not as if I don't enjoy these virtual tours - I do; I really love the interaction with the blog hosts and their readers - but that's part of the trouble: it's so very distracting! And then I had to take time off to design leaflets and a poster for my Chorlton Arts Festival event, which takes place tomorrow evening, and to spend a morning delivering them. Here's the poster I designed: I have to say that with my attention at such a premium I didn't put as much care and time as I usually do into the design, but I guess it does its job.


It really felt as though the novel was being sucked out of my brain by these things. Anyway, they all got done, and the virtual tour seems to have settled into a routine now, and the novel seems to have taken good root in my head in spite of it all. In order to ensure that, I had been working really long hours on it, and my back was aching and I felt exhausted, and I must say pretty frazzled at the end of each day when I looked around at the mess in the house and turned to all the other things I had to do. I made the decision, having cracked it, that I need to pace myself and do fewer hours on it each day, and I felt secure enough in it to take the weekend off and take stock of it while clearing up some other things. Turns out it was a really good move: with the distance, I was able to think about an unformed worry that had been growing at the back of mind and see what it was: I needed to go back to the beginning and adjust the frame I had set up for the novel. Must say, though, that by the time I had spent yesterday afternoon planning the reading on Tuesday and doing an application for another arts festival, and with domestic stuff still to do, I just didn't get round to writing this blog yesterday evening as I meant to do...