Back to it

Well, life's getting back to something like normality after launching The Birth Machine. I'm still working hard on promotion, but it's now the more routine kind of work that can be done in the afternoons after a morning's writing and drainage of creativity - contacting mailing lists etc.

So in the mornings I'm finally back working on the WIP. I have to say I was dreading it, dreading that moment where you pick up the thing with which you were so obsessed two months ago - dreaming it at night and daydreaming it all day - and think: What the f***'s this all about? because you've long ago moved light years away from its creative space.

In fact, I didn't even remember where I'd got to in the story, leave alone all the thematic threads and connections I was meant to be juggling. I always write in longhand first, but type up chunks as I go in order to be able easily to look back on it, but I'd been so fired up, and then latterly so anxious to finish a whole section before I suspended work on the whole thing (I didn't) that I'd ended up with reams of pages untyped. So obviously the first task was to type that up, which it seemed would be a good way of getting back into the novel. But you, know, my writing's terrible, and the scrutinising it needed meant that I wasn't getting the flow, and so the next obvious thing to do was go back to the latter part of what I had typed up and read that. But guess what, I discovered I'd edited that with a black fountain pen, again without getting round to typing up the edits, and it was covered in blobby black scribbles which once again needed intent scrutiny. So that's what I'm doing now, typing up those edits, but it's so long since I made them it's taking me ages to decipher them...
And this afternoon I shall be doing something else I put off because I simply couldn't face it on top of everything else: spending the whole afternoon in the dentist's chair...