I’ve been a bit quiet, both here and on Twitter/Facebook this last week, mainly because I’ve been trying to get Book #3 off the ground (Book #2 being October’s short story collection, which I will be boring you senseless about in due course). As with all these things, it’s a question of finding a project that seems worthwhile committing a sizeable portion of my writing time to – which is exactly the same problem that faced me before I got properly stuck into Mrs Darcy.
Anyway, last year I did have quite a neat idea for a new novel – a kind of literary sci-fi-ish sort of thing – and I duly started writing it. Unfortunately, what with all the running around (actual and virtual) promoting Mrs Darcy, I got interrupted, with the result that when I came back to it towards the end of last year, I found that I’d lost momentum.
So I did what any normal writer would do and reanimated a completely different project instead. This is a non-fiction thing (no clues yet, sorry) that I started work on several years ago and then dropped because I couldn’t see how to pull it all together. What’s interesting is that, having completed a novel now, I’ve got a much clearer idea of how to structure a narrative and the new version is (to my mind, at least) several thousand orders of magnitude better.
Ironically, having got stuck back into this project, I then found that the other one suddenly unblocked itself, so it looks like I’m going to be working on both simultaneously for the time being. I’m quite cool with this, because I can use each one as a distraction from the other – provided, that is, I don’t come up with a third project to take my eye off the ball, such as a sequel to Mrs Darcy.
Incidentally, if anyone out there has read Mrs Darcy and desperately wants a sequel, this is what you need to do:
1) Make sure you’ve “Liked” Mrs Darcy’s Facebook page.
2) Tell ALL your friends to go out and (a) buy it and (b) “Like” the Facebook page.
3) Give it an utterly brilliant a searingly honest review on Amazon.
And speaking of reviews, I’ve been catching up with my reading lately, and I really must get around to putting up some reviews myself. Wow, there aren’t half some wonderful books out there…