Hmm. So I have arrived at the stage of life where I have dreams about going on Health and Safety courses about how to handle radioactive material. Whether this is some form of subconscious commentary on my writing abilities I am not sure. It all seemed a bit of a lark in the dream — a training course as classic excuse for getting out of the office. More on this later.
So I’ve spent the last few days trying to edit up God’s Cobbler. I say ‘edit up’ as it’s a little bit like putting meat back on a skeleton. I’m just hoping that it remains a coherent whole and doesn’t become a Frankenfurter of a story. As of yesterday it stood at 13.7k. I suspect by the time I finish this pass (I am like the RAF, strafing my story with adjectives, dropping the odd bomb mot, and generally nuking it from orbit) it will be 17-18k. So definitely treatment sized.
It’s quite difficult writing about Italians. I realised yesterday that I’d written in a character purely based on 5 seconds of screen time for Sophia Loren aged, ooh, 35. And what an ooh age that was. Anyway, with my poor track record for caricature I ended up giving her a crooked nose. So it’s Sophia Loren, aged 35, with a false nose. Hmm. Or now that Catherine has given me the idea elsewhere, perhaps it’s Nigella. The character serves up stew and is a widow.
Curiouser and curiouser. Funny how the brain repackages things.
I’ve been looking at various writing-related websites, wondering how best — if — to unleash the Cobbler on an unsuspecting public. Most of the peer review ones look like really hard work and a bit of a busman’s holiday (ie building fake relationships with people based on the false premise that both of us need each other in order to artificially push some third-party approval rating up a notch. Which is part of the day job). So, Authonomy and the like are being discounted for now. They should change the way the reading aspect works, allowing authors to give credits/kudos back to reviewers for feedback that helps them improve their work. But I guess any of these approval systems is open to exploitation.
In case anyone has managed to get to this para and knows of a good, preferably publisher-backed, submission/review site I’d be grateful. I can’t get the Arvon Friends site to acknowledge I am one, and I got a little cross at completelynovel.com. Can’t remember why. Probably because the founders are disgustingly young. Smile.
Anyhoo. I need to do some marketing. Well, actually, I need to do more writing. I have a little roadmap of creative work stretching ahead of me until the end of June, probably. After which I will start to seriously think about whether I’m in shape to chase agents. I wish there were more of you dear reader, so that I could point to more than the hundreds of empty pages on this blog.
But to do that I need to do some outreach. And right now I simply do not have the time. Speaking of which. 5:30 am. Time for morning pages. See you after the break.
