Monk Quixote

Hav­ing fin­ished the beta draft. I now wait for feed­back before mak­ing it a bet­ter draft and then… the crush­ing inevitabil­ity of rejec­tion from agent after agent. But we fight on, we do not let the dark lady logic win — no! I’m in the mid­dle of com­plet­ing my  dis­place­ment activ­i­ties top trumps pack:

• Made a list of agents I will approach, ranked, with dif­fer­ent coloured labels;
• Made soup;
• Made a list of soups;
• (Yet to make agent soup, although I here spaghetti is better);
• Done some ironing;
• Done some irony;
• Done some ironic soup (it’s frozen);
• Checked my email about a bil­lion times;
• Tried to dis­tract myself on twit­ter (feels very much like adult tel­ly­tub­bies some­times, only ‘refresh, refresh’ instead of ‘again, again’.;
• Frozen to death in the kitchen. Ok, not actu­ally to death, but to a point approach­ing death, where N is the start­ing point and the end is a point beyond which soup, no mat­ter what it’s ingre­di­ents, can no longer revive you;
• Started sec­ond novel;
• Wor­ried about sec­ond novel’s com­mer­cial poten­tial (or lack thereof). Pon­dered writ­ing novel about soup — or iron­ing. Resolved to call the novel ‘Iron soup’.
• Waited a bit;
• Con­sid­ered mak­ing main char­ac­ter a soup-obsessed ser­ial killer, for maki­mum cookery/crime crossover sales;
• Jig­gled my knees in a really irri­tat­ing man­ner. It’s ok, because there’s only me about. Still very irri­tat­ing though. And I can see my reflec­tion in the glass. Jig­gle piggle;
• Despaired at the sheer bloody num­ber of other authors out there. Per­haps if I can’t out-talent them, I could kill them all. With soup. I could send care parcels to var­i­ous agency author lists con­sist­ing of poi­soned soup. Hmm. Very Agatha Christie. I won­der how long she waited for feedback.

Any­hoo. This post is really a load of old non­sense to keep the blog tick­ing over and to pre­tend to the man who’s been run­ning around paint­ing var­i­ous walls for the past four five hours that I don’t press Apple+R for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that  this draft — pos­si­bly this story — not being ‘the one’. I like bits of it, but there are other bits are con­fused, or dull, or plain wrong. And I’m begin­ning to see this as my ‘friends and fam­ily’ book. But at least I’ve learnt some things along the way:

• A book can be as sim­ple as 35 scenes. That’s not scary at all. 35 writ­ing days. Easy. (Cack­les hys­ter­i­cally as he looks at the cal­en­dar — let’s see, novel #1 over­due by 9 years);
• You can sit in a crowded place and yet be com­pletely alone, as long as you have headphones;
• Don’t turn round in Star­bucks after you’ve been writ­ing for hours or you’ll freak your­self out (one time it felt I was back in a uni­ver­sity sem­i­nar — six tables imme­di­ately behind me all occu­pied by lone typ­ists, but mostly it’s the seething mass of tod­dlers, tired-looking mums and har­rassed staff that are disturbing);
• You don’t have to begin at the begin­ning. But you do have to end at the end;
• Don’t get too attached to your char­ac­ters. They’re not real. They won’t buy you beer. Or make you breakfast;
• Trust your fin­gers. If you start writ­ing a char­ac­ter or scene dif­fer­ently from the one in your head, let it flow — see where it goes first. Don’t rein your­self in too much;
• There should be a lit­tle applet for Scrivener or WP apps that you can load with your own per­sonal cliche list. I used the expres­sion ‘wheezed asth­mat­i­cally’ three times — all of them have since been struck. There are far too many ‘arghs’ and ‘ahas’ as well. And the less said about the MMS and DA homage bits. La la la.

Hurry up peo­ple. Read. *Smile*.

Patience, souphop­per… patience.