At last, I started the second part of The Book of Thoth yesterday afternoon, albeit very, very slowly... The spell has been broken and one month later, I now need to get back into it inside my head... This is why Part 1 had gone so well: I had been spending about a month or so planning the book, typing up the background story, defining the characters, even drawing a little map of the estate.

So when I started on the actual writing, my head was full of the book, with several scenes already playing in my mind.

I can only write while "emerged" in my story. I cannot do one hour here and there, I cannot be doing something else and then get onto the book and write 1,000 in one go before returning to something else. I need complete silence, complete peace of mind, I need my head to be empty of everything else... This is not easy to achieve, especially as I have been very busy doing a multitude of other things...

I have also been slacking as far as I Am a Muse is concerned. I need to start sending the MSS to some more literary agents, but my ink cartridge is almost empty and I can only buy it online... Which I keep postponing all the time. I wish more of those agencies would accept electronic files instead of requiring printed documents... It's the bloody 21st century after all!

Still haven't gone back to the book. This is starting to annoy me big time. It's not avoidance activity... It's just life, things to do, to sort out...

Rot!

Reading: "Footsteps in the Dark" by Georgette Heyer, a distincively different style from the Gothic splendour of Peter Arckroyd's "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein".

For the past 10 days or so, I have been leaning about the ins and outs of business generation by young people in the Middle-East... I am now a champion of corporate-speech in both English and French...

A few more days and it's over...

I can't wait to get started on the Book of Thoth again! There's a tenuous link between my freelance work and my writing, though: the book is partly about ancient Egyptian Gods!

There will be no book updates for a while, as I am working on the checking /rewriting of some website content - ironically it's for Qatar, hope the unrest won't start there until I get my invoice paid! :-)
This is the kind of job that tests my French, which has improved a lot for the past year. I write, speak and think in English these days, and my French had gone so rusty!

I am planning on scribbling a little bit for the book of Thoth this weekend though, I need to get Part 2 started. I already have the first line:
"At 27, Adam Tuckfield was contemplating the smouldering ruins of his life..."

Oh, yes!


This is Woolecombe beach. Bliss.
I just wish I had stayed longer. It is wonderful for inspiration. The quiet, the space, the horizon...

I was thinking that I would love "The Book of Thoth" to be an old-fashioned illustrated book, as it is so visually led: I have posted pictures of some elements I am using in the book and I have drawn a map of the estate - not finished yet! I have also sketched some of the characters. I have a very precise idea of what they look like, and what they wear. The only individual that is not fully formed yet is the young man who ends up going back in time to 1925. I will start writing about him in Part 2 - which I will be starting next week. So I will probably know more about him then!

Then I watched the Beauty of Books - the one about illustrated books - two days ago and it confirmed all of the above! You never know, it might happen one day.
"The Book of Thoth: an illustrated book"!

I am extremely pleased as the Book of Thoth is completely on schedule. My aim was to finish off Part 1 (set in 1924 and mostly through the eyes of an 11 year-old boy!) by the end of this week and I have indeed completed it.

Today is for general revisions (of course, this is not the final version as I am only writing draft 1 of the novel at the moment).
I am pretty sure I will have to cut some of it though, as I already have 9,500 words... and it's only Part 1!

I am having a lot of fun writing this; it is so very different from I Am a Muse. I am allowing myself more artistic license and let my imagination guide me as I write, much more than with the previous book.

Next week, I will start on Part 2, which is set in 2011...

I have enjoyed Sebastian Faulks' Faulks on Fiction immensely... It reminded me that I grew up learning about the world through books...

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. Fascinating.