5/11/2011 Exercise booksYesterday morning, while exercising - I always have ideas while I'm exercising, it must be the accelerated pumping of blood to the brain - I thought about the opening chapters of my first book, "I Am a Muse".
The end of the year is fast approaching now, and I have set myself a deadline. As no agent/publisher has so far been interested in my book, I will publish it myself in 2012. Recently, because I haven't had time to do a lot of work on my second book, I have found myself thinking about the first one more and more. There is a section in there I just KNOW I have to work on - basically, I might have to add a scene to the book. Then there's the tricky question of the opening chapters. With hindsight, the first part might be a little too slow for it to kick off the book properly, and I have spent a bit of time playing around with the first few chapters. I now have re-organised them so as to have the more dynamic, urban London scenes straight from the beginning, then the action switches to Cornwall where we meet the other main character of the novel before travelling back to London and resume the story where we had left it a few pages back. I will need to go back properly to "I Am a Muse" in the forthcoming weeks. I need to re-read it again and decide whether to press ahead with writing the "missing" scene or not. Is it really missing? Would it change a lot of things plot-wise? This is the beauty of writing: I don't really know myself and I am writing the bloody thing! In other news, I am trying to get back to "The Book of Thoth". I have been finding it difficult to get back into the story after such a long time, but I am quite satisfied with the re-reading of the last few chapters and the corrections I have made so far on the first draft. Now I need to take the story forward. 3/11/2011 Whitemoor HallI have just found a very atmospheric picture of Allerton Park, the house I am using as a model for Whitemoor Hall, the country house where most of the action in The Book of Thoth is set. I have been staring at pictures of this for hours on end for the past nine months or so and it's not over yet! No writing today I'm afraid, but going over (and correcting) the last 30 pages I wrote before my holidays so I know where to start tomorrow morning... Allerton Park has also been the subject for some great B&W photos by Simon Marsden. It is while reading Mr Marsden's wonderful book "This Spectred Isle" that I found the castle and decided to make it my main setting. I have found quite a few things in there that I might use in the book... I have used Kitty's Steps in Devon, for exemple, and renamed it The Wise Man's Spring...
12/10/2011 Eine Grosse Plot!This really made me laugh, because it's exactly where I'm at with The Book of Thoth... It's bloody complicated and the background story took me a good month to write! Yesterday, I re-read it and thought I was completely mad for having thought out something like that.
Today is my last day on the book for quite a while. I am going away to a place where there is no computer, Internet, etc. This is entirely voluntary, you understand. I NEED NATURE. Dorset, here I come! Then when I come back, I will be working on several assignments for my (freelance) day job all at the same time; as usual, after some months of not having a lot of work - which is completely fine as it allows me to get on with the book at the detriment of my forlorn looking bank account - they all come in in quick succession, all to be completed at the same time. So it will be long days and weekends without writing one line... I will still try and scribble bits and pieces here and there as prompts/ideas... 4/10/2011 The Book of Thoth - draft one... 56,000 words of the first draft of The Book of Thoth have now been written, and I haven't reached the end of the first half yet.
This manuscript has started to look like a seriously bloated monster. I can already think about one thousand things to review, amend, research, tweak, improve, move, scrap, add... My first novel "I Am a Muse" was just child's play compared to this one! 29/9/2011 The research journeyI have been doing quite a lot of research these past few days for my second book, "The Book of Thoth".
It is really exciting, because you just go from one thing to the other in no particular order and you keep taking notes. I don't know about other writers, but I actually get even more ideas when I do research after stumbling across some bits of info I think would be quite good to use somewhere in the book... So over the past few days, it's kind of gone thus: Favourite cigarette brands in the 1920s Gramophones Planispheric astrolabe Abortion in the 1920s Electricity and electrification in the 1920s Edith Wharton Midnight bath and other antics in the Roaring Twenties The history of vegetarianism George Bernard Shaw was an outspoken vegetarian! Oh, look! G. B. Shaw received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, just when my book starts! I have to put it in there... His wife Charlotte really was a strange woman... How do you say "family" in Egyptian? Answer: Makhaut. Sounds good. Let's use it! Oops, end up on the bonkers rambling website of a God botherer waffling on about the conspiracy theory of the Illuminati. Oh, it is quite interesting, even though it's been written by a religious nutter There's a wikipedia link explaining the conspiracy theory HERE The Victorian dining-room Decorative plaster mouldings in the Victorian house There! That was rather fun, wasn't it? 21/9/2011 Hilary Mantel on the Culture ShowIf you like books and literature and if you, like me, are fascinated by writers, their inspiration, the way they work, why they write, then do watch the Culture show special with Hilary Mantel (only 3 days to go HERE).
I admit that I have only read Beyond Black, but her other books have been on my "to read" list for quite a while now, and I have read one or two in-depth articles about her. It was a fascinating and very touching portrait of an incredibly sensitive, imaginative, intense person. I found myself in a few things, for example the way writing has rescued her, how it's allowed her to carry on living. This is the way I have always felt about writing and books: if everything else goes wrong, I'll always have them. 20/9/2011 Downton Abbey, series 2Yesterday evening, we finally sat down to watch the first episode of the second series of Downton Abbey. I usually don't do series, apart from (maximum) 3 or 4 parts dramas.
But I loved the first series and whatever the trendies think about it, I'm absolutely not ashamed of it! I am particularly interested in this second series as it deals with the First World War and its effect on the people back home, whatever their social background. Much like the first series, the music, the sets, the props and the costumes are absolutely splendid. The actors are very good as well, and even though some social aspects appear to have been ironed out - I am still convinced upstairs and downstairs can't possibly have been that close and tolerant to each other - I have enjoyed each and every episode. I am not a big romantic but couldn't help feeling a big knot in my throat when Lady Mary watched the train leave the station, taking away the love of her life and bringing him to the slaughter of the trenches. It is difficult to imagine with our 21st century minds what it must have been like, and I just imagined the chattering pain it would cause me if I had been standing on that platform with the love of my life on that train. Once the programme had finished, we fell into a big conversation about the way people coped at the time, courage, bravery, dissent, fear, the psychological and physical scars of the war, etc. I do hope I will manage to recapture this when needed in "The Book of Thoth", even though I would only scratch the surface. I am in the middle of writing my second novel (TBoT) and it is set a few years after the end of WW1 - in 1925 to be precise - and even though this will not be the central theme of the novel, the shadow of the Great War is everywhere and permeates the very fabric of the house and the tight knit group of people who live on the (fictional) Whitemoor estate and the village nearby. It will therefore be interesting for me to see how Julian Fellowes has treated the intricacies of personal relationships on such a heavy national and international background. I have my very own WW1 expert here at home. I will make sure he provides me with the details I need and he will guide me in my work in order to make sure it is as accurate as possible. Because there are some mythical and supernatural elements in my novel, I believe it would be good to make the rest as believable as possible! 19/9/2011 CountdownJust opened the word document on which is stored the first draft of my second novel, "The Book of Thoth": 48,000 words!
And let me tell you that I'm far from finished! A little more than four thousand words in three days and counting! That's more like it!
The story of "The Book of Thoth" is developing... I am now at one of the crucial moments in the novel, when the central character realises that he might not be in the decade he thought he was... I am finding it extremely difficult to do this without making the whole time travel thing sound grotesque ... Maybe it will be... There's always the second and third draft to remedy that. |
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