Tuesday 18 January 2011

keep up, keep up!

This is an exhortation to self, not you.

1. Keen viewers will note from the list of better blogs than this over there on the right that I have been locked in mortal combat with one of my many Nemeses, Jenny Davidson. I started my novel before her, but was very busy last December and so was only 500 words per day for a chunk. She remorselessly caught up with me for a while. Since Christmas, I have been staying a thousand or two words ahead of her. Except you will not have noticed, because I haven't mentioned it. Anyway, I have 50,000+ words of a first draft. I stopped today and am going to do an audit before writing the denouement and adding in the last voice, during which I will discover, among many other terrible things, dozens of bolded notes saying: 'check this with an expert you idiot'.

2. When you are writing a historical novel (by some definition) featuring an almost-unknown protagonist who wrote a not-well-known book about an obscure subject, it gives you a pause when someone else has borrowed it from the British Library.

3. Bookswap, Windsor Firestation, Thursday. I'll be co-hosting with Scott Pack. Authors are Emma Townshend and Elizabeth Buchan. I have very nearly finished both of their books.

4. Tall Tales, next Thursday. As per usual. Marie and I are two-thirds of the way through Warhorses of Letters, episode 5. Some people will like this news.

2 comments:

Jenny Davidson said...

MORTAL KOMBAT.....

You are more discreet than I! Good luck with audit and denouement...

Robert Hudson said...

My book is almost precisely the same length as yours, and I reckon I have almost precisely the same amount to go. I very nearly pushed on to the end - I do know what happens - but I started planning tomorrow's bit and I just thought: hang on, I THINK this is right, but let's make sure. I've written it one voice at a time, and several span the book's duration, so it's not as if it won't need an audit anyway to deal with coherence and repetition...

(By which I mean, yes, Mortal Kombat. You also join Salman Rushdie as a Nemesis of Marie Phillips in the field of Gods in Modern Cities. And I write with Marie. It's almost like a blood feud, the more I think of it.)