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:
MORTAL KOMBAT.....
You are more discreet than I! Good luck with audit and denouement...
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.)
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