An Old Flame*

Are you the same person that you were ten years ago? I mean, obviously in a lot of ways you are (name, memories, NI number and so on). In some other less obvious ways you... maybe... aren't. Those pink corduroy flares that you thought were a good idea? That evaporated milk habit? That - ew, squick! - that boyfriend?**

If you're wondering why I'm asking, it's because I'm editing my first novel. I wrote it nearly ten years ago, and it's an odd experience coming back to it. I hadn't even read it for years, and so in some ways it was rather exciting. There are lots of adverbs (sadly) but also some rather fun scenes, and some plot twists I genuinely hadn't remembered. It needs work but I think it could be quite good, if I do the right things to it. And the right things aren't the opaque, totally mysterious impossibilities that they are for my most recent magnum opus, thank God, they are actual definite changes that I can do. This is all good. 

But - as I say - it's odd. It's odd because my writing voice has changed, and I'm trying to work out how much I should go with my old one and how much I've got better. It's odd because the sort of book I write now isn't the sort of book I wrote then, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write that sort of book. It's odd because I recognise myself and I recognise the differences, the way I've developed as a writer and as a person.

It's oddest of all, I think, because it's a love story.*** It was my first love story. 

People talk about how first novels are autobiographical (and then often go on to say that they're rubbish because they're autobiographical). That's not true, obviously, because loads of people write novels without ever writing anything recognisably autobiographical. But in a way it is true: your first novel is the one you've waited your whole life to write. It's the one, I think, where the purest expression of yourself comes out. You're less guarded, less ambitious, less driven by career moves or vanity. Not to mention that every time you write a book, you narrow down the possibilities for your next one - so the first, the first... It's not the best. But sometimes it's the most yours. 

And so... my love story. It's making me feel the way I did ten years ago. I was in love with my character then, and I'm still in love with him. I have to be, or I couldn't write the book. But now... I don't know. It makes me feel... off-balance. Haunted. Maybe slightly unfaithful. Like a perfect lover from the past has walked in and expects me to love him as much as ever. And I do.  

We'll see. But right now, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only four chapters in. But I can't help thinking, maybe I've cracked it. Maybe that's the trick of happy editing: leave the book for a decade.   

* I love this metaphor. Especially as the character in question is called Ash. 

** This is a joke. I didn't have a boyfriend ten years ago. And not having a boyfriend is never a bad choice.

*** Slashy?! Of course it's slashy. 

A quick update.

This may not mean anything to anyone who didn't follow the original soul-searching about Come The Revolution a while ago, but to anyone who did and remembers vaguely what I was on about - I seem to have won the fight. Give or take a few explicit details in the sex-scenes, which I can live with. I love my editor.

I thought about making this post less mysterious, but if I did that I would have to kill you. And the Internet is a very populous place...

In other news, I am in She Stoops To Conquer at my local theatre next week (wigs, corsets, West Country accents, lots and lots of knob gags), am recovering (I hope) from a cold, doing well on my New Year's Resolutions (except for the one about punctuation), and haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey yet. (One of my friends is going to lend it to me. I suspect that as a big fan of The Story of O I will be disappointed. But watch this space. It strikes me as the sort of thing I might want to blog about.)

Anyway. Right now, my main feeling is: hurrah!

On a lighter note...

The last couple of times I blogged, it was a bit angsty. The problem hasn't gone away, but I'm determined not to worry about it until it raises its ugly head again, so for the moment all is relatively serene in the Collins household. (Unless someone asks me how the writing is going, in which case they are almost literally knocked backwards by a gale of ranting. But people are rapidly learning not to ask...)

And yesterday I spoke to my lovely hopefully-soon-to-be-agent (don't worry if you're getting confused about how many agents/editors I have - it doesn't really make any difference to this story) and she really made me laugh. Partly because of what she was telling me about my book - I was making notes, and one of them says, and I am not making this up, 'try to write good prose' - and partly because she said, 'You know that Mitchell and Webb sketch, where one of them is an editor and keeps saying, "How about doing like this? Well, not like this, obviously, but maybe a bit like this - well, not really like this, but..."?' 

But mainly because she said that when her assistant put Edward Leigh onto her Kindle to read it, she accidentally loaded the Word document with tracked changes.

Now. I didn't know this. But apparently when that happens the Kindle isn't equipped to deal with it. So it loads everything, original and final versions combined - so all the deleted bits, all the new bits, all the comments - without any kind of formatting or signposting... I.e., in this case, all the cut 10,000 words and the new 15,000 words. Not to mention the occasional moment where I'd lost my temper and put in a note-to-self like (and I quote) 'Yes, but where the hell is the PLOT?!'. 

Apparently, the assistant, when asked her opinion, said, 'I'm enjoying it, but the narrator does seem to do a lot of things... well, twice.'

It reminded me of the time I listened to Mozart's Requiem for the first time*. It was on vinyl, and I put the turntable on the wrong speed. I told my parents I thought it was brilliant but... maybe a bit high-pitched. 

* I am not going to tell you how old I was. Suffice it to say that I was at secondary school - old enough, you might think, to realise that the music was over in roughly 3/4 of the time one might have anticipated.

Done. Almost.

I thought about just leaving this blog post as the title on its own, because it just about sums up everything I have to say. But that seemed a bit... stingy. Oh, by the way, I haven't had much sleep. So don't expect the right words in the right places or anything. (Or rather, as I typed that originally, "don't expect the right words inntb eh righy placex". Which, coincidentally, is one of my favourite Basque proverbs.)

I don't know if you've seen the film 28 Days Later. It's not one of my top ten... but there's a moment when the hero's making his way through the apocalypse-torn, disease-ridden world and he goes into a church and up some stairs, and the camera focuses on some graffiti: NIGH, it says, in huge spray-painted letters. And then the shot pans up, and it says above that, FUCKING. And then EXTREMELY. It takes longer than you think to get to THE END IS...

So my edits were - OK, are, so much for having finished, I've got to start again at the beginning now - a bit like that. Last week I worked really bloody hard (up at six, worked till four, started again after dinner, till midnight) thinking that that day I would get there. It wasn't till yesterday this morning, at ten past three, that I finally wrote the last sentence. I was too tired even to feel particularly triumphant. But now I have a new draft. Not the final draft. Probably not even close. But those problems, which seemed like a brick wall, did have handholds, after all. I'm not sure that, having climbed up, I won't have to inch my way painstakingly back down again and find another route - but right now I can take a breather, hoping I'm on the right track.

Sleep. Read. Do some laundry.

I did tell my agent that she'd have the MS by the end of the week, though. So tomorrow I will be back to work. No doubt, this time tomorrow, I will be staring helplessly at my computer screen and wondering if I could just cut straight to the middle of the book. Actually - there's a thought...

That last sentence probably won't be the real, final, actual last sentence. But the end is extremely fucking nigh.

Editing. Still.

I refuse to get into the habit of starting every blog post with an apology for not blogging more, because that way madness lies... but, er, well. Sorry. I should blog more. I suck.

Basically, this is because I'm still editing. And the editing is weighing so heavily on me that if I do anything else I feel guilty. Including blogging. Right now, though, I'm on my lunch hour (ha! who'm I trying to kid? my lunch hours) and facebook was looking boring and googling myself wasn't fruitful and the BBC iPlayer wasn't showing anyth-- wait, I'm giving away far too much, here. I am a hard-working writer, honest.

Anyway, here we go. Hello. Long time no see... :)

I was hoping to get a new draft of Edward Leigh to my agent last week, for the 1st of February. I did actually think I could do that, right up until the 30th or so of January, when it dawned on me that I'd only got halfway through and most of the work is in the second half. I've never missed a writing deadline before, and it came as a bit of a shock. The thing is, I thought I had it sorted. In January I'd sat down and more or less told myself what I needed to do, scenes I needed to add or delete and so on. Then all I had to do was just implement my notes and All Would Be Well.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? Yes, it was the "more or less".

So there are a few problems with that rosy idea of editing. Firstly, edits, like a novel, are only meaningful once you've written them. They will always work in theory. It's only when you're writing them that you realise that there's a glitch or a bug or whatever. (In my case, MAJOR PLOT POINTS which have been ENTIRELY FORGOTTEN. Oops.) And secondly, "just adding or deleting scenes" is like saying "just writing a novel". Today I've written more than a thousand words from scratch, which in a first draft situation would be a good day's work. But according to my (and I do not want to admit that it's even slightly optimistic) schedule, I have another fifty pages to get through this afternoon. And another hundred tomorrow. Wish me luck.

It's like toothpaste. You look at the nearly empty tube and think, oh, not much there, better buy some more. But then, as you squeeze, the toothpaste builds up until by the time you've rolled the tube up halfway you realise there's a bloody sight more toothpaste than you'd bargained for. (OK, so that metaphor would work better if toothpaste was more of a burdensome, negative thing. Probably not many people find out they've got more toothpaste than they realised and feel utterly daunted and overwhelmed. Although if you do, let me say that I know exactly how you feel, because toothpaste - well, it can be so like editing...)  

Or rather it's like a machine. You think it's just a question of changing a few cogs and then you realise that a) now the whole balance of the thing has gone and there's a lot more recalibration to do and b) it's still not going to work after that and you don't know why.

Sigh.

Actually, I think it is advancing. I might get it done by next week. I really hope so, because I'm dying to do some reading and writing and fiddling and thinking and you know, writerly stuff*, without feeling guilty. Then again - anyone else find themselves editing and gradually starting to think, hang on, I think I'm making this worse? Those moments when there wasn't enough of a particular character, so you take them out entirely, or you suddenly realise you've cut the very part your agent liked so much, or... wait, this is getting too depressing. Enough - if you know what I mean you know what I mean.

On the plus side, it will be finished one day. I hope. And then we will look back and laugh. Ho ho.

And The Broken Road came out this week - hurrah! - and has already had a lovely review on bookbag.

And the salt and pepper pots are safely back at King's College.** (I assume. I didn't phone to ask.)

You lose some, you win some.


* AKA sleeping.
** Although sorry, Elin, those Maltesers may never return to their rightful home...

Of deadlines, editing, wading through treacle, and the relative easiness of the latter.

So. It's just as well "write more blog posts" wasn't one of my New Year's resolutions. It's better not to fail spectacularly at too many things at once...*

At the moment I am editing.

More precisely, I am trying to edit. This week I have actually done some work, i.e. cutting and rewriting, which is an improvement on last week, but that putative deadline of 1st of February - oh, I was so pleased to have an actual deadline like a real writer! - is looking less and less achievable. Especially since the Australian Open is NOT BEING SHOWN ON THE BBC, which means I have no reason to stay at my computer, idly editing in the changes of ends... (If you think that's a joke, by the way, sorry, it isn't. I was genuinely relying on the motivational power of watching BBC Sport, with Word open in a different window. Please don't laugh.)

I don't know why it's so hard, but it really is. Maybe because I've just got another idea for a novel, or rather an idea for another novel, and all I want is to start writing that... or because I'm trying to do something new every week, which is quite exciting but rather distracting, or because I'm feeling strangely domesticated and would happily spend a lot of time cooking. As I say, I don't know. It's not even that I think the book is bad. I think it's fine. Maybe it's just that it's not the sort of book I feel like reading right now.

It doesn't matter. The crucial thing is that it's difficult, but it's advancing. I think I have tentatively decided how to solve my problems - ha! note the "tentative" - and now all I have to do is Just Do It. (To coin a phrase. Thank you, Nike.) As someone rather vulgarly and brilliantly says in this relevant blog post, "That story isn't going to unfuck itself." Well, quite.

So I suppose I should be optimistic. I might hit the deadline. You never know.

Then again, I should be working on it now. Right now.


* If you're interested: out of my 12 New Year's resolutions, I have so far kept 6 (more or less); 3 of them are unkept as yet, but since I regard myself as having until the end of next December to keep them I'm not being too hard on myself; and I have failed miserably so far at the remaining 3 of them. I'm not going to specify which are which. :)