The net is really like having one of the best encyclopedias in the word at your elbow, not counting a friendly sort of librairian, named Google, who is willing to run around and bring back the information for you. Want some details on 17th century church clocks? It’s in the British Museum. Seeking to see if my church tower is really feasible as a design? Well here is a similar one.

Countless material, too much to mention: how did people cope before the Net and Google?

I am busy revising chapter two. There are parts that will need cleaning, tidying, cutting, but this chapter is falling into place, and I am counting that it will give me the voice and impetus to move on through to the first draft of chapter three. And then four…

But not today. Today I must prepare for Kim’s party. Her 9th birthday was actually last Saturday but we’re doing a thing for friends and so forth tomorrow. I have put my foot down—I hope to some effect—saying, no, you are not inviting all your class when we agreed on three people (not counting the other three who will be coming, and Emiline and Nadja. But hopefully the latter will be able to help me stay calm). Then off to prepare party games to occupy them. Wrap pressies and prizes. (Mum, your packet and letter both arrived OK). Do some shopping. Tidy, clean and put everything away where small grubby hands can’t grab at it. Rent a couple of videos just in case. So all this means that I probably won’t be able to work over the weekend either… We’ll see.

After five days of writing three lines a day, and not liking even that… Last night I sat down and wrote three pages (approx 600 words) just like that. It’s filler, not advancing from where I am stuck, but it was a relief to feel the words coming out.

So what is filler?
In this case it was a description of the town of Mouldburton that I felt needed to be used to sceneset before we get to the Police Station. Methinks that this is what is probably what is needed, more filler—if the worst comes comes to the worst, I can always cut it out later—but I believe that I am so obsessed with the plot points that I am forgetting the rest of the story. Which is, when you come down to it, filler.

While I have been dried up in this manner, I have been revising chapter two. As the voice in chapter one is totally different, and is not the voice that I need to cultivate at the moment, I will come back and revise that one latter. So looking at chapter two I realise that I have pages and pages of ‘filler’. It’s needed: to describe a place, set a scene, create a mood and so on. I must not be scared—at least, not yet. I also managed to work in a description of Colin. Generally speaking I don’t like character descriptions, especially books or chapters that start with them. I like my characters to be seen and described through other people’s eyes, and then by how their traits affect what they do and how. This also means that descriptions can be slightly misleading at times, or become clearer as we peel through the layers of different people’s views to get a new idea. So as Colin is the principal narrator I needed to let people see him, but without him describing himself. So I managed to slip that in in a bit of filler.

I have just finished about 24 pages of chapter two. If anything these pages are a little more dense than those of chapter one. This is a rough first draft, and these two chapters are the two that I had the best planned out, almost blow for blow. All the plotpoints are in there. Gramps’ voice has come over fine. Colin sounds right but his interior voice isn’t there yet. And I’m afraid that there is too much description in places—but not of the right things and events. This is all probably in line at this stage so I will panic myself at a later date. I intend to reward myself with a pizza tonight as I feel that this is decent progress. I know I won’t keep it up for a month. But if I get over the first humps and hurdles, then I know that I will get there.
. . . . .
Reading Jonathan Carroll’s “A Child Across the Sky” today. So far, so wonderful—lovely dialogue, lovely non-sequitors, lovely throwaway descriptions. These are getting better as I read them. I will never, ever be able to write something as accomplished as this. Ohhhhhhhhh. But I can’t put it down. Good calm evening in perspective.
Sweet dreams.

Chapter one in the zeroth draft currently takes 25 pages. There are a couple of passages that hold together (yes, at this stage, just a a couple) and these seem tell me where this chapter should go. In fact it is like no other in the book and needs to fell like a saga or Beowulf or similar. I managed to slip in two lines from the Scottish play (relating events outside when Duncan is murdered). This is the feeling that I want to aim for for it. The way that everything plays out here is quite barbaric in places, but it is needed to set the scene, and it sows a lot of important background material for the rest of the story (and anyway, they were barbaric, in a way). The question is, should I do the second draft on this now, or should I move on to the next chapter… Probably move on. As I figure that this will be around 30 chapters, this means I need to write a chapter every two days…

Quick aside: suppose that I do manage to write the zeroth draft in two months. In no way does this mean that the book will be written in that time. Rewriting and revision will probably add at least another four months to the program. I started planning the story in this form back in December at the same time as Juliet, using this to knock out ideas when I was too tired to work on Juliet. Parts of the story (Stone and everything about him and his kind) go back over twenty years. And the Police Inspector has been around for about five years. I shall probably work on Died when I feel this one is getting overflogged. Unless I do something entirely different. I had an idea—and this was really the ghost of an idea—about a King with a very small Kingdom. Something in the vein of Bill for a slightly younger age group.

The French say ‘canicule’ for a heatwave. The strict translation of this in English would be ‘the dog days’, what the French, in turn, call the ‘Indian Summer’: those days at the end of the summer when the long hot days come back. They are called ‘dog days’, the original meaning of ‘canicule’, because at the time Sirius, the dog star, rises and sets with the Sun.
So we are having a minor heatwave. The capacity of the temperature in Paris to quickly soar is rather worrying. It goes from a pleasant 12 degrees to 24 and more overnight. It is as if there is no longer a temperate zone between the two. And once the heat gets inside the flat it is nearly impossible—apart from sleeping in the bath—to get cool.
So between insomnia and heatwaves, my nights are not exactly much fun at the moment.
. . . .
Up to 14 handwritten pages on Pirates, but this isn’t good work. I have got neither the voice nor the rythmn yet. Up to recently I’d have said that sunch a proposition was prevarication. Now, I’d be less inclined. The voice is the way that the story unfolds to your ear. All (good) books have a voice. No, I’ll correct that, all good tales have a voice. The rythmn is just that, just as much in the writing as the speed of the writing. So I plough on.

I forgot to say that I started Pirates the other night. And now with today’s every cloud has a tarnished lining news, that means that I have 2 months clear before me to finish at least the first draft. Currently I am right in the middle of the opening chapter and am wondering if this would be better off as an epic poem rather than an ordinary chapter. Anyway I have written twelve pages of version zero.

What is a page? Stupid question, no? Well, I found when writing Juliet that it was convenient to write on A4 sheets in landscape format, and just write on the left-hand side. This left me the other side of the page for notes, scribbles, corrections etc. And this is what I am doing now. So I suppose that 12 of these pages is worth just 6 ordinary manuscript pages. And ordinary manuscript pages are probably half the size of real life laid out book pages. This then means that I have written 3 pages. Suddenly I don’t feel half as happy as I did before…

What is a version zero? Version one will be the manuscript that I will type in, so version zero is the first draft. I’ll then come back over this and integrate the notes, corrections and changes in order to make version one. I hope that version one will be very close to the finished document. This wasn’t the case for Juliet.

I spent all day yesterday working on Juliet and then Pirates. Juliet, in order to get it finished; Pirates, because I had been pulling at the leash for a while now. Although I’d love to start writing I think that I need some more preparation, so I was writing out lists of info about all my characters: the four who are central to the story, the secondary line of folk, even the ghosts and bit parts. I want to get to know these people…

Around 1 in the morning, I thought I’d reread Juliet. I was surprised to find that the first chapter is not as bad as I thought it was! In fact it was quite good, and I even chuckled in a few places. What’s more, this was in places where I should have which I found encouraging. I will re-read the second chapter tonight and see if I have the same reaction.

Well, as I just revised the synopsis for Juliet I thought that I’d try and write one for Pirates.

This was a pretty amazing experience. I’ll explain why: I have been living with the idea of this story for a couple of months now, even if elements—the character of Stone, for example,—go back twenty years. I have been thinking it through and making notes, some detailed, some just ideas, but today was the first time that I attempted to sit down, pull those together and see if they made a story. They do. A spiffing one with twists, turns and surprises right up to the end, even if I do say so myself. It is a sort of cross between Treasure Island and Peter Pan, so that means that the Jonathan Swift elements have gone. And it’s all a much more a boy’s tale than Juliet which is much more a girl’s tale. (Oh, I’m sure that Kim would like them both, but that’s the way that I see things.)

The other thing that this has is that the plot is a lot simpler without the Y structure like Juliet. It’s also strange because I thought McHarry was the central character and it has turned out to be Colin. This is very nice, but a bit surprising.

Oh frabjous day!

. . . . .

Curious, both Bill and parts of Pirates date from more than 20 years ago. There are also some of Lenny’s adventures from just a bit later. I was thinking that I should get to thinking about Died as that hasn’t had 20 years to distill down to a story, but I had forgotten about Juliet which just came from the image of the horse waiting below the window in the rain. The first provisional title was The Storm Pony. Anyway, currently I have the first 2 chapters of Died very clear in my head (and Esterhaze is a very nasty person) but perhaps I should work on that like Pirates.

And then my great worry… what do I do after that? Oh there is that Dreamcatchers story idea. Perhaps I should also take notes for that…

Or perhaps just bask in the idea of the wonderful synopsis for Pirates for just 10 minutes more…

Yesterday I had two strange experiences. The first was the formal interview required under French law before one can be fired. Surreal wasn’t the word. No, sick was more like it. You are being praised to the heavens to such a degree that it starts becoming suspicious, but you’re still being fired. I think that I would have prefered the treatment of a boss that I heard about from a friend: you were called into an office; he would have his checkbook in front of him—“How much?” was the question. And you collected your papers on the way out.

Then I tried to write a synopsis of Juliet. I consulted about 15 sites through Google. All explained in length how to write a winning synopsis that is guaranteed to sell your book. I imagine that the quality of writing and the actual book should also have some merits, so I took the titles with a small truckload of salt. What I did manage to pull together was a rather sketchy—and at times contradictory—structure and modus operandi. The part that I found the hardest was the idea that the final document should just be one page long. I tried that, it became a blurb, not a synopsis. Yet, all the sample synopses that I found online were about 3-4 pages, so I don’t feel bad about mine being in the same case.

Initially, Juliet has a complicated structure—a ‘Y’ shape. With two stories paralleling each other until they join. During the forks of the Y, events happen on one side and are paralleled on the other. To make things worse from my point of view, initially everything was chronological, but this made practically all the first scenes, rabbit ones and Juliet didn’t get introduced until chapter 2 (when reading this to Kim, she just assumed that Juliet was a rabbit too. Oops! I changed everything to start with Juliet and establish her first). In the synopsis this comes over as choppy. Now, of course, because of all that, I have severe doubts about everything. And it took about 4 draughts to get the beginnings of the current synopsis.

The fact that I’m trying to write the synopsis is actually good news. Thomas, a friend of Ludivine’s, knows the editor in the Children’s division of a reputable British publisher. I must send her over the first three chapters and the synopsis. Now, my reasonable self knows that nothing will come of this except a polite refusal letter in a few months. However, it is nice to know that I will get even that. It also means a slight foot in the door when Pirates (which will be better than Juliet by a magnitude of 10) is finished. And that could be fun. And if that is not the one… well there is always Died.