March 3rd 2017: In the last couple of days I’ve found it hard to get back into my stride, and the horrible thought passed through my mind that I might be losing interest in the novel. But that isn’t true; I know exactly what I am trying to do and where I’m heading with it. In the past, when I’ve started novels there was always the chance that I would abandon them because I didn’t really know what I was doing. And then there’s the other fact that I can’t deny which is that I can very rarely get right to the end of other people’s novels… no tolerance perhaps, no kindness, an awareness that time is precious and so what you do with it has to be excellent including the writers that you read….?
Today, I made some good headway. I wrote 2,656 words. It took about three quarters of the day, but I’ve moved into chapter nine and I’ve realised that if I have to ‘genre-ise’ the book it will be something like a Gothic mystery novel. Things are coming together, although I spend a bit of time each day hunting through my Child Cephalina notebook to find certain details that I’ve gleaned through my research. What I’m going to try to do when I’ve finished this first draft, is to edit in across the chapters interesting bits and pieces that I’ve found so I end up with another layer of detail. So today, I am pleased with myself, but I have got freezing feet to deal with.
