Progress

Happy New Year.

I don’t tend to write much over Christmas; I always find it a time for generating new ideas or doing the writing-tasks-that-aren’t-writing, like submissions or editing or planning. And looking back at old stuff to see if it can be resurrected (a fun task, but the answer is always “no”).

Consequently, the Robin Hood novel has been submitted to an agency, a (new) short story entered for a competition. Most likely nothing will come of either, but at least it feels like I’m doing something.

I’m also going to set myself a number of targets every month in 2018. This can include a number of pages to write in the novel, define what needs done to the gamebook, or lining up correspondence etc. to support further (fruitless) submissions of Robin Hood.

I’ve also reached a natural break in the fantasy novel. I think it’s about 2/3 finished, so I’m re-reading what I’ve written so far with an eye to consistency and rhythm: what scenes work well in which order, which scenes are superfluous and which new scenes need written. Watching a load of French New Wave films recently has been fascinating for many reasons, not least in the way they draw attention to the film editor’s art.

As for fixing inconsistencies and replacing placeholder names, I’ll not worry about them until later unless they’re so obvious they impede comprehension. Fixes at the level of the sentence – or the individual word – can wait until much (much) later.

It looks like this novel will consist of 5 parts (hey, it worked for Shakespeare*), and I’ve written to the end of Part 3. Now I face a decision. Part 2 is stylistically very different from the rest of the novel. Do I write Part 4 in the same way? Would repeating the use of the effect I employed there weaken the impact of Part 2, or would it do the opposite and help to create a symmetry to the book’s overall form? I’m leaning towards the latter.

*Yes, I know the division of Renaissance plays into a 5-act structure is a later editorial convention.