A bit of a gap

It is some months now since I posted anything on this blog, not because I have given up on it, but because I have put it on the back burner for a while. I submitted extracts of my historical novel to a Fiction in Progress class at Edinburgh University, and received some encouraging feedback, but it also taught me things I still needed to work on. Part of that had to do with aspects of fiction technique, but also I felt I didn't have a clear narrative thrust. I had chapters that were more like jigsaw pieces in search of a bigger picture to fit into. Also, reading the 19th century novel of the period by James Grant gave me a feeling that I really didn't have his understanding of the period to persist without a great deal of further thought. I didn't want to replicate the ground he had already admirably covered. Historical fiction is not something to take on board lightly.
Instead, I did what some primers will tell you not to do: I had another idea for a quite different novel and I have been working on that over recent months. The primers say that if you start a second novel before finishing your first you will end up with two unfinished novels. That does not seem to be the case so far. In November last year I was going to be away from home for 3 weeks with only tenuous connection to a computer and would have time on my hands. I was intrigued by the American NaNoWriMo project (National Novel Writing Month). It was started about a decade ago by a group of Californians as a challenge to write a 50k novel in the 30 days of the 11th month of the year. Initially I thought it was a mad idea. However, I bought 3 A4 notebooks from Sainsbury's, in lime, purple and aqua, their seasonal colours, and decided to see if I could sketch out an idea for a novel over the month. I worked out that handwriting roughly 6 pages of those notebooks would amount to about 1000 words. I had a scenario and a bunch of characters but no plot. But character is plot, of course. By the end of the month I had about 30k words of a murder mystery story, pretty uncouth, sometimes quite silly, but when I looked over it I felt that I had something I could actually work on. So over succeeding months, despite a nasty bout of shingles, a fascinating two-week trip to China and 3 weeks of rather tedious SQA marking of English close-reading exams, I have now almost got a complete first draft, currently standing at just over 60k words. Only the final 3-4 chapters have to be completed. However bad or good this draft is, it certainly feels like an achievement. No one asked me to write this. No one is waiting to receive it or even wanting to read it. I don't know whether I can revise it into the sort of state that I could think might merit considering possibly - you see the hesitation here - thinking of approaching someone like a publisher, an agent or a more established writer in the same field for an opinion. But it's there. A Scottish murder mystery story set in the present day, but with a historical element - 18th century this time, an easier period to research and one that I knew more about before I started. Heigh ho.