It feels like a naughty treat…
It feels like I have been editing forever!
Black Hare Valley Book One: 1996 is out, and Book Two: 1966 is ready to go once the front cover is finalised. Book Three: 2026 has only just come back from my editor, and Book Four: I Remain is waiting patiently for its turn… But whenever I can’t work on that series, there is The Dark Finds You trilogy to edit. Part Two is ready for my editor but that will obviously have to wait until after the Black Hare Valley series is done, and I just recently finished a third draft of Part Three. As an aside, Part Three is the one I am less sure about and I’m curious to know what my editor thinks of it in time!
I will be getting to the Book 3: 2026 edits really soon but in the meantime I’ve been having a much needed break from endless editing. Which means the tantalising prospect of new writing!
God, I miss new writing….
Nothing beats that feeling of writing ‘chapter one’ on a fresh new page and letting the words flow! Of course, there will be a plan, a loose plot, planned scenes, research on location and character bios all ready to go and chances are they’ve been sat waiting for years! I absolutely adore that feeling of starting a new book and it feels like forever since I’ve experienced it.
So, while the two series mentioned above are waiting, I can place my attentions on two writing projects that have been hovering in the background. Neither project really means brand new writing, however…
First up and the one I have prioritised, is the rewrite of The 7th Child, a family mystery I wrote a messy first draft of over a year ago. I loved the plot, the location and the characters, but something felt off about the narration. I had chosen to recount the present day events through first person point of view of one character, while the past scenes were from multiple character points of view and in third person…. I just didn’t like it at the end, in fact I hated it! It took me a while to figure out a better way to tell the story and I decided doing the whole thing in first person with an unreliable narrator would be better.
I then had second thoughts about that….
I started with a simple read through as I needed to remind myself of what I wrote. I made notes as I went along on possible different ways to structure the book. I decided that it really does need an entire rewrite and change of structure, which is weirdly exciting!
A few days ago I started the big rewrite and I’ve done two chapters so far. It feels like a mix of writing and editing, which I am okay with.
The other project is a book with the working title ‘The Ugly One’. Now this is a book I wrote but never finished when I was just nineteen. In recent years the characters started to talk to me again and I had new ideas about how to rewrite it, as sadly I lost the original hand-written manuscript. For some strange reason I have only been letting myself write this book on a Saturday evening after a glass of wine… Don’t ask me why. A lot of it is set in the 90s so perhaps a glass of wine or two and listening to nostalgic tracks helps put me back there! It’s a bit of an experiment in many ways, this one. I will keep writing chapters once a week unless I get stuck.
But The 7th Child rewrite will take priority and I’ll keep you updated on how it goes!
