Normally when I return to this blog after so long away it is with a profound feeling of guilt. Not this time. I have been sooooo busy! Honestly! Some of it is the day job. For a variety of reasons, we are shorthanded at work, so that’s been taking up even more of my time than it usually does.
Then there is the small matter of revising D______. Last time we were here, I had just finished the first draft. Since then, it has gone through two more iterations and is now in the hands of my agent, the estimable Brady, who will endeavor to make it better before I hand it over to my editor for her to make it better before it’s finally allowed out into the world.
The revision process for D_______ has been . . . interesting. Even with a week’s writing retreat at Moniack Mhor (which is as stunning in summer as it is stark in winter), everything seemed to go more slowly. In the end, I found myself eating up more and more family time just to keep my head above water. Worst of all, I had to push back my delivery date. Now, asking for more time is quite normal in publishing, where deadlines are, um, flexible. But I’m a lawyer at heart. Asking for an extension to a previously agreed schedule is, quite simply, excruciating.
As for the underlying cause of these tribulations, I am far from sure. On my worst days, I worry that D________ is simply no good and that I have been applying endless amounts of lipstick to a literary pig. On my middling days, I berate myself for being overly ambitious and reaching beyond my abilities to tell a story. And on my OK days, I figure that D______ is simply a new frontier for me – part psychological thriller, part noir in a sci-fi hull – so getting it right is bound to be challenging.
But mainly I worry that it’s no good.
A couple of months ago, I attended a launch event for this year’s Bloody Scotland crime festival, to which I have been lucky enough to be invited. Linwood Barclay, the great Canadian thriller writer, was on stage. In discussing his writing process, he likened sending out his finished manuscript to waiting for someone to mark his exams without the slightest sense of how well or badly he’d done. For the first time in my writing life, I know exactly how he feels.
Time to start work on something else. Take my mind off it.