Another Week Off
Added on 09 February 2008
Late on a Saturday night. School mid-term break is about to start, which means work on Lost In Juarez comes to a crashing halt. Maybe not a bad thing. I've done a tremendous amount in the last five weeks and the break won't do any harm. I'm getting to the thriller/action end of the manuscript. The chases and the hiding in cupboards and the police etc. I'm not used to writing that kind of stuff, so suddenly it seems like hard work.I usually find it easier to write dialogue, but I'm in the middle of a fairly long sequence where the hero is on his own, so it is all prose, describing actions and thoughts. I ended up having him have a (one-sided) conversation with a Bob Dylan fridge magnet. I began wondering if it might be worthwhile if Bob could answer back. Which has got me into thinking of doing a Play It Again, Sam kind of an idea. But then, I couldn't do it with Dylan because he's still got that whole being-alive thing going on. The chances of him ever discovering that Lost in Juarez even exists are about one in a gazillion, but if he did he might not be very excited by appearing in it. Which led me to think that perhaps I should drop Bob, and have Lake Weston addicted to George Harrison or Elvis or Hoagy Carmichael. However, having given this a reasonable amount of thought, I'm probably going to stick with Bob, and therefore any conversations Weston has with him, which won't be many, will be one-sided and unproductive.
Despite the work of the last five weeks, I'm probably not as close to the end as I was hoping to be at this stage, but it's coming on ok. I've actually written as many words as I aimed to have done up to this point - except yesterday, when the dark mood that had descended mid-week finally took its toll and my imagination was blackly bludgeoned into submission - but am not as far progressed into the story as I expected to be for having written this amount. Which means the book is going to be longer than originally intended, or I'm going to be doing a lot of editing of what's already been written. It'll be good to have the choice when it comes to it.
For now a week of swimming, bowling, pizza and sleepovers has just begun, so that Monday 18th should see me desperate to get back to the Mac to escape the tyranny of (not so) small children.
My NFL cold turkey lasted 2 days, 7 hours and 43 minutes...