Day One
Added on 08 November 2007
It's time to get to work on a new book. I do this to a truncated timescale where as I act as editor and publisher and therefore don't have anyone to answer to. Give myself a tight deadline to make sure I sit down and get on with it, because I have no one else telling me to do it. The new book is called Lost in Juarez, and so far it has gone through a tortured process, and I've not really started writing it yet.It began as an idea about a guy writing an Animal Farm-esque diatribe against the government, on how they abuse civil liberties and human rights in the name of freedom. A political thriller. That was the idea, and I saw it as a tv series maybe. I liked the main character having a Bob Dylan addiction and came up with the title Lost In Juarez, which comes from the first line of 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues'...'When you're lost in the rain in Juarez when it's Easter time too...'
Then, when trying to decide on a novel to release next year alongside the last Barney, I thought I'd re-write 21 Years On The Back Of Dixie Klondyke's Spanish Guitar, which I'd published on-line at one time. And I thought the title Lost In Juarez and the main character's Dylan addiction would be a perfect fit, so I transferred those two ideas, moved them over to my old crime novel and started re-writing the old novel under its new guise.
Three weeks in and I realise I hate it. Don't like the central character, don't like the genuinely nasty serial killer - as opposed to the serial killers in Barney Thomson books who are a bit daft and just so happen to murder people every now and again - and didn't like writing a police procedural. So, three weeks in and I'm in crisis. Having had a cover designed and written up the blurb etc, I've now decided to completely change tack. I'm going to ditch the old novel and go back to my original political thriller idea for Lost in Juarez, will push the release date back a little to give myself more time, and will ultimately aim to make the book fairly short. It will help me get it down in time, and most books benefit from brevity, something I've forgotten in the past.
So, despite the fact that I've been working on it for three weeks now, since I've binned everything I've done so far and am now starting work on a completely new Lost In Juarez, this is, I believe, Day One.
Haven't done much so far except scribbled a page of background...