grahambinns.com

I suppose that I should probably have managed to get more done over these last few days, but I'm satisfied nevertheless.

The plot outline for Muse-that-was is now complete; 83 notecards (or rather Impress slides, but let's not quibble) worth of stuff, which I shall proceed to sort through on Sunday, are the final result.

Although I'm far from done with the thing, I think I can finally see the golden syrup of truth through the molasses of story. At least one subplot has been excised in the note-making, without destroying the rest of the tale (remember that stories are woven, not told; plucking out a plot is akin to plucking a loose thread from a rug - you never quite know what's going to unravel), and in fact parts of the tale have been strengthened as a result, having to stand on their own merit rather than rely on something that never really worked. Also, bar the places where I have notecards but no prose for bits of the story, I've expanded all those NOTES IN CAPS that I left in the manuscript for myself, which is both immensely satisfying and a great relief.

If I can get the second round of edits done by the end of the year I'll be tremendously happy. If I can get copies of a coherent tale out to beta readers early in the new year, I'll be flying.

And novel the second is waiting in the wings, tugging impatiently on the curtains, begging to get in on the act.

Not yet, though.

Tomorrow, Sarah and I are going to see this lot (MySpace link, sorry) at the Manchester Academy, which should be fun (and, beforehand, noodlesdoubleplusgood). The last time I saw them was in Preston in 2000 or thereabouts; I'm reserving judgement on how well they've aged in the meantime.

Okay, I confess, I've not been much with the writing lately. Not because of lack of time - I've had plenty - more because of a lack of motivation.

I'm sick of the sight of the novel formerly known as Muse. I've spent most of November working on writing an outline of the current plot so that I can fix the holes for a final (or mostly final) draft prior to sending it out to beta-readers. I'll be honest with you: I well and truly loathe the the damn thing.

It's not that it's a bad story. There are bits of it that are bad or, at best, need serious work, but that isn't the problem. The story just doesn't have the same spark for me that it did when I set out to write it; it no longer interests me, rather like those Christmas presents that you got as a kid that were the only things able to capture your attention for the week after Christmas, but whose charm wore off quickly thereafter. Reading it through again doesn't excite me as much as it did when I was doing the first pass of edits, and that means that I've been procrastinating more than usual in an attempt to avoid it. (On the upside, though, my bass playing has come on in leaps and bounds.)

Throughout all this, and bearing in mind I'm still hoping to get the outline finished in time for the last week of November, during which I have four well-deserved days off work, is the undercurrent of the embryonic novel the second, which keeps pestering me like a well meaning farmyard dog that has taken one too many blows to the head. I want to sit down and work on it, I really do. I have at least one of the main characters firmly in my mind, another one there in outline and a third for whom there is a situation but, as yet, no character with which to fill it.

I'm well aware of all the advice that states that you have to treat stories rather as you would relationships, in that it's a bad idea to move on to the next one before you wrap up the one you're already in, and ending the current one suddenly can be equally disastrous (especially when you're just going to go off with something younger and more flexible). That doesn't stop me from yearning to have three months off to sit down with novel the second and really bash out something I can be proud of.

But I can't do that. I will return to the battered, one-eyed crone that is Muse-that-was. She may be old, but she was beautiful once, and I loved her enough to coax her into being. I owe her some perseverance at least, bass playing be damned.

333 / 333 (100.0%)

Done. And now onto other things.

313 / 333 (94.0%)

I'm procrastinating, but I think I'm allowed to procrastinate just a little. I have but twenty pages of manuscript left before the first pass edits are done on the project-formerly-known-as-Muse (let's just call it The Novel and have done with it; I haven't got a damn clue what title I'm actually going to imbue it with), which I have every intention of getting through tomorrow morning. If that works then I might try to get a story written for Halloween (natch) or Samhain (same date, different slant on the story). At the moment, the story I've got in mind might be more suited for the latter. The Novel is, to be brutally, soul-rendingly honest, a mess. There are many bits of it that are cohesive, but for every one of those there's a bit that's so far out on its own it doesn't even register as part of the story. It needs a lot of work, and I don't see myself starting on Novel The Second until the new year (at least). I'm going to take a break from the manuscript for a few days, but I'll come back to it soon enough, if only because I hate leaving things half finished. It's as though I've got half a novel in the manuscript, mixed in with muck and dirt and muddy water. It's a bit like looking at a mirror buried in a peat bog; all I have to do is scrape away the crap and I'll be left with something like the shards of a good story. After that it'll be a case of finding the literary equivalent of Aryldite (which sadly doesn't have a Wikipedia entry) to join all the bits together. As I've said before, it feels like I'm going about this all the wrong way round, writing the story and then taking it apart and rewriting it again... Assorted clever writers would be spinning in their grave. But this has always been a learning curve for me. Having approached the novel with the NaNoWriMo attitude of "No Plot No Problem," I then discovered that having no plot was, in fact, quite the problem once you get outside of NaNo and try to turn your 50,000 words into a full story. Still, c'est la vie. If it takes me another couple of months to get the story right (that's a conservative estimate, alas) then that's reasonably fine and dandy. At least when I start the next one I'll have a better idea of how to go about it.

The muse is, rather ironically, ignoring me tonight. Not in the sense that I'm suffering from what I've rather tediously referred to in the past as writer's block; more accurately in the sense that I can't seem to find any real desire to work on the Muse manuscript this evening.

It's probably because I got little sleep last night. Sarah, bless her, is suffering from a nail bed infection (this is not, I should note, an infection gained from sleeping on a bed of nails), and as such struggled to find a position in which she was able to fall asleep. A trip to the doctor, resulting in a lanced nail bed, a course of antibiotics and a recommendation to take a cocktail of codeine and diclofenac sodium before bedtime should hopefully help with that tonight. For myself, lots of peppermint tea is probably the key.

I did think about finishing off a story that I started in Nero yesterday lunch time about a woman who wins someone's soul in a charity raffle, but I honestly don't think I could concentrate on it. Tonight, I think, is a night for music. I'm off to find a guitar.