grahambinns.com

I'm avoiding writing. Okay, so that's nothing new, which makes it all the more of a ball ache, but I've got $foo pages of notes on novel-the-second and it's starting to piss of Writer Graham that Codemonkey Graham is sitting around tinkering with things (like the new grahambinns.com in all its Django'd goodness) and essentially hogging the brain time.

Brain time is precious, indeed.

So I'm going to take an extended break from blogging (as opposed to the regular breaks that you may have noticed when I've got nothing to say or at least nothing working point to and shouting "look, look," at before running hard in the opposite direction before anyone notices), at least until I've started on novel-the-second's manuscript. After that, well, we'll see.

I think I need to remember what it's like to make things up. I haven't done it for a while.

I woke up yesterday morning to find myself, somewhat disconcertingly, a year older than I had been when I went to sleep.

I don't have much truck with birthdays to be honest. As a kid, of course, they were second only to Christmas in the times-of-the-year-to-be-excited-about stakes, but, being a kid, that was pretty much entirely about the presents. Like most people I've found that the importance of the gift-getting part of birthdays dwindles into insignificance some time after one's seventeenth birthday (when the gift of driving lessons seems to say to you that you're an adult, even though you're not).

So yesterday was a fairly ordinary but nevertheless pleasant day. I stayed home - it's a quasi-tradition of mine to take my birthday off - and managed to get nothing done in the morning through listening to England beat Australia by four wickets at the MCG. The afternoon was spent doing other things that required undivided attention, such as trying to work my way around a potential knotty plot problem with novel-the-second, which I finally wormed my way out of by simply hoping that the problem would go away, which it duly did.

And with that I was finally in a position to say that yes, this story is definitely a novel and that yes, I will definitely try to start writing it at the beginning of March, depending on how I go. I have one character firmly ensconced in my head and am trying to come to an understanding of sorts about the second, though she's giving me some trouble.

I'd forgotten how much fun this bit of writing was. It's not as much fun as the actual writing, which always feels rather indulgent, like I shouldn't be doing too much of it, but it's definitely a tasty aperitif that sets the creative juices flowing.

Anyway, can't stop. I have a bolognese to finish.

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.