On Thursday 31st July 2014 no blog written by me existed out there in cyberspace. Today (Saturday 26th August 2017) there are 172 posts and, although the original intention of always connecting everything to Shakespeare hasn't been fulfilled, the regularity has settled into a 5 a month pattern and I've got better at incorporating pretty pictures which some readers tell me are (quite truthfully) the best bits. I can live with that. I've learned to keep to my own deadlines. The dream of course was to write a novel....
No words
On Friday 1st April 2016 there were no words for a novel but that's the date I started dedicating three days a week to writing. There was the play set in a doctors' surgery. There was the screenplay set on the banks of a river. There were the poems about birth and childhood. There was the book about growing up Roman Catholic.... and there was the story of a red-haired teenager who suddenly realised his parents and the world around him were not what he thought....
Rhenium
On Monday 1st August 2016 it dawned on me that all the other writing projects had fallen away and Raydan, the red-haired teenager on the planet Rhenium, had become real to me and scenes I had written were having consequences in my imagination. And I had to write more. So The Akolyte Wars were born. The story became The Rhenium Wars. The over-arching story is currently Rhenium Tales and the first book is Raydan Wakes.
On Sunday 7th August 2016 I finally started committing to the laptop and at 10:30am on Friday 25th August 2017 (yesterday) I finally printed the final chapter of my first draft for my first reader, Emily. It took me a couple of years of churning out blogs, 4 months of experimenting, a week of fear deciding whether or not Rhenium was The One, and then One Year And Eighteen Days to produce Draft One of 118,285 words divided into 15 chapters, each chapter having 3 distinct sections. (And bits that have been edited out are already waiting to be pasted into Book Two....) I have no doubt that the final word count will come down. The first version of Chapter 15 was 12,000 words, at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon it became just over 8,000 words. Today it's 6,521 words. Editing's the way to go. But I'm feeling weird at the moment - half Superman and half petrified/embarrassed/confused. What next? Keep editing. Keep writing. Just keep going.
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| Superman picture credit: Sacha Goldberg |
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