Another milestone is always reached. In my case it’s another chapter. The revision is not looking at a checklist but rather just reading and making changes along the way. Thinking for example that chapter 6 could be from the viewpoint of Maggie to save a run of 4 from Bill’s viewpoint. But chapter 10 will be an information dump about vanity presses, still can’t be helped although I should try and just keep it to the business end and have Daniel and his friends talking about POD and subsidy publishers. This week I want to get at least to chapter 13. So by my birthday I should have revised to the end of Part 1 (chapter 55) and should start on Part II which will be about how Bill is forced to assassinate members of the poetry world by Hannah and how he’s hunted by the police

When writing poetry feedback is quicker. There are workshops and it’s easy to send them by email to magazines. It’s also a medium I’m quite happy working in. It’s a nice place and the world would be better if more people wrote, but that will do for another blog.

And the novel goes not well. One reason is because we now have granddaughter three days a week and I can’t seem to work on non consecutive days. Still, I should research writing for well-being and maybe writing in the digital age. At least I  can work on my poetry. I’ve selected 20 love poems, done a proposal and will send them off to the Emma press next week. Fingers crossed.

Apart from the fact that today the Queen became the longest reigning Monarch in English history today is notable because I finished typing in the revisions for the first draft of my novel. That’s 54 chapters and a rewritten final chapter. At least now the tenses are fairly consistent and the story makes sense. I’m so glad I’ve managed to incorporate episodes of the life of the real Bill Billings, at least when I knew him in the early 80s; also what poetry was like in the 80s and a few poems to give a bit more flavour of the time. The next job will be just to read through it.

The school term has started so now my writing/revising days are on Wednesdays and Fridays. They are also days I go to the gym.

I’ve just started the process of actually revising the text. So far I’ve completed  Chapters 1-5 and it does actually make more sense and the characters have started to come alive. I can’t help thinking of that Hugo Williams quote “if you can’t write good poetry then you can’t write good prose.” Bearing in mind the number of time you have to revise a poem I can look forward to spending the next couple of years revising. I wrote a prose piece, since published in the Screech Owl, about my time at Lumb in the 80s seeing Seamus Heaney eat a plate of Jammy Dodgers; it’ll fit in the book without any trouble.

Went to the Yvonne Arnaud to listen to Dr Howard Cunnell from Kingston  University talking about the process of writing and rewriting. Most of what he said  made sense especially about character confusion, too much explanation, plot holes and over written description.   Useful points too about the structure and harmony of the novel as a whole. As I expected there is no one or indeed best way of doing anything; you have to find your own way to revise.So it looks like 5/6 more drafts before it’s ready to be read by  or to anyone else.

I’ve been spending the past few weeks (or rather my Weds and Thurs busy ensuring the story makes sense. Thought I just about finished when it seemed like a good idea to add a real character (me) into the mix so I can appear in future parts of the book. Once I’ve done that I’ll get busy with my notebook and different colour pens.   This is going to be the fun bit, moulding the raw clay of words. I’m up to Chapter 6 now and worried that I’m not changing enough.

Still writing poetry though. Love poems in my bluesy form BC/AB/AC in 3 stanzas. that some people seem to like.

On Wednesday 5 November i finally finished the first draft in just over 51,000 words. It was basically just the plot with a few bits of dialogur and characterization thrown in.  Before I started revision i need to get a bit of distance betweeb me and the draft so that when I read it I will be doing so with fresh eyes.  So i started a free online course https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/start-writing-fiction which lasts for 8 weeks. Lots of useful things – creating characters, the importance of detail, keeping a writer’s notebook, research and writing your own short story.  But after three weeks i thought “Well I’m doing the real thing.” So for the first time ever I’m dropping the course. No doubt it will give me nightnmares.

26/7/14 I’d been  quite happily putting off actually writing some prose, tinkering with the story board and thinking up excuses and putting off the actual work. Now last monday I started a free online course, Talk The Talk which should take 6 weeks, and on Tuesday attended a talk at Waterstones in Guildford about whether to use an agent or go the self publishing route. But before I went I sat down in the morning I sat down and used Dragon for about 600 words it converted into text, and by the time I’d made the corrections and added to the text, had written 1,000. I managed to do that 4 times last week. So i think now I can call myself poet and author.

6/7/14 Hugo Williams said “if you can’t write good poetry then you can’t write good prose.” I been writing poetry since I was thirty learning the craft – voice, lines, stanzas, how to make a good title, meter (although I’m only really bothered about this if the line doesn’t flow) and rhyme – the different forms and their qualities, and reading lots of poems. I’m eager to start writing some fiction. I’ve had a story in my mind for some years so I started to draft an outline which turned into an outline for four novels, which gives me something to aim for.  I say outline because I know that words have a way of taking things over and I’m sure that the characters I’ll be writing about will want some changes, and there’s the plot itself. The unexpected will happen. I’m all set to go. I have some Dragon software to turn my words into text and I’ve been dreaming about the book. But something is always holding me back from starting, illness (shingles took a month to get over), something on television (the World Cup, Wimbledon), family matters but mainly fear that the words won’t come and it’ll be rubbish.