Bill Riddell

Giving Birth to a Premature Novel

In my last two posts I discussed effectively blackmailing myself to finish a draft novel I have been working on for some years now. If it was not completed by the end of last month I had promised to donate $1,000 to charity.

Fortunately I scraped by and saved my money. The draft is complete, I have effectively written a book of some 70,000 words.

However it’s not done, far from it in fact. I took some time off initially to have a break from it and return to it with fresh eyes.

I’m now working my way through on the second draft. Filling in placeholders, where I knew more needed to be written; but, at the time did not have the words to fill in the details about a characters appearance or a page of dialogue that just was not working.

I’ve already slashed a few scenes, added others and enlarged some more.

The book is a fictionalised version of a relationship with someone close to me over a few years, his and my characters and other are changed, so are settings and events – many of these elements seemed too close to their real inspirations so they have been changed.

There is a lot of general polishing going on – there, their, they’re etc. I get the words down as quick as possible and worry about spelling, grammar and every other thing later. Then sometimes I forget about it as readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with.

After this second round of polishing, which after a break I hope to have finished before the end of the year, I’ll hand the novel over to a few trusted friends for some feedback and head back for some more revisions.

Keep an eye out for some fresh posts coming soon, including a new short story. My apologies for the absence.