Despite my cat’s attempts to disrupt the big rearrangement of my novel, I’m making progress. We have my father-in-law staying with us at the moment, so time is scarce, but that means that when I have a rare moment home alone, I make the most of it – sometimes that’s more effective than having lots of time, anyway.
And that means that today I finished the rewrite of my first chapter. It still needs a lot of work but I was happy enough with it to print it out (I rarely do that, sorry trees) and told Jan. He wanted to read it tonight and I said yes. Fortunately, since he’s not a native English speaker, he is only reading it from curiosity about the topic, and I’m not expecting any criticism or even helpful feedback, but somehow it will be nice for me when I know someone else is looking at it. Not that I want to show it to anyone else, so don’t anyone ask for it, please!
Writing good fiction really is a whole lot more difficult than writing the travel articles and blog posts that actually earn me money. I always think it should be the other way around. But that’s life, and it is very satisfying to start playing around with words and sentences until they sound really good.
One note I must make: I’m not happy with the opening, really. But I can’t seem to find a real hook to open with, or perhaps I have one, but for me it’s not a hook because I know it so well. The opening is something that came to me one weekend morning a few weeks ago as I dozed in bed. The rest of the first chapter takes bits from all over the place in my original draft, and I’ve rewritten most of them completely to tie them together. Let’s just say it’s all still a work in progress. But at least there is progress.
