Mercy for a Friday child

 ... is beginning to grow. 

Among the conversations which I've known Luke and Baz and Fran must have, as a result of what happened in 'Snap',  a new murder story is beginning to emerge, and make connections to what has gone on in the past. 

Very early days yet, but finding the perfect title  - which then gave impetus and focus to a rag-bag of semi thought-out scenes - and designing the cover has further helped it find a shape.

NOT what I wanted, damn it ...

Gym ideas again - this time the opening sentence of the novel to follow 'Making good', a novel which I had no intention of writing , believing that to be the last ...

4 a.m. not too soon

Yay!!  While 4 a.m. is too soon to get up in these November mornings (unless I really cannot contain myself - in my first NaNoWriMo year I once got up at 2) the hour waiting for the more acceptable 5 a.m. was spent pondering on 'Making good' which I have, over the past few days, been re-reading.   At 120K it needed, as I was well aware, bringing to a close, but up to now I have been unable to see a way, a point at which to do it.

Probably two-thirds through writing 'Damage limitation' I had pencilled in a natural ending - the tenth anniversary celebration.   The whole series was meant to end there, but with the final half of the final chapter already written, something unexpected (to me, at least!) happened at the  beginning of that chapter, which necessitated the writing of 'Making good.'

This, I am (fairly) sure, will be the final one.   I suspect I have already written what needs to be a final chapter but have then run on past it:  something more mildly dramatic was needed to underline it, and in my early morning hour's pondering I think I've found it.

Now I have to write it (that's the relatively easy bit;  the first sentence of the chapter is already in my head) and then re-jig the other chapters so as to take place before not after - a little tricky, but far from impossible.

To work.

NaNoWriMo2011

I've signed up for this for the second time.   Last year's 'Holding steady' was a follow-on to two smaller books, finished at about sixty-three thousand words and needed a lot of editing, minor but necessary, and I shall do a little more work before I re-publish in Blurb.   I've since written 'Damage limitation' (113,000+ words) which for ease of editing I published in Blurb and am currently reading and re-reading.   The follow up to that is at thirty-three  thousand words, titled 'Making good' and currently semi-stalled.

But this year's novel will be different.  'Not wanted on voyage' began life as a response to one of Lisa Richard Claro's Book Blurb Friday photos, will be part-populated with half-drawn characters from Thinking Ten prompts and has barely a vestige of a plot, which is a bit of a draw-back when it hinges on murder and who-dunnit and why and how, a genre I knew little of until recently.

So, twelve honeymooning couples (some true some false) four or five crew members (some good, some bad) and a need to convincingly bump a few off under suspicious circumstances, by person-unguessed-at, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.

In preparation I am re-reading P D James and Ian Rankin and, following a lucrative trip to the Tynemouth bookfair on Sunday, Mark Billingham and Stuart Macbride, with Michael Robotham and Stephen Booth to follow.   Not to pinch ideas but for some help in  how to construct a plot.

Pantsing and plotting ...

A few months ago Milo James Fowler wrote on Write 1 Sub 1 about the relative merits of pantsing and plotting when writing.   I am definitely an almost 100% pantser, and my fiction almost always character-driven.   Trouble comes when, as I have said before, the characters develop minds of their own and start to do and say things I had no expectation of them doing.  But it's not only the conversation:  three chapters ago a thoughtless, throwaway little episode inserted itself into another paragraph:

"And while they were out Sally phoned Sean and asked him to go and see her.   He refused, she was pressing and in the end he did as she asked, at lunchtime.  They didn’t so much as touch, although he would have liked to comfort her.   And she didn’t apologise, as he had expected she might.   Neither told their spouses of the meeting, because each was smarting from one or more of their misunderstandings."

Now these chickens have come home to roost - now Sally's husband is demanding that Sean tell him what Sally said.   Whatever it was had the effect of making Sean really bad-tempered and I have already delayed the explanation once, with a few pints, a walk along a river, a confession of something completely different, but I can delay no longer ... and I don't have anything in the way of a convincing explanation of what she could possibly have said to him that was so inflammatory!

BUT I could no more plot this than fly - for me plotting would take the heart out of what I write.   Fingers crossed that the answer will come - it almost always has in the past, even though it sometimes takes a couple of weeks.   In the meantime I write elsewhere on other subjects ...