My toes are curled around the springboard, I’m holding my breath and gathering up my courage to dive in….
Some years ago I wrote a novella of about 23,000 words as part of my Master’s Degree. I’d planned to redraft it and send it around to publishers but I never did. It had been written at a particularly difficult time in my life – I was going through a marriage break up as I was writing it. By the time I finished the novella I’d left behind a ten year relationship, my home and my job – all I took was my children, my clothes and my laptop. Once the novella had been submitted and I’d completed my Masters I soon filed it away and began working as a part-time lecturer in the English Department of a local university. At the time I was also writing freelance for a magazine and then doing some fiction editing, the occasional arts review, writing some poetry and generally getting on with life. The novella has continued to sit in the hard drive of various laptops – transferred across to new machines untouched. Every time someone has asked about it I’ve managed to avoid the question by saying it’s too soon to look at it again, and in truth it has been. I’ve been like the thousands of other writers all over the globe who are also not writing a novel…
So I’m taking the plunge now.
I’m going to print out the 73 page manuscript and hand it over to my trusted reader P and see what happens. I haven’t read it myself in four years but I’ll let him read it first and then I’ll begin the real work of writing – cutting, redrafting and making it readable.
Watch this space…..
