THE CASE OF THE MISSING NOVEL

“So, where’s this novel, then?”

It was a question. Although the enveloping twittermist that has recently befogged my brain was  a pea souper, I recognised it as a question. Good so far. Usually, only a glass of Islay single malt invites such clarity.

I looked everywhere. I even looked under William the cat, suspicious that he might be concealing my manuscript as payback for my underhand concealment of a jelly baby in a piece of tuna.  It was not under, or in, William.

It took me a little while to remember that my manuscript was not a physical item and didn’t exist at all except in some electronic backwater on my laptop’s hard drive. This failure to immediately remember was not, hopefully, the beginning of Alzheimer’s, but rather the result of the next novel having a wild party at neuron central.

There is a big box in my garage. In it there are physical manuscripts as diverse as a Technicolor dreamcoat: scripts, screenplays, short stories, poems, rants, a letter to Father Christmas written when I was a mere 35 and merry on Lagavulin single malt (I never did get a Caribbean island), every piece of commercial copy I have written, several incomplete novels and a radio play plagiarised a short time after submission. At least they changed the characters’ names, if not the plot or the jokes: a metaphor for life, perhaps?

It is both comforting and saddening to open this box, like reading old love letters and remembering the girls I loved, those I lost or misplaced and the one I kept. Or rather, kept me. The writing was of its time, as were the girls and together they stay in the past but I remember both with fondness. I would usually let the girls out of the box when they began to complain about the facilities.

“So, where’s this novel, then?”

A lovely person with great taste who, coincidentally, follows my blog, had DM’d me on Twitter with this question, which forced me to consider why a novel that should have been out in March was still not published.

The main reason is that it hasn’t been edited properly by a proper editor like wot it shudda bin. I did have an editor, who turned out to be less an editor than a clone of Genghis Khan when he was really mad, but we parted after 80 pages. Irreconcilable differences. One being that my editor wanted my novel to be a different novel from the one it was and I wanted it to be the one I had written, but neater.

My second reason is that I am a naturally lazy bugger. I can sit for days listening to the sound of wood worm chewing the oak beams in my house.  I can spend many hours staring at utilities bills knowing they are written in ancient Assyrian but that studied concentration will magically enable me to understand why an energy company wants to steal increasingly large amounts of my money, even when the price of oil drops. And, like most writers I can travel for months, even years, in the country of the mind searching for stories and characters to fulfil that inner urge to scribble stuff.

My third reason is that as I reread my virtual .mss for the nine-hundredth time my characters began to change. Now, I could have ignored their screams and ploughed on, but they were right to change, so the story changed.

Time passed.

More time passed.

Then I joined Twitter and time laughed at me, most days. Haha, it went.

All these perfectly logical reasons for not completing are excuses. Nothing more.

“So, where’s this novel, then?”

Currently, it’s in seven parts and is 134,000 words long. It’s exciting, multi-layered and quite scary in places with one or two naughty, Old English words and some quite rude sequences. It deals with themes that have always fascinated me: time, the supernatural, fear, chaos, English history, and the persistence of human love in the face of overwhelming odds. I’ve tried to make it intelligent and adult in its treatment of the themes, but given the state of my brain, this fanciful idea may be an illusion. It needs joining together and then ‘kindleising’ before it goes on Amazon where real readers and not just my beta readers will love it, loathe it or ignore it. If readers buy it and love it, I will be delighted. If they buy it and do not love it I will shrug, become momentarily depressed and then carry on writing the next one. If they ignore it I will be puzzled for seven days, at the end of which almost biblical period I will remember that I am a writer and not a professional salesman.

Of course, none of this obfuscation answers the question.

“So, where’s this novel, then?”

In answer to my blog reader I can say honestly, truthfully and without a shadow of prevarication… I don’t know.

It’s in my head, it’s on my laptop, it’s in the ether. But it’s not in my box.

And that is the difference between it and those incomplete but wonderful progeny currently settling down into old age in the garage.

This one will be published and it doesn’t really matter when. There is no rush because even if I drop dead tomorrow some kind family member will publish it, eventually, in memoriam.

So, it may be out soon, or later than soon.

My characters are almost happy in their revised roles and I am almost happy with them. They are old friends and will never be forgotten, even the incredibly evil ones.

Sooner or later, we will face the world together, pull the rabbit from the hat and go “Haharrr!” in a masculine voice reminiscent of Robert Newton as Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950) but avoiding adding ‘me hearties’ or ‘Jim, lad’,  since those phrases represent the wrong type of pirate.  You will understand, if you read my novel.

And when we have said that we will get on with living. I, in my Derbyshire cottage for a limited time, my characters in the minds of readers, forever.

To begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this and  thou wilt have finished.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus