Wednesday 15 January 2020

Plans for 2020

This is just a little note to sketch out the year as I see it.

Death of a Dream-Pedlar is finished, utterly finished, put-to-bed, done and I am now going through the tedious, soul-sapping and laborious business of showing it around to agents. I really hope that I get some bites this time and I can start this new decade with something getting close to a book deal.

I am exploring some ideas toward a funded PHD, though I am a little hesitant to say much about that at the moment, if anything comes of it, it would mean a move and the chance to bury my snout deep in some archives like a happy hog.

I am also working on a brand new novel, provisionally titled Inanna Underground. It starts with the body of a woman called Inanna being found in a disused WWII bunker in North West London. She belonged to a group of people with a special interest in old bunkers and underground spaces. Most of the novel is told in flashback and tells the story of Inanna’s entry to the group and builds up the various reasons members of that group may have wanted to kill her. Who it was that killed her and why are revealed at the end.

As the story is pretty simple, I need a challenge to keep me invested. I have two. The first is a simple one of time, I hope to finish a rough draft by Easter Sunday, I estimate this should be about a thousand words a day. The other challenge is the narrator, he’s a humourless, unimaginative, detail-orientated nerd who gives loads of information but very rarely the big picture. It’s a difficult character to get in the head of and even harder to try and make the story interesting when the narrator is interested in completely different things for me. I haven’t cracked it yet but as the chapters pile up, I’ll work out ways to handle it.

Other than that, I shall post Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle posts every other month and try to post something every Wednesday. If I miss this schedule, it’ll be to try and get that first draft of Inanna done.

If all goes to plan, I should end the year with some genuine steps towards a full time writing life in some form or another. If the decade goes well, maybe I could achieve my dream of writing interesting stuff for a living and sometimes talking about it. I can only hope.




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