Richard Wright

Nearly 4000 new words on Craven Place today, which isn’t bad at all given this morning was mostly finishing off the editing of what had gone before. I’m not quite done for the day, so there may be more to come, but my brain is caffeine-fried, and there are televisual distractions to be had. I’ll tap little bits through the evening, and see what happens.

Although the screenplay forms a loose outline for the novel, the emphasis is on ‘loose’. The novel is evolving quite significantly from the movie that never-quite-was, with the supernatural aspects in particular becoming more pronounced. The conclusion is also going to be rather different, I think, though I’ve yet to decide. There’s a way to go yet, and not much time. March happens on Sunday, after all.

The prep work I’ve done re-reading and editing the first half of the book has helped me to skip easily into the groove today, so it’s been time well spent. My biggest worry about taking this book back on was that I was going to be bored by what I’d previously written, or unable to get into the mindset I had ten years ago, when the book really began. So far, it’s been an easy journey. The only regret I have is my writing music of choice. I had wanted to write it to the soundtrack of Horner’s Braveheart (my writing music is always, without exception, wordless mood stuff, usually movie scores), because that’s what I wrote the screenplay to all those years ago. Alas, my CD must have been scratched when I burned it in iTunes. I’m using Zimmer’s Gladiator as a reliable standby, but it doesn’t quite fit, especially when it gets bombastic. Still, it’s a small complaint, from a good day.

It counterbalances any gloom from a short story rejection that popped into my inbox this afternoon. There are some interesting notes from the editor – the story contains so much detail that, despite nice turns of phrase, they lost the thread of the tale – that I might come back to some day. This particular story is quite personal to me, and I freely confess that I have real problems standing objectively back and looking at it, so there might be some mileage in the crit. However, it may be that this falls into the spectrum of a particular editor’s taste, and the next person to read it may respond quite differently. I’ve sent the story to a new market, and I’ll see how it goes. Normally, I’m quite good at judging how important it is to change a story from a particular editor’s note, or whether it should be left alone, but not with this tale. Time will tell.

Right, time to take plonk my fried brain in front of something that isn’t this computer screen, I think.