Where did the day...fortnight...go?

It's been a busy couple of weeks, clearly.  Three weeks, I think.  I suppose most of my absence can be put down to the gathering bank raid that is called Christmas.  Not that I am the least bit religious.  I am more interested in the Winter Solstice because it means the long daylight hours of Summer are on their way once more.  I'm not a fan of getting up in the cold dark, getting to work just before sun-rise, spending all day in an artificially-lit, over-heated office and then coming home in the dark squashed into a seat on the tube among a host of plague carriers.  I am not a Winter person.

Last time I wrote I was part way through The Sea Detective, a novel ostensibly about solving the mystery of two disarticulated feet found washed up on either side of a fictional Scottish Island.  At the time I was 108 pages in and only one foot had been found.  Well, the whole disarticulated foot thread came across as incidental to the actual story about the 'hero' finding out how his grandfather died during World War II and why he wasn't recorded on the island's memorial.  In fact, the foot crime struck me as being something of a footnote.  It also prompted a deeper thought:  is this a fairly standard ruse of crime fiction:  put the most outrageous part of the story on the cover jacket to snag a purchase and then tell a totally different story for the next 300 pages?  I had read two novels using that sort of approach on the trot so I needed a third to see if the premise was false.  My mother-in-law came to the rescue by lending me a crime novel by a far better known (deceased) author:  Stieg Larsson.  Yes, I am reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Having just read Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft who was hailed a the new Stieg Larsson on the jacket by his publishers, there was only one way to determine the truth or hype of the claim.  I'll go with hype.  I'm only about a quarter the way through Larsson's book but from the start there is a gulf of difference in the writing style, narrative, dialogue and story.  To me, Kallentoft's work read as if was intended for TV and the crime was slotted into the personal lives of the characters.  Larsson's novel is so much more and it is easy to see how this became an 'international sensation' made into movies.

It may be Christmas before I finish it.

Moving on, I am still writing my second crime novella set in Cumbria.  It's darker than Stone Dead and I continue to have no idea where it's heading...but I'm going with the flow.  I also continue to have no idea what to call it:  Novella McNovellaFace is not an option even as a working title.  It's getting sidelined a bit with all the pre-Christmas activity...and work, obviously, but I will finish it.  If it runs to a similar word count as Stone Dead, I'm about halfway through at just over 10,000.  And that brings me neatly to the grand opening of the envelope containing that 1st draft.

If you remember, six weeks ago I took Stephen King's advice and put the 1st draft of Stone Dead into an envelope and wrote 6th December on the front of it.  I then went and did something else.  This evening, I opened that envelope.  Now, if I follow Mr King's advice, I should take a red pen to the said draft and edit it before handing it to my Ideal Reader.  I thought to bypass that exercise as my wife is a much better editor than I am.  But she agrees with Mr King.

If I'm honest, I don't actually like reading my own work.  It's almost entirely because I see a betters way of writing a section and that mushrooms into major reworking which is where I get bogged down in detail.  I think I will revert to using a pen on the printed page to curb my editing zeal.

I'll keep you posted...