End of the Holiday

So, Christmas and New Year have come and gone.  It has been a bit lazy.  We seem to adjust to a new time clock over very quickly:  up late, bed very late.  But I'm on annual leave until this coming Monday (7th Jan) so don't care overtly.  It has given me some space to write...and research.

To tidy up a few things, I finished the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  This was, in part, driven by the fact that my wife had bought me the next in the series: Girl who Played with Fire.

To close the book, so to speak, on GwtDT, like other crime thriller books I have read recently, the heroine of the title - said tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander - only really gets involved with the hero 300 pages in.  For a book that's only just over 500 pages,  that's still over halfway.  She is in it early on but the threads of the story are only loosely linked.  Perhaps, it's my expectations that need to adjust.  Maybe it is a thing of this genre to wait for the real story to get going.  I don't know.  All I know is that I enjoyed the book and the accolades given to Larsson's writing are justified...in my opinion.

Off to one side, slightly, I convinced my wife to watch the Swedish subtitled version of the book because I remembered nothing about the Daniel Craig edition other than the girl getting on a motorbike at one point.  It was interesting inasmuch as whilst in places it had lines that were verbatim from the book, two whole romances for the hero were completely ignored, the timeline got distorted, the old detective on the case was instrumental in the solution where in the book he wasn't and one character was declared dead when she was very much alive.  It worked as a film but this is a case of:  read the book first.

In other news, my wife and I went to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition at the British Library.  For me, this was a fabulous two hours of gazing at the beauty of manuscripts over 1000 years old.  Some looked like they could have been written yesterday.  Others were so finely detailed you wondered how they did that with a quill.  Fabulous.

To give you an idea of what's on display until 19th February, there was:  the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf, the Lacnunga, Bald's Leechbook, Codex Amiantinus, the Utrecht Psalter, the Harley Psalter, the Domesday Book along with the Alfred Jewel (aestel), a largely complete digital recreation of the Ruthwell Cross, the stunning buckle from Sutton Hoo Mound 1 and lovely seax (a large, single-edged dagger alleged by some to be the source of the name Saxon) engraved with runes.

If you can get a ticket, go!

Moving on to my personal writing, I have struggled with the latest novella - still 'unnamed' although I am considering the rather unusual title of Lásabrójtur - you'll find out why if I ever publish it.  As for the writing itself, I know what the ending is, I know what the story is;  I just don't seem to be able to get it down in one coherent stream.  It has frustrated me to a degree.  What has surprised me, though, is that although I have struggled to write, I have already put more words down in this work than in the whole of the Stone Dead.  Inevitably, there will be a cut but I am still surprised and am wondering whether this will end up being closer to 40k words by the time it's complete - that's pretty much the upper limit for novellas.  Something else that has come out of writing this criminal tale is that I have had to do research into police and forensic procedures to reflect true Police practice rather than allow some of the more ludicrous efforts that appear on TV to cloud my writing.  They make a fascinating read and really are not that televisual in terms of excitement.

Right, it is time to go.  I have two items on my agenda for the next couple of hours: focus on getting my novella straightened out and eat food.

Until next time.