August marches on. I'm back from the family holiday in Normandy - my lot, plus my brother and family, my sister and her partner and our mum. It was great fun and begs the question - why didn't we do it sooner??
When I logged back on, it was a boost to see a positive review in the Daily Mail and a short story I wrote published in the Sunday Express magazine. Louise, my publicist at Hodder, quietly works away to get me publicity and I'm grateful for that.
... On with the writing. I'm three weeks away from finishing the second draft of the second novel. It's a lot better than the first draft was. I've rewritten great swathes of it and rearranged the order in which I reveal information to the reader and hence to the main character, Claire. (I have a tendency to reveal almost everything by Chapter 4 - I did it in the first draft of both novels and then had the characters with nothing to do for the rest of the chapters.)
Today I'm rewriting Chapter 10 and at the same time jumping forward to a scene closer to the end as it feels 'alive' in my head. My first creative writing teacher always said 'write where the energy is' and that remains very good advice. There are, of course, the times where necessity means you just have to slog away at the 'hard bits' - for me those are the bits where the prose is about 50% there. In my head, I know what I'm trying to say, but I haven't written it well enough. I make myself sit there and keep trying different angles, different words until it's closer to the good stuff. It makes me sigh and talk to myself and lie down on the floor of the five feet by seven feet cluttered space that I call my study - yes, I need to remember to keep the drama on the page! - but it's incredibly satisfying to finish the day with a completed scene, or maybe even just a couple of hundred words that feel absolutely right.