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| Getting in a few NaNoWriMo words between sessions at the Imperial College |
This whole experience has so far been hugely liberating and I would go so far as to state this is the most I have enjoyed fiction writing since I was powering to the end of Chasing Innocence, waaay back in the last decade (2009).
It's all about control. I have planned The Handyman around a great structure and know where I'm going with every scene. I'm not constantly worrying about the story, whether it will work or where I'm heading as I've already thrashed the hell out of the story. I'm just trying to make what I'm writing as good as possible. Very liberating.
In between my 1.6k NaNoWriMo words today (hoping for a huuge day tomorrow) I went to the Writers and Artists Self-Publishing in the Digital Age seminar, at the Imperial College in Kensington. There was some great interviews helmed by Amazon's Jon Fine of Tracy Bloom and later of Mel Sherratt. Both authors were incredibly interesting in vastly different ways. The highlight of the day was the talk on marketing by Joanna Penn.
I also had my first experience of networking which actually went really well. Met some really interesting people.
Here's some of what I wrote, mostly this morning in Starbucks Paddington before the Imperial College and after I got home. This is as written, so first draft caveats and all that:
He knows it isn’t real because this happens every night. It feels real though. Angela is dressed for work, it’s night because that’s when she usually worked. Smart trousers and shirt, short jacket in the summer. She is stood in a road, walking towards him, camera strap wound around her wrist, camera held in her hand. There is a car moving fast, coming towards her from behind, the headlights cast long shadows of her limbs that reach out. He can hear her voice but her mouth isn’t moving. Her eyes implore. Any second the car will hit her, it isn’t slowing.
‘What do you see?'
Daniel sits up in the spare bed, swings his feet onto the floor. He hasn’t slept in their bed since the night before the holiday. He stares up at the picture in the half light of night, ambient light outside casts shadows, early traffic builds momentum. The picture fills the wall, has been printed to the highest resolution, so much detail and colour although he sees little in the pre-dawn monotone. If you had asked Angela, she would deny it was her best, but it has been her most successful. It predates Daniel in her life, even Molly but not Nikolaj, who was with her in Hawaii when she took it. In the water beside her, keeping her stable in the relentless surf. You first see it and think of telescopes and space and far away galaxies, sparkling stars and hued greens and rusty nebulas. Then your eyes adjust and realise the shapes and textures and you see a giant wave crashing into a seabed, stirring silt and stones, the distorted radius of a setting sun filtered through dense layers of aqua, glinting sand. It is an image you can lose time to. It has adorned books and hung from gallery walls, sold in supermarkets rolled in plastic and framed in specialist stores. Ten years after Angela lay at the bottom of the ocean, trying to capture the perfect moment, royalty cheques still fall on the doormat. Once a quarter, twenty pound, sometimes less, or a little more.
Her cameras and the accessories of her work are lined and stacked in bags beneath the print. He is still sat on the bed as daylight pushes back the shadows. The traffic drums outside. Sunlight creeps up his back. He has less muscle definition than before, two months now. Has only just started working out again. His wounds are purple puckered flesh, will in time fade and blend with the other scars. Daniel has many scars, at the periphery, his arms and legs, several beneath the hairline above his right ear. He used to be too quick to sustain anything but peripheral wounds. The angry flesh in the middle of his torso stands alone.
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