Disaster Strikes

I have to abandon the first 6,000 words and start afresh. None of it is how it should be. I want a gothic ghost story that seethes with atmosphere, not a light-hearted romp through some girl's nonsense adventure. Why won't the things I see in my head, the story I want to tell, come out onto the page? Why is it always something entirely different?

It's too light-hearted, too bouncy, too much humour - this always seems to be my downfall when I'm trying to write and it needs to be cut out, if only I can find the right tool for the job.

Oh well - I suppose I could have called this post 'Disaster Averted', for at least I'm only on the first chapter. Better to discover this now, in the very early stages, than halfway through.

Hmmm...got me thinking. Of my two previoulsy shelved projects, the working titled Devil's Weather has the right tone. Why did I stop writing that again? I can't remember. I think I got about 30,000 words into that one. Maybe I'll go back to Harry after all. The lead character of my most recent project, which got 40,000 words in, was starting to annoy me and the tone had gone skew whiff, just like this one.

It'll require a complete leap of setting, a change in my mind's inner frame. Okay, bye bye London. I'm going back to Dartmoor.

So I'm Doing It Again...

Trying to write a novel, that is. And this blog is going to be the spy on my progress; the dobber-in if I fail to write for ages or to basically keep things on track. This time I won't have schedules or plannners or even daily word targets - I just want to be able to report something constructive here as often as possible, so my imaginary readership will be desperately impressed.

I have another blog, on which I post book reviews and various rambling thoughts about nonsense. But I want this one to be dedicated purely to writing this new novel, if only to keep my thoughts separate and focused.

And God knows, I need to stay focused. To date I've written two novels to full length but can't be bothered putting in the work to polish them up, plus two others have fallen by the wayside over the last year or so, half-written and now bereft, like a torso with no legs. But I really, really want to finish this new one and maybe I'll go back to the other two mutated ones later on.

The reason this blog is called 'The View From the Rabbit Hole' is because that's what it feels like to me when I'm trying to force a book onto the page. It feels like I've disappeared down a narrow, dark, frightening and disorientating tunnel, with no idea which way is up and faced with the task of trying to haul myself to the surface. The blue sky of the real world can be just glimpsed way up above me and I can hear the hollow, distant sounds of life going on up there, without me. But I feel very disconnected from it and unsure if it even really is my world, where my efforts will be recognised and successful, or Alice's intensely creepy Wonderland where nothing has any meaning.

Goodness me, I don't half talk some rubbish. Anyway, this will be my progress board, where I'll state my word count after every writing session (5,352 at this moment in time). I bet you can't wait for the excuses to begin.

What the hell's this?

Just somewhere else for me to ramble on, most specifically about the trials of being an inept wannabe author who can't write for toffee.

That's all.