Once again, it has been quite sometime since I wrote anything for this blog. I have been busy dealing with work related matters that sprung up over the weeks. As I have said before, I am at a crossroads in my life now and I am eager to get things moving in the direction I want them to go. My motivation is scraping the bottom of the barrel right now and it is very hard for me to remain interested in what I do. As a result, my writing has suffered due to a combination of these matters. I will begin writing something and then have to stop in order to sort out other, interfering, matters. This leaves me frustrated and irritable at the best of times. It also ruins the flow that I have going at the time making it hard for me carry on when time does become available.
I have decided that I cannot continue in this way and will leave employment when my present contract ends in March next year. I will then focus on my writing and take a chance that I will be able to put something together, perhaps taking part-time employment somewhere, wherever that may be, in order to keep a few funds available. Nothing is certain in life but without trying then nothing will ever happen. “Fortune favours the brave,” as the poet Claudius Claudianus once said. I hope that proves to be the case.
I have managed to sort out the few errors in Chapter 10 that had been bothering me and completely rewritten Chapter 11 since editing it was going to more or less equate to same thing at the end of the day. I am now very happy with this segment of the story although I did have some doubts over details. Some people I know dislike stories that overly describe a scene or setting and others dislike the shorter attempts by the writer to move between scenes. Some feel that only the important parts of a story are necessary while others want everything. It is certainly a choice of styles. Anyone that has read H.P. Lovecraft will certainly have an idea of detailed descriptions. Some like that and some don’t. I have tried to keep a balance.
I am presently, and much belatedly, moving on with Chapter 13 having recently succeed in reworking Chapter 12. I have two previous drafts, each some twenty pages in length, for Chapter 12 that I wrote before the third and final draft that I eventually went with. I finally found what it was that I was looking for and I am pleased with the way it has successfully contributed to the later Chapters in the story. Chapter 13 will tie ends up and provide some new ones before Chapter 14 forges this new material with everything that I wrote before during the original draft. I think I had previously suggested within these pages that Chapter 13 would do all of this but at that time I could not foresee the changes that I would have to make.
It certainly feels as though the great weight of the past month or so has finally been lifted from me; it was a lot of work going back over those three chapters. However, while I am closer to the eventual end of my book I still feel so very far away…
