So, I’m back from a short break with my family in beautiful Pembrokeshire, and I still have another week before I have to return to work. Naturally, Mrs Nobbs has a long list of jobs for me to do around the house, chief of which is to erect the greenhouse we bought from someone on Facebook at our little allotment.
That was a fun challenge in the first instance. When we went to pick up the thing, it had already been dismantled and while some of the components had been taped together and rudimentarily labelled with things like “back wall”, there were no instructions on putting this giant jigsaw together.
I ended up spending a whole Saturday afternoon listening to football on the radio and trying to out the whole thing out. The first half an hour consisted of me just laying all the separate piece on the back lawn and repeating, “This makes no bloody sense.”
Still, I managed to get it up and then label each and every piece so that it would be easy (hopefully) to put back together at the allotment when we’d prepared a spot on the plot for it to go.
On top of that, I have a couple of ceilings to paint. Which I’m really not looking forward to.
But you don’t really want to know all that. What you are really interested in is the progress or lack thereof) of my writing. That, after all, is what this blog is supposed to be about.
Over the past week, as I said in a previous post, I’ve been working on A Wounded Heart and it’s going pretty well. The manuscript is now over 30,000 words long and I can see the path ahead with the story.
But I’ve come across a new issue. Westmouthshire now spans seven novels and multiple short stories. And I’m finding that I have to go back and refer to earlier works more and more so that I don’t write something that contradicts another book.
For example, yesterday I had to check and see if I’d described the layout of Paul’s house in A Tortured Soul or if I’d allocated the four bedrooms to the four housemates.
And this evening I’ve had to refer back to A Tortured Soul and Kissed by a Rose to sketch a map of the University campus and make sure the accomodation I was about to write about hadn’t been written about before or, it it had, that I described it in the same way.
It’s all getting very confusing. So I’ve created an Access database to keep track of it all. All I need to do now it go through my older books in order to populate the database.
So that’s another job!
