It’s been just about six months since my last post on this blog, over a year since my last post on the “From Across the Pond” blog and about five months since a post on “The Grumpy Blog”.
All of which is unforgivable.
I have tried to keep up a presence on Facebook and twitter (although there’s been nothing on my Facebook Author Page for six months – just on my personal FB profile), but that really doesn’t excuse not posting here.
The reasons, or excuses depending on how you view it, are the same as always. Writing is a hobby, not a career. I don’t exactly sell enough books to pay the bills, so when it comes down to it, the day job has to take priority. As does family life.
I mentioned on The Grumpy Blog that my daughter started full-time school last September and last October we were looking at Secondary schools for my son. Well, Little Miss Nobbs has settled in really well seven months down the line and Nobbs Jr now has a school place, albeit not the one we wanted. We’re going to appeal the decision, but I really don’t expect to get anywhere with that, it’s more of just a formality to make me and Mrs Nobbs feel that we’ve done the best for the boy.
In terms of writing, my ‘soft’ deadline for the first draft of A Wounded Heart came and went with me being nowhere near meeting it. In fact, work on the book has ground to a halt. I feel that it’s not going the way I wanted it to and am actually considering throwing it out and starting again.
I’ve never experienced that before and it’s pretty disheartening.
A Good Man was originally published in October 2011 and A Tortured Soul was a May 2014 release. That’s about a two and a half-year gap. We’re now in March 2017, approaching three years since the release of ATS. I really should be putting the final touches on the final draft of A Wounded Heart, but it’s just not happening.
If I’m honest, where I am with it now is considering turning the trilogy into a quadrilogy. There’s a story I want to tell about Paul’s summer between his first and second year at University, but it’s not really a part of the story of A Wounded Heart. Or maybe it is the story of A Wounded Heart and what happens in Paul’s second year is a different book – A Mended Heart, perhaps.
The point is, I think I need to split the remainder of Paul’s story into two books, and that would allow me to only throw out the parts of what I’ve written so far that have created the roadblock I currently feel the story has.
Don’t get me wrong, what I’ve written so far isn’t terrible by any means, I just seem to have driven the story up a cul-de-sac and there’s no way I can see to turn the thing around and drive out of it. Best to just leave the eighteen-wheeler there, walk back to the start and get in a Smart car to see if that get’s me where I need to go any better.
In the meantime, the other book I’m working on, The Truths We Live—which is the sequel to The Lies We Lead—is the one that has my attention at the moment. It’s currently standing at thirty-five and a half thousand words and coming along nicely in the past couple of weeks. Yes, that’s only about ten thousand words more than my update last October but given how little time I’ve spent writing in the intervening months, to have even done that is pretty good.
And I have a clear idea of where this story is going and what the end point is. So that bodes well.
So, I will try my best to keep this blog updated more regularly and I will try my best to get the first draft of The Truths We Live finished sooner rather than later. Then I’ll finally sit and work out just what I’m going to do with Paul Robertson.
