Works in Progress

Five days, Five Blog posts. Not a bad re-start to my blogging if I do say so myself. Actually, it’s surprising quite how easily the words began to flow again once I opened up the taps and actually sat down to write.

Okay, so I haven’t added anything to the word count of my three works-in-progress, but that’s because I’ve been reading through one of them to bring myself back up to speed with it. Adding words isn’t far off. I might even do it after I’ve posted this.

In the past week, I’ve posted articles about being politically homeless, the Gillette ad everyone got upset about, my job and how it makes me blasé about money and how my son is still playing football three years after I last posted about him playing football.

I’ve also added an excerpt from The Lies We Lead to the website after realising there wasn’t already one there.

I’ve tried to revive the Facebook page too by scheduling posts, but the reach remains underwhelming to put it mildly. Facebook pages seem like such a waste of time and energy. I suppose they are designed to extract advertising revenue from businesses really and I can understand that. But I’m not a business – although I am trying to promote myself and my work, so… You can see what I mean though. I get more engagement from posting to my profile than my page and that kinda makes the page seem redundant.

Twitter is… Well, it’s twitter. A platform now so dominated by prominent celebrities that if you’re not a prominent celebrity it’s nothing more than pissing into the wind.

I suppose I should talk about the three works-in-progress I mentioned above and try an explain with each one why they stopped me from writing for so long.

I’ll start with a story which I haven’t settled on a title for but is the most likely to be released first. It’s a sequel to The Big Four Ohhh! in which Ruth and Dave take a road trip across some of the southern US states sometime after the events in the first book and enjoy all sorts of adventures.

I have a well laid out plan for this story. Over the course of two weeks our heroic couple spend time in Nashville before driving to Memphis, Jackson and finally New Orleans.

It’s the kind of road trip I’d love to take myself.

Along the way they have adventures in a strip bar, with a lady friend at a health spa, with multiple gentleman friends in the spa’s hot tub and other exciting encounters.

The only thing that really stopped me writing it is the general malaise I’ve felt because of the other two stories on my list. It currently sits at about 10,000 words written and should come in somewhere between 40-50,000 I would imagine.

Now, the two problem pieces.

Let’s start with the least problematic. The Truths We Live is a sequel to The Lies We Lead. It’s currently about 65,000 words long and I don’t think I’m that far from finishing it – probably another 20-30,000 words should do it.

It’s the story of Bobby’s foray into the world of Adult Entertainment along with his former (and returning) porn-star wife, porn-star step-daughter and two porn-star girlfriends.

It’s been fun to write, I think what I have is coherent and hangs together, but the issue is how to finish it. I have at least two threads hanging and a third that I’ve hinted at but not fleshed out at all (book three, anyone?). I think I’ll only be able to tie up one of the loose threads, leaving the other hanging for a third book, but the one I think I can tie up may the trickiest to get right.

I’m currently in a corner of my own making—I have Emma, Mel and Bobby reading a blog post review of Bobby and Emma/Kitty’s movie together, and perhaps stupidly tried to actually write the review. And in someone else’s voice.

Not the best idea.

If I can just force myself to either finish the blog post or scrap the idea and just gloss over the content, focusing on Bobby’s reaction instead, I might actually get somewhere.

That brings us to my real problem piece. A Wounded Heart, the third book in the Paul Robertson Saga.

I’ve written myself into a corner, I’ve got too many ideas to cram into it and no clue how to do it without it becoming a huge, unseemly mess. I know that what I should really do is bin a good third (at least) of what I’ve already written and probably commit to a fourth book in the series too—but I’ve never liked deleting something I’ve written, and at this point, a fourth book feels more burdensome that exciting.

I need to finish this story. I need to finish Paul’s story and do it in a satisfying way, but the prospect is just so daunting that I lack the will to do it. It’s a problem, and I don’t know how to solve it. And I don’t like not knowing how to solve it. So instead I’ve ignored it.

But I’ve ignored it for far too long now.

Perhaps the way to solve it is to finish the other two books and the thrill and satisfaction of doing so will set me on the right path. So that’s what I’m setting out to do. Finish and release the untitled sequel to The Big Four Ohhh! and then to the same with The Lies We Lead.

I hope it works.