It’s the journey, not the destination—I keep reminding myself. And it’s a long journey, or at least I’m making it one. It was about a year ago that I decided to re-write the novel that I’d already written seven times. I was going back to scratch. I’d hoped it would take me three months, but now I’m hoping I’ll be done before the end of this year.
In that year, I got wrapped up in a bit too much volunteer work, over-extending myself. Of course, the writing got squeezed, but I still wrote something almost every day, just not always my novel. That’s been sporadic, at best. (I’ve been using Pacemaker so I now have a visual graph of my bad writing habits.) Read more
Writing a novel is really like putting a puzzle together. Characters, plot, setting, theme, dialogue, emotion. Or perhaps it’s more like cooking a stew.
It was a balmy twenty seven degrees centigrade in late October in Venice, Italy; birthplace of Casanova and often referred to as the most beautiful and romantic city in the world. I was lounging in a café, sipping cappuccino and watching the world go by. Gondolas and river taxis glided past and the canal water gently lapped at the edge of the patio, a scant three feet away. Tourists stopped to pose for photos on the iconic Rialto Bridge.
The title of this blog was originally, ‘Deadlines be Dammed’, which sounds brash, but that isn’t what I needed to write.
