Writing is the most fun you can have with someone else’s clothes on but it has a dark side.
Pouring words into blank pages, two fingers trying to keep up with ideas, is a fantastic high.
When it goes well the sparks are flying, idea builds on idea like bricks, characters write their own dialogue, sometimes they even gang up and change the course of the story.
When it’s not going well it is hell.
The flow slows to a trickle, even stutters to a stop, but the tyranny of the blank page never lets up.
It’s like a love-hate showbiz marriage, a volatile cocktail of lust and loathing, ambition and need, weakness, occasional violence and, if you’re lucky, mind-blowing make-up sex.
If you and the blank page can tough out the peaks and troughs together then typing those magic words “The End” is the equivalent of flopping onto the sweaty bedding with a soppy grin on your face.
It’s surprising where the wandering path of crime novel research takes you. I only realised when scrolling through my Danny bookmarks.
There are links for field stripping firearms, private jets, Louboutin shoes, dogging and the Goldberg depression test.
Then we have lap dancing clubs, night vision equipment, Menorquina horses, ration packs, wild boar, dialect dictionaries, HM Coastguard, Gibraltar apes, rough sleepers, dominatrixes, Polish folk music and rock groupies.
Makes for quite an eclectic browsing history.
Checking books sales is always tense. Sometimes, instead of wading through websites and spreadsheets, I wish a little bell would ring for each sale rather like the one that announces another trainee angel has got their wings in the classic It’s A Wonderful Life. Having such a sales bell clattering like a fire alarm would be very distracting but I think I could live with it.
@williamjtodd
ebook: The Wreck Of The Margherita
paperback: The Wreck Of The Margherita
ebook: Death Squad