Well, the rate of the new novel has slowed – currently 75,000 words – and I have to put it down to my sleep problems.
I have always been a bad sleeper ever since I was a kid. It takes me ages to get to sleep and I wake up numerous times in the night. When I mentioned this to my parents they just said I was nosey and didn’t want to miss anything. I have just lived with it and it has never really had that much affect on me. Yet in the past few years, I have been getting tired in the afternoon and that is new. The doctor put me in touch with a sleep clinic and after a test I have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Currently they are treating me with mellatonin and CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy.) The problem is, I am not getting to sleep any quicker, I am still waking up in the night but the medication is making me even more groggy during the day. I am managing the day job. I have always been an early riser and a morning person so I do my day’s work before lunch, although I still keep a watching brief in the afternoon in case something is needed. I am dog tired by then though so not much writing is getting done – my brain is too fuzzy.
Not too much blogging for the same reason – did I heara cheer at that? – but I am launching something today which I threatened to do before. I tell people who ask that I wrote my first novel at 18 but in actual fact it is enitrely possible that I was 17 when I first put pen to paper. Most of story was certainly down within a year, handwritten in notebooks, but it took me a lot longer to type a manuscript. I always wonder what would have happened if I had got support from the family rather than ridicule and at one stage an outright attempt to stop me writing. Maybe the result would have been a nice clean manuscript that someone could read rather than the messy thing it ended up being.
The journey is clear. The story was written in the period 1980 to 1982. The typed manuscript was ready by my birthday in 1984. It was sent out to only the one publisher and declined in that same year. Then it was in a drawer until 1990 when I fell into vanity publishing. It came out in print in 1991 with 500 copies available. Over two years 72 were sold. The other 428 were essentially stolen although technically they were left in my kitchen cupboards when I had to move down to London following redundancy. I let my flat and the tenant moved the books to his friends place because he needed the room but he nver gave then back when he left. technically, there are more copies of Trance out there than my other books combined.
As the creation was BC (before computers) and the book is out of print, I have no manuscript. Well, I did have the original until 3 years ago when I had an attack of booklice but had to throw it away then. I have been toying with the idea of serialsing it in my blog – in the original, unadulterated format – as an illustration of how it all started. This wsa the book I wrote just to see if I could. Now I am copytyping it out to put on here. I don’t really need to think so it is easier than writing the novel.
Once I have it all done, i will have a full manuscript again and then I have to decide whther to try and republish it. Truth be told, I would have trouble knowing what the target market would be. It was supposed to be a thriller but at that age we write a few years younger than we are so it might be a bit Enid Blytonish.
Coversely, I was heavily influenced by Alastair Maclean in those days who wrote long chapters. The 60,000 word story only has 12 Chapters. Each is too long for a blog so I will have to split the chapters up. First episode to follow.
I was made aware by a reader that there is a technical mistake in the first chapter. I am not going to change it so it will be interesting to see if anyone else spots it.