It's all bit weird here, in this corner of the universe. The foundations have moved. The constant, the taken-for-granted, the always-there is no longer there. The new Elizabethan era of Queen Elizabeth II is just that, an era: complete, finished and consigned to the history books.
And the unconscionable, the abomination of desolation, is here, front and centre, set up in the holy of holies of our national life. Perhaps it will go away if we bury our heads under the pillows, perhaps it won't. It won't, not for a while yet. And the carnage it wreaks will last for generations.
To cap it all, the equinox has passed. It is now Autumn, promising Winter.
In all this turbulence, a week has come and gone; a working week, more or less, and I have set out for myself a work plan for the autumn. This is a weekly writing schedule comprising six days for six novels and one day for review. This is the day for review.
Six novels? Writing? Are you mad?
Probably.
Let me explain.
One novel is complete and published, if only by me on the blog here: Small Finds. (Not that that stops me from thinking of things I should change and things I should have done differently.) The job here is one of marketing and promotion. Ha! In practice, that means the odd post on Twitter.
Two more novels are already written. Their working titles are Theresa & Tom and Andrew Bridges. These two are (near) contemporary stories.
One of them, Theresa & Tom is in manuscript form in two large notebooks, so the job is to type it up into the old laptop in the writing hut. It is set in the final years of the twentieth century.
The other, Andrew Bridges, was written directly into the laptop so the job there is to read, review and edit. This story was written in real time during 2021 and early 2022.
The fourth and fifth novels are fragmentary and both derive from writing I did a decade or more ago. They are both historical and they are related to each other. They are, in effect, two parts of one story. This story is the history underlying the archaeology of Small Finds.
In both cases it is a matter of finding extant material, piecing it together and reworking it into a sound narrative. Some of this material is in notebooks and some of it is in redundant computer files. The stories have had various titles over the years. For now, I'll call them Paul Aurelius and Septan. The action takes place at the beginning of the fifth century in Britain (Septan) and beyond (Paul Aurelius).
I spent an interesting time on Thursday, recovering text from archived, obsolete MS Word 7 files from 1998! To my delight, I discovered what amounts to half a novel already written (Septan).
In the light of this discovery, this has been a Good Week.
And the sixth?
This is a glimmer in the mind, a mirage in the desert, a fantasy. It is a sequel to Small Finds.
This idea would, if it does become something more substantial, pick up on a couple of the characters in that novel and follow them into the contemporary future. Small Finds is set in 2010. This follow up fast-forwards to now and, beyond now, to 2025 and ... well, I don't know yet where it ends up.
The job here is to plan a narrative arc and I spent a happy hour Friday afternoon doing that. It's a rough schema. When it comes to the writing, it will change. But that's half the fun, isn't it?
It is, as a say, all a bit weird in this corner of the universe at the moment.
