Finding my way

The most important thing in getting my life back on track, it seems to me, is to resume work on my novel Mummy's Boy.

To help me do this I need to do two things. Firstly, I'm going to set up another blog dedicated to the work in progress. I'll post the first draft up chapter by chapter. This mechanism has two benefits. It will act as a catalyst to the creative process, allowing me to measure and discipline the amount of work I do on the book. It also allows for feedback from readers, something that proved so helpful with the re-writes of A Half Life of One.

Apart from all the external pressures that have kept me from writing in the past couple of months (okay, a month's holiday in New Zealand wasn't really ressure) I am a little concerned that the book - which tells the story of a kid growing up whose life increasingly comes to be centred around his mother - is in danger of turning into yet another "misery memoir". I must avoid that outcome at all costs. The book isn't about misery for a start. Life is wonderful even when it is challenging. It's more about the way the balance changes as children grow up. In this case, the change is pretty dramatic.

I guess I need to make sure too that the novel isn't a "memoir". Not a straight retelling of my life story. I think the best way to fictionalise the story is to let the characters really develop in an untrammelled way and set my imagination free.

Whatever the answer, the only way to solve the problem is to get back writing. With that aim in mind I have decided that my new life starts here, today, now. Whatever happens, in the next twenty-four hours I'm going to write another chapter.

That prospect is both terrifying and wonderfully exciting.