You get yourself a little momentum going. You think “Yeah, my voice is a little scratchy because I’ve beeen reading my book out loud, and some tricky parts of it repeatedly, for hours.”

Nope, you’ve got that seasonal cold thingy. A brain of snot. Dawesomb.

It happens. That strange lightheaded inability to focus because no damn reason at all. Or sinus pressure that you remember old people talking about when you were younger and laughed incredulously at, because you’d had a runny nose your entire life but had never experienced pressure up there.

Incredibly, it will be February tomorrow.

I really thought, back in November, that The Killer and The Dead would absolutely be published by now.

I recognise it won’t be for 2 months minimum. I don’t want to admit that, but I’m going to finish the out-loud in cigar-croak voice section maybe tomorrow, certainly on Saturday. But this run through has revealed to me how many simple fixes need to be made to my prose, the nut and bolt tightenings that I wanted to disregard a few months ago in order to hit my schedule.

They cannot be disregarded. I think I have something special in this next book, and it would be foolish to sabotage it by not doing my due diligence. I have caught enough things this read through, improved enough sentences and paragraphs, to know that being more systematic will yield more rewards.

I just didn’t want to in November. I wanted to hurl the book out there, as raw as its narrator and imagine the two things would excuse each other. Maybe they would have, I’ll not know now.

Now I know I need to control my overuse of words like ‘now’. Along with many others. I just edited three nows out of this blog.

It is funny – this blog is in many ways an inescapable advertisement for my writing, and it is written by me, in what can only ever be my written style*. So my writing is on display in every blog, eternal exemplar. But I do not edit these blogs very much at all, in comparison to my novels. If I did I’d be lucky to publish one a month. Most I write in Word first, the last three, not so much. I’m trying to close the gap in my hasty writings, to remember the rules I cleave to when writing more formally, but the truth is I often forget.

So yeah, I got sick this week. Bummer.

 

 

 

 

 

*I believe that a writer can write in many styles, and yet still have a style all of their own that might haunt them, should they try too hard to shake it off. Break it down, try to understand how it works, yes, indulge it other times, sure, but not too hard, or it becomes boated and useless. Deny it and try to eradicate it at your peril. Your style, your way, is you. Took me a long time to stop being self-conscious about the way I am in writing. But I still use the word now far too often. And still. Dammit.