Post the Nineth: A-Version Therapy

Apologies for the lack of posts lately.  It's been a mad month in the Day Job, as well in the Personal Life, and quite frankly I'm still not sure how I woke up this morning to find myself only a few days away from the clocks going back.  I'm sure someone owes me a large portion of October somewhere down the line.  Things will calm down soon hopefully and I'll be able to get into some kind of routine of publishing posts.

The Manuscript - in all its imperfect glory!
(photo: Jack Gilbert)

So what have you missed? Well, the good news is that my Proof Reader has finished proof-reading THE WICKEDEST WAR, thus becoming the second person (one of my beta-readers was the first) to have read both the 1994 original version and the 2014 reboot.  The general feedback was very positive. That was a huge relief to me, especially when you consider that his main observation of the original was "it's a good yarn full of thud and blunder".

So, I took a break from compiling the TWW bible - yes, it's taking much longer than I thought it would - and I started going through the marked-up manuscript.

There's only one marked-up manuscript, which is just as well because when I came to correct the electronic copy I found that it the digital versions have been fruitful and multiplied.

Post the Eighth: Know Thine Enemy (And Thine Good Guys and Thine Places...)

So, I started work on DARK DAWN just as I said I would in Post The Seventh.  However, I haven't added a single word to the narrative in the last fortnight.  Instead, I've started compiling the basic skeleton of the novel's bible, that's the reference guide for any of you out there unfamiliar with the term beyond the...err...biblical context of the word.

A small glimpse of the bible (with a small "b").
They're only spoilers if you know what you're looking for...
(Photo: Jack Gilbert)

And to procure a phrase from the Good Book, "it was good".  Is good, I mean.  But it got me thinking about THE WICKEDEST WAR.  It's now in the hands of another three beta-readers, including a fellow writer - one far more experienced than I am - and I thought to myself, "Jack, it's been two years now since you touched the half-finished bible for TWW.  I wonder how many inconsistencies they're going to find in that tome of yours..."

It turns out the answer is quite a few.

Post The Seventh: Confidence Tricks (of the mind)

It's been a bit of a crazy and full-on time at the Day Job lately, but I still feel I should apologise for not posting anything sooner.  Although, in my defence (yes, I know I'm my own prosecution counsel as well) this is about the tenth time that I've sat down at the computer with the intention of writing Post The Seventh.  However, the previous attempts all ended with me writing three or four awkward paragraphs which were then promptly deleted due to lack of clarity, direction and coherence.

The part of my brain that's responsible for assembling and committing words to the page just haven't been working properly for the last few weeks and I felt I had what they refer to in motor-racing parlance as "a bag of neutrals".  And if I'm honest, I've also suffered a crisis of confidence of late as well.

I should have seen it coming, the stress had been building-up again and I was pushing myself to stay creative in amongst it all, partially to keep my writing skills sharp but also because I wanted to stop my brain's fly-wheel from spinning itself into destruction thinking about work matters so I kept the problem-solving portion of it distracted with the construction of the plot for my next novel, DARK DAWN.