Vamping up is hard to do

The most recent story has reached something like a first draft stage, at last. I am not sure what to make of it - I've wrestled with it so much that I don't have any objectivity about it, so it has gone to a couple of first readers for initial comments before I take it further.

The breakthrough in writing it came when I realised what it was actually about, which allowed me to scrape of the surface layer and tinker with the canvas and the undercoat. It was also heavily influenced by an interview I heard with M John Harrison. This probably made the writing a lot harder to do but also made it a lot more satisfying once I typed "END." I'll link to the interview once I find it again. Much as I like The Executry of Edward Moorehouse--my story written after the holiday in Sutherland--it is a very straightforward, linear narrative, whereas the latest, Still Life, is not. I think that's progress.

The other thing I did was to be ruthless in excising anything that didn't need to be there. Whether I went too far (or perhaps didn't go far enough) is something I'll need to come back to. And right at the end I remembered something Hilary Mantel said about deleting your first paragraph. In this case, once I worked out what the first paragraph was (I restructured the scenes quite a bit as I went along), excising it worked beautifully to throw the reader in media res, I hope.

I'll see what comes back by way of comment. In the meantime there is work and the Independence referendum to distract me before I start to work up the next story. I should add that the two I have written so far in this sequence are essentially the first and the last, so I now have to fill in the middle. This means that the story I have just "finished" will undoubtedly change again to harmonise with whatever I write next.