Time passages

Since my last, I sent all of the drafts of the recent stories to an editor for a proper assessment and edit. I was surprised when the report came back very positive and with only minor textual infelicities picked up.

When I say "surprised" I don't mean to be excessively self-deprecating: I was genuinely surprised that an objective reader coming to them for the first time didn't raise more queries. They are now undergoing a closer line-edit, so we'll see what comes out of that.

In the meantime, I have been working up ideas for a novel in the same world and am content with how this process is going. I've also been toying with a short story in a completely different context: once I have a more detailed idea of how that goes I'll write it--researching and plotting is fine, but I need the practice in actual writing.

Early in this process of trying to learn to write, I read a lot of the usual self-help manuals. I didn't get a lot out of them to be honest, a lot of them seemed to be advocating a cookie-cutter approach leading to over-familiar end results. The only book that I actually found helpful was Steven King's On Writing. Most of my 'education' came from considering authors whom I like and trying to work out why I like them and what I could use. So I like Muriel Spark's concision and acidity; George Mackay Brown's masking of subtlety within simple prose; Christopher Priest's unflashy intelligence; Dorothy Dunnett's focus; and M John Harrison's obliqueness and refusal to conform.

This weekend I have been reading James Wood's How Fiction Works, and it has been the right book at the right time for me as I consider how to develop ideas. A couple of years ago I probably wouldn't have engaged with it so well, a couple years more and it would be too late for me :-)