Literary Brainwave!

I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA for my book. It's like a new version of my story, which I'm going to do...

Which I cannot divulge. It's so good, if I said it here then everyone writing for children would want to copy me and I, of course want to be first...

(What am I saying? Nobody reads my blog these days anyhow!!!)

Ukh despite the brainwaves, I have been feeling pretty terrible of late. Which is a paradox, I know, but that's life... Sleeping on and on and on. And on. And on and on. And on. Oh yeah: and on again. Terrible, I know. Makes me seem really lazy, doesn't it. If I do manage to be in bed by midnight, which is difficult when you've spent an evening slowly ~ very slowly ~ dreaming up silly animal tales, then it is difficult to sleep afterwards. I write pretty slowly ~ less than a page an hour, which works out at an average of just FIVE words per minute... and that's only the first draft...

Anyway once I do get to sleep, which can be difficult because ironically I sometimes feel a bit "high" of an evening, I fall into an abyss of dormancy and am unfit to be revived until a good TWELVE hours later. FOURTEEN, SIXTEEN, EIGHTEEN on a really bad day. Then I generally get up feeling distinctly under the weather...

OF COURSE I have tried forcing myself to rise at eight, and when I do I think "Wow, I'm doing really well..." until I dare to sit down at around 10am and suddenly ~ WHOOSH! ~ sleep overcomes me once more like a stealthy disease and I'm wiped out all day, making up all "lost" time, and often more. + making it even HARDER to sleep at the right time come midnight... Another thing: when I sleep less than twelve hours I usually feel very depressed during the day. Much worse than on a "standard" day... so I can't win. I'm just SO GLAD I'm managing to get this story done. I'm now a good ¾ of the way through (20,000 words written!). Isn't that amazing!

20,000 words, by the way, can I say to the non-writers amongst us, is NOT a lot of writing. To people who don't have cause to think in thousands of words, let me explain. In an adult Penguin Classics style volume (ie fairly closely-set type) that is just 50 printed pages.  In a kiddies' novel (sans illustration) it works out at approx 75-80 pages, not counting blank patches at ends and beginnings of chapters (which can add a lot; that's one device publishers have of lengthening brief manuscripts into books of more impressive length). So really I've NOT done a lot of writing. My book will not by any stretch of the imagination be "too long"! But hey I'm SO HAPPY to be writing it. I just cannot believe I never knuckled down and did this before.

(Well I AM the author of three failed novels, FAILED being very much the operative word!!)

(Actually I CAN believe it. I spent years feeling uninspired and thanks to that maxim "write what you know" I felt limited to tawdry tales of heroin addicts, petty crims, prostitutes and gangsters ... also I did once try composing a mysery memoir. But walking into WH Smiths one day only to see a five-pack of life-tales of woe on special offer. I remember thinking "no way do I want my own life packaged up like that ~ schizoaffective heroin addiction next to wife-beating, anorexia and incest" and so I proceeded no further. Also just the act of recalling my life and having to join the dots into something that made sense to strangers was more disconcerting (or upsetting, if you prefer) than I had anticipated.

Another thing: as a writer you're obviously known for the genre you write in and I did not want to feel I'd have to spend a career putting in repeat performances of druggy tales. Plus, if I did put in a successful memoir, I reckon my "fans" (if I collected any) would want more and more tales from my own life. Fictionalized stories would feel very much like a second best, and I've always wanted to be a novelist, not a memoirist.

As for children's writing, once I turned my mind to this field I had literally an entire page full of ideas ~ all for separate books. More ideas in one hour for children than a lifetime of "adult popular fiction" (the genre I'd always wanted to write in). What stopped me from proceeding was how difficult I found my first attempts to be. The writing just would not flow... So I put it down, assuming that I just didn't have it in me ~ that I wasn't good enough to write for children. 

Children's writing is a rare talent ~ I can see that by the profuse lack of talent that appeared to be on display every time I browsed the kiddies' shelves in WH Smith ~and I just didn't think I had it either. What changed was that I stopped worrying "will they understand this word; is that sentence too complicated for them" (and I haven't got any and don't even KNOW any children) and just sat down and wrote the story for myself. I'm such a big kid anyway there's no difference between writing for a ten year-old and writing for myself . That's how I found my voice...

Anyway, enought said! Gotta go and put more high-grade entertainment to paper...

Hope you're all doing well. Take care folks XxXxXxX ☺