NOVEL FATIGUE.

After the adrenaline fueled flush of finishing Gold Dragon Haiku with the fiddly business of formatting and uploading to Amazon, I took a couple of days to wind down (well, scroll through various Twitter streams and get my tweet feet wet) before returning to normal hours of sleep and work.

However, it didn’t take long before whatever subconscious urge compels me to write started sending guilt messages. Get back to the novel - it’s not going to write itself - three quarters of the way there – come on, move it!

Currently I have only four chapters (of strand B) left to complete the second edit and I have to admit setting goals, getting my head down, working then watching those targets tick past, does feed the enthusiasm. Yet the changes I’m making are more or less cosmetic ones. Like those do-it-yourself programs where you knock down a wall or extend outwards and while this might give some change - the fact remains - it’s the same house albeit with a freshened aspect.

So if I’m being honest, I have to admit to a certain fatigue. When I’m in the thrust of writing what I  fondly refer to as THE NOVEL, I’m wholeheartedly absorbed. I’m married to my creation, but like many marriages, there comes a time when familiarity induces a certain boredom that comes when there’s nothing new to discover. My affair with haiku is in a cooling off period and I have to make my marriage work.

This journey is not a quick one and the nearer I get to the end, the deeper I dig within myself to rise to the challenges. Time is a strange phenomena because although the finishing line is in sight, the distance between myself and crossing that line, seems, despite my endeavours, to stay constant.

One niggling worry is that I’m not sure if the novel is long enough to satisfy current publishing requirements. I have approx. 70,000 words and will probably arrive at around 75,000 by the time I’ve completed some planned additions. But will it be enough? I’m going to ask my beta readers to particularly look for where the story could be expanded, not simply for the sake of padding the book out so I can reach a magic number, but for where the story can be genuinely enriched.

On the other hand, a story is as long as it needs to be. Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland and Though the Looking Glass are all brilliant stories that didn’t reach the 100,000 word count.  All I can do, all I want to do, is keep writing.

The Twitter Experience

Yes, I like it. It means being more disciplined, more conscious of time management but so far, so good.

I’m reading a wide variety of blogs - and opinions about blogging. How personal, how informative, how academic should they be? One post broached the question of purpose and made me wonder what my long term plans were for blogging. I decided I didn’t have any. I see blogging like a smorgasbord – you choose what you want to create out of it. You write, work at improving your writing and be flexible.

I’m tweeting a haiku a day on #haiku and am thunderstruck by how many varied haiku appear in a constant never-ending stream. How great is it that people all over the world are tweeting poetic images presented in three short lines into the ether?

On a different front, I’m fighting the Battle of the Ground Elder. No, this isn’t some computer game I’ve been sucked into, not is it related in any way to fantasy novels - it’s an insidious ground weed with what’s called a creeping habit. A mile a minute thoroughbred on steroids is more like it. But as with the writing, perseverance pays dividends...

Today’s haiku:

SPRING BUS HAIKU

river rises high

greedy waves laps at stone walls

the bus speeds onward
 
Today’s offering is from my book Gold Dragon Haiku which is available as an ebook at the Amazon Kindle Store. 

Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/GOLD-DRAGON-HAIKU-ebook/dp/B00CLJ0RGK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1367505326&sr=1-1

Here’s another link where you can upload and share some of your writing (check out Samera Owusu Tutu’s Flash Fiction stories – loved the gremlins in the underground):

http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/community/shared-work

To all story lovers out there, good reading, and to those who write, good writing.