Chapter Seven

I have finally stopped fiddling with chapters four, five and six. Are you bored of me saying this yet? But this time it is all done and dusted, as I have printed it ready to send to nice people T and M who are reading it through for me. At least, they had the first three chapters back in April, I hope they don’t mind this disjointed book effort coming their way!

Agh. Can I just scream here silently please? I cannot write. There, I’ve said it. Chapter seven’s starting paragraph, no matter how much I push it, is refusing to budge and just sits there like a big lummox. I can’t see over it to the next paragraph and so we sit and angrily eyeball each other. We have done it for around three hours now, and I am considering ‘Avada Kedavra’ and blasting its nasty little words out of Word for good.

I am desperate to at least touch base with chapter eight tonight. I can’t sit gabbling around the lower chapters like a cod-fish all my life, surely? But it does look like I will get to my birthday in September and still will not have a finished story I am proud of, that I can show others and say lookit this! Ah well… at least I have a job, and can keep slowly but steadily redrafting around it.

Since writing the paragraph starting ‘agh’ above (three hours ago, in case you wanted to know!) I have managed to get in 1057 words of ‘new’. It’s a bit bleak this chapter though…just been researching where bodies wash up in the Thames. Did you know the Thames has what is known within certain circles as a ‘u-bend’ where most bodies turn up? Did you want to know that? I’ll have to read all this section tomorrow and check it’s not too harrowing! Don’t want people to read my words thinking they have bought into an ‘Angela Carter’ and halfway through it turns into a ‘Lynda La Plante’.

So, since I still have 5000 words of chapter seven to puzzle over and it is already near 10pm, I think we can safely say chapter eight remains somewhere over the rainbow for now. Although purring ginger cat on my lap has anchored me down to this spot, so maybe I’ll push on for longer yet. It’s hard to argue with a writing coach that purrs so nicely.