A short break

Tomorrow I'm off to Australia for a couple of weeks. I expect it will be harder to post from there. I've set myself the task of completing Chapter 5 while I am there. This is going to be quite a difficult one with lots of exposition that I shall have to try and fit in in an interesting way. We shall discover more about Vivie and Gwendolyn and about the purpose of the Kensington Gore Croquet Club. More importantly we shall finally get to Ludens and Vivie's involvement in his release. I am well aware that I'm a long way into the story and my star turn is yet to make an appearance.

I have just been watching Johnny Depp in the Ninth Gate - a sort of occult horror. I'm amazed by the liberties that this and other films of its kind take with the audience. Characters have to behave peculiarly to help the plot along. I want to try to avoid this if I can.

I am determined to return to this blog even if I am only talking to myself and I hope to report on a satisfactory Chapter 5.

A new start!

Finally, I've got myself started again! This is good for me - usually when I give up on something I stay given up. This time I'm going to be a bit less ambitious.

The good thing is that I did persevere with the story. I now have about 35,000 words of first draft. So I'm about a third of the way towards the sort of length that publishers are suppose to prefer. I've decided to press on if I can and at least have a go at getting it published. There are a few people at the Richmond Writer's group in much the same boat so that is, in a way, encouraging.

Spoilers

Inevitably a blog such as this will contain spoilers. Over the last decade or so I have been impressed by people's resistance to spoilers. Even quite young children seem to be adamant about them. They want to experience the story as the writer created it without any preconceived ideas. Now in truth it is a bit pretentious of me to even think about spoilers in the case of my story, written by an amateur and unlikely to be finished let alone published. A spoiler for The Gentleman Rankers is not going to be in quite the same class of calamity than one for a Harry Potter novel, is it? Nevertheless, I shall try wherever I can remember to flag spoilers in advance. Oh yes, and I nearly forgot - probably no one will ever read this blog either.