Oh, dear, another deadline missed!  Well, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish it …. The new, improved version of Chapter Seven is printing out even as I type, and that’s as much as I’m going to be able to do before I head up to Scotland tomorrow morning.  That leaves three more chapters to revise when I get back, which is disappointing, but then again, things could be worse.  I am – still cautiously! – pleased with how it’s been going, but I do seem to be writing much more slowly nowadays.  All these extra jobs don’t help, something those of you who only ever buy books second-hand might bear in mind next time you by-pass the option to contribute to author’s royalties!

Anyway, Max and Freya are slowly coming together (so to speak) and I’m hoping the last three chapters won’t need so much revision.  Chapters Four to Seven required major rewriting, although I did reuse a lot of the material in the first draft, which was in all the wrong order.  It’s amazing how obvious it seems second time around.  I had to tighten up a lot of scenes too.  The boring scene I complained about in June was duly axed.  The action was necessary to move the plot on, but it was much more effective to have Freya telling Max about it, rather than describing the scene itself – again, obvious. Duh! I ought to be past making a mistake like that in the first draft, but on the other hand, I do think it helps to know exactly what happened, and sometimes you only find that out by writing the scene itself.

I had a bit of a blow a couple of days ago when I learnt that my nice editor was moving on to a job elsewhere, so when I do finally finish the manuscript, it will go to someone new.  It’s really important to have an editor that you like and trust, with the tact to suggest major changes without making you want to give up writing for ever in despair, but I have been lucky so far with all my editors and I’m hoping the next one will part of a fine tradition.  I have just been rereading Olivia Goldsmith’s novel,  Bestseller , an entertaining look at publishing in the 90s, and I notice she dedicated it to her editor.  For some reason I’m enjoying this book more second time round.  There’s not much I can identify with, I have to say (could this be because I haven’t, in fact, written a bestseller?) but she’s very good at describing the sheer slog of writing sometimes.  Somehow the whole business is just not as glamorous as you think it’s going to be!  Anyway, she makes editing sound an absolutely hellish job, so whoever my next editor is, I will make sure that I am extra nice to her …

Back in a couple of weeks!