As proof of the efficacy of leaving a novel to marinate, I woke up this morning with a new idea which should make more sense of the whole thing. All I have to do now is to write it all down! (yes, that’s the hard part)
‘Frozen in Crime’ has been sitting on my computer since I wrote ‘The End’ in June, but now it has started pushing other things out of my brain – especially the other novel I’ve been editing, unfortunately. This is the stage I was hoping to get to by now – although I would prefer to have finished the other novel too, obviously. I’m still sort of hoping to carry out the two edits at the same time, or at least interleave them so everything gets done. I think I can manage this as I seem to have finished the re-thinking phase of ‘Song of Vanora’ and now just have to plough through the Word file making sure my new thoughts are woven into the text. The next phase of that one will be to do some final spelling, grammar and sanity checks and create a map. Although I’m not exactly eager to do spell-checking, it’s the last part of this that strikes terror into me. But now that I’ve got the idea of including a map, I can’t deny it might be necessary for people who, unlike me, have no idea where Kirriemuir and Forfar are.
‘Frozen in Crime’ is also the kind of novel that might usefully have a map at the beginning. This is partly because it takes place in the middle of a bad winter, when everything looks unfamiliar and no-one seems to know where they’re going, and partly because I’ve encouraged the characters to go outside their comfort zones quite a lot and I feel it would only be charitable for me to provide an aid to navigation.
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 