In between times

After a week in which I spent every evening in the black cavernous space behind the scenes in a theatre, and during the preparations for a week in which I will travel across Europe by train, tunnel, train, ferry, train, ferry and train, give a paper at a conference and return by very nearly the same route, I’ve been taking stock of my writing plans.

‘The Coronation Quest’, the first draft of which should be finished by now, has taken an unexpected turn and developed a sort of second wind, which is another way of saying I haven’t got to the end yet. This is slightly annoying in some ways – though good news in the sense that the plot wasn’t making any sense and now it is – as I don’t think I can possibly get to the end before I go away, and as I am not very good at writing fiction while in transit I almost certainly won’t finish until after I get back.

My so-called writing plan for the year, already not working very well even before this, has become even more tangled, to the extent that I may have to re-write it on a new page.

I realised this morning on the way to work that I don’t *have* to write all my first drafts during NaNoWriMo and its various offshoots. This was a bit of a revelation to me, although goodness knows why it should be, since I managed to complete some novels before I had even heard of NaNoWriMo. Anyway, the result of this flash of sanity was that I decided it would be more realistic to aim at spending the second half of June finishing off ‘The Coronation Quest’, and most of July editing it and ‘Adventure at the National Exhibition’ which is sitting there forlornly on my computer like a rescue dog waiting for a new owner. After that I can go into August happy in the knowledge that I can concentrate on ‘Pitkirtly VIII’ as it’s known at the moment.

Now I’m off to try and capture some amusing video footage of the cat chasing a miniature drone (the kind that’s like a helicopter, not the kind that hangs about beehives doing nothing) which I hope to use during my conference presentation to take people’s minds off museum labelling and storage systems.