Somehow the closer I get to finishing something, the more ways I find to procrastinate. You’d almost think I didn’t want to finish. It isn’t so much that – I love the feeling of having finished something. It’s all the work that’s needed to get to the end I object to! Laziness is a positive advantage in my ‘other’ career in database management – it forces you to find shortcuts and clever little tricks to make it all less tedious. It isn’t so useful when writing.
However… I have managed to tear myself away at intervals from the delights of carrying out random family history research and even more random spells of posting political comments on ‘The Guardian’ website, and in the above picture you will see that I currently have two printed copies of different books awaiting the final edit. I must say I didn’t quite intend to be working on them this close together. But the state of play today is that I’ve completed the final edits for ‘Two Adventures at the End of an Era’ and still have to start them for ‘Closer to Death in a Garden’. I feel as if I should apologise to anyone waiting for ‘Pitkirly X’ – but the other one has been waiting longer and I knew it would be quicker to edit as the two stories together are only about half the size of a novel.
If you look closely at this second picture, you will see my notes on ‘Pitkirtly X’ for my so-called structural edit. That makes it sound like quite a difficult undertaking, but actually all I had to do on this occasion was to list the chapters in order with a short description, and then go through making sure the sequence made sense. It doesn’t always!
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 