The First Draft Done

and still doubts remain...

Over the past week, I’ve had a very interesting exchange of messages with the former English teacher of all our four children, focused mainly on how painfully personal poetry is for the reader and for the writer. The conversation played into what I’ve been talking to R about on substack. That every great piece of art, every great poem, every great novel, has that ability to evoke in its lookers, readers, listeners a unique picture, view, reaction. For me, that’s what creation, being an artist, writing, is all about.

Last week, too, I finally read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, which I loved. In the afterword to the edition I read, the afterword by Sally Beauman reflects on how Du Maurier often described her creativity as an “aberration” and that she thought being a spouse and mother were incompatible with being a writer. That really hit home with me, because it’s the way I feel a lot of the time, and why I do often think about just stopping with the writing, because it does constantly take its toll on my relationships, my mental and physical health, and I constantly carry guilt (unnecessary, according to M) around with me that I am not being enough of a father and husband.

All that said, at 17:45 on Friday 29th September, I finally wrote THE END on the first draft of The Mortality Code. I started it in mid-June 2020, and it was meant to be my Lockdown book, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. A sequel to The Immortality Clock, which really finished up as an anti-Brexit historical fiction novel, it was meant to be a quick write (as was the first), my attempt at “airport” literature, but I seem entirely incapable of writing books which require little research and use too many adverbs and adjectives (although I have tried to use slightly more of them in these two books in a vague attempt to be more populist).

I am hugely relieved that it’s done (the draft stands at 110k words), and will now put it to one side for a few weeks before I start editing (and cutting) it, although I have to admit that I am not experiencing as much physical relief from finishing it as I hoped I would. And questions and doubts remain, which will bug me even if and when I find it is at least suitable for reading by M and the public at large.

Apart from trying to finish a novella based in Agios Nikolaos in Crete, I don’t envisage I’ll be doing any more writing this year except for the daily poem and my blogs (if even that). And even the novella will have to wait for a while. The process of finishing this novel has exhausted me, in truth, and I feel totally and utterly drained, mentally and physically. Very odd for a job (and it is a job, NOT a hobby) that involves sitting on your backside most of the time.

And hopefully, The Mortality Code will be available for Christmas 2023.