Oh, I really can’t be bothered…

Having published ‘Making Friends with the Crocodile’, I do feel that I have succumbed to the temptation of sitting back and resting on my laurels. It seems to be quite difficult to motivate myself to write anything, and, strangely, it also seems quite difficult to motivate myself to do anything about publicising said novel.

I have tried to galvanise the other Work In Progress; my long novel ‘The Assassin’s Garden’, which already weighs in at some 110,000 words, but I seem to be very dissatisfied with anything that I write. I get too easily sidetracked from the research that I need to do, and everything that I read back seems to be somehow trite and uninteresting.

There are some short stories that I need to edit, one of them almost 15,000 words long. But do I feel like doing it? Nope.

Then there is a poem cycle that was going well…nope.

Even blogging seems to be much harder work than usual.

Is this some sort of reaction from finishing the other novel, I wonder?

But what about publicising ‘Making Friends with the Crocodile’? Surely there is plenty of incentive to do that?

Well, I have had a few reviews, and they are all very kind and generous with their praise, and I have the strangest feeling that I am so pleased with them, that they seem of more importance to me than sales.

Obviously, no sales would mean no reviews, so this doesn’t really make too much sense, but I do wonder if other writers feel this way after publishing a book.

Or could it just be because it is my first?

But, something clearly needs to be done.

I had decided to enter NaNoWriMo this year. This is National (Na) Novel (No) Writing (Wri) Month (Mo), which happens in November (No again?) and is internet based (So how come National? Search me…) and is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel (Gosh) in the month of November (Phew!). This is generally in the form of a first draft, to be edited later at leisure. I thought it would be fun to try, and I had begun to make a few notes in readiness.

But in a similar way to the way that my idea for ‘Making Friends with the Crocodile’ hijacked my writing last year, held a gun to my head and forced me to write it, so my ideas for this other novel have rapidly snowballed until I knew that I had to make a start on it.

And so, I now have a new work in progress.

Again it is set in India, but this time there are two main protagonists; one Westerner and one Indian, and the story will be written alternately from their Points Of View. I have pretty well worked out the details of the plot, but let’s just say at the moment that they both change a lot as a result of their meeting (I don’t do spoilers, but I do try to do teasers!).

Hopefully, this will goad me into rather more activity than I have managed in the last few weeks, including now thinking up a new idea for NaNoWriMo.