Fed Up Friday

Question: what do you do when you’re 25,000 words in and you suddenly realise the entire plot is nonsense.

There are two possible answers:

1) Turn it into a comedy.

2) Scrap it and start again.

Unfortunately, the rules of comedy mean that it still has to make sense, and it doesn’t. Besides, it’s not intended as a comedy, so I’m left with option 2; scrap it.

After the launch of The Deep Secret and the completion of STAC’s Christmas Crackers, I set to work on the next case for Felix Croft and Millie Matthews, and that’s where the problems soon manifested.

It’s irritating. I’ve spent the last seven days working on this (no I am not doing nano, I always work at that speed) but try as I might, I cannot make this thing make sense, and at eight o’clock this morning, I finally worked out why. It’s two separate novels and I’m trying to make them fit into one, and because they’re so different, it’ll never work. It’s like wearing your frilly shirt and bow tie and dinner jacket, with a pair of denim shorts and flip-flops. True there are people who might do that, but it doesn’t make them style gurus, and there are no doubt writers who would cobble the two together, but it doesn’t make them novelists.

So while my good friend Maureen Vincent-Northam is busy drilling through plates, and my old mate Trevor Forest is running Magic Molly through her 4th adventure I’m back at the drawing board, working on what will be Croft and Millie’s third outing… if I can make it make sense.

Friday? I’m fed up