New Beginnings

It’s been a busy time. In addition to completing rewrites for my next novel, my legal practice, being a dad, step-dad, and a husband, and the myriad challenges of turning the dream of the Unbound Book Festival into a reality, there’s been little time or space in my head to write anything new. I’ve been living with my new, as-yet-unwritten book for more than a year now, but limiting myself to research and planning. It’s a complicated story. Told over the course of one June day in Paris, 1927, it involves six separate but interlinked narratives. There are acrobats and artists, dancers and writers, transvestites and surrealists, a pyromaniac Armenian puppeteer, priests and prostitutes, and (of course) musicians. There’s Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Maurice Ravel, Diaghilev, Sidney Bechet, Sylvia Beach. I’ve been having a lot of fun honing plot lines and developing characters, but with everything else that has been going on, I’ve been reluctant to start the thing in earnest.

Well, no more. On Friday I switched off the phone and the internet (sorry, beloved clients) and wrote all day. Today I tore up most of what I did on Friday but wrote a bunch more. I am moving from the generalities of plot to the particulars, and am mapping out scenes in detail using, of all things, a pen and paper.

And I’m exhilarated. This will be my seventh novel. I know all too well the slog ahead of me. You can be sure that before too long I will be complaining about how impossibly hard it all is. But right now, I’m itching to wake up tomorrow morning so I can switch on the computer and keep telling this story. And, I don’t know, that felt like something worth sharing on a Sunday evening.

I hope everyone has a great week.