Ever written a Novel?   Me neither!

 

Ever wanted to?  Me too!

 

So here’s what I did…some of it completely by accident!

 

image sourced from stock.xchng

 

I’m a writer and a wannabe Author, but at present I have to fit it in around my full-time job, home life, pets, classic (for ‘classic’ read old and in need of work) cars, house fires and all the other day-to-day trivialities that take up everybody’s time.

So, to get round this, I began writing in the little ‘holes’ that bubble up into everybody’s day – those empty voids of waiting that make you sigh with exasperation. Like arriving at work earlier than you’d like because to wait any longer would mean dicing with rush-hour traffic (20 minutes writing time right there!). That just-eaten-lunch-but-not-ready-to-go-back-to work-yet space (15 minutes there!  Or 45 if you’re lucky to get one of those old-fashioned ‘Lunch Hours’.) and those other times when waiting for a significant other, or a dentist / doctor / pharmacist.

 

These minutes all add up.

Someone once quipped, ‘I’m getting paid by the hour, but getting older by the minute.’

Don’t sit waiting for time to pass – use every precious second for something.

So I spent the ‘spare’ seconds and minutes making notes about story ideas, characters and even jotted down dialogue between as yet unformed characters.  Those notes ended up (after a particularly nasty illness) assembled on my first-ever laptop and coalesced into a writable story.  

Now, twelve years on (how time flies!) I have the makings of a novel and have set myself the goal of seeking a publisher by the end of 2010 (I’m nothing if not realistic) but it isn’t the same story with which I hoped to get my career going.

‘HomeWorld’ (see link on the right) was the story I’d wanted to write since I was at school in one guise or another (that’s the story, not me!), but when ‘Elementals’ exploded into my head in 2006, it became the driving force that really got me motivated.   However, after 3 years, as I reached the 230,000 words point, I became aware that ‘Elementals’ was nowhere near ready for submission.

Too big, near-impossible to trim to the industry-acceptable size of 120,000 words and quite obviously only one part of an epic adventure, it just wasn’t ‘novel-shaped.’  

But I had learned a lot during the process of writing it.

Despite the urging of several people around me to submit it anyway, I took the (painful) decision to place it on the back-burner and turn to a completely new project, something that would hopefully catch the Supernatural Romance (Vampire) wave that began sweeping around the globe in 2008/2009.

So, as I continue to age (now 39 plus VAT) at my desk  in Darlington, I am hoping that I can build enough of a writing career to change my future without having to resort to the DeLorean.  Plutonium is still a little hard to come by…

Watch this space!

 

Please check out my pages and links at the side.

Write on!

A. J. Toynbee

 

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