… the day after you’ve spent five full days editing a novel you’ve been working on for a very long time … and you let it go off to the Alpha Reader … and you are certain that you should probably go and start looking at the job adverts … that feeling … today.
So, Vigil, the novel-formerly-known-as-Brisneyland-by-Night, is out of my hands for a while. I can forget it, just for a bit, let it settle into the mind-sediment. Let the backbrain ponder on it, while the forebrain goes about its business.
My brain is empty … or so I thought. I got up, picked up the ms and looked at the notes I’d written about the stuff I can do while the thing is away (writing a synopsis, writing acknowledgements, checking the chapter numbering, etc) and started doing all those things. Then a couple of sentences came into my head, the line of a new novel, Scandalous Lady Detective, which follows on from the novella I wrote last year, Ripper.
“At the best of times, thought Kit, Highgate Cemetery was eerie. But just on dusk there was something even more strange about it ? the fact you could see, but not quite see due to the low light, the gathering mist, the deceitful landscape of headstones and monuments that concealed more than they revealed.”
And it felt good, if not somewhat terrifying.
No rest for the wicked. I’ll pull the rags of my storytelling around me and wonder off the path again.