Everything’s Coming Together …

Ok, so those of you who regularly read the blog will know that just over four months ago, I gave up life as a traveling nanny-come-first aid instructor – come author, and have returned home to a more socially acceptable 9-5 job!

After two months waiting to start my new job, the past two months of employment have been quite literally mental, working every hour under the sun to try to claw back all the debt I ran up waiting to start the job! As of today, I’ve had just four days off in nine weeks! Which, as I’m sure you can appreciate, has taken it’s toll on my writing.

I’ve been knackered! After 12+ hours a day staring at a computer screen, quite frankly the last thing I wanted to do every evening when I got home was to spend another couple of hours typing away.

Add to that the increasing general frustrations of being an ‘almost there’ author – something I’ve spoken recently about in ‘Just the Advice I Needed’ and ‘The Writer’s Marathon‘ – and it’s been hard to motivate myself to continue writing.

A few months ago, when I was waiting for my ‘day job’ to start, I began a book called ‘Mercury’s Child’ – a novel for 11-15 year olds about a girl called Halley MacFadden, who discovers eight parallel universes to the one in which she lives, and who, without giving too much away, soon realises that many of the people close to her are actually different versions of the same person.

The book has always felt ‘almost there’ (a phrase all too close to my heart at the moment!). The more I developed the concept, the more excited I got, but I just kept thinking it needed an extra va-va-voom, and I guess this slight apathy towards the story, combined with all the other reasons I’ve been disinclined to write, have meant that Mercury’s Child has sat half-finished, and untouched, on my laptop for the past two months.

Now, for those of you who are regulars, you’ll know, when it comes to writing, I like joining the dots! I write by linking connections, and I get my ideas by drawing connections from things I come across in every day life … (Me vs Me! and ‘Give Yourself an Inspirational Day!’) And you’ll also know that my Dad, who died when I was 19, has been playing on my mind quite a lot – ‘Just the Advice I Needed‘ – so with all that in mind … I think everything’s begun to come together!!!

Mercury’s Child needs some oomph … something that makes me want to write an ending, and also something which makes me believe in my writing again, after nine months of rejections from publishers.

As everyone keeps telling me, the best thing a writer waiting to hear back from publishers can do, is to keep on writing … but you need to be inspired to do that, and you need to believe in your own writing.

As I explained in Just the Advice I Needed, Dad has become the inspiration. My biggest fan might no longer be around, but that doesn’t mean I ought to stop believing in myself. If anything, the amazing feedback I got from all you guys from the blog post I wrote about finding all his old writing should be something that inspires me to believe in my own writing. But I have a feeling Dad can help me out in another way with the writing!

So, as I mentioned above, I’ve been working crazy hours recently – the life of the starving artist!!! And today was my fourth day off in nine weeks! The day off was long overdue, but it also gave me the down time I needed to start joining the dots and finding the connections around me.

Mercury’s Child is the story of a little girl.  Halley, the central character is just 11 years old when she begins travelling between the different parallel worlds. But there’s another major character in the story – her father Robert, and the different versions of the same man that she comes to know. And I think that’s the missing link in the story that I might have just begun to see.

I grew up surrounded by my Dad’s stories. Not the literal box of old stories and projects which now sits under my bed, and decorating my bookshelves, but tales of his weird and wonderful life. Tales of the thirty-odd years he lived before I came into this world. My Dad, a computer programmer by trade, was a hundred other things. He had been an English teacher in Tehran, a lorry driver, an insurance clerk, an RAF translator, a backpacker … And those were the stories which coloured my childhood. Which inspired me to momentarily forget my Cambridge law degree, and become a live-in nanny over in Canada, which inspired me to pack my bags and see the world, which inspired me to do every job from a children’s party entertainer to a first aid instructor.

But Dad’s stories don’t just have to inspire my life, and the way I choose to live it … They can also inspire my writing! Because I have a feeling that Robert MacFadden is missing something that my Dad had in truckloads …

Backstories ….

The man was meant to have discovered the different universes, and lived in different time-z0nes, set 20 years apart. He literally lived tens of different lives …

So now it’s time to add all those back-stories in, and see if I can put the va-va-voom back into the story, and get back my writing mojo

C-C xxx