It occurs to me that writing a novel is much like having a baby.
You're just going about your life and then, quite without meaning to, you've conceived an idea (see - even the terminology alludes to pregnancy) but you haven't decided what you want to do and it's too early to tell anyone for fear of jinxing it, so you revel for a while in the secrecy of it all. After a few weeks you start to feel emboldened, tentatively tell a few friends, and before you know it people you've never met come up to you at parties and talk to you about little else. They laud you for having the courage to go through with it, and then tell you about a friend of theirs that did, and who has never been quite the same since. Months later and you suddenly find yourself past the point of no return. You're struck by the realisation that, one way or another, this thing is coming out of you and that when it does, you'll have to show it to people and hope that they don't think it's ugly. To top it all, your friends who haven't been through it don't understand your new lifestyle, say you've changed and then declare you mad when, come the following year, you announce that you're going to do it all again.
I'm past the ideas stage, but thinking about my lack of any real progress too much still makes me feel guilty and vaguely nauseous. For ages - on the advice of an author friend of mine - I didn't tell anyone. The potential embarrassment of having to admit later that I couldn't find a publisher or had simply given up, prevented me from doing so. I've been writing (or at least trying to) for eighteen months now, and rather than continue to tell no-one, I've decided to tell potentially everyone. As I'm intensely afraid of failure this is, for me personally, quite a stupid brave thing to do. My hope is that it will force me to be more disciplined - that when I'm sitting at my desk, staring at a flashing cursor on a blank word document and really struggling to produce anything new, it [the fear] will give me the impetus I need to carry on. If only to save face.
However, this blog won't be all about the writing process, rather it will be about my life at the time of writing. I'm not really one for full and frank disclosure - that should probably be known now. Inevitably, my posts will reveal far more about me than I would like, but be assured that I won't be conveying every little detail of every day - very boring patterns would soon emerge if I did. I work in publishing so it will likely have a bit of a literary bent from time to time, but mainly I just wanted somewhere I could freely put down some of my thoughts and observations without being censored, and, hopefully, without censoring myself.
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