Midsummer Check In

Well, where does the time go? I can’t believe it’s mid-June already. Summer has been and gone. Did you blink and miss it? A few glorious days of sunshine and warmth in May. Thankfully here in Scotland, although we had hot weather, we had nowhere near the heat experienced further south. I really don’t do well in the heat.

We made the most of the sunny weather, painting the front of our cottage and restoring the front garden to some semblance or respectability. The back garden – well, that will take a lot more hard graft, and my back is currently protesting.

I enjoyed a few wonderful days up in Aberdeenshire house hunting. Yes, we are looking to move from our lovely little cottage, having decided it’s no longer large enough for two grown men and two dogs. Mostly it’s due to all of the ‘stuff’ I inherited from my late brother – including copious amounts of photos, trinkets, knick-knacks, ornaments and chinaware that once belonged to my parents. It was an unenviable task, going through every cupboard and drawer in every room of what was once my childhood home, deciding what to keep, what to give to charity and what to throw away. However, there can be no going back now, no regrets or recriminations. The old family house has been sold. 50 years of precious childhood memories are now tucked neatly away in my mind – and also currently in my loft, hence the need for more space.

It’s been a productive year for writing too. I finished the first draft of the next Gertrude Harrington Mystery ‘Death on the Tracks’ last year. That has had its first edit, and I am now getting ready for the second edit and polish. It’s still on track for an autumn release.

In January I finished writing ‘Village of the Damned’ which will be the following Gertrude Harrington Mystery for next year. It’s a prequel and delves a little further into Gertrude’s past. And yesterday I completed ‘The Art of Murder’, which follows on from ‘Village of the Damned’.

The process of writing never ceases to amaze me. I start with the briefest of outlines, often just a single sentence or paragraph (sometimes only a title). This expands into a lengthier outline of a couple of A4 pages, and this is where I decide which main characters are to feature and which new characters are to be created. (This often changes during the actual writing). This outline is then broken down into chapters and expanded. There are always 30 chapters in the Gertrude Harrington Mysteries. I aim for writing 8-10 pages per chapter, with 20 for the reveal at the end. I try to stick to this to give the books a uniform feel, but some chapters end up shorter and some much longer. Most of the Gertrude Harrington Mysteries have been roughly between 250 and 275 pages . ‘Village of the Damned’ and ‘The Art of Murder’ in their first draft form come in at 311 pages each.

My writing process is very fluid. Often things that were supposed to happen in a particular chapter occur completely out of sequence and require much note taking to ensure everything still fits together neatly. This is one of the reasons that I like using a word processor, because I can go back and amend things as I write. That, and the fact that I find using a pen for any length of time to be rather painful these days. I’m getting old, you know!

Sometimes characters appear out of the blue as I’m writing, which can be really irritating. (I’m looking at you, Arabella Wilmington-Hildebrandt!) Turns out she’s rather an important character, actually.

Once I have completed the first draft I print it out and put it in a springback binder, then put it away for a while and get on with something else, usually editing a previous book or sometimes starting another new one right away. That all depends on how furtive or active my mind is.

Considering where I have just left Gertrude in ‘The Art of Murder’ my first inclination is to start the next book (which will be called ‘Murder by Design) straight away, but I know that if I do that ‘Death on the Tracks’ will not be ready for autumn.

And since I want to get back on track with publishing at least one book each year, that would not be good.

So, sorry Gertrude, for the moment you will have to stay in the…