Kiss of Life

After my first crime novel, Broken, was finished I sat back and waited for the offers to flood in. And I waited. And waited. It was like fishing in my local indoor swimming pool. I got some nibbles (that, too, can happen at the leisure centre, but I digress) and one almighty, heart-stopping bite from a big publisher, but no fish. The book got some good reactions from editors, even making a shortlist in a competition, but I had to move on. Broken was put into storage, only to be read when I have chronic insomnia and an urge to pick on myself.

Still, I was certain my brilliance was soon to be discovered and started the second book in a flurry of inspiration. Then got completely stuck in the middle. It didn't matter how I looked at it, I was a failure. All the praise and positive feedback means nothing when your novel inexplicably dies on you. I did the worst thing possible: I stopped writing. Okay, I penned the odd poem, but my work in progress, Kiss Chase, languished in a computer file for six months, barely touched. I got on with the important things in life like playing Spider Solitaire, convinced the enthusiastic response first time out was a fluke. Whenever anyone asked me about the book, I'd mumble my excuse about needing to do more research then change the subject.

I only opened the Kiss Chase document, after spending so long grieving for it, as I had a tentative idea for a new novel. I thought I could lift some scenes from the dead book, squash them into the new plot, maybe saving myself some time. It's lazy, and it doesn't work. I'd previously tried to transplant deleted scenes into another story; it jarred and took twice as long to blur the edges as it would to write new material. But I am famously stubborn, and hoped I could salvage something from the abandoned novel.

I read through the forty thousand words or so I had tossed aside and was pleasantly surprised. The main idea was good, I still loved my main character, and I could see where the plot had gone wrong. I'd allowed a subplot to mushroom, taking the book in completely the wrong direction. If I pruned out the diversion, the story could progress.

So that's what I did: deleted a quarter of what I'd written, then read my pared down book. Without the tangent, I could pick up the narrative thread and follow it once more. Editing it down was a matter of meticulously going through to make sure everything I now had made sense. The more I worked on it, the more I found my mind buzzing with ideas again; I wrote everything down in a little notebook, not stopping to think too much in case I came to a dead end again. I ended up with a much smaller, streamlined document and pages of scribbled notes which, when I could decipher my handwriting, helped me form a cohesive plot. I sketched out ten chapters in a mad dash, then wrote the synopsis.

Having just gone back to flesh out the embryonic chapters, I'm now moving on to the endgame. It's been hard work, but also exhilarating. Kiss Chase has been resuscitated. You never know; this time, I might just land that big fish.

*BTW, my books have nothing whatsoever to do with fish, it's just the only metaphor my poor, post-Christmas brain could come up with.