I am so nearly ready to upload my next novel ‘Loving Judah’; I am at the rereading aloud for the second time stage having just finished going through knocking out the little repeat gremlins. When I’m writing, particularly if I’m in full flow I have little tics which repeat… the word ‘just’ for example, ‘feel/felt’ and ‘suddenly’, I had a whole chapter of my characters were just suddenly feeling things….
Thanks to modern technology and the ‘find and replace’ thingy, I can go through my manuscript and eliminate or replace all those unwanted phrases. There also seemed an awful lot of tears and crying, so I’ve cut out a lot of that and replaced it with more subtle emotions…
One of my friends who had a read-through, commented that my conversations went on for too long; I’ve written about this before but the dilemma in ‘Judah’ is that some significant events take place before the characters meet each other, to they have to explain their back stories… I have taken my editorial scythe and cut down swathes of unnecessary blether and yet I hope the remaining conversations are realistic.
I was thinking of publishing next Sunday on my wedding anniversary… as ‘Loving Judah’ is about love – family love, the love of friends, romantic love… but then I thought maybe Halloween – not that there is anything very spooky in my novel, but there are ghosts!
It was very foggy now but Bavol pulled her uphill. She remembered holding Judah’s hand; they’d walked up one of the dales near Copthwaite, the two of them last summer when he came home after finishing his finals. And she had a sudden, virtually physical awareness of Judah’s presence beside her, as if he’d taken her other hand and she was walking between the two tall men. Bavol stopped and Aislin looked round as if to see Judah behind them.
“Seen a ghost?” asked Bavol unnervingly.
Aislin’s teeth chattered audibly and she laughed nervously. She wasn’t frightened but it was the eerie side of creepy. The fog was so dense that if Bavol had taken half a dozen steps he would disappear.
So… Halloween, twelve days to go!
Lois Elsden 