Wobble

I’m working hard at my latest novel, Magick, a sequel to my genealogical mystery, but to be honest, I’m having a bit of a wobble…. it all seems a bit woolly, the characters don’t seem very distinct, there’s not much action, there is too much interior monologue and as usual not enough descriptions of place… I know this is just the first draft, but there doesn’t seem any clear lines… it all seems a bit muddly.

In Radwinter, right from the start there was a clear direction it was going in, Thomas Radwinter was trying to find where his family came from, to trace his ancestors. Along side that was his actual life, and there was another very clear line of plot concerning his marriage, and his relationships with the people he worked with. Gradually, as his research got nearer to the present, elements of his own life began to coincide with the story of his ancestors… When I finished the first draft, I had work to do and lots of things to check and smarten up, but it seemed quite clear to me how the whole thing hung together.

In Magick, Thomas is now researching his maternal line, going back from Sylvia Magick, tracing his ancestors back to a workhouse in Cambridgeshire. A novel has to be more than that, so there is another aspect which is his new relationship with the young woman he now lives with, and all the complications of them starting a new life together. He is now a house-husband and earns a little money by doing genealogical research for friends; the main thread becomes his search for a missing girl, using his research skills. It doesn’t sound so bad when I wrote a brief synopsis like this, but it just seems woolly and not clear at the moment…

Oh well, I’ll just keep going!