Wood from the trees

I’m not getting over confident but I am beginning to see the wood from the trees, the light at the end of the tunnel, the end in sight, more the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning… and so on! For some reason, although writing here and my various self-challenges have gone really well, my novel writing over the last few years has been more of a dreary grind at times than an exciting adventure with my characters.

I can’t remember when I actually began my present Radwinter story – and maybe I would have done better to have had a break from my characters and either gone back to finish my other stories, or started something completely new – but I had what seemed like a couple of great ideas and so I began my eight Thomas Radwinter story. There are two main story-lines, one involving some characters who appeared in #6, ‘Saltpans’, a mother and daughter whose husband/father had disappeared from the beach front hotel they run. He had walked out of the front door, apparently to have a cigarette, as he often did, and was never seen again. They ask Thomas to have a look at the known facts of his disappearance a dozen years ago, wondering if maybe he hadn’t gone down onto the beach and got washed away and drowned, but had left them and their home for some reason. The other main storyline is of an old friend of Thomas’s who is worried about an elderly neighbour who it seems was not living in her cousin’s house, a cousin who was in an old folks’ home, but squatting there unbeknownst to the lady now in the care home – and unknown to her, not a cousin at all! There are a couple of sub-plots, two little friends of Thomas’s eldest child who seem to be neglected by their parents, and an unknown double of Thomas’s who causes havoc wherever he goes!

My recent breakthrough is that at last, after the words grinding out and the plot lines getting in a dreadful tangle, things are beginning to flow – and not just the words. The plot lines are actually leading somewhere, and with one of the main stories I actually know the ending and how to get there, and with the others I see the resolution of the puzzle but the route to it is still a little uncertain. With the latter I may need to do some rewriting, but at least  things are becoming clearer and now I just need to knuckle down and WRITE!!