flying fingers!

I first started my blog here in March 2012 – in fact it was 12th March and I wish I had remembered it nine days ago on the actual day, to celebrate twelve glorious years! I had finished the day job the previous year and had begun to write properly and seriously. I had completed my first proper novel, ‘Farholm’ and began my blog to try and promote and publicise it. Since then I have written thousands of posts about all sorts of things, but mainly my writing and my books. I write about things that go well, and also things which don’t go according to plan, and also the occasional disaster. So last year, I am sure I wrote about a writing disaster – but I probably wrote about it more lightheartedly than I actually felt.

Somehow I deleted the last twenty to thirty thousand words of my latest book! It was to have been the eighth, and probably last, in my Radwinter series of genealogical mysteries. It was a tremendous blow and I was annoyed with myself as well as frustrated. The difficulty was further compounded because with a new laptop I was writing in Google Docs not Word and despite the best advice from all sorts of helpful and kind people, and my own best efforts I couldn’t retrieve it. The only thing to do would be to rewrite.

The Radwinter series was set in whatever year I was writing  – I had started the lost book before and continued to write it during the halcyon pre-lockdown days.  My characters as I write them are very real to me, and in particular Thomas Radwinter, the narrator, has been, and in fact some cousins have even said he is actually me (except I don’t have swarms of children, and I am older and a woman, and have never had gingery hair or a beard.) The thought of rewinding my creativity back to 2019 when I first started writing the book, potentially called Spindrift, was daunting to say the least. I kept writing other things, but I was sunk in a creative quagmire with this, to be truthful.

Unexpectedly, today, and I’m not even sure how, I found a complete copy of the finished first draft!!! I don’t know where it was (I can’t suspect the boggart as he’s not that technical) but I have found it!!! I have now saved it in several different well sign-posted places and I feel full of joy!! Now I have to get my head down and really work hard on it because it’s far too flabby and repetitive at the moment. I must knock it into  shape, slim it down, polish it up and get ready to launch!! To get it published in the summer would be absolutely amazing – not least because then I can get on with writing all the other things I have in my head!! I must “chase the glowing hours with flying feet”, or in my case, with flying fingers!