Writer’s blog – stardate – 14.01.2013
Late last night (too late for me to commemorate the occasion with a post, as has been my custom on self-publishing my previous two books) I waved bye-bye to Joint Enterprise – The Third (and final?) Romney and Marsh File. And as the drunken archaeologist once said after urinating up against a fresco of antiquity, ‘What a relief it was.’ I pinged it off into cyber space towards the planets of Amazon and Smashwords, powered off the laptop and burst into…the kitchen looking for alcohol.
The Romney and Marsh Files have plagued, amused, frustrated, consumed, entertained and owned me for longer than I care to remember. And now, like the three little pigs, they have all left home. Yesterday, I sent the last little pig of a book into the big-wide-world to get on with it.
And all day it has felt like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I feel like I’ve just wandered out of out a dark, musty, damp, labyrinth of confinement after years of aimless incarceration into crystal clear light and fresh clean air. I feel like…..enough. I’m just pleased that I can move on.
I don’t want to forget what a wonderful and interesting and educational and emotional experience the whole process has been. (That’s why I just wrote it down.)
What will I do now? Well, I have two other novels in a different series written that I feel I can do something with. I feel that they have some potential to be something better than they are. I’m going to have to work on them. I’m going to change a few things that I’ve come to realise could be better. I might even re-write them from the third person into the first person. I’m almost certainly going to change the name of the central protagonist.
But before I do any of that, I’m going to get stuck into some serious reading for pleasure. I have two Raymond Chandlers, two Gerald Seymours, The Mosquito Coast (I read the first couple of pages yesterday and understood something more about what it is to write well), an Elmore Leonard and I’m sorely tempted to re-read the Patrick O’Brians, or at least a couple, before I do anything else.
Life is good.
Oliver Tidy 