Write Another One, he said
I had just finished off a marathon writing challenge; I have banged out my #2badpagesaday and there's a manuscript (a couple of folk are kindly having a peek). Everyone said, step away from the words; move away from that story … leave it alone, pretend there is ‘nothing to see here’. You have to come back to it later.
Then the editing can start; that’s the real job.
Okay, okay … I get that. Totally. You guys seem to know what you are talking about. I hear you. I have done it; turned my back on the characters I’ve been living with for as long as my aging brain can remember.
So, what now, I ask?
I even asked it out loud when I wrote What The Fiction Have I Done?
What The Fiction (WTF) do I do now?
Folks say, take a break from it; come back to it in a few weeks. A few weeks? But I am missing it so. I’m curious about how my characters are and how they are getting on in the world I created for them. I miss them.
I’m not sure I know what happens next.
Cue the perfect prompt from author Des Ryan (thank you).
Simple. “YOU START THE SECOND ONE”. Doh, why didn't I think of that?
I scurry off to check my ‘Notes’.
Here’s the thing, I scribble ideas all the time; well, not all the time … mostly, occasionally, gusting ‘not that often’. But, anyway, there it is.
An idea.
A draft first paragraph.
I saw the glasses first.
Before I saw the blood.
The sparkle of evening sunlight caught the unbroken lens. The cracked eyepiece on the right-hand side cast a distorted glint that made me look again. My second glance slides away from the wire-framed spectacles to the drops of blood which guided my own fading eyes to the kerbside.
That’s it. That’s what I have.
All I have.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s something in it.
