On New Year’s day I have made a practice of starting a new book, or as in the case of 2017 picking up where I left off before party season hit.
So, I’m 50,000 words into the new thriller. It’s contemporary and it has no connection with archaeology; that’s all the clues I’m giving. Oh and the working codename is NRT.
When I was a lad I was at the same fencing club as Desmond Bagley’s widow, Joan. She invited me up to Castel House one afternoon to talk about my ambition to be a writer. IF I paraphrase her advice it was “When you start writing a book, there’s an awfully big pile of blank paper to fill.”
In the modern parlance that translates to a pure wordcount on the computer, but the image remains. Three quarters of a refill pack for my printer needs to be covered in print – hopefully something a large number of people will pay to read. I no longer print early drafts of books, it’s a waste of trees and ink, so at the moment NRT exists only in the electronic realm. And enough of the blogging, it’s time to write!
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