It's done.  Eight pages of tightly typed notes.  A new structure to my novel.  The invisible character now suddenly not only visible but stronger, fully formed, and a much more terrifying and riveting presence than before, complete both physically and emotionally.  I've worked so hard on this that I can even tell what he's doing when he's not on the page.
Working doggedly at the opposing POV and wrestling with plot points until I was almost banging my head against the wall, I have succeeded in taking this novel where I wanted it to go - at least in note form.  
​There were always two main problems:

• I couldn't see the second main character as I was stuck inside the head of the main character (a problem with writing so intently in the first person)
• There was no inciting incident before the Act II climax

By making copious notes of the 2nd main character entirely from his POV, I was able to solve multiple problems.  With a much deeper understanding of his character, the inciting incident appeared easily out of nowhere.  It as if it was always there, waiting to be found!

So there is a lot to be said for standing back, going through the novel with a fine tooth-comb and making pages and pages of notes.  I sometimes found myself thinking on the page and the notes themselves are an unholy mess.  I ended up making notes of notes to put some order into them.  But now it's done.  I sat back on Thursday and realised - you've got it.  This is the novel.  The story is there at last.

I just have to write it now.

A rare moment of Christmas magic touched Bloomsbury yesterday.  It was around four in the afternoon and we had been feeding starving squirrels on Tavistock Square, each one variously soaked and filthy from scratching about in the vast bog that is supposed to be lawn.  Once we’d run out of nuts, we had to run ourselves because they were intent on following us, so hungry and desperate were they.  Crossing Gordon Square, we heard the strange sound of voices singing, echoing through the quiet streets – quiet only because the council has changed the one-way system and two thirds of the road is now given over to cyclists, thus screwing up the traffic for miles around.  We couldn’t figure out where the singing was coming from as it echoed off all the buildings.  I thought it must be the large, ornate church that looms on Byng Place but the lights weren’t on.  It was that time of afternoon when ordinary lights everywhere were glittering like Christmas trees in the damp dark, reflecting off the black mirror streets and turning the foggy sky a weird mauve colour.  We wandered towards Waterstones to inspect the new cafe and were amazed to find that Waterstones has undergone a transformation:  the windows are now “open” so that you can see right into the shop.  Instead of the usual boring displays, they were decidedly Christmassy.  There was even fake snow.  The new cafe is now on the ground floor and has been named Dillons.  If you know the history of Waterstones on Gower Street, you’ll understand the poignancy.  But the cafe was full of students frantically stabbing laptops and it didn’t look half as inviting as the old Costa downstairs (my favourite branch, now gone).  Perhaps I’ll try it out later when it’s quieter.  The singing turned out to be a choir doing fantastic harmonies on standard Christmas Carols outside the church on Byng Place.  One of the choir members was wearing a Santa hat.  On Gordon Square, deserted and dark, there were four robins competing beautifully and several startled blackbirds, but the wet squirrels on Tavistock Square had gone to bed.  If you see them, feed them.

Would you pay over £100 to have someone tell you how to write your second draft?  I considered this recently, tempted by an email from Writers&Artists.  They have loads of courses for writers, nothing cheap, all very tempting, particularly the ones aimed at self-publishers.  All that brilliant advice from editors, publishers, agents etc etc - surely invaluable, I thought.  The course that really tempted me is called "The Novel:  Writing is Re-Writing."  You have to have at least your first draft finished to qualify for the course and considering the trouble I've had with my second draft on my latest novel, I was hugely tempted.  I even inspected my finances and wondered if this would count as a birthday present.  No chance of ever claiming the money back from the tax man because everything I was promised about filing claims turned out to be a lie - you get NOTHING back except the 7p interest you made on your ailing savings account.  Bastards.  But I digress.  I was just about to click, yes, I'll do the course, sign me up, where do I fill in the on-line form........when I suddenly remembered what I'm like.  I never take advice from anyone, least of all about writing.  If I have a problem, it's more satisfying to fix it up myself.  Also, I hate talking about my work.  And I wouldn't want anyone to see my work while it was still in the creative phase.  I'd be terrified someone would steal my idea or - far worse - tell me how to change it because it was second rate.  I wouldn't want anyone to say to me "would you consider......."  No, I wouldn't.  And last, but so very much not least, I've finished more novels than I care to remember.  I got stuck on them too.  One got totally overhauled ten years after it was finished.  Another one I couldn't "find" the main character, and when I did, he turned out to be the best character I've ever created.  I have to keep reminding myself of these things while I write, because whatever problem I come up against, I've got through them before and the only way to go is to persist, persist, persist.  It's a courageous soul that continues on the obstacle course from hell, or so I keep telling myself.  I may only do a few hours a day, but I keep on doing those few hours and eventually it all adds up and the novel is finished.  But that's another day, another year.  So no fancy courses for me, telling me what to do.  I'm sure there are people out there who really need other people to tell them what to do.  For me, the obstacle course isn't worth doing unless you do it by yourself.
......although I did dream for a few moments, while considering the course, that one of the agents would go "wow, this is the most amazing novel I've seen under construction in the last 100 years when are you going to finish it's going to win every prize in the universe here's a billion dollars to keep you warm."
Yes, well. 

This is the link, if you're interested:  Writers&Artists:  Writing is Re-Writing

I've finally figured out a way to tackle my second main character.  As my novel is in the first person and essentially has only two characters, it has been almost impossible to get into the head of the character that ISN'T the first person.  Everything the narrator says or does just bounces off the other character, so everything ends up being a reaction and there's no depth.  I've been troubled by this character since the beginning of the novel - or, at least, since he turned up in the novel (in chapter 12, I think it was)(before that, he was mentioned, so the reader knows he's coming).  I've found it almost impossible to get into his skin.  The fact that he is male has nothing to do with it - more of my stories are told from a male point of view than not, so this was not the issue.  My first draft fell to pieces because I had failed utterly to really understand this character and the 2nd draft has gone the same route - I couldn't figure out the conflict between the two characters, I couldn't figure out his personality, I couldn't understand why the things he did made no sense.  Considering that he's one half of a two-hander novel, this was a serious problem!  I've never had so much trouble developing a character.  My previous novels were action-packed and had many points of view and it was much easier to get inside a character's head when they were very busy doing stuff and doing it with other people.  My two characters in this novel are isolated to the extreme and there is no action at all......except perhaps the sex, which so far is hardly better than porn.
HOWEVER!  I've at last found a way.  I've abandoned my novel for the moment and am concentrating entirely on getting this character's act together.  I tried writing up his past (everything that happens before the novel begins) in a story form, told in first person, but that went awry too.  So I'm doing it my favourite way:

• Using bullets to separate ideas

I'm now onto my third page of bullets and that's just the before-the-novel-starts stuff!  I also managed to work out what drives him, what fuelled his hatred.  Everything I'd come up with was just wishy-washy and inspiration wasn't striking.  One can sit around for days hoping that inspiration will strike in the usual odd place (on the bus, in the bath, before you go to sleep) but as this wasn't happening, I just sat down, every day, to work as usual, and hammered at the point and looked at it from every angle.  It took four days of bashing at air, it seemed, when finally I looked at the mess of notes I had written and realised that, yes, actually, I had done it and there had been no fanfare.  It had been in front of me all along, I just hadn't seen it because I needed to view everything from a different point of view, and the only way to do this was just to make notes and make notes and make notes.  I wrote down the facts and kept writing down the facts until the facts gave the answer:  the character is in pain.  It's pain that drives him.  It's so bloody obvious now that I've worked that out.
I'm now ready to go through every single scene in the book between him and the first person and make notes on what HE is thinking, what HE does between these scenes, what HE knows and she doesn't.  When I'm done, the novel will at last have its sails.