​My writing isn’t going well.  If I had to blame anything, then I’m going to have to say it was the pandemic.  I did try.  I started an Exodus Sequence story quite early in lockdown but it was a mess and didn’t work.  I handwrote a short story but it was so poor I couldn’t find the will to fix it up.  I spent a long time working on the Exodus Sequence story, its title changed to Enlightened, realising that I’d tried to write two stories together that didn’t work.  Successfully separated, I wrote a fresh new draft, feeling quite confident at first.  It soon became apparent that it was a poor effort and, once again, I haven’t got the will to edit it. 
Where do I go from here?  How do I get back into writing again?  The depression of the summer is beginning to ease but the anxiety hasn’t.  I’m back at work, wearing a mask all day, while some colleagues only wear a mask under their chin.  I don’t feel safe.  I don’t trust anyone.  The world has gone to hell in a handbasket and I don’t want to go out.
If I’m indoors all the time, you’d think this would be prime conditions for writing.  People who don’t write and have no idea how the creative process works keep saying that to me:  “oh, you have SO much time to write now!”  What does TIME have to do with it??
I tried to concentrate on some marketing instead.  Not only has this failed utterly but I wasted £200 on a book promotion website that I realised too late is a con.  I have really been burned.  After all these years, you’d think I’d have some sense.  I thought I had checked them out really closely.  I thought I’d done my homework and my research.  But really, I was just desperate.
 
So here I sit.  It’s September and I have NOTHING to show for 2020 except a new caffeine addiction, a total loss of faith in myself, and a future that involves playing dodge-the-disease every day.  How do I come back from this?
 
I’d like to say I have the answer but I don’t!  My solution to everything is to just write.  Anything.  Garbage.  It doesn’t matter.  Just get some words on a page.  I have LOADS of editing to do but haven’t worked my way up to that.  So writing it is.  But what do I write if I don’t believe in my ability to write anymore?!  Teeny tiny writing.  Small and crisp.  Just an idea.  No need to develop it. 
 
Microfiction.
 
After amazing myself by actually managing to write a few of these, I then googled it to see HOW to write it.  Well.  Bugger that.  I can’t do rules.  I’m already chained.  I don’t need writing rules to chain myself further.  If that means my microfiction is a failure, then, well, heh, so what’s new.  But I like it.  And I like doing it.  My imagination is being exercised.  And in the long run, getting my imagination operating again is more important than having time to write.
 
LOWTIDE is my first ever attempt at writing something huge in a tiny space.

I approached an agent in the US recently, the first time I’ve ever done this.  Perhaps, I thought wildly, my contemporary/portal fantasy novel will have greater appeal to the American public.  As I’m not very good at pretending to be English and feel like a fraud setting my novel in a “quirky village in England” (you can’t believe the research I had to do to get a feel for non-clichéd village life), I thought perhaps my “quirkiness” would be entertaining rather than, well, researched.
The rejection arrived less than a week later. 
I have approached a total twelve literary agents this year.  In the previous two years, I approached 21 (just for this novel, you understand).  Of the 33 total, only 18 bothered to reply, all with bog-standard rejections, their emails almost identical (do they learn how to write these at Literary Agent School?)  I’ve run out of agents in the UK who don’t sneer at fantasy.  Sadly, my novel (or proposed series of novels) isn’t really Big Fantasy, which makes it even harder.  It’s set in the modern world.  The magical realm is separate and reached by what is traditionally called a portal (like Narnia).  There’s a bit of magic in our world but not much.  It’s very character-driven and heavy on relationship building.  There are a large number of strong female characters.
Is this all so unappealing?
It’s been over two and a half years since I approached the first agent.  I’ve already written the second in the series, though haven’t edited it yet.  I had hoped to write the third this year but it has begun to dawn on me that I probably won’t get to it.  A year that I had greatly looked forward to, filled with exciting projects, has been crushed by so many outside factors that I can barely get up in the morning.  I hardly need mention the pandemic.  Then there’s the realisation that I no longer feel able to work in my Real World job.  And on top of that, I’ve just been told I may have to have an eye operation for a possible torn retina.
I mean, fuck.  How do I respond to this?  I don’t know how to keep going.  The two efforts I’ve made this year at actual writing have produced absolute rubbish.  The immense amount of editing I have to do (which I usually enjoy) has been left to gather dust because I haven’t got the energy, crushed as I am by the events of 2020, not just globally but in my life.  I may have felt a smidgen of hope recently, when I got into gear and approached the US agent and did a whole bunch of other “writing career” stuff but the eye operation threat has destroyed it all.  There I was, trying to remain positive, trying to stay busy and productive, making an effort, DOING something, when I got steamrollered.  And it was a big steamroller. 
 
I recently tweeted:
I'm not sure I can do this writing thing anymore. I've been trying to find an agent for over thirty years now. I've been trying to get people to read my books for a decade. Nothing I do works. I am a droplet lost in a tidal wave.
 
I didn’t expect much of a response, the word “droplet” being the clue.  But someone replied with this:
I think your years of experience show a resilience and strength that the rest of us aspire to! I was feeling this way for the last couple of weeks... And reading your post makes me feel like such a lightweight. You are truly badass!
 
Me?  A badass?  According to Google, this means:
A tough, uncompromising, or intimidating person.
 
I was quite touched to be viewed this way!
 
While “perseverance” may be my middle name, the other side of the coin is, I’m afraid to say, total despair.  And as for the answer to the question I posed in the title of this blog, I don’t have one.  People may admire me for persisting and persevering on a difficult path, but for me, that path just looks like the ashes of my life, with all hope lost, a road that goes forever on and on in a talentless void.  And I only keep on walking because I haven’t spotted a turn-off.

If you can’t find an ending to your WIP, there is only ever one reason for it:  something hasn’t worked earlier on.
 
I’ve reached the end of novels, novellas and short stories in a variety of different ways:

1. I knew the ending first and have been leading up to it confidently from the beginning
2. I had a vague idea of what should happen but had to work on it once I got there
3. I knew what was supposed to happen but couldn’t figure out how to get there
4. I had no idea where the story was going
5. I had no idea how to end once I ran out of story

 
Every story is different.  No one way of writing is better than another.  For all my novels, I plan my endings to avoid waffling on endlessly.  I want to lead the reader confidently towards an ending that will either surprise them, please them, or leave them thoughtful (better still – wanting to read more if it’s a series).  This is something that works for me.  I like to know where I’m going.  I want to know what’s going to happen to my characters.  This way I can work on nuances and hints and ironies while I write.  Sometimes the ending can go flat when I get there, having held it in my head for so long, but a bit of rewriting, rethinking and reworking soon rekindles the original fire.
 
My short story writing is more experimental so I’m ready to expect the unexpected.  There can also be something quite delightful about not knowing the ending to a story.  It’s like embarking on an adventure and discovering things as you go along.  Not knowing your ending doesn’t mean you’re going to get stuck.  In a wild creative urge (and your muse on top form), a brilliant ending can occur to you just when you need it. 
 
While I’m definitely NOT going to advocate that you MUST know your ending before you start, there are going to be times when you just can’t find an ending – even if you planned one!  It’s awful if a planned ending doesn’t work but it’s worse if you just can’t think of a way to end a piece.  I don’t suffer from writer’s block but I come close to it when I hit a total blank at what I realise must be the end of the story.  How do you even know if you’ve reached the end of the story?  Has the plot run out?  Are all the characters dead?!  Or are you just sick of it? 
 
Whatever the problem, my Big Writing Tip should work.  Before I get to it, let me take you through some writing experiences I’ve had:
 
Knowing the ending
All my novels were carefully constructed.  I didn’t necessarily know them scene-by-scene and interesting things often occurred along the way, with some characters proving more alive than others, but I knew where I was going.  My Fleet Quintet novels were immensely complex with a plot that spanned hundreds of years (actually millions!) and some wild leaps in time.  I carried the plot of five novels around in my head for years and it was a great relief when I finally finished the fourth one.  The fifth novel in the Quintet is yet to be written but I have all the notes:  I know exactly what it is going to happen because I know exactly where all the plot holes are that need to be filled, the dangling threads that need to be tied up, the mysteries yet to be solved.  This is all planned!
 
Finding the ending years later
This has happened to me several times.  My short story, The Evolving, which I wrote in my early twenties, was rewritten decades later with an altered ending that actually made sense.  Another short story, Walked (which had a different title), was written in the late nineties but the ending was deeply unsatisfactory.  I knew the MC had to get to the desert in a plane, but what did she find there?  Over ten years later, the story became part of The Exodus Sequence and the ending resolved perfectly.  It was as if the story had to wait for the right ending to coming along!  Another Exodus Sequence story, Crashed, had a very weak ending that I couldn’t resolve.  By applying my Big Writing Tip, I finally found the perfect ending years later.  But I had to really work for it!
 
Not knowing the ending
My short story, Diamonds on the Moon, is a relatively unstructured piece which I didn’t plan at all.  I started with a dragon waking up on the moon, trapped in a crater, wondering what his purpose in life was.  I had NO idea where this was going.  I certainly hadn’t planned for Neil Armstrong to turn up in it!  I really just wanted to write about beauty and joy and friendship and I think I succeeded with that.  The final sentences of the story capture a theme that is prevalent throughout my writing (which means the ending worked for me, though I can’t be sure it works for anyone else!)  I planned nothing, yet the story is definitely finished and finished on a high note too, despite the sadness.
 
No ending at all
A recently completed Exodus Sequence story (which will appear in a collection of short stories as well as the second Exodus volume) (eventually) began very strongly indeed.  With characters that leapt off the page and felt very alive, it was great fun to write.  But once they reached their goal, knocking on the front door of a forest cabin they were trying to find and conversing with the inhabitant within – what then?  I had no idea!  Where was the story going?  What were they trying to do?  Why was this person in a cabin important?  I couldn’t answer any of these questions and was clueless as to how I was going to end the story.  I continued on boldly until finally I ran out of steam.  I’d rather hoped something would occur to me before I reached the ending, but it didn’t.  So I abandoned it for a while, then applied my Tip, and ended up with something more brilliant than I could ever have hoped for.  It moved the whole Exodus Sequence forward, rather than reaching the dead end of plot stagnation which is where I’d left it.
 
Having an ending come to me out of the blue
This is utterly brilliant when it happens.  It’s what you dream of as a writer.  It’s creation at it’s most excellent.  It also hardly ever happens.  I wrote Experienced pretty much “off the cuff” as it were.  There was no planning.  I launched into it wildly, then had to stop and restart the whole thing because I needed to change it into first-person-weird.  If you read it, you’ll know what I mean by “weird” because it’s a very dense story and takes a while for the confusing claustrophobic drug comedown to wear off and the plot to emerge.  The reader is basically walking in the MCs exactly footsteps – there’s no space from him.  You’re so far inside his head that you couldn’t escape if you wanted to.  For me, the revelation came during the fight at the end.  I knew what the MC had to do during the fight.  I just didn’t expect him to end up on real-world Io (that weeny volcanic moon that spins around Jupiter), nor did I expect that very last scene.  It absolutely tears me apart!
 
BIG WRITING TIP
 
If you can’t find an ending to your WIP, there is only ever one reason for it:  something hasn’t worked earlier on.
 
Oh, wait, didn’t I already say this at the beginning of this article?  Well, yes.  Because my Big Writing Tip isn’t more complicated than that.  It’s not some big secret thing.  It has nothing to do with inspiration, creative ability or your muse.  I’m quite sure there are a zillion other articles out there with advice.  Perhaps I’m saying exactly the same thing.  Perhaps I’ve come up with something genius.  But honestly, this is just what I’ve done and it’s worked for me.  Hopefully it’ll work for you.
 
If you’re stuck and in despair, the first thing you need to do is walk away from it for a bit.  It doesn’t matter how long.  If you can’t stand the story anymore, then make it quite a long bit.  You may just need a cup of tea or you may need to abandon it for years.  But if you don’t want to do the latter, try this:

1. Read the story from the beginning and make notes.  It doesn’t matter where or how:  I like using plain text documents.  But I’ve also been known to handwrite notes in vast volumes.
2. Ask painful questions while you read:  Does the plot make sense?  Do you know your characters well?  Do they remain “in-character” as it were?  Do you know what they want?  Do you even LIKE the story and where it’s going?  Is there an earlier scene that suggests a way out for the character and an ending to the story?
3. If you’ve had ideas while writing of earlier events that need changing, then change them now.  Sometimes if you spot a plot flaw, you’re not going to be able to think clearly until that flaw is cleared up. 
4. During this particular edit (it may be the first time the story is edited), you will almost certainly find things that don’t work.  Plot flaws, character errors, missing elements, maybe even a lack of structure.  You may find your tense is wrong or it should be in a different voice (first person rather than third).  You may even find the style is all wrong for the story and that it needs to be hard ass noir rather than wishy-washy fantasy (that would be quite an extreme change, but you get the idea!)
5. By now you’ve done a huge edit on your story, you’ve rewritten it, you’ve changed it, you found a new character or deleted one, your MC has expanded a bit and you know them inside out, you know their goals and dreams and past mistakes, you KNOW your story.  Has an ending miraculously suggested itself to you yet?  If it hasn’t, then there is still something missing from the story – and it’s not the ending that’s missing, it’s something earlier!  Find it and add it and connect it to the end.  There’s your story.

 
I’m currently working on a new short story for the Exodus Sequence about an MC from a previous short story, Woken.  His name also crops up in various other stories, so I thought I knew him quite well.  In this new story, he’s found dead on a beach in ancient Greece by a hermit – except that he isn’t dead and he has a huge story to tell.  The purpose of this story is to tell the truth about Atlantis (at least, the truth according to my Exodus Sequence universe!).  I launched in with no plot, no particular idea of which characters were going to do what.  I had some scenes in my head that I wanted to have play out.  And I knew that at the end, the hermit leaves his tiny Greek island and goes off to find some big name, like, I don’t know, how about Plato, to tell his story to, which is how Plato found the idea for his Atlantis.  That ending is all well and good, but what about the ending of the story that the MC relates?  That is the ending that is eluding me completely.
 
I already know there are some huge problems with the structure of the story.  It doesn’t have one!  It lurches about with info dumps and static conversations between characters.  I hate it!  Worse still, I don’t have all my facts straight.  The Exodus Sequence is a huge story with many characters, spanning millions of years.  Most of the stories are concentrated in the present or future.  Shattered takes place at the time of the Neanderthals and Woken in Arthurian times.  But this one, while set in the hermit’s time of ancient Greece at the time of Plato, also has a huge chunk set long, long, long ago, when there weren’t supposed to be any people on this planet at all.  It’s the heart of my Atlantis story, the soul of the Exodus Sequence.  The “thing” that happens here affects everyone forever more.
 
No pressure in getting it right, then!
 
What I’ve been doing is rereading ALL the stories in the Exodus Sequence and making historical notes.  I started this a few years ago and forgot about it.  Basically, I’m working on canon.  If the story has been published, which most of them are, then I can’t change the history.  And there is a lot of it!  It’s going to be very useful indeed to have all the “history” in one place with casual references to past events recorded in a linear fashion (to make my life easier.)
 
This is excessive when it comes to doing homework in order to find an ending to a story that has stalled, but it shows you how far I’ll go to get it right.  Hopefully, your story is just a one-off and just requires some serious editing.  By working on the Exodus universe history, or canon, I’ve already got a thousand ideas of how to fix up the story.  Better still, I’ve found the ending!  I realised my MC can’t possibly know who traps him.  THAT was the plot flaw.  It also means that in a future story, I can have a big revelation when he finds out who it is.  No writing is ever wasted!

I hadn’t planned to write anything this spring. I had been working on my short story compilation when the lockdown began and, doggedly, I’ve continued to put it together:  editing, doing a little rewriting, formatting, etc.  Quite a lot of it is done and I fear that it will be finished too soon – before the end of the lockdown, before summer, before I have a cover ready for it (whichever comes first).  I really hadn’t intended publishing this book before September, so there’s no particular rush.
My next big job (I’ve got this whole year pretty well mapped out) is to once again edit my Prizewinner and begin preparations for submissions to agents.  In the meantime, I’m still approaching agents for my fantasy series (though I seem to have stalled a bit during the lockdown).  And then – the big prize at the end of the year, or autumn, or just...later on – I will sit down and write the third Honeysuckle novel.  But between here and then...that’s a lot of time not doing any writing.  I started the year struggling with my writing and felt it was a good idea to take a break, doing something really constructive, such as working on the short story collection.
It’s just that I couldn’t possibly have known how I was going to feel in this lockdown.  I want to write.  I need to write. 
But what, exactly?
I have PLENTY to be getting on with.  I’ve got five series on the go.  Yes, really.  How did that happen?  I think it’s because I’m one of those people who love starting new things, who have endless ideas, whose imagination flies in every direction.  The five series are:
 
The Exodus Sequence:  White Shadows, Last Exit, Golden Queen, Merlin – a gloriously huge tale spanning millions of years, crossing several genres and experimenting with style.  (Finished 12. Unsure of end total)(short stories/novellas)
 
The Fleet Quintet:  Mindwalkers, the Fleet, the First, Gomenzi – an alien invasion of a most peculiar kind.  (Finished 4 out of 5)(novels)
 
Honeysuckle Rage:  Lightweight fantasy set in modern England with only one door left to a magical realm, about to be invaded.  (Finished 2 out of 7)(novels)
 
Tales of Everlast:  Short stories set in the magical realm first introduced in the Honeysuckle Rage novels.  (Finished 3 out of however many I feel like writing)(short stories)
 
Jacaranda Jane:  Autobiographical short stories.  (Finished 1 out of however many I feel like writing)(short stories)
 
I also write the occasional short story that fits into no series at all.  And of course, there are any number of novels in my head all clamouring to be written too.
I should really do another Jane story but they are hard to confront, seeing as how they are about me, albeit in the third person.  I’d rather do something more escapist, at the moment.  Having just finished an Everlast story, I might do an Exodus one instead.  But there are so many to chose from!  I want to write more about Zipp (the heroine of SPOOKED) but the next part of her tale is quite complex and I actually can’t get my head around it out right now.  Also, I need a different kind of challenge.  Which may involve reading Plato.  Urgh, really?  Must I?  Can’t I just cheat and read the Wiki page instead?! 
As an entry in The Exodus Sequence (volume two), it stands slightly outside of the general plot line – not that the reader so far would be aware that there is a plot line, but trust me, there is one!  Volume Two will be much more explanatory, compared to Volume One which, for the most part, concentrated on introducing readers to the characters and the aliens.
 
Let’s see how far I get with Plato…

I’ve just spent the last hour trying to think of names for the two main characters in a new short story.  What a waste of time!  I wanted to make notes for the story;  instead I got stuck on what I was going to call the prince and princess. 
 
Why is it so difficult?  There was a time when names used to just jump into my head.  I never worried about whether a name was cool or not.  It was just a name.  A name that seemed almost preformed was Gomenzi, anti-hero of my novel “Transference.”  I was sure I had heard it somewhere before because it felt familiar.  It doesn’t, however, seem to exist.  It doesn’t come up at all if you Google it – aside from my novel “V. Gomenzi”.  These days I Google all names to make sure there isn’t some famous person with that name, although this is only true of names with surnames;  my characters often only have one name, particularly if they are gracing the pages of a sci-fi story.
 
Other names that have leapt into my head are: 
Angelica Zippoli
Alenka Koie
Claire Halward, with parents Nick and Karin
Dett (who had a number of variations such as Detter, Detteth, Detteria and Besredetth)
Sistia Scarpora
Yani
Domitian (okay, I stole that – but who would think to use it now!)
Ziann Rama
 
The list goes on! 
 
Recently, in the last year or so, my pool of imaginary names seems to have run dry.  The heroine in my short story “The Crystal Vision” had so many name changes that sitting here, right now, I can’t actually remember her name.  This is NOT a good sign.  All characters are a part of me, after all;  it’s like not being able to remember part of your own name.  I’ve just checked:  her name is Lightness.  Urgh.  No wonder I couldn’t remember it.  It isn’t really a proper name at all (her mirror-twin is called Darkling, which is even more ridiculous).
 
I’m currently doing an enormous edit on an enormous novel I “finished” three years ago.  The main character in this has not only had her hair colour change but also her name – at least seven times.  I really, really wanted to call her Igraine.  And this is where my problems start:  the names I love are invariably mythical or made-up and used in famous novels.  Igraine was King Arthur’s mum.  The name has pretty much never been used for anything else (unless you’re a trendy parent, the kind to saddle your kid with names like Merlin or Frodo or Galadriel).  I worked on it for an age and eventually came up with my own made-up name, Ilgria.  When the novel was done (at least, I thought it was done), I realised I didn’t like the name at all.  My daughter agreed, saying she thought it made the character sound old.  Being highly enamoured with Tolkien names, I pinched a word from Elvish and called her Elanen.  My daughter promptly mispronounced it.  I promptly discarded it.
 
The search went on.  After several more attempts, I came up with Alegria, which is basically just Allegra dressed up a bit.  When I started my Big Red Edit (which has currently turned into a bit of a rewrite), I realised it was horrible and had to wrack my brains all over again.  Finally, I hit on Elanor.  It sounds a bit like all the names I’ve been wanting to call her, so is ideal.  And it’s pretty!  But it’s also a very famous name from, yes, Tolkien, being both a flower and Sam Gamgee’s eldest daughter (she even has her own Wiki page).  I eventually settled on a variant of the spelling and my heroine is now called Ellinor.
 
But you know what?  I don’t like it. 
 
While that name-search hangs over my head, my new short story, which I dreamed up all of two weeks ago, has run aground on the same deserted beach.  It doesn’t help that she’s a princess and he’s a prince.  The ONLY name that seems to go with prince is Charming.  Yes.  Really.  Prince Charming.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
 

You don't.  I didn't, anyway, yet I am a ferocious editor of my own work and a brilliant proofreader.  This latter quality has been discovered in my Real World job and everything that is written is brought to me;  I invariably find a hundred obvious mistakes that everyone else has missed.  It all boils down to experience.
When I first started writing (I was twelve), it was by hand.  Nothing got edited!  When my typing speed overtook my handwriting, I didn't do much more than correct mistakes with a bit of Tippex.  My first PC  (it was an Amstrad....ahem) meant I could do a weeny bit more editing, but even then, I didn't do much.  I wasn't a proper writer yet and considered that everything I wrote was perfect first time.
HAH!
I turned into a Real Writer when I began the Fleet Quintet.  Working more professionally, using what is now an ancient version of Word, I was far more willing to rip things apart;  to rewrite and rewrite until it worked;  to throw out what didn't work and begin again.  Nowadays, the REAL writing for me begins when I do the Big Edit.  My writing seems - generally - to follow a particular pattern.

• The story is created in my head, then in notes.
• The first draft is an attempt to get the story down and is usually an excruciating process of self-doubt, anxiety, wordlessness, and zero inspiration.
• This "first draft" will consist of several edits, usually rewriting of earlier bits because something later on doesn't work.  So there's still a lot of plotting going on as well as character changes, even name changes.  Sometimes there are changes from third to first person.  Sometimes I restart the whole damn thing from the beginning.  But this is ALL still part of the "first draft."  I'm still getting it down on paper, as it were (or on a computer screen).
• The Big Edit comes when the first draft is finished.  I might have a rest period before I start this.  It usually entails reading the whole story in one go (or several if it's a novel) and making notes but NOT changing anything.  That comes later.  Depending on how well the first draft went, the Big Edit could vary in length.  I've been known to abandon a story altogether and then come back to it and finish it with a flourish.  It happens.
• The Red Edit is when I print out the story and read it VERY closely indeed, armed with a red pen.  This is probably closer to proofreading, though by the time I get to the Red Edit, I've already done a thorough spell and grammar check and would  have proofread it before printing it.

With my current WIP (the Prizewinner), I'm doing a combined Big and Red edit.  Hence Big Red Edit!  When I picked up the novel again a few weeks ago, half of it had already had its "red edit" but with loads of notes.  What I really wanted was to have the notes in red on the page, not on a separate bit of paper.  Instead of redoing that first half (it's a LONG novel), I'm now Red Editing chapter by chapter:

• Read the chapter through thoroughly, correctly everything on the page with red pen that you would normally do on a computer.
• Then make these corrections on the computer.  This gives you a SECOND chance to see your corrections which means you really have to think about what you are doing.

So far, this is going quite quickly.  Sometimes a red pen edit doesn't work when you see it on the screen.  Sometimes I see something on the screen that I missed.  
In the end, I'll end up with a novel that has been thoroughly overhauled, which is what I'm aiming for.

The Big Edit has begun!  And it's begun in red pen, which means I have pages of manuscript covered with little red scribbles.  My red pen leaked everywhere too so my fingers looked as if they are dripping blood.  Hugely appropriate when I consider how much of my novel I've had to cut....
I began this red edit two years ago and abandoned it in disgust.  I thought it was a bad novel and not worth saving.  It was also unbelievably long, coming in at 185K words.  No agent in the universe wants to read something that long unless it's brilliant and going to win the Booker Prize.  Picking up where I left off, however, I've discovered it's not that bad.  In fact, I got so involved in reading some bits of it, I forgot to edit it!
I spent two years working on it, from February 2015, probably the last time I've written anything without being conscious of its length (I'm more controlled these days).  I had no idea it was turning into this massive project!  I thought I was never going to finish it.  I battled with the story.  I drowned in notes.  I rewrote and restructured and rewrote some more.  I wrote more notes, more than I ever had for any story, trying to find the male character's voice, failing miserably.  In fact, it's very possible I have failed on every front when it comes to this novel.  I've referred to it before as That Difficult Novel.  In the spirit of hope and a bright future, I'm now going to call it the Prizewinner.  (I may discuss in another blog what I think is wrong with it - and why it works despite that.)
It was meant to be a brief fairy tale.  It was meant to be sensual, a woman's learning experience, a man tortured by some weird affliction that resulted in immense pain.  He was meant to be demonic, she was meant to be heroic.  It was meant to be about beauty and knowledge.
It's now none of these things.  You may catch a glimpse of Beauty and the Beast in it (hasn't THAT been done to death...) but otherwise those nobel themes have long since been lost.  As for the sensuality:  unless you really know what you're doing, you just end up with porn.  Or, worse still, Mills and Boon type porn.  I didn't want either. I'm going to have to cut about ten dripping wet sex scenes from this novel.  Somehow I'm going to have to learn to express their love and desire and all that romantic stuff in a different way.

One thing you learn in your Big Edit:  nothing is ever as terrible as you think it is.  There's always something salvageable, whether it's the story itself, the plot, or the writing.  My Prizewinner has some good writing.  It has a fantastic twist.  The story is worth reading.  But it takes too long to get going (my usual flaw) and sags in the middle.  However, the end is mindblowing.  Getting the reader to get as far as the end is my challenge!

The picture below is very much what the novel is about:  beauty, nature ... and a lot of water.

I was hoping to finish the current draft of my new short story before Christmas.  But then I got flu, neatly handed to me by my Real World job manager, who coughed and sneezed all over me until I too ended up with the skyrocketing temperature, the lost voice and the feelings of death.

Today is the first time I've made an attempt to write anything.  I'd pretty much given up on the goal of finishing the story on time (well, this draft anyway - it still needs work).  After all, it's not like I have any kind of deadline.  It was just a personal thing.  
When I started off this morning, I thought I'd forgotten how to write.  Then I had another mince pie (very good for you when you're ill - full of fruit and stuff) and perked up.  I now KNOW I will be able to finish this draft tomorrow, Christmas Eve.
It's just a little thing.  But it's the little things that keep you going.  This story has been immensely difficult.  To be honest, though, I can't remember a time when writing was easy.  Perhaps it's always this way.  The stories are hard to write.  But every moment agonising over them is worth it.  
Good for the Christmas spirit.

Don’t panic.  Don’t despair.  Don’t run away and resolve never to write again.  Don’t let the ocean of failure to close over you so that you are forever drowning and wondering why it is you couldn’t be happy with just being an unimaginative nobody.
Yes, well, it’s all very well to give advice but very hard to take it, particularly when you are talking to yourself, however sternly.  When something you’re writing doesn’t work, what are you supposed to tell yourself?  Keep writing, you can edit it later?  It’s garbage, dump it now?  Everything you write is garbage, anyway? 
I’ve learned several tricks over the years that help when writing goes badly.  There have been many years, mostly writing into a total void, so I have some idea what I’m on about.  A new short story I’ve been trying to write recently keeps failing and for several weeks I tried all my usual tricks.  These are to:
 

•     Change the title
•     Change the main character’s name
•     Change everyone’s name
•     Start again and change the viewpoint
•     Start again with a different scene entirely
•     Divide the story up with chapter-type headings for each
•     Change the title again
•     Edit everything from the beginning to fix up the weak points
•     Decide grimly that you’re going to get to 10 000 words without looking back
•     And then run aground on poor plotting
•     Have a brainstorming session in which you:
•     Change the title again
•     Change all the characters names
•     Cut up a sheet of paper into 12 and on each write a different ending to work out where your story is supposed to be going
•     Go and make some Lemsip because you’re ill and can’t think anymore (this is optional)
•     Realise you need to change the MC’s vision
•     Realise how you can tie this in to the ending
•     Suddenly come up with a brilliant ending
•     Sit down the next day to start writing and it’s still all shit
•     Beat yourself up with a rolling pin

 
Between the Lemsip and the rolling pin, there are some good points here:
 

•     The title is vital.  Once I found the right title, I knew what the story was actually about.
•     Names are vital, too.  If you don’t like a character’s name, you’re not going to be able to develop them well.
•     Viewpoint is everything.  Once I found the right viewpoint, the story opened up much more easily.
•     You can’t always know the entire plot when you begin.  Not all stories are the same.  Sometimes I know everything from the start, other times I have to stop and think about it.  Some stories develop while you write them.
•     Make notes.  I often make more notes than I need.  I often then ignore almost all the notes and come up with a good story, anyway.  It’s just a way of getting the juices going.
•     Know your ending.  The hardest things I’ve ever written are those in which the ending isn’t clear.  It’s always blindingly obvious when an author has no idea what the ending is and either just trails off or comes up with something that doesn’t make sense.  Even in a ten-volume work, you need to know the ending from page one of the first volume.

 
By now, I’d had some excellent ideas and knew exactly where the story was going.  It was exciting, interesting and I couldn’t wait to get (re)started.  Unfortunately, I then hit the next brick wall:  the actual words on the page.  So far, they had been lumpy, unstrung, and felt like the kind of Worthy Fantasy that I loathe.  This was not what I was going for.  Yet another new start (fresh document, the old ones abandoned in the folder like crumpled-up paper in a wastepaper basket) and I still couldn’t find the story’s style. 
 
At this point, my writing spirit died.  My confidence expired.  I was convinced I’d never be able to write again.  This wasn’t writer’s block:  it was just writing bad.  But for this, at least, I have advice too, which I will endeavour to follow:
 

•     Leave it alone.  Stop writing.  Go and do something else.  I’ve been ill so I should concentrate on getting better.  Walks under the few trees left in London.  Bake tea breads.  Read.  Knit.  Do jigsaw puzzles.  Clean the bathroom.  Write blogs(!)
•     Handwrite it.  This is very painful.  And slow.  And prevents you from going back and editing anything because reading one’s own handwriting is inevitably quite an effort.  You are thus forced to keep going until you get to the end.  It doesn’t matter how bad it is – it’s now ON PAPER.  It’s done.  It’s written.  Your writing spirit is restored.

 
At this point, all your troubles will be forgotten.  You’ve got your story, even if it is on lined school paper.  By having to retype it (long, slow, laborious, particularly if your handwriting is anything like mine), you will see all the errors.  Feel free to make editing notes.  Write them up as The Big Edit.  This is the fun part:  this is when you get to bash the story into the exact shape you want it.  Confidence will long since have returned because you GOT IT DOWN.  Fixing something that is already written is way easier than fixing something that hasn’t even been written yet.
 
So.  I have my pen.  I have my paper.  Next week I’m going to write.  By hand. 

Last Wednesday I sat down for the first time in four months to do some Real Writing.  Having spent the summer working on my website, my brand, my new editions and a million other admin-type things, it was a relief to sit down and so some Creating for a change.
The first day didn’t go well.  I hadn’t expected it to.  It isn’t always easy to get back into the saddle, after all.  Earlier this year, I had written most of a new Exodus Sequence short story, what will be the second story in the second volume.  Thinking that the story had failed, I abandoned it, planning to return to it later.  Upon rereading it, it didn’t seem too bad after all.  The main character was entertaining and funny.  Since the story is primarily a character sketch, that was quite important.  So it was with more confidence that I approached it on Thursday.
Imagine my delight to discover, at the bottom of the Word document, something called “Focus.”  I clicked on it to discover Writers’ Heaven:  nothing on the screen except the document with a black background instead of that pale grey glare you usually get when using Word.  No ribbon.  No taskbar.  Suddenly I was exactly where I wanted to be:  inside my short story.  I was focussed, just exactly as the new document view intended.
Now imagine my horror when, on Friday, that Focus view was gone.  I couldn’t find it anywhere and couldn’t either recreate it, though I did try.  I googled it.  I studied the Microsoft website.  Then I got into a chat box with someone from MS.  By this time, I was in tears.  I was actually sobbing.  Well, shit, you might think;  what’s she crying about.  Some stupid gizmo on Word that vanished.  But it was just the last straw, I think.  I have spent the summer battling.  For quite a while, I was at war with KDP.  Our emails burned with politeness but weeks went by with an agonising problem I couldn’t solve (more about that in another blog).  The battles with editing, with new covers, with getting things to fit, with streamlining almost thirty manuscripts………
Losing my Focus gizmo was that proverbial straw and I was the camel’s back.  Through all those months of slog, all I wanted to do was write.  I wanted to escape to my funny little universe that I’ve created.  I wanted to feel like myself again.
In the end, though the MS support person tried really, really hard, we couldn’t find the Focus gizmo and couldn’t recreate its brilliance.  I realised finally that something like this had happened before:  after a major update from MS, I got a brilliant new thing on Word – only for it to disappear the next day.  You know what this is?  It’s a way to make you realise that your Word is old and shit and that you should go off and spend a million dollars a year on Office 365 because THAT’S  where that Focus gizmo is.  It doesn’t exist in the cheap MS Office for Home and Student 2016.  It was a fucking carrot. 
Realising that, I closed down my computer, made myself an enormous cup of tea, and started again, wanting to just wrap up a sentence or two.  Deciding to experiment first, I opened another document, clicked a few things and discovered I COULD recreate Focus mode.  I can’t get the black background, though the dark grey is quite nice.  I can get rid of the ribbon and have figured how to get rid of the taskbar (temporarily).  This is great.  It means I can now write without distraction.
It’s not as good as real Focus mode, though.  Focus mode is achieved with one click.  One more click and you’re back in normal mode with your pretty blue ribbon at the top, so it’s just a temporary thing.  By creating this dark grey background, it means that ALL documents I open now are like this.  Even Excel, which surprised me. 
To achieve this, go to Options/General and select Dark Grey for your Office Theme.  To get rid of your ribbon, there’s a weeny arrow called Ribbon Display Options at the top of your document.  And to get rid of your taskbar (while you work), right click on it and select Taskbar Settings, then Automatically Hide the Taskbar in Desktop Mode.  All these things are easy to get out of, too.  Just hover your mouse and everything reappears.
So this is how I’m focusing on my writing.  Grey mode.  It’s a bit like being on a Federation starship in reserve power mode. 
As for actual writing and getting to the end of the story…..that’s yet another tale for another time.
 
(You can read about that here:  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gray_mode)