Monday 9 April 2012

Cold porridge

On Good Friday I thought I had completed the third draft of the fourth novel in the series 'Land of Broken Promises' and all I had left to do was the boring job of checking grammar, spelling and format word by word.
I intended to spend today (bank holiday Monday) sending off three chapters and the synopsis of the completed second novel to an agent. and was all set meanwhile to give my undivided attention to hostessing yesterday's family Easter Egg Hunt and lunch.
At 11 am yesterday, in a state of panic, I was replacing three eggs, and reprinting three muddied clues that I had hidden well from anyone searching the garden, but all too visible, apparently, to light fingered passers by. As I took the clues from the printer, it suddenly struck me that I needed an extra chapter in the first third of the fourth novel and would have to erase the pieces of back story I had carefully dropped into the second third of the novel. My instinct was to sit down and work on the rewriting immediately but of course one can't do that when one is a hostess, so here I am on the bank holiday faced with a task that has grown cold overnight and instead of buckling down to rewriting, I am finding all sorts of displacement activities such as washing up and writing neglected blogs. I won't even deserve my cold porridge at the end of the day.