Greetings all and first up it's time for me to say thank you to Anna, Jo, Shilpa, Kat, Sarah, Tracy, Dorota and Mary on LinkedIn. It's so great to see quite a few of you taking the time to like, love, comment and share my thoughts. Much love to each and every one of you.
Today, my thoughts turn to some Shadowfruit. I'm sure several of you are wondering what an Earth is Mr. H on about now. Allow me to extrapolate upon the title of today's piece. Shadowfruit is a novel I've written which is sleeping in a little old recess of my usb stick. It was originally at around 75,000 words but I'm sure I did strim that down to about 67,000 and this tale is graphic horror. Believe you me, when I wrote this I did not pull any punches and I kid you not it is more than capable of giving many a sleepless night.
I know that in the midst of the unpleasantness sits a damn good story, even if I do say so myself. Careful Mr. H lest hubris take you I hear you cry, but, I am not succumbing to ego but I did enjoy reading it back to myself. Let's be honest if I read it back and thought it was a lot of old toot then there'd really be little point in me continuing with this assault on the novel industry.
Why did I not send it off then? I guess the first is that I do procrastinate a lot and also there is this feeling of inferiority. By that I mean there are many great writers and though I often tell us all not to compare ourselves I'm afraid I do. Then there is also the fact that getting work accepted can be a long laborious process and yet now I find myself at this point willing to get down and dirty. There's a lot of work to be done to my novel first though.
I imagine you're saying but you've written it Gaz, get on with it. No. These days my style of writing is far more subtle and I do not need to churn up the gore counter. Plus there are parts of the story that I know really do need to be chucked and I aim to bring the intensity down from 10 to about 0.5. I'm also going to go down the route of finding a publisher as opposed to vanity or self publishing. This is a much harder road and I'm quite prepared for the battering that will come from editors. You have to be to make the story the best it can be.
There is no point on going on a voyage of self acclaim. The novel needs to stand up on its own and the time has come for it to find out if it can or to disappear into the ether. Whatever happens, this is a course I am embarking on and I also thank Shilpa for the message on Tuesday which basically meant, come on, get on with it. Therefore, I shall and I will as well as all the other projects I have on the go.
I did say it's time to awaken the hurricane of creativity. Well, let's just say strong winds are coming this way.
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