Billy Weaver

Billy Weaver wasn’t the sort to settle for the outskirts of town. Live fast, die young would have been his motto, although even he probably hoped to hang around a bit longer than he did. He was always a tearaway, too young to fight in the war, but old enough to work out where a profit could be made. The thing about Billy was how he looked – like butter wouldn’t melt even if he stood in front of a furnace. He had a cheeky grin, a cocky way and charm to bring the birds down out of the trees. And that meant he could have got away with murder, although as far as his family knew he never actually killed anybody. No, Billy’s talent lay in spiriting things away from their rightful owners and redistributing them to places where he could earn a few bob.
Even before he entered his teens he had made himself known to the local wide boys; done them a few favours and proved how his innocent face could be of value to them. So it was no surprise that he was at the heart of the black market around his local streets. If you wanted it, Billy, or his mates, could get it for you – at a price. He wasn’t totally bad. Like they always say, he was good to his mum. He made sure she had a few extras every week to bulk out her rations and to keep the other kids fed.

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I'm finally working on the novel again. (The one I thought I'd lost) I did this for Thinking Ten - just to make me write something new for it.

It's my own fault

I've been panicking this week. You see, about a year ago I was working on a fairly hefty (for me anyway) novel and I was about 13 chapters through it. It was coming along really well; something I could be proud of. Then NaNo got in the way and I shelved it while I produced something else.

What I should have done was just cheat on NaNo and continue with the work in hand, but I didn't. I'm not saying I didn't produce something good from Nano - far from it. In fact I'm seriously considering giving that a good edit (now it's a long way behind me and I can look at it with new eyes) and publishing it through LuLu.

But I shelved the thing I was proud of. Bad girl! Because this week, when I finally thought I wouldn't mind having another go at the WIP, I couldn't find it.

I'll pause a while for the other writers out there to take that in.

Thirteen chapters. About 21,000 words as far as I can remember. Missing. I was convinced that I'd saved multiple copies of it: at home on my laptop;  at work on my personal drive on my PC; on at least two thumb sticks. Apparently not.

I couldn't even find the notebook that I'd carefully planned the story in. Planned? Me?  Yes! That's what makes this work so special. I'm normally a seat-of-the-pants kind of writer and this is a HUGE thing for me. I know from the start what the story's about.

Well, I've turned the house over trying to recover anything of the story and first of all I found the notes. That's a start, but I didn't relish the prospect of rewriting the whole thing. I know there was some pretty good prose among the verbiage.

I have managed to rescue some chapters - quite a chunk, actually - but I know there are still gaps. I hope to be able to track down the missing pieces as I continue to search through the probably several million words I have turned out in the last couple of years. (I write professionally remember - I turn out a lot of words!)

The panic has subsided a little. I know I can recover the project with some effort. And there are now several copies of what I have found. But it's going to be tough.

Alchemy - inventing the big brother I never had

My WIP is a bit of a monster at the moment and I'm fighting to get it to fall into place properly. It's my own fault. I've been writing chapters as the muse has presented them - not in the order they will finally take in the book. I'm realising that I have described a lot of surroundings that are season-dependent and might be faced with cutting the heads off a few chapters and stitching them to earlier or later events. Ho hum.

Meanwhile, this book will have a cast of thousands (well - lots anyway) and I'm enjoying inventing them - including the big brother I never had in real life but always wanted.

He wanted to be a scientist and I can remember him clearly in his white laboratory coat. One of his favourite possessions was a chemistry set and he would carry out smelly experiments in the kitchen at weekends with lots of liquids that frothed and popped and changed colour when he mixed them. Sometimes he would let me watch, but I could never join in because he insisted that safety was important and I did not have a proper coat like his.  His real love was mechanics though, and he would take things apart to see how they worked, then sit for hours putting everything back together just to prove that he could. He wanted to show everyone, including himself, that he understood what was going on behind the front of things. He was a bit like that with people too, because he could always see straight through me. There was no fooling him about anything and he often unravelled my teenage troubles for me, with his calm and wise view of the world.

Homesick

Sometimes my feelings seep through into my writing. Here's an extract from my latest WIP and, in spite of what it says, I miss the moorlands desperately!

As I drove on, higher onto the moorland, the fields became smaller and more angular, hedges gave way to grey, stone walls marking long, narrow strips of land. The cattle of the lower slopes were gradually replaced by wandering sheep that dotted the stony hillsides. I saw many lying slumped against the foot of the walls and it was not until then that I understood the pattern of the dry, grey lines. They had been constructed against the prevailing wind and were designed to provide shelter in a landscape that offered very little natural protection against the elements. This would be a very different place in winter from the scene I could see spread out before me; without the sunshine of a summer’s day it would be truly bleak.