A Literary Life

I started a novel in December 2010.   I talked about its genesis in an earlier blog post (“ Origins of a Novel ”).   Now the screenplays I’ve written are out in the world, trying to find buyers, I’ve returned to the novel.   Here’s the thing: the few months away from it have allowed me to see it in new light.   It’s funnier than I remember.   A few pages I thought worked really well are actually quite clumsy (and unnecessary) and have been done away with.   For the majority of its 300 pages, though, ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ works a treat.   Yeah, it needs tidying up.   A few scrappy lines here.   A missing scene of explanation there.   But the base, it’s solid.  Its walls are strong.  The whole thing works.   The titular characters work, their interaction is strong, and there is a real sense of romance, loss and tension between them.    I want to talk about the three sisters of the title: I...

I’ve been busy preparing a final draft of the first three chapters of my second novel, currently titled ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, to send to literary agents and potential publishers in the hope of securing a proper book deal that will actually see my work reach readers.   I’m inordinately proud of what I’ve achieved with this second novel.   I started writing it in December 2010, after a few months of thought, and wrote the first fifty or so pages through to mid-January 2011 when I stopped.   I was starting to write screenplays for the first time, and they took over.   Through 2011 I returned to the novel rarely, writing just ten or twenty pages before stopping again.   I completed the first draft of another novel in that time (a novel I can’t decide what to do with, as it’s good, but not great) and I wrote at least seven screenplays (three of which hit either the BBC Writersroom, where they recieved reader commentary, a rare honour, or The R...