After all my whingeing and whining I have started a new
book, putting the two that I was trying to work on simultaneously on the back
burner. I will get back to them in the fullness
of time but not now.
Now I am having fun; I’m excited about my new book. It’s about a sixty year old woman whose
husband leaves her for an OLDER woman, someone he plays bridge with.
Now I don’t always notice these things, preferring to give people
the benefit of the doubt, but I do know that some of the clubs where I played
bridge in England had all sorts of goings on.
I heard of someone who left his wife for his bridge teacher, and someone
else who was found dead after a heart attack in his bridge partner’s house in
the middle of the night – which as you
can imagine created a huge scandal, his wife knew nothing of it, but apparently the relationship was common
knowledge to ‘those in the know’ whose number did not include me. Now I
play at several bridge clubs in South Africa and I haven’t noticed any ‘extra
table’ activity but that’s not to say it doesn’t happen.
Anyway I am enjoying writing the book – as usual the
characters take on lives, voices and personalities of their own and I just
write it all down. I think that’s what I find so exciting about
writing – watching the story unfold.
One of my little (?) peculiarities is that I can’t write unless I have
a title first. Not everyone is like that
– my daughter was half way through the second draft of her book before she thought
of a title. But not me - so I can tell
you the title of the book I started last weekend – it’s ‘A Season, and a Time’. You will probably recognise the quote – it’s from the Bible,
King James Version, Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3 – ‘To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven’.
To those of my generation it also
has the words Turn, Turn, Turn but that doesn’t have any biblical origin, it
was strictly added by Pete Seeger when
he made it into a song (which I had on an LP when I was a teenager).
I have some of my completed books available as freebies on Kindle
over the Easter Weekend and am supposed to be trying to promote them but really
I’d far rather write my new one. I know
I am supposed to be trying to sell books which seems ludicrous really - the sort of people who write fiction are
not the same sort of people who are successful marketers. So I have made some half hearted attempts at
listing them on various websites and will now go back to doing what I enjoy!
Till next time J
