Up A Hill To Fetch A Pail

I’m housesitting again, back in Tirohanga but a different house with a different view. Lovely. I can see the Hutt River empty into Wellington harbour, looking straight out past Matiu island across the harbour and through harbour mouth into the Cook Strait and away into nothingness. It really is quite nice to bounce into a new physical environment semi-regularly, and see how my life responds – you only recognise how much you are created by what is around you when you have a chance to settle into lots of different places in succession.
On the other hand, I have effectively been living out of a bag for about sixteen months now.
On the other other hand, I haven’t paid any rent for about sixteen months now.
Plugging ahead with Ron the Body, which is proving challenging in the very best way. RtB has four parts to it, and the aggregate comments of several readers pointed out quite correctly that parts two and three weren’t doing the right job. I’ve finished a re-envisioning and re-writing of part two now, which feels good; it, in fact, feels more like it’s the book it should be. Some quite major changes to the first version (no journey to Iran, for one) reflecting a narrowing of focus in order to more properly explore the characters and themes that are the true centre of the book. All those subplots were just distractions, in the end. I’ll save them for another project I suppose.
I’m sure this new draft will create a bunch of new problems even as it solves the old ones, despite my careful planning and thinking through and so forth. Such is the writing life. I’ll deal with them when I know what they are, and hopefully they’ll be much more manageable in scale than the current issues. That’s the revision process, I suppose – each draft you swap larger problems for completely new smaller ones; keep going until the problems are so small no-one agrees what they are or you just can’t bear to think about it any more…
A more serious series of posts about the graft of novel-writing can be found over at my fellow mooseblogger Ungulating Ungulate. He knows whereof he speaks. One, Two, Three.
And while I’m linking there, I’ll pass on a link he circulated: The Brainsturbator Library, a bunch of .pdf downloads of all sorts of interesting stuff, including Military documents, wireless info, neuro-linguistic programming stuff, lucid dreaming guides, and so forth. Of special note are some books by Derren Brown, whose TV show I adore. Warning: these pdfs aren’t hardly optimised, and there’s no warning how large the file is before you click; and I would not vouch for the legality of distributing these titles…