Although I can’t get excited about creating audiobooks from the first two volumes of the Biome NE47 series until sales take off, I am beginning to feel the stirrings of anticipation for the third volume. Working title: Biome NE47 Sequel. It’s all very well writing in an audience vacuum, but reading aloud feels vaguely pretentious if there’s nobody ever going to listen. I hope that won’t be the case, and that I can get stuck into the recording work, but I think I shall have to be patient on that front. So I’m enjoying the percolation of ideas developing into the next volume, while I wait.
I think the narrative arc, the ‘story’ if you will, is going to be concentrating on a family dynamic. By the end of ‘the fiery volume’ (Biome NE47: A Novel) we are awaiting Evelyn’s labour and delivery.
So as reader and writer (interesting, isn’t it, that the writer of a novel is probably among the most obsessive of all its readers?!) I’m eager to discover how the new family copes as life in the biome develops.
Mostly, however, during the few weeks of northern England’s summer, I shall concentrate on garden duties, some touring in Harry Hymer, and putting a few notes down of ideas for Sequel. It must be fallow time, before I cross my eyes, put my head down and re-enter the realm of creative imagination where the characters take over and do their thing.
It’s a good thing that I’ve been able to cope with my deteriorating keyboard until this point! The dysfunctional space bar (the sensor on the right side, where I touch-type hit it with the left side of my right thumb, has stopped working, though the middle and far left sensors are fine) has meant endless hours of backspacing to recover the spaces not registered. Everything from my MacBook Pro is now backed up by Time Machine on a 1Tb SSD, so that I can safely take the laptop to the shop to avail myself of the guarantee.
This lovelylaptop has carried me through more than half a million words so far (all of AllendaleDiary.org and the first two volumes of the Biome NE47 series, as well as numerous poems, short stories, fragments and memoirs for the past two years of our writing group), and another 100k or so should be within range. But it will all be so much more felicitous if the space bar works as expected!
Meanwhile, little vignettes and concepts keep rising to the surface, as some 10k words have gradually been laid down in the new Scrivener project. It’s sometimes actually hard to hold myself back! But I also sense that these things should not be forced, so I shall keep reminding myself of two classic behavioural clichés: discretion can be the better part of valour; patience is a virtue!
Biome NE47 