Well next week I’m finally getting the opportunity to travel to where the events I’m writing about took place. On Tuesday I get to go and get the “feel” of my characters and hopefully the creative fires will be stoked and I’ll go into over drive. Which absolutely needs to happen if I’m going to hit my deadline of the end of the month.
Things are finally beginning to fall into place as far as the research goes thank god but I’m spending way too much time on the phone and scouring the Internet. I only agreed to the deadline because I thought I had all the information I needed but the more I check the facts the more problems I find with the prosecution case we were presented with.
So far they’re not major, nothing that would indicate a major travesty of justice but there are two things in particular that are serious enough to be worrying and which need some serious checking out. This means the research is taking off in directions that the gardai and DPP obviously never went in so it’s taking me away from the stuff I already have and making some of it unusable.
OK, if I get everything sorted it’s going to make a great book and will do a lot for it’s sales outside Ireland but it sure makes for a pressurised month. I’m hoping that the trip down the country will bolster up the Irish side of the story. I know I shouldn’t refer to my protagonists as characters but at this stage I’ve been plodding around their heads so long I feel as if I’ve written them…will have to keep a grip on that when I’m talking to friends and relatives!
Working on something this intensively is a new experience. When I’ve written fiction in the past it’s been at a far more leisurely pace and I wouldn’t have pressured myself to such a high word count each day knowing that quality was the most important thing. Now I have to keep an eye on quality and quantity and get the thing knocked out in superhuman speed. Then there are the times when every day life tugs insistently at your elbow.
This week I’ve been constantly distracted by practicalities in between the curve balls thrown up by the research. I have to do a tv interview on Tuesday (on another trial I covered – the price of working in a tiny specialty in a small industry) and have discovered that my trip to the country needs to be moved up to Tuesday if I’m going to get the access to the guards I need.
So I’ve been making hotel reservations on the Internet. Luckily the husband, who isn’t inflicted with the out of sight mentality that creeps in when I’m working so hard, reminded me to ring the hotel to check the booking had actually gone through and it hasn’t to that’s a snotty phone call that needs to be made on Monday.
I’ve just spent the past hour (hence the fact I’m blogging at all, it was either this or start throwing things) trying to find out the position for using song lyrics in my book. There’s only one song I need but it’s crucial. I need three, maybe four verses and a chorus. This is the problem with going with a cut throat publishers. It’s up to me to do all the boring bits – one of the reasons for my trip to the country is to try and get photographs for the book. Consequently copy right is also down to me. I checked the contract recently. At least the don’t want me to handle the printing as well!
I’m getting to the stage that I need to hole up in a room and write 24 hours a day to hit the deadline so all these things are becoming major irritations. It’ll be worth all the panic when the book is on the shelves and I guess it’s all part of the experience but there has to be a slightly less stressful way to do this.
Well at least when I’ve got the hotel sorted out and I’ve caught the train I will have three whole days with nothing else to focus on. I can understand why writers book into a hotel for the last six weeks before a book is due in. Maybe next time!
