I had to have a chest
X-ray last week and the radiographer really made me smile. You’ll have to take
your nipple piercing out, she informed me when I arrived. I don’t have one of
those, I replied. Well, you can leave your belly bar in, she countered. Nope,
don’t have one of those either. So much for the impression I made waltzing in
there with my Rhianna-red hair and nose stud.
And today I was guilty of
exactly the same thing. Day one of tackling the revision of the sequel to The
Only, a two inch stack of manuscript pages facing me (which I helpfully forgot
to number before printing them). It was definitely going to be an unwieldy,
confusing mess and I would hate every word and want to rewrite it all. So did I
really want to tackle it now? Shouldn’t I be doing anything else like pairing
up the odd socks, polishing the plant leaves, rearranging the recycling?
Determined not to be the
Queen of Displacement Activities today, I stayed in my seat, opened the folder,
pen in hand, and began to read. It mostly is an unwieldy, confusing mess, it is
first draft so it’s supposed to be practically unreadable, but on the first
page I found something that really works. Not yet a ‘wow, did I write that’
moment, more of an ‘I got that right that early on?’ smile, this something* will
really help when I’m trying to knit the spaghetti of my plot together.
Page one
down, only another loads to go, the socks will be staying odd, the plants dusty
and the recycling a heap for a while yet.
* And as for what that
something is? Couldn’t possibly say, it is, after all, a suspense thriller . .
.
