After a lovely quiet week in my friend Pam's "spare" flat I've moved back to the home of Timmy and Lucy, a pair of crazy little canine friends - you might remember this post where I uploaded a photo of the terrible two. I will try to get a better shot of them this time around but as they are seldom together and still for long enough to get a picture the only time I might get one would be if I were to sneak up them as they slept!* The house-sit is for two weeks while their "mum" is over in Adelaide, spending the school holidays with her granddaughter. Then I move on to another canine house-mate that I haven't met yet. Watch this space:-)

I haven't been doing much writing lately, and I'm missing it. I've become used to the rather strange cycle I go through, which goes something like this:
1. Get inspired and write anything up to ten hours a day for a few months
2. Run out of ideas and play with the piece for a while
3. Give it up as a bad job and don't touch it for a few weeks or months
4. Start to feel really cranky and distressed because I'm not writing
5. Get inspired again

Often what stops me writing is the realisation that I'm not doing nearly as well as I thought I was. This last time I got so fed up with not getting anywhere that I decided to start sending the book out in any case. After all, I've been struggling with the darned thing for three years - my reasoning was "If it's no good yet then it never will be," which is really not a good enough reason to inflict the work on agents and publishers. A couple of friends have read the opus recently and said I'm being premature in sending it out in so raw a state. Now I actually didn't think it was all that raw, but apparently it's raw, or at least somewhat undercooked, due to my usual problem - not enough setting.

It's not only setting. Good writers have a knack of including setting and characterisation very subtly but as one of my critters puts it, I tend to segment things - first THIS emotion, then THAT piece of information, then THIS conversation, then THAT battle, then THIS little bit of description... "Layer things" says my friend. "Multi-layer. Interweave"

It's that multi-layering and interweaving so that nothing is left out but everything serves the whole - which, if the thing works, will be greater than the sum of its parts - that I really don't have the hang of. It must take ages to learn, unless you're absolutely brilliant, for the writers I know - both published and unpublished - who have the knack of it, have all been writing for quite a while. Mind you, I've been trying to write fiction for fourteen years, so surely I should be getting the hang of it by now!

OK, I won't send the book out again until I've had another go at multi-layering. But I'm feeling too down in the dumps about my own apparent thick-headedness to do it at the moment so I'm at the cranky stage. I don't like the cranky stage, but I've started to realise there's nothing I can do about it. It's a natural cycle, like the seasons, and I can no more make the succession change of my own volition than force winter to give way to spring. What a good thing I have doggie playmates in the meantime.


*Update - I couldn't get around the front without disturbing them but on the third go I compromised and photographed the terrier terrors from behind. Butter would not melt, eh? (HA!)