… because I am working on my book.

Yesterday I reflected on bottom lines and the hard realities that underlie being a writer—the same, in fact, that underpin any business, from the corner dairy to governments, although the perception of the writing life is frequently more idealised and romantic. I will talk more about this, but not today, because today I am happy because I am writing my book.

If you’ve read recent posts you may feel I have got the “writing” part a little wrong, because I have been talking about the fact that I am currently editing The Gathering of the Lost, the second book in The Wall of Night series. But editing, you see, is still writing. Even picking up the typos and grammatical errors is part of getting the story right, but that’s really copy- or proof editing. Nuts and bolts stuff.What the edit is about, for me anyway, is doing your utmost to make your story ‘sing.’ You already have your characters and the arc of your story, the action of the plot and the motivations and mechanations of your characters.

When you go through the manuscript again, you have the opportunity to give all those aspects of the story more depth: to add shading and nuance to your characters; to make sure you’ve got the pacing and sequencing of your action ‘spot on’; to be sure that you’ve foreshadowed everything that needs foreshadowing, even if the resolution is not necessarily in this book, but perhaps in the third or even the fourth in the series.

So for me, editing is still a very creative process and I love both the sheer creativity and the sense of “making”, but also that feeling (to—very loosely—paraphrase Sam Gamgee in the second Lord of the Rings film; I don’t think the lines appear in the book) that you have the opportunity to put something good into this world. (I think Sam said something like that you ” … have to believe that there’s some good in this world.”)

And when I’m doing that, everything else falls away and I really do feel like I’m the right person in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.

Even if I know that at some stage I’ll have to put down my pen again and keep a weather eye on those bottom lines.