As the title of this post suggests, I have indeed made a start on the main stage of writing The Monochrome Landscape. According to Word I've written 2191 words so far, but Liquid Story Binder says 2185.

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I’m thinking about Rust.
Ron Rust.

D’you know him? Spawned from the pen of the brilliant Andrew Davies, Ron Rust is Creative Writer In Residence at Lowlands University (otherwise known as the pissant swamp). And Rust takes his job very seriously. His mission: to discourage as many students as possible from embarking on a career in Creative Writing, in order to narrow the field for himself.

Davies never explains exactly how Rust achieves this, but I think I know. Rust doesn’t leap out and bash students over the head with a rock. Nor does he set about their novels with a blow-torch. He’s much cleverer and more insidious than that:

He slowly and deliberately pours cold water over their ideas.


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Unfortunately, double the twins doesn't mean double the fun. The Comedy of Errors belongs to the same, tedious, word-play stage of the bard's development as Love's Labours Lost, in which I had the misfortune to play 'Costard, a clown' in a school performance. Since that painful time I've been aware that tastes in comic banter have changed a lot since an audience fell about at the idea that 'lying' could have two meanings.



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My outline for The Monochrome Landscape is finished, and I think I'm ready to make a start on the writing. Sticking with the course schedule, I should 'officially' make a start during Week 34, which starts on Monday 23rd August.

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You often hear that the art of editing is dead. I’ve read many articles along the lines that the truly great editors, the sort who can turn a sow’s ear into a literary silk purse, are a dying breed and today, all editors really do is cross a few t's and dot a few i's.
I don’t know if this is true in some of the big publishing houses. I expect like most things, it’s true in some cases and not others. What I can say with complete confidence is that this hasn’t been my experience with the small independent publisher who has taken on my young teen novel.
If I’m hand-on-heart honest, I never really ‘got’ what an editor did until now.


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There's a sense of excitement building, along with a lot of trepidation. Come September, with both of my little ones in school and me without any work whatsoever, guess what I will have? A lot of time on my hands! The excitement is hand in hand with hope, ideas, wondering if I can really do it and belief that I can. Get my stories written and then get them read. Please don't let me get swamped by all those other things that need doing, oh, and housework. Let it just be head down, fingers tapping, tea steaming, cat purring, ideas flowing, characters living, breathing, talking.

A while ago, I was thinking about how the order in which you arrange the phrases of a sentence makes a difference to its effect. And then on the WriteWords forum someone queried whether a sentence like this was good writing:

My hand reached out, seeking Adam's rough warmth but finding only the cool sleek linen of the sheets.

The grounds for the query were that "finding" implies that the sentence is going to go on with something like "My hand...finding only the cool sleek linen of the sheets, gave up in despair". Only it doesn't. (And yes, it's arguable that traditional punctuation dictates that there should be a comma between "cool" and "sleek". But for now I need my commas for more structural things.)The querier felt that "finding" should have been changed by the editor to 'found'. That would be a perfectly correct and clear sentence, but it definitely feels different. As always, what's really going on is buried in the grammar. The main clause, able to stand alone because it has a finite verb, is this:

My hand reached out.

Then there's a subordinate clause, which tells us more about the main clause.

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