Terry Pratchett once said in an interview that you’ve got to keep an eye on your secondary characters, or they’ll take over the show.  Turn your back for five minutes and there they are, merrily rearranging the plot to suit themselves, the blighters, and generally making more work for the poor put-upon writer.

I thought I might avoid that with Trinity Moon, since I was working from a synopsis (a heretofore unheard-of event, I might add, which has proved helpful and frustrating in equal measure).  Everything’s chugging along nicely, and I come to an action scene where Gair throws a lock on Ne’er-do-well No. 1 and laying his sword across the fellow’s neck, threatens to cut his throat.

Whereupon the strangest thing happens.  Ne’er-do-well No. 1 takes a firm grip on My Hero’s family jewels and purrs, in a very feminine voice: “Not if I geld you first, Empire.”

Eh?  Where did she come from?

<scrolls through preceding paragraphs>

Nope.  No girls there.  WTF?

So I continue typing, to see where I will be taken, and suddenly she’s sitting cross-legged on the table, twirling her dagger through her fingers and eating my dates.  Gair’s dates.  Whatever.  The saucy minx.  She’s got backstory, she’s got attitude, she’s sensual and snarky and inordinately fond of knives, and she’s made herself right at home in the story without so much as a by-your-leave.

I’ve just been mugged by my own imagination.  And I didn’t feel a thing.

…I entered a short story competition organised to celebrate the author Douglas Reeman’s 25 years in print.  Somehow, I won, with a rousing Napoleonic War frigate action in the Med.  This was 1984, and I was a whole 15 years old.

I got to meet Douglas for lunch in Mayfair and was thoroughly charmed by the man.  We corresponded for some time afterwards, and he was unstinting in his encouragement of me as a writer.  We lost touch, as school and exams got in the way and I shelved my wilder writerly ambitions for a time.

Recently mum and dad had a clear-out of their bookshelves and I reacquired a sizeable collection of Douglas’ books, including his Alexander Kent “Bolitho” series on which I had gorged myself as a teenager and which inspired me to write my prize-winning story.  Curious, I Googled and found Douglas’ website, which had an email address.

I wasn’t expecting him to remember me but I sent him a short note yesterday to say hello and congratulate him on what is now 50 years as a published author (that’s quite something, in anybody’s reckoning, and boo! hiss! to his publishers for not marking it).

Today I got a reply.  He does remember me, still has photos of the day we met at the Navy Club, and is every bit as charming, gentlemanly and encouraging as I remember.

This has made my day.  I am completely, utterly, and quite ridiculously, made up.

So I’ve started on Book 2 of “The Wild Hunt Trilogy”, “Trinity Moon”.  I confess, I’ve cheated a bit – there was a sub-plot in Book 1 that I was deeply attached to but it wasn’t deeply attached to the rest of the opening story arcs and just didn’t fit, timeline-wise.  So I cut it out, all 40-odd k of it, earlier this year and realised that it should have been in Book 2 all along, and I’d been trying to cover too much ground in Book 1.

It needs an edit, since it hasn’t had the same amount of attention that Songs has, which is what I’m doing now, and the excitement has started to build.  I’m getting that little wobbly buzz under my breastbone again, and I’m absolutely dying to get through the edit and start turning the plan into some real new chapters.

Oh, didn’t I mention?  I’ve actually got a plan for “Trinity”.  Me, the walking definition of a pantser, has A Plan.  I’ll have a synopsis next, just you wait.

It’s done.

The final edit on Songs, that is.  I should be relieved, elated, but I’m not.  It feels like an anticlimax (there’s that word again).  I was expecting some great rush of triumph as I hit the final full stop and clicked “Save”.  Instead all I got was “Jeez, is that the time?”

So what am I going to do with my evenings and weekends now?  I have been living and breathing this book for the last year; my husband looks up when I enter the room and asks “Who are you again?”

But that’s me.  When I’m writing, I am totally immersed in it, saturated by it.  I think about it on the loo, in the bath, on the train, in the five minutes between phone calls at work when I really should be digesting the latest epistle from HMRC.  Now that it’s done, I find myself vaguely bereft.

My reading has been sadly neglected.  Richard K Morgan and Joe Abercrombie stare reproachfully at me from the shelves where their new books have been sitting, unopened, since I bought them the day they came out.  Unread books in this house are an Abomination, and I have two dozen Abominations in the study.  I’m afraid to go in there.

So I’ve started querying agents.  I’ve been writing stories since I could write, pretty much.  Started aiming at novel-length fiction when I was a teenager.  I read once that the first million words is just practice and if that’s the case, I’ve served my apprenticeship and then some.  Let’s see if we can’t make all this hard work worthwhile.

Any writer will tell you it’s hard work writing a novel.  What’s even harder is the final edit, when you have to trim and prune and polish until the damn thing shines so bright it’s blinding.

Unfortunately all that trimming and pruning and polishing means cutting stuff out.  Stuff you love.  “But it’s mine!” you howl.  “It’s mine and I love it and I don’t want to be parted from a single word of it.”  Sound familiar?

No matter how much you tell yourself that it’ll be a better book for it, you won’t believe it at first.  Then you’ll get to a point say 35% of the way through and you start to develop a bit of detachment and think yeah, I can do this–and what’s more, it’s fun.

This carries you through the next 50% of the job, and then it all comes to a shuddering halt, right as you turn into the home straight.  This is where I find myself today.

I’ve done the hard part, taken 15k words out of a somewhat overfed manuscript and rewritten a few chapters that just weren’t cutting it.  The result is cleaner, tighter, better paced and does more with less.  I’m well happy with it.

My problem is this.  In the big finale–I hate to use the word climax.  Maybe it’s my mucky mind but it just seems, well, rude, quite frankly.  It is inextricably linked to gentlemen’s top-shelf periodicals and Newcastle’s only blue movie cinema, which had a name beginning with C and ending in ax, with a lime in the middle.  But I digress.

In the big finale, the bad guy doesn’t appear.  I thought long and hard about this, and decided that he should.  It is, after all, his show.  And I had an idea that he should saunter on set in one of his Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen silk shirts and taunt My Hero about his girlfriend.  It’s the kind of thing he’d do.

So I started looking for where I could engineer an appearance by the bad guy.  And bugger me if I couldn’t find one.  The finale chapters work so well as they are that shoehorning anything in is just going to upset the balance (and you don’t want to start upsetting the balance in the Force, mate–anything could happen).

I therefore find myself in a quandary.  My head says a finale without the bad guy and My Hero squaring off is not much of a finale at all.  Dare I say it, an anti-climax.  And my heart is saying, don’t bugger about with it or you’ll spoil it.  Of course the logical way to approach this is to employ the wonderful “Save As…” command and make a copy of where I’m at right now, try the edit, and see if it works.  If it does, great.  If it doesn’t, no harm done, go back to the backup and all it’s cost me is a couple of late nights (sucks having to work for a living, eh?)

I am, however, a writer, and therefore only peripherally acquainted with logic.  None of this book or either of its sequels has been planned.  It has evolved on tea, chocolate biscuits and four hours’ sleep a night (sucks having to work…etc)

Aargh.

This, as my dad’s colleague used to say, is a two-biscuit problem.  I need more Hobnobs.

Got my third Tysabri treatment on Wednesday, and I’m not dead.  So far, so good.

I feel more alert, better able to concentrate, without that awful grey mental fog.  I’ve been able to finish overhauling my website, achieving more in the last fortnight than I’d managed in the previous four months.  It’s good not to feel like a vegetable any more.

I’ve also been able to devote some time to my novel ‘Songs of the Earth’.  It’s at the final edit stage now, and will shortly be hitting some agents’ desks.  Wish me luck.