My first problem that I last wrote about was the difficulty of writing in very bright sunshine, where the glare on the screen made it unreadable.  The solution to that was ridiculous in its simplicity – all I had to do was change my Windows colour scheme from the standard to High Contrast White.

That took care of that!

My other problem was the story line I am working on for my Magnum Opus.

I had the main theme of the story and quite a few interesting strands to weave through it.  But no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work.

I have made about five false starts, on occasion getting up to two or three thousand words, but each time the plot fell on its face in a mire of contrived and patently ridiculous scenes.

There was something wrong somewhere.

One evening I was sitting out enjoying the last of the sun and just letting my mind wander, when suddenly I had an idea.

My main character has been happily married for years, and it was the wife who kept upsetting the plot.  I had my brainwave!

I killed the wife.

So the story starts with my main character as a widower.

Immediately everything (or nearly everything) fell into place.  New scenes presented themselves and the plotline is a lot stronger.  I am well into it at this stage with several thousand words under the belt.

Whoever said that killing the wife is a bad thing?

We have been here two weeks so far and have only had one morning of rain.  The rest has been blistering sunshine.

This has led to a bit of a problem.

One of the things I intended to do here was to write.  The ideas are flowing and the urge to write is strong, but I am torn.

Do I sit indoors and type away while the sun blazes outside?  No.  That would be tantamount to sacrilege.  I did not come six hundred miles to sit indoors and type.

Do I sit outdoors and type away in the sunshine?  That would indeed be my ideal, and I have in fact tried doing just that.  However, laptops and sunshine just do not mix.  I am not worried about the lack of power outside as this laptop has a very good battery life.  What stops me is the glare on the screen.

No matter how I set up the laptop, I find myself squinting through the glare trying to find where my curser is, and what exactly I have typed.

To say that this is frustrating is to put it mildly.

Feckit.

I think the sun wins.

I have made a start on the book.

There are now 434 words consigned to my hard disk.

This may not sound like much of a book, but there are three things to consider.

The first is that 434 words is roughly one two-hundredth part of a full novel.  Or to but it another way, if I were to lash out the same number of words every day, the book should be complete in 200 days, or somewhere around the beginning of February.  However, going by past experience, some days I will churn out a lot more and other days, I shall write nothing.  There is also the probability that I shall erase vast tracts of it.  We shall see.

The second point to consider is that there may only be 434 words, but they are probably the most important words in the book.  The first sentence only contains 22 words and I would contend that those 22 words are the biggest hurdle to any writer.

Why?

Every book should start with a hook.  What is a hook, you may ask?

Suppose I started a book with the words “It was a bright sunny day, and the birds sang in the hedgerows” would you read it?  I am prepared to wager that it would be straight back on the shelf where it belongs, while you go looking for something more interesting.

Suppose however that the first words were “It was the second time that day that he had been murdered, and he was beginning to get annoyed”?  I think you would be inclined to want to read a bit further?  Hopefully you have been ‘hooked’!

Unfortunately my latest magnum opus doesn’t have such a good hook, but it is better (I hope) than the first example.

Thinking up a good hook is essential, and is worth ten times more effort than any other sentence in the entire book.

The third point about my 434 words is the very fact that they are written.  I no longer have a blank canvas.  Ask any painter and they will tell you that there is nothing more daunting than a blank canvas.  I am now on my journey.  I have plotted an approximate course, but I still don’t know exactly what adventures I will have on the way.

I am a bit nervous about the impending journey, but I’m looking forward to it too.

At 80,000 words, it was quite a project that involved a lot of time and hard work.

The reason the novel never hit the shelves is simple – I submitted all but the last chapter to the publishers, but having completed that last chapter, I decided I didn’t like it.  I contacted the publishers and withdrew the work, much to their annoyance.

You would imagine that having done that much work on the project, it would have been preferable to tweak the manuscript rather than scrap it altogether, but I had fallen into a trap of my own making – I concentrated too much on completing the work and lost sight of the plot.

Since then, I have been working on a new project.  The story line is more or less complete, the characters are all alive and kicking and there are various sub plots.  However, I have not yet put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, as the case may be).

What I need is an incentive; a bit of impetus.

I have decided that writing a book is like quitting smoking – the more people you tell, the more you are stuck into the process.

Within the next week or two, I really must start typing.

It could be an interesting topic to follow here?