I was hoping to write something brand new for the reading in the class on Saturday but got a bit bogged down. I’m still hoping to write something on the new novel, even if it is a collection of fragments, for the tutorial with Alison.
For the reading I looked at what I’d written most recently for ‘Burying Bad News’ and was guided by the 2,250 word limit more than anything else in picking two of the sections set in Oxford, which came to about 2,500 words. They are when Sally and Ana are roaming the streets and when Sally argues with Emily Smiley. They’re mostly dialogue, which will be interesting as I’ve had a quick scan through some of the other extracts sent around for reading and, as might seem sensible at this part of the course, they’re first chapters of novels so set the scene for the rest of the story and tend to have a lot less dialogue. I wonder if picking something out from the middle of my novel will totally confuse everyone. The problem is that the novel doesn’t have a chapter one yet!
I knocked off a quick 500 words of ‘Gravediggers’ for Swan Supping. This is basically a more comedic version of ‘The Angel’ but allows me to try a few things out for ‘The Angel’. Again it’s almost exclusively dialogue with a reference at the beginning to a famous work which might set some expectation about what may happen in the end. Click here to read: Gravediggers Part 3