Tag Archives: cats

Just Magic

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The other day I visited the Magic Faraway Tree. It was deserted, which seemed strange for a portal to another world. But then perhaps that’s because it’s only a portal for my daughter and I.

She decided the tree was magic several years ago, when she was still young enough to need walking to school, to hold my hand on the way and count cats and pretend to be dragons, puffing out smoke in the frosty air.

The tree stands at the top of a hill, looking out across the valley and beyond, across rooftops that wouldn’t have been there when it was a sapling. Now it’s tall and stately, branches spreading to shade us during summer and create sky patterns during winter. It’s one of several trees we used to pass on our morning walk, yet the only one that became a Faraway Tree, home to fairies and dryads and dancing sprites, my daughter so enchanted by Enid Blyton’s stories that to this day she hasn’t finished the final book in the series.

We would often bring things to leave for the fairies, tucking them into the bark or among the roots. A patterned leaf or delicate flower, an interesting stone or shiny coin picked up on our journey. Once, an elderly gentleman offered us a piece of sea glass from his pocket, green and rubbed smooth by the waves. He’d carried it for a long time, he said with a smile, but thought that the fairies might like it. My daughter, thrilled and grateful, agreed, placing it in a special spot at the base of the trunk, cushioned by moss.

The moss is still there, velvet soft and deep green, but our gifts are gone. I hope the fairies liked them. There is magic still there, too. The magic of memory. The magic of joy.

Just magic.

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Herding Cats

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So, I’ve been doing a little editing recently. I have six books on the go at the moment – the next five instalments of The Ambeth Chronicles, plus another unrelated novel that’s very close to being finished. Oh, I’m not trying to edit them all at once, not at all – that would be a recipe for insanity, I think. Instead I’m focusing on No Quarter, the next Ambeth instalment, with occasional forays into A Thousand Rooms, my unrelated-to-anything-else novel.

When I first wrote No Quarter, the words just fell from my fingertips, so fast at times it was hard to get them onto the page, my fingers flashing on the keyboard as the sentences flowed. But, as is so often noted, first drafts usually suck. Sure, the story is there, plus the occasional passage where you’ve just nailed it, managing to write the words just as you wish them to be. But for the most part, first drafts need a lot of editing, refining and fairly ruthless chopping before they are ready to go out into the wider world.

And so this book was no different. I’ve edited it several times since first writing, had it out to beta readers (all of whom loved it), and have read and re-read it many times myself. But it needs a little more polishing. And so I’m on a final structural edit before sending it to my editor (is that a bit like cleaning the house before the cleaner comes over?) and the phrase ‘herding cats’ keeps coming to mind as I chase the words across the page.

For it seems as soon as I get one lot of phrases in order, another set runs free, yowling and scratching and refusing to get into line, leading to yet more rewriting and adding and taking away. It is a fight, this book, yet I will not give up. The story is there and, if I keep going, bit by bit, I know I’ll get it corralled.

I once wrote of words as being slippery silver fish, lurking in dark waterweed. At the time I was thinking more of how it feels when you’re searching for the correct phrase to express what it is you want to say, a far more sedate place to be than the forest of handwritten notes and wriggling paragraphs where I find myself now.

And so I continue, cracking my metaphorical whip and wielding my red pen, pulling these unruly sentences into line, tying the story together. And I know that, eventually, it will be done and I can sit back, nursing my scratches and breathing deep, before I tackle the next one.

How does editing feel to you? Is it a struggle, or a part of the process that flows? There are so many metaphors that come to mind: trying to squeeze into a too tight corset, smoothing harsh edges in a sculpted piece of work, untangling a skein of silken thread. Editing is a necessary part of the writing process and, once completed, gives the satisfaction of a job well done, a polished piece of art ready to share with a wider audience.

But at the moment, it’s all cats 🙂