Well it’s been a good few days since I have posted, but then con­sid­er­ing the marathon run through­out March, I’m not sur­prised (are you?) April has come, and par­tially gone, and I took a small break from really ham­mer­ing the key­board every night.

I was going to try and get back into Ran Red over the week­end, but as any keen observers may see, I tend to go a lit­tle quiet on the week­ends because it’s fam­ily time. So, as opposed to tak­ing off Wed-Fri, I ended up tak­ing Sat­ur­day as well and actu­ally got back into the writ­ing of my book on Sunday.

Unfor­tu­nately Mon­day was a shit day at work for me, but I won’t get into the non­sense of that bull because I try not to dwell on it for too long. So, because of my want to just relax at home, I did not shuf­fle off to scrib­ble more. Tues­day I did, and that put me back on track for get­ting into April. I’m going to try and get most of my mid­dle act done this month and hope­fully go into May with a good angle on the sec­ond half of the book.

But this post is sup­posed to be about March…

What did I get out of my month? Well, as men­tioned before, I had done a cou­ple of drafts for the begin­ning of And The Stars Ran Red, but ulti­mately they were noth­ing con­crete. One was before the great NaNoW­riMo depres­sion of ’08 (as in, it stopped work­ing as opposed to get­ting all The Cure on myself), and the sec­ond some­time before the new year. Both ver­sions were men­tioned here.

But, any­who I also men­tioned how I had got­ten back into the shit of it and kicked my lit­tle writer’s sebat­i­cal at the end of Feb­ru­ary — per­fect tim­ing for zee NPI — and so, March began.

Ini­tially I went into writ­ing prop­erly (for the first time in a while) with gusto. Sure, I had a cou­ple of false starts that I put to one side, but it was about start­ing new. I think ulti­mately, that was the best thing I could have done. If I had car­ried on from the ‘tried’ ver­sions of my begin­nings, the entire month would have been a strug­gle to bounce off of a board I was never truly sat­is­fied with.

What became of that was entered in every day for the next thirty-one days, so I’m not going to rehash every trick and turn I fol­lowed to find my effort a suc­cess. How­ever, I will say that look­ing back in reflec­tion, I can see noth­ing more than a great deal of my story cre­ated, char­ac­ters founded and filled out, sce­nar­ios ignored and dis­cov­ered and a whole lot of temple-rubbing at the yip­ping sounds of chil­dren in the background.

Bar the story progress, I can see why I found it hard and got deterred in the past. There’s no deny­ing, writ­ing with a fam­ily hov­er­ing around you 24/7 is dif­fi­cult with a cap­i­tal DIFFI. A few times I man­aged to get so far into the story itself, it didn’t mat­ter, a few oth­ers I just had to give up on the oppor­tu­nity to write and actu­ally relax. It was (and con­tin­ues to be) like try­ing to untie a knot — patience and per­sis­tence win in the end, but some­times you go insane and start pulling harder. At that point, who are you fight­ing? The knot, or yourself?

Away from metaphors, I am look­ing to the future now. April and May hold more twists and turns for Ran Red and I can’t wait to find out how my first book turns out. I’m sure it will be a bat­tle get­ting there as life and the love of being a writer con­tinue to dis­agree at times, but then it will only be that much more reward­ing in the end.