Unravelling

I have not been on holidays, as the lack of recent posts on this blog might lead you to suspect - if I had, then posts with pictures of surf, sunshine, and fish, would have been popping up. I have been busy providing support as various family members deal with the fraying and unravelling of some of the threads of the tapestry of their lives.  Stories have ended, and been lost, and threads have broken beyond repair, remaining only in memory.

It has been a difficult, trying time for some of them, and providing support has meant letting some of my routines slip - but that is life.  No amount of planning can identify the exact time and place when certain contingencies will pounce on us, even when the general form and likelyhood of such events is anticipated long in advance.

As the family have moved through the various emergencies and emerged at new balance points, I have been able once again to find time to write.  The journal came first, of course, as I needed to record and make sense of the things that were happening around me. As a degree of normality returned, I was able to once again address the final scenes of my current attempt at a novel - though that was simmering all the while at the back of my mind, and may even have benefited from the process of fermentation. 

A couple of days ago I was able to declare the first draft complete - the first time I have attempted a full length novel and reached a conclusion that I found satisfactory.  Short stories have always felt easier - the ingredients for the ending or the punch line are usually present in the opening lines or paragraphs.  The threads are fewer, and the weave, though it can be complex, does not have the potential for tangles that a few hundred pages can hold.  Short stories can be knotty, but novels can develop dreadlocks - combing them out can be so painful that the only option is run the clippers over it and start afresh.

Already I am building a mental file of the knots that need undoing or cutting, the trimming and polishing that has to happen to make a draft into a novel, and finding the idea of working on the second draft appealing.  Does that mean I am on the right road to completion?  I hope so, because the concept, characters, and scenes for another novel are already trying to get my attention.  Topical as those concepts and characters are, I need to get started soon.

Tonight looks like being the first in a few days not to be illuminated by lightning storms, so, as I doze off, thinking about my stories, I hope to be soothed by the murmur of the creek that has been refreshed by those storms, and the cheerful calls of the frogs and crickets enlivened by the rain and the rising waters.