A Graveyard Visible

So, I'm writing this story, you see. It's called A Graveyard Visible.

This here's the first page:

Yeah, I know. Stunning handwriting, isn't it? That's me being ultra-neat for show. It gets a lot scrawlier later on, the kind of thing that only Ancient Egyptians could glean anything from.

It's had a funny old existence so far, this story. The opening line has existed, with a slight perspective change recently, for about ten years. The initial ideas and a partial first chapter were tapped up on a knacky Pentium II in the first half of the Noughties. (And how can that be sooooo long ago? Time no longer makes sense to me.)
I loved that opener, but I couldn't find the spark. There was no life to it. I reached for some kind of story, but it wanted nothing to do with me, just crossed its arms and turned away. Like so many other ideas, I shrugged, said 'Suit yourself,' and carried on with other things in the firm belief that I'd come back to AGV within a month or two.
It was about five years before I saw any of that preliminary work again. There's plenty of ideas that are jotted down in a white-hot frenzy, under the conviction that this one's gonna be a beaut, they get put momentarily aside, and when you see them once more somewhere down the line... Well, at best you chuckle and move along, at worst you try to remember what bad things were going on in your life back then to make you so demented. AGV was one of the very few that was still simmering, like it had been lurking, waiting for its time. I went over what I had (about two thousand words, and some random musings), and became convinced it would be my next project (it wasn't - the first version of Macadamian Pliers took over that slot).

'Oh God! I've had another idea!'

I spent a bit of time writing Mac Pliers and its sequel (a couple of years), and while I really loved spending time with those characters, they were dark stories, and I was in the mood for something a bit lighter. It still wasn't time, then, for AGV. Next up was Make Your Own Monster, an adventure for boys packed with mad creatures and ruminations on responsibility and chaos theory. Then came Maddie, the story of a Mad Scientist told in her own words, which at its most simplistic talks of how charming madness can be, and at its upper levels discusses the narrowness of our point of view and the inherent selfishness of the human condition. That doesn't make it sound like a lot of fun. Maddie is lots and lots of fun. It's a sit-com after all.

Every now and then I thought of that graveyard on Daisy Hill, of a boy who sits cross-legged at his mother's grave, and of a girl who watches him.

It took two years or so to write Make Your Own Monster, Maddie, a third much shorter novel, and knock out rough outlines for a few more in a series. We're looking at about ten years since that first line of A Graveyard Visible was written in Word '93. Ten years, during which I must have scribbled down hundreds and hundreds of other ideas for stories, ideas I was convinced were red hot and better than anything else I'd thought of.

And yet Caleb spoke up. He was still there. All that time a boy stood waiting at the edge of his scary story. There's things he wants to talk about, like loss, and what waits for us at the end, and what it takes to reach out to others. It's a novel that is making me think about a lot of subjects, and will be the backbone of my forthcoming blogs.

I've had so many ideas, and this one stuck. I'm glad I didn't force it the first time. It would have come out all wrong, like a pirate novel I once attempted to write. The lead character was great and his crisis of confidence appealed (a pirate that loses literally everything that defines him), but I pushed it too hard. I got bored, and as a result the writing was leaden. That was a hard lesson, and a lot of months lost. I'm enjoying A Graveyard Visible. And that's all you can hope for as a writer.

Never write what you think you should. Write what you must.
Got that?

Laters