I like to think I’m very organised with my writing. But I’m not. I tell myself several lies as I write: a) I know what I’m doing, b) I will remember what I was about to say when I broke off from my writing, c) I will remember where I put those crucial notes, d) I will know where I saved the various versions of my draft.

As I said, lies, all lies.

I’ve just spent about ten days trying to piece back together the draft of a novel I wrote six or seven years ago. In January I had the ‘most brilliant’ idea for it, suddenly it came to me, out of the blue, the direction to take the story in, all the background and setting, after years of pondering, fell into place and seemed so–right.

But.

It took me an hour to put all the separate chapters into one complete draft, and reading through, I realised there was a lot of material missing. I had:

No chapter 39

Or chapter 40, though I had a 40a (???)

No chapter 41

Two chapter 42s (different chapters, not an original and a copy)

No chapter 44

Two chapter 47s (again different, not an original and a copy)

And although the story ends in the middle of the action – I cannot find the ending. And for some reason, there are a lot of very short chapters in this book, so it feels like a lot to keep track of.

I always back up my works in progress (I’d advise anyone to do this) – imagine something terrible happens, your house is flooded, there’s a fire, or your computer goes up in flames… (ditto important documents and of course, photos of your babies). I back up through several methods, and whilst these are a bit haphazard, (don’t judge me!) I’m slightly more organised than I used to be. So I save my WIP onto the computer, obvs, then onto a USB stick, and then I email the Word file to myself, and I save onto ‘the cloud’, int his case, my OneDrive account. Because you never know, right?

But.

I saved all my files titles and so none of them were the same. So as I say, I’ve spent the last ten days trying to put a full draft together so I can see what I need to do with the story to make it work, and to try to make it good. This, by the way, is known as the half-baked writing system. I don’t recommend it as a process.

By the time I’d finished this on Tuesday, I was frazzled, because I’d muddled my brain trying to figure out what I already had, and what I still had missing. I had two files Windows just point blank refused to open. I had several that were basically entirely html – but with a bit of text in the middle. I’ve definitely honed my detective skills this week. I felt like I had a big uphill battle ahead of me to rewrite/replace all those missing and corrupted files. It was beginning to feel as though it just wasn’t worth the effort. I didn’t do much work on Monday/Tuesday, I was too low.

Yesterday, I started fresh, and went through everything, even the stuff I already ‘l knew’ I’d looked through. I pulled out my paper files and went through two lots of early drafts. I found my missing chapters! I went through all the back-ups of my backed up back-ups and found non-corrupted files to replace the ones I couldn’t open or that were mostly comprised of html. I still have no ending. But this morning I found a note to myself written in 2015 that says ‘Still need to do this, this and this,’ and having calmly sat and worked through everything, I realise I do have a ton of notes signposting the way I planned these missing chapters to go.

I only hope the end product will be worth it. I’m planning a new series. Did I mention that? This book will be the first of those, and I hope it will be out in the big wide world in 2021. That seems quite close now, even though we’re still only in April 2020. this has been a weird few months, hasn’t it?

To find out a bit more about this series please click here;

If you can bear to, I’ve put a couple of chapters on here, so you can have a read. The book will be called A Meeting With Murder: book 1 of the Miss Gascoigne 1960s mysteries.

Thanks for putting up with me. I hope everyone is safe and happy. Live Long and Prosper, as our childhood hero Mr Spock says. 😉

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