Twelve Months
Yesterday I finished my first read-through of Valiant, a werewolf PI novella I started writing in February 2015 and finished a month or so later. For those who have been following the blog for a while, you might notice this represents the three-month period immediately prior to me realising there was something awfully, awfully wrong with my sleep. The process of drafting Valiant is what made the problem clear. It’s a project where I fell asleep at the keyboard constantly, frequently dozing off a half-dozen times every hour. I can see it in the manuscript, during the read-through. The front half is full of sections where I make odd typos or launch into sentences where my attention has obviously wandered. The back half is full of…well, disjointed and faintly psychotic thought processes. Half-finished paragraphs, prolonged exchanges of dialogue where I’ve repeated the same things two or three times in a row. Character names changing three or four times every page. Points where you
