By Jove I think he's got it!

Well fuck me sideways with a splintered plank...actually don't...but you can congratulate me on the initial completion of Half Lived...chamone motherfucker, suit you, and a resounding cry of hey nonny nonny...I am rather excited.

I say that it is the initial completion because now I need to start to read the thing, edit it, farm it out to my trusty academic who so happens to be the love of my life, intellectual guru, scratching post, oh! and the heroine of the novel. Insofar as one considers there to be a hero and/or heroine Rose certainly fits the bill. From me to Rose to my trusty reader, Digger, back to me for the creative accounting - the adding and taking away - thence on to agents and publishers who will roundly reject the manuscript until someone has the vision and the cahones to take it on: that someone will be a person who gets it, who lives it, who knows, a believer, a disciple of Truman, of the best of good books, Half Lived.

M.I.M.O.

End of the Beginning

Yet again the best laid plans of mice and men have become like Swiss cheese...full of holes. Upon my return UK-side I had intended to keep a more regular vigil upon my blog but alas this has fallen by the wayside which is I guess where all mixed metaphors wind up. Fear not for my time has not been spent idling in a soup of TV, chocolate and wanking for I have been a very busy boy.

You see the novel is nearing its completion, I have plan and everything and it is kind of written down for once insofar as I have variously scrawled upon two post-it notes and they are attached to the wall behind my desk; but it is a plan nonetheless and I am sticking to it, working on and through it.

As I near said completion it occurs to me that this is not an ending but with all the ceremony of a rapidly advancing cliché the end of the beginning. That is to say that this novel is but the first instalment in a long line of novels. I have in mind an initial trilogy, all three parts of which are in my head, book two in The Adventures of Truman (very much a self-deprecating title, by no means one that is working or will in any way shape or form work) is written in my head it simply needs emptying onto the page, well screen first then your page if you follow, whilst book three is known to me in detail but will require some research and a perhaps lengthy trip to west Africa more of which I cannot or rather will not divulge here and now; watch this space both proverbial and physical. Beyond The Rose Trilogy (very much a working title and one that might well work) there are Further Adventures to be told.

Being as it is the initial instalment the current work within which I am engaged appears to me to be the most crucial as it is the introduction, the fundament, the founding stone of all that will follow. As such it is presently with a sense of excitement and no little pride that I approach the end of the beginning; I had expected a sense of a hole being left where the whole of the novel used to live, within the spaces and places of my mind that it occupied but it is a living, breathing, organic thing and will continue to develop, to learn, to act and suffer, to grow.

Oh, yeah, all I need now is a publisher...