The Challenge

…is this: by the end of the year I will have completed my third novel.

In return, I will be handed the completed manuscript of Dominique Phoeleli’s debut novel and be the first person to read it. I’m honoured.

We’re hardly trendsetters in our attempt to hammer out a complete novel in a short space of time.  As some of you may be aware, National Novel Writing Month begins on the 1st of November. Being a slow writer, I’ve never considered taking part. Until now. Perhaps I’ll sign up, though that would be a bit of a cheat as I’ve already written around 100 pages of the novel I’m aiming to complete by the close of 2010. Still, like I said, I’m a slow writer, so maybe they’ll allow that as a handicap and give me my head start.

Here’s something you probably don’t know. Writing doesn’t come that easily to me. It’s hard work. I spend hours just sitting in front of my laptop writing and rewriting each sentence as if it were the most important in the book. I used to pretend this was because I’m a perfectionist but, in truth, it’s because I’m insecure. Words are my greatest passion, but they also flummox me. Sometimes, I’m astonished by the beauty of a sentence as it falls from my lips when I read it out loud. I return to it for days after I’ve written it, like the lovesick to the memory of a kiss, only to realise a week later that it makes no sense. If I wrote novels in html, I’d get constant syntax errors.