Where's the time gone?

I’m sure you all feel the same as me about time – the older you get, the quicker it goes. It seems to be running away from me.

It’s 23rd November , 2022 today, the sun is shining and it’s warm - ish - where I am in Wiltshire. I’ve just taken Mabel, my Labrador, for a walk and we got a bit wet. I have an app on my phone that now notifies me about rain and I was told ‘it will rain at 10.28 and last for nine minutes’. All very helpful and quite frankly, rather terrifyingly accurate, but I still got wet.

I’ve been distracted from writing recently by various things happening at home. The title of my last book “Life Happens” certainly rings true. It’s hard to motivate yourself when you know you’ve been putting it off for weeks and the blank screen awaits … but this week, I’ve got my creative juices back; I read through the first nine chapters of the sequel to “Life Happens” I’ve already written and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. In fact, I enjoyed reading it!

It’s such a weird process, writing. It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote them, but I re-read them as if they were written by someone else. I honestly had forgotten quite a lot of it. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. The working title is “Life’s Complicated” and it follows the lives of the characters through some tricky times. Grace, Jen and Rachel’s friendship is still solid but their lives are certainly about to get very complicated. I’m introducing Rachel’s sons, George and Harry into the mix and they have dominant roles. There’s a completely new character, Beth, too. I don’t even know myself at the moment how it’s all going to pan out. I’m the sort of writer who has a ‘vague’ idea of the plot but things develop as I go along. It’s a very dynamic way of writing … I can even surprise myself by my plot’s twists and turns.

At the same time as writing, “Life’s Complicated”, I’m also writing another book! This is a complete departure for me and I don’t know how it’s going to end at all. I heard someone describe their book on the Graham Norton show as ‘autobiographical fiction’ and this kind of sums up my new idea.

It’s an attempt to write a comic book about growing old and having a very long marriage. I’ve always wanted to write a funny book (I think I mentioned before, in a previous blog, that “Aphrodite’s Child” started out as an ironic look at an RAF posting but then changed into something more serious). This new book is my attempt to write a book similar to “This is Going to Hurt” – full of ‘laugh out loud’ moments but also full of pathos.

I loved “This is Going to Hurt” and I wouldn’t dream of comparing my writing to Adam Kay’s, but this is what I aspire to. It’s working title is “Love, Honour and Annoy” which I came up with and was sure that someone else would have it as their title but I was amazed to find it’s ‘mine’ for the taking. There’s no such thing as copyright for book titles, as long as you don’t call a book something SO famous it would be ridiculous like “Harry Potter” for example. So, you can call your book what you want but if it’s been used loads of times by other people, it would, of course, be stupid. It’s not set in stone but I think it’s a catchy title.

So … I must get on. I’ve got a lot to do.

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Speak soon

Sarah