Jubilee, excuses and trains

This time, I could blame the Jubilee for my lack of posting but I'm really starting to feel like I should stop making excuses and just get on with it.  Man-up and all that, even if that feels vaguely anti-feminist to say.  Woman-up?  Sounds a little odd.

The end of last week saw some writing progress, this time on the computer seeing as the sun had gone and buggered off behind the clouds again.  On Thursday and Friday I wrote Chapter 3 of Hide and See's sequel, which is slightly bizarre in that I've not actually written Chapters 1 and 2 yet.

I wrote Hide and See in a very linear fashion, moving chapter-by-chapter through the book, and only jotting down rough ideas for later parts, in addition to my neatly-tabled plan.  This time, I seem to be writing scenes whenever they occur to me, without worrying about whereabouts they'll appear in the novel.  I've yet to decide whether or not this is a good thing - time will tell I guess.

When I say I don't know where they'll appear, I have at least been keeping these scenes to the first third of the novel.  I don't think I could write something from the end because I don't know for certain how I'm going to get there yet.  I mean, I've planned it but it's very unlikely that it's actually going to pan out that way.  Such is the nature of planning sometimes: do so with great thought, then largely disregard if something better comes to mind.

In other news, the deadline for the Good Housekeeping competition passed and I didn't hear anything.  Not hugely surprised (or surprised at all, in fact) given the fact that it was the first time I'd ever entered a competition like that.  Plus my entry was quite violent, much like most of what I write (I'm sure something could be said about my mental state here) and perhaps not really appropriate for the lovely people who read such magazines.

While writing this blog post, I departed for almost an hour in order to go stand on a bridge in the freezing June wind to watch a steam train. (*cough* anorak *cough*) and it was really quite marvellous.  I stood right over the top of it and felt the bridge shake as it went underneath.  But it also served as an interesting writing exercise - whether I could interrupt my train of thought (unintentional pun, I promise) mid-flow and then pick it up easily upon return.  And while I think I managed it, I feel rather sorry for my sister who had the unpleasant task of interrupting me mid-thought.  It wasn't pretty.