How Grammar Affects Relationships

 I've finished another book. For about the tenth time. This, I think, has to be the last draft. I've got to the point where I'm taking a lot of stuff out, all the extraneous thickets of guff, and dropping in character detail, buffing up the fore-shadowing, hacking back, looking for clarity. This is the point where the writing has been done - drafts three to eight are where the proper writing takes place - and now I'm polishing, worrying at the commas and, amazingly, still finding typos. If I didn't write typos I wouldn't write anything at all. But there are no days where I write nothing at all. Maybe there should be. I should leave a field fallow like feudal crop rotation.  

I could do some painting. Write a few songs. Earn some money. 

This book has been a long time coming, but was quick to write. I wrote the first half when I was artist in residence at the MAC in Belfast, a meagre three month tenure, where I, nonetheless, managed to write a play (as yet un-staged, and it never bloody will be) and half a novel. After I got home I didn't look at it again for five years. I didn't think of it. By then I'd been asked to write a film for Disney, my novel Fine had been accepted for publication, and I was in the process of sketching out what would become Teeth. 

One day I found the file, and thought, Ooh I wonder what that's like, and read it, about 30, 000 words, in one sitting and with mounting excitement. It was GOOD and, better, I knew exactly what should happen next. The whole ending was laid out in front of me.  

All stories are different. Or all my stories are different. Sometimes I plan them carefully. Sometimes I know what they're going to be before I pick up the pen, other times I know the ending first and reverse engineer the book out of the big finish. On one occasion I fell in love with the beginning after I'd already written the ending, and then had to completely rewrite the finale because it was no longer good enough. That one was a mess. The Teeth and Spine memoirs wrote themselves, they're just windows into a few months of my life where strange things were being done to my body. With this book though, I just started typing away on a borrowed computer in an Arts Centre and hoped for the best. After ignoring the manuscript for five years, I read it and all the pieces fell into place: re-reading allowed me to extrapolate the ending from that truncated first half. I set about it in a fury, and had another 30, 000 words in a couple of months, and the book was finished. It had taken only five months, over a period of five years. 

Except, I still had to write it. What I'd typed up was the clay of the text. It had to be shaped, honed. It had to be constantly rewritten until it was good enough, or until I could no longer work out what the hell it was supposed to be. Maybe I should stick in a drawer for another five years. Really let the bugger bake. 

No. 

Because I do think its good. And because I'm too old to keep just giving away five years. Realistically, I don't have that many half decades to play with. And because I've polished and polished and its come up a treat. You could see your face in my prose. You could straighten your tie or replenish your lippy by it. It's called, How Ghosts Affect Relationships. It's a ghost story, of sorts. It's sad and funny and strange and practically unmarketable. It doesn't really fit into any of Amazon's demographic groups, but that's their problem not mine. 

No, it's mine. They won't give a shit. 

How Ghosts Affect Relationships is the second book in my loose "Oh What A Lonely Boy" trilogy, following on from Fine, and ahead of a book I'm currently writing, called Nobody's Watching. After that I'll start writing about upbeat, successful people having a great time and splashing the cash. You have to write what you know. 

How Ghosts Affect Relationships won't be out for another year or so. Save your pennies.