If you follow the Bestseller Experiment podcast you might have noticed that we recently finished our first draft. This is always a cause for celebration, even if the draft is a big old mess (which it is) and will need a ton of work (which it will). Simply finishing something is an achievement.
I celebrated by getting a summer cold, and diving straight into rewrites of a TV pilot script. This was huge fun, as this was the script that had been give such a kicking a while ago, but I had spent the time since working on solutions that I couldn’t wait to try out.
The other reason for the hurry is that I’m moving house. The Stay family is leaving the suburbs and heading to the country… Well, maybe not the country, but it’s next to a farm, and for a boy born in the city that counts as the countryside. All this means lots of packing (so many books!), and a break in my usual routine, which means I haven’t written anything other than emails to utility companies in three days.
I’m a ‘write every day’ guy. If I don’t write anything during the working day, I get twitchy. So much so, that I just snuck out of bed in the middle of the night to sit among the boxes and compose this blog…
… and that feels good, even though it’s not the full dose of happiness that I get from a bit of creative writing. But I am reassured by the response we got from Sarah Pinborough on the podcast when we asked her if she wrote every day. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s bollocks.’ She went on to clarify that even though she might not actually be writing her latest work in progress, she’s always thinking about it. Well, I’ve been doing lots of thinking, and I’m allowing myself to call that work, even if it’s just for a few days.
The other thought that keeps me going is that when we move I will finally have a writing room. I hate to use the phrase ‘man-cave’, due to all the icky connotations, but it will almost certainly be the very definition of male writer mid-life crisis decor: film posters, books, Lego, and I might even succumb to the lure of vinyl LPs again… Lordy, what have I become…?
In the meantime, keep writing, my friends. I love hearing about your work and news (my friend Graeme Williams just had some amazing news!) and it’ll keep me going till I see you on the other side once I’ve unpacked…
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Mark Stay Writes 