Work in Progress
23 February 2009
There’s something peculiar about the business of writing, about the way the need to write is so overwhelming and yet is sometimes so difficult to execute. I’m feeling overwhelmed at the moment – too many unfinished Works in Progress on the go at once. I can’t seem to focus – my concentration flits from project to project. The Belfast Boy, my novel that was ‘accepted’ by a small press publisher three years ago but was never published, needs to be revised and updated. Kickback, the novel I wrote last year and that The Secretary reckons needs a lot of work on its plot, is nagging at me to be rewritten. And I have any number of short stories in need of a sharper ending, waiting to be sharpened. You would think, wouldn’t you, that a reasonably successful short story writer (who is also a – so far – unsuccessful novelist) would concentrate on finishing a few more short stories. But instead I’m bogged down in another new novel.
Why? You might well ask.
It’s a mystery.
