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It is week fourteen of 2024. How is the writing going these days? We have survived March! A hearty round of applause to us all. I hope that April and May will be like walking through a beautiful green meadow with a gentle downslope carrying us into the easier days of June. Here at the garret, I’ve been immersed in the calm, steady rhythms of copyediting. Last week, I worked on a book I did a content edit for just a couple months ago. This is the author’s third novel, and her revisions are so self-assured—and so much faster!—than they were for her first. Practice really does pay off, for writing as for most other things. Mucking around in your pages and words on a regular basis builds muscle and brain memories just like pianists practicing scales. This week, I spent most of my time with a group of familiar and much-loved characters in an ongoing cozy mystery series set in France. There is murder, yes, but also wine and lamb quiche and a pinch of romance and some quite vicious humor dressed up to seem light. It’s like April came early for me! On the Novel Study front, things have not been quite so light and easy. March did not stop being the tantrumming toddler it always is, and so book work got pushed to the corners of the weekends that weren’t dedicated to rest. I did perhaps my most elaborate story spreadsheet to date for Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, and I can’t wait to show you all of the levers and buttons he’s pushing behind the scenes to make this novel the enthralling ride that it is. But to do that, I actually have to get the words on the page, and that has been a fight. As always, I’m starting with the opening—and this novel actually has three of them, so there is plenty to say, but I’ve been struggling to say it. After a week at my desk, I didn’t want to be there on the weekend, but writing on my laptop from bed (where I wanted to be!) or even the couch hurts my wrists. So I stopped after a few paragraphs and decided to switch over to paper and pen. I managed a couple more paragraphs before stalling out altogether and deciding it wasn’t just my wrists but my brain that needed a break. I turned my attention instead back to the illustrations for the book, improving on the ones I put together for the blog posts in, um, Google sheets. Here’s a little sneak peak of the new illustration on the chronology of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, for example:
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