Disjointed day

After taking Leia for a few loops of Mudford Rec this morning, I called at Tesco Express then went home and sluiced her off. It was a wee bit muddy! Bit of a nightmare with the retest of Tasha's car - the garage said they couldn't do it, after saying to drop it back anytime before 28th. She needs it by Sunday to get back to Bournemouth so please keep everything crossed that they find ten minutes tomorrow. All the work has been done. 

I seem to have been jumping about all over the place today re writing. I started off by looking at what my serial synopsis included so far then, out of the blue, I emailed the editor and asked about the 9500 word stories. Are they all crime/mysteries? Do they need a synopsis first or just the complete story? How much do they pay? My editor is amazing and always responds really quickly, even though he's maxed out. I'm so lucky to have a good rapport with him. (He also said that my serial instalment 3 was super after my rewrite and that he will send it across to the main editor straight away. Angela has the final say so I wait with bated breath.) 

Anyway, this got me thinking and took me away from my present serial plan. I started thinking about how I could write a 9500 word mystery and then I remembered a few scenes that I cut from the novel I worked on for my MA. I loved the two elderly characters but felt like there were two many different decades involved in the story. The first chapter was actually one of my favourites but I'd eventually taken it out. I piddled around in my emails and found it (I always email myself any work I do), copied the relevant chapters into a new document and read through it to see if it could work. I realised that if I could split it and add some scenes in between and then some at the end, I could turn it into a mystery, although it would be a comedy mystery (if there is such a thing?!). I will have a go. I already have about 4500 words to work with. Some of the language needs changing, but it has potential. I won't really know until I've written a fair bit more whether or not it will work.

Jon's out at a festival in Poole tomorrow (Saturday) so that'll be tomorrow's job for me.

Today's happening have been slowed down dramatically by pelvic and lower back pain. I've had the spasming pain in my back for a week or so (what I've had since I was 16 and damaged it. The spasming comes and goes). Today's pain feels like when my endometriosis was bad, so it is either inflammation from something I've eaten, or it's pain that's travelled from my ribs/back. Either way, I wish it would do one as it always freaks me out. It's too much of a reminder of what that pain was like day in, day out - and it makes me silently panic that it's back. It will probably last a while longer, then start to fade. It happened when we were at Butlins last September for a 70s weekend and made it a bit miserable for me. I had to keep going back to the cabin, take pills, lie down with a hot water bottle for an hour or more and hope it would calm down enough for me to go back to the club.

Today's quote is by Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. 

I have found 10,000 ways that won't work.

A really well-known one, for good reason. I can certainly relate. When I first started submitting to magazines, I could easily have given up. There were a lot of rejections; enough to repaper a house over the years. The trick is to find a balance between developing a thicker skin at the same time as listening to what an editor says. They know what the reader wants and if you think you know better, you won't sell your work to the magazine. Writing seems to be a learning curve that never really ends. There's always something new to learn and there will always be something that doesn't work, no matter how many years you've been writing. Edison swallowed his pride and battled on. What a great life lesson.