As Living in London gets to 80,000 words I find myself both planning the next novel for the blog and also considering how Living in London will look after an edit and revision before it is e-published.

As the chapters posted are the first edit, you have read the facts of what happens in the Living in London created world and how the characters act out the story, however, as the structure of the book becomes a consideration in order to add to the suspense it’s beginning to look like a complete re-shuffle.

After Kate Forsyth’s author talk a few weeks ago, something she said resonated with me in regard revising and editing and how the completed first draft is a piece of clay that you can now mould and it is in this state that the suspense is added.

Now the full plot is exposed with the characters motivations and desires clear it is an easier task to go back and add the suspense elements. For example; I am planning to have Ryder stalking a little earlier, but work on my suspense development and initially make it appear that he is stalking Ellie, our protagonist. Also I am toying with the idea that Ellie meets Kate in the café initially, but at the ending of the story and then go back in time to retell how she got there.

Ah so many ways to develop the bare bones, I am looking forward to it, I just need an extra 12 hours in the day!

As for reading this week, I have begun To Kill a Mockingbird after the announcement of the passing of Harper Lee. Despite the language being dated it is beautiful and her descriptions of otherwise mundane subjects so eloquent. For example the description of Maycomb;

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.