The Big Goodbye
It wasn’t long after I finished my typewritten novel that I started experiencing panic attacks. The first one woke me in the middle of the night, terrifying me, and leaving me seething with anxiety. I was sure something had broken inside my head. I thought the anxiety would run it’s course, the way a cold would, but it remained omnipresent. The nights became a horror; I dreaded the quiet, where the anxiety could just spill out into the emptiness. But, conversely, sleep brought the only refuge. Finally, I decided I needed to see a GP – just not my GP, who knew my parents well. I didn’t want to risk…
Typewriter Mania
I have no idea how long my handwritten novel is. One A5 exercise book is 240 pages. I average about fifteen words a line, and there’s twenty-five lines per page. That would mean there’s roughly 90,000 words in that book. I made it halfway through the second exercise book, which would make that first draft (not counting the annotated material) about 135,000 words. Given how scrappy it was, given the notes scribbled on inside covers, given it had taken writing a book to work out the story, I knew I had to rewrite it from word one (even if you could do something with a hideously handwritten novel). Moving up…