Tag: Writing (Page 5 of 11)

A Cuckoo In the Nest

12th August 2009 / Abigail / 2 Comments

: Image via Wikipedia

Writing a book is hard work. When it goes from being a hobby, something you can take as long as you like over because the only deadlines you have are your own easily breakable ones, to something that might just might have a future, things change.

I’ve written most of my life. When I was a child I wrote stories about my toys. As an adult I became a journalist so that I could earn my living through words. I’ve written books because I had a story to tell and a dream to follow and I’ve written one as a seemingly impossible feat as publication loomed mere weeks after my story was over. Each stage has been different and each stage has taught me new things about writing.

Over the last couple of years that learning curve has been particularly steep as the words became more than something I did and became part of how I paid my rent. I’ve learnt that I can hit a deadline with a book just as I can with an article. I’ve learnt that when the whistle sounds writers block is a luxury there just isn’t time for.

I’ve also learnt that several of the things I had indulged in when I only dreamed of being a writer are actually necessary to getting the whole ball rolling. I’ve read interviews with authors over the years who talk about their obsessions with a certain kind of ink or a certain kind of paper and thought, nice work if you can get it. Those of us who hack away for a living can’t afford the luxury of being picky. Any pen and any paper will do as long as the moment isn’t missed.

Now I realise that some touchstones, some rituals are actually part and parcel of the job in hand. Writing a book isn’t like writing an article. There’s a lot more of it for a start. You have to sustain the pace and the concentration to get to the end. That’s a lot of concentration.

When I obsess about working at my desk or drinking the same kind of tea or coffee for the duration of the project in hand it’s not because I’m being pretentious, it’s because it’s one less thing to worry about.

For the past six weeks all the order, all the usual, comfortable things were displaced and I learnt another thing about writing. Writing, at least to deadline, makes you antisocial. House guests should be accepted with caution. House guests who intend to stay for six weeks and who expect life to revolve around them should be avoided at all costs.

I freely admit that I’m territorial. Who doesn’t care about their home? I grew up as an only child and like my space. Writing hasn’t caused this territoriality but it has definitely exacerbated it. But hold on a minute. When it’s my space anyway, why should I worry about getting cranky when it’s invaded? When I have a big task ahead and am at a stage where I’m a step closer to the goals I’ve had for as long as I can remember, why shouldn’t I resent someone who disregards that, who should know better.

The common cuckoo, cuculus canorus, has a rather unattractive trait. It’s a bad mother, a dirty stop out who doesn’t see the point of raising the offspring once the egg has been laid. So it finds someone else to do the job for them. The poor unsuspecting foster mother raises the cuckoo chick as her own, unaware that her own chicks have been booted out of the nest leaving a hungry, demanding monster in their place. That’s what the last six weeks have been like. Paying court to someone who took advantage of hospitality and patience while my own chicks, the book, the husband (I make no apologies other than this one for that order – there’s no deadlines with the husband!) have been pushed very firmly out of the nest.

It should have been a no brainer but this was one writing lesson I obviously still needed to learn. For that matter it was also a life lesson that had passed me by. It’s not a mistake that will be repeated.

What I Do On My Summer Holidays…or How to Avoid the Silly Season

5th August 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

August is always a quiet month. Even if you’re in a newsroom this is the month when the “silly season” hits. The courts and politicians are all on holiday and so the news that’s there to be covered can be rather thin on the ground. In terms of general news the silly season hasn’t fully hit…one of the few plus points of a rather nasty recession. If, like me, you work in the courts, however, the shop is well and truly shut from the very start of August until the beginning of October.

Some of the courts still sit – the High Court and the Children’s Court still process cases from time to time as needed. The District court too has a constant stream of miscreants, but I don’t work in any of those courts. My bread and butter is the Central Criminal Court so August and September are extremely quiet as there’s simply nothing doing. People may get murdered, other people may get charged, but the actual murder trials are on hold until term starts in October.

So every summer I have a choice. Either sit at home and twiddle my thumbs for two months or try and find something productive to do. Two years ago I was making trips down to the Mahon Tribunal to take down our former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s testimony. Last year I wrote Devil in the Red Dress. This year it’s an altogether different project.

I’m writing a novel – well to be more exact, I’ve already written the novel but it still needs further editing before it’s in a state I’m happy to send out to publishers. I’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions on this blog but now I’m several weeks into the editing process it’s become more of an obsession and less casual material for this blog.

Editing is far more of a slog than the free flowing drafting that initially creates the story. This is the time when you are chipping away at the raw material and trying to make it into something that’s actually readable. When I’m drafting the words might flow and the plot might spring into place organically (if I’m very, very lucky) but editing is down to the minutiae, the technical nitty, gritty of the writing process.

This is the time when you realise how often you’ve used certain words and phrases and get over your initial blushes to fix the problem. This is when you take out the irrelevant words; the ands, thens, or whiches that can safely be chopped to make a cleaner more fluid sentence.

Because no matter how fluid your writing may feel when you’re drafting, it will always benefit from a strict vetting with a red pen. When you’re in the middle of it it can seem counter intuitive that this sometimes tortuous process can be the thing that frees up a page but that’s how it works. I always liked the analogy of editing being like a sculptor chipping away at his marble until something beautiful emerges.

Of course, you edit with journalism and non fiction as well but it’s a far more perfunctory affair than with fiction. With journalism you are writing in a much more rigid structure so while it can be cleaned up or streamlined, the kind of in depth surgery that a larger piece requires just isn’t necessary.

So I’ve been spending large chunks of every day sitting at my laptop. I left behind the red pen some time ago and now we’re down to the actual physical changing of the words in the manuscript. When it gets to this stage it really becomes an obsession. The manuscript becomes a god, a drug. Every moment you are away from it there is an ache that simply will not stop.

I’ve been working for the past few weeks on a little table in front of my bedroom window. It’s not a perfect setting. I’m used to working at my desk with all my touchstones and paraphernalia that I like to think make me a better writer, or that help the inspiration to flow. Much as I love my desk, it’s in a rather busy place, fine when I’m on my home in the house but not really workable when there are other people in the house and this summer we have a prolonged guest.

So I sit at my little table and look at the trees outside the window. It’s the kind of place I would have picked to work in the past, before deadlines became an issue and publication of any kind was a simple dream. The fact that the internet up here is sporadic at best and there’s no direct light and there’s not even space to put a mug of tea would drive me up the wall if I was writing my usual fare, which is generally fueled by caffeine and online research.

But for this job of editing, which I have promised to finish before the courts go back (after way too many years almost there) my little table is an oasis. A different space that allows me to have the quiet and the concentration to do the chipping away that I must.

Up here, I wouldn’t now a silly season if it beat it’s wings against the window, although I’d probably be momentarily distracted. It’s another world, far away from deadlines, and column inches and the Four Courts. In the end it’s all work but I’m feeling very fortunate this year to spend the summer writing in the bedroom and watching the sunshine and the barbecues going on below.

A Room of One’s Own (With Apologies to Virginia Woolf)

5th July 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Tomorrow I’m back in court for the sentencing of Ronnie Dunbar. He was found guilty of the manslaughter of Melissa Mahon, a 14-year-old from Sligo. It’s going to be a big sentence but I’ll write more about it once it’s been given.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on other projects. I’m getting to grips with writing fiction again which is quite an adjustment and I’m discovering, or rather remembering that I work differently when what I’m writing isn’t real.

With non fiction and journalism, at least the kind I write, you’re still telling a story but you’re also recording real events and people. You’ve seen the characters with your own eyes, sat near them, watched them over weeks. You know every little tick and nugget of information almost by heart. You have notes to work from and pages of facts to work with.

I find when I’m working like this I can work almost any where. It’s the kind of writing you can do in a newsroom environment with televisions and radios blaring and people shouting around the room. Any where you get a spare five minutes becomes somewhere you can add something towards your quota of words. It’s possible to work with half an ear on what’s going on around you because you don’t have to reach for the words in quite the same way you have to do with fiction.

When my characters have their arena inside my head on the other hand quietness becomes more important. Over the years I’ve tried to write in the odd spare minute but it never quite works out that way. It’s one thing when you’re purely editing, when the words are pretty much set and just need a bit of a polish, but when you have to produce a scene out of thin air then a bit of peace and quiet to get your head in the right place becomes a necessity.

The problem is that peace and quiet are illusive things. My desk, where I’m writing now, is in the main room of the house, under the stairs. It’s where I feel comfortable writing and where I’ve written ever since we moved into this house almost a decade ago but it’s not the quietest place.

When I started the novel it was something I was doing for the love of it. Publishers and agents were a distant dream and there were no deadlines apart from the odd one I imposed myself. Back then I had a modest goal of around 500 words a day and could usually find an odd hour or so in which to write them in perfect peace and quiet.

Things have changed since those early days. As I work on the book this summer I’m aware that I’ve made my promise of a finish date to someone other than myself. My agent is waiting for my new and improved manuscript by the end of the summer and that gives the whole thing an urgency it’s never had before.

I spent last summer writing a book as well and managed to fulfil that promised deadline but Devil was a work of non-fiction so closely linked to the day job that the pressure of a deadline seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Even though this summer I’m working on the book that has been an obsession for years and I know my characters as well, probably better, than those I’ve watched in court, I’m finding myself yearning for a room of my own. Virginia Woolf’s essay of that approximate title has long been a favourite.

And I can’t fault her thesis even now. For a woman to write in perfect peace, without the demands on her time that come from living in the real world with husbands and friends and work and a house and all the rest of adult life, then a room to herself and extremely understanding family are vital.

I know that at the moment I’m just at that stage where the enormity of the task ahead is looming ahead and it seems like an impossible mountain to climb. I’ll have my story finished by the deadline and the work will get done but there may well be tears and foot stamping along the way when the demands of real life seem too much and never ending.

I’m noticing how territorial I get when that elusive space is threatened in a way I would never do when there’s an article to write or a blog to post, when I’m in journalism mode. Maybe this is simply the writer bit of me coming out. Maybe one day I’ll manage to marry the two. But for now I’m longing for a room of my own and an oasis of calm. Perhaps it’s time I moved my desk!

The Jury Bites Again

26th June 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

All this week I’ve been working through a paper edit of The Novel. The next stage is to add all the changes into the actual document and write a few extra bits and pieces that need to be worked in. I’ve been working pretty intensively, far faster than I would have if I was writing a draft or actually typing up changes. It means that I’ve been totally zoned out for the whole week. I resurfaced long enough to notice that Michael Jackson had died, at some stage last night but apart from that…

Because I’ve been working with a hard copy of The Novel I haven’t been on-line much at all for the past few days, with the result that this blog has suffered somewhat. I didn’t, for example comment on Wednesday about Monica Leech being awarded record libel damages against the Evening Herald.

For any readers not familiar with the story, Ms Leech is a PR woman who worked in an extremely well paid capacity for the Department of the Environment. This was back in 2002 and 2003, when the Government purse strings were not quite so tightly knotted. Things blew up in 2004 when several papers printed articles suggesting that she had only got the contract because she was having an affair with the then Minister.

There have been several libel actions in the wake of these claims. In 2007 she won €250,000 after allegations against her voiced by a caller to the Liveline show on RTE radio. She failed to successfully sue the Irish Independent for printing the allegations from the show. Last November she was awarded €125,000 against the Irish Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

This week was the daddy of all awards. A High Court jury awarded her…wait for it…€1.9 million against the Evening Herald.

Now in Ireland, a jury in a libel trial can name a figure they think should be awarded to the complainant. It’s not like the UK, where the judge gives them a ball park figure and they make their decision around that.

Being accused of having an affair in the national press might be a deeply traumatic experience, especially if it’s not true but is the damage worse than, say, someone who has been paralysed in a horrific car accident, or someone disabled for life after a problem at their birth? With the proceeds from her various actions Ms Leech now has enough money to avoid the media spotlight for quite a while should she choose to.

€1.9 million is an extremely large figure and one can’t help see it as highly punitive rather than simply a reparation for harm caused. There has been a lot of comment this week about the size of the award and what it means for the Irish media.

It does seem ridiculous that in a criminal trial a judge imposing a sentence for a crime that does not automatically carry a life sentence must come up with the term according to strict guidelines. Each sentence must be decided along a sliding scale of seriousness within the definition of the offence. The judge must arrive at a figure then take into account any mitigating circumstances that would lessen the term. If he doesn’t arrive at a sentence this way there is a pretty good chance it will simply be overturned on appeal.

However, a libel judge doesn’t have any sliding scale. There may well be one but he doesn’t share it with the jury who are sitting in judgement. So twelve people who have probably never set foot in a court of law before are allowed to come to a decision unfettered by any rules or case law.

I’ve written in the past here about some of the bizarre things juries can get up to. I’ve seen them fail to reach a unanimous decision when both sides of barristers were in absolute agreement (a case of not guilty of murder by reason of insanity for a classic paranoid schizophrenic). There have been numerous occasions when a verdict has come as a shock and I’ve wondered if I was sitting in the same trial as those twelve.

Yet this unpredictable beast is let loose when it comes to civil damages. All their prejudices against the media are left to run riot when they are not allowed to when a person’s liberty is at stake. I know that a jail term is different from a fine and a criminal trial is very different from a civil one but a jury is a jury.

I’m not saying that Monica Leech wasn’t wronged against or that certain sectors of the press might have pushed the story further than they should but lottery sized libel wins don’t help. They just weaken the press. Stories that need to be reported go uncommented on. The threat of such massive payouts will frighten papers into inaction.

Any country needs a strong press. Of course it should be an ethical press but it shouldn’t be afraid to pursue stories that might upset the great and good. Because sometimes the great and good are doing things to the public detriment. That’s what the press are for…and there’s been plenty of evidence in Ireland how much we need one like that.

A Question of Immunity

22nd June 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

I’ve not been in court for the past week or so. Instead I’ve been working on The Novel. At the moment I’m reading through a hard copy of the manuscript and editing in preparation for a full rewrite. In practice this means my days involve not moving from whatever spot I park myself in the morning with occasion burst of movement to get food, water or any other basic need.

My days are counted in pages and chapters and my grasp on reality is, for the moment, slightly less than firm.

This morning I was on my way into town for groceries when I bumped into a colleague from the courts. It feels like I’ve been away for months, even though it’s only been a week or so.

In my moments of resurfacing into the real world I’ve been watching the ongoing controversy of the judges’ pay cuts. For any non Irish readers let me explain. The Irish economy is rather bolloxed at the moment as you may have heard. We’ve gone from being the poster child of economic boom to an illustration of how not to do things. We have crashed and burned quite spectacularly since the new year.

The government desperately needs to save money to try and keep some kind of check on a spiralling deficit. Consequently they are trying to persuade all public sector workers to agree to pay cuts and stop being such a strain on the national purse strings.

Now it would be easy to imagine that the Irish economy is almost entirely propped up by public sector workers who have job security the rest of us can only dream of, the strongest unions in the country and a bench marking process that was supposed to protect them from being worse paid than the private sector but has in many areas led to them being paid a lot more. But this isn’t a post about public sector workers or rather it is about one particular kind of public sector workers.

Judges do not have to take a pay cut. It’s in the constitution that they can’t be forced to. So the government have asked them to make a voluntary cut…a move which has so far proved a not particularly popular option.

I can see why people are so upset about the failure of 129 out of the countries 148 judges to volunteer for the cut. In a climate where there’s more bad news every day then the reluctance of a group who individually earn between €170,000 and €290,000 a year to make a gesture of solidarity is going to stick in most gullets.

But I can also see why they have constitutional protection in the first place. Judges need to be impartial and should not be in a position where they are tempted to make political decisions based on financial, or other, pressure. Justice should be impartial and it’s right that there should be some form of constitutional protection for that. The pay protection is there for the same reason as the protection from prosecution…because judges should not be vulnerable to any form of pressure when they are trying a case.

Now before everyone jumps on me I know that judges are human beings like the rest of us and are still public servants. It might be easy to forget that when you see them sailing through the corridors of the Four Courts preceded by their tipstaff carrying an impressive staff to announce their presence.

I know a lot of people would like to see an end to that kind of pomp and circumstance but for the moment that’s the way things are and that’s an argument for another day. It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out. I’ll be watching with interest.

Not in Praise of Bloomsday…

16th June 2009 / Abigail / 5 Comments

Today, June 16th, was Bloomsday. If you’re not familiar with the concept, June 16th 1904 is the day when all the action in James Joyce’s opus, Ulysses is set. Every year on that day the great and good and literary and arty gather in Dublin to retrace the route taken by Leopold Bloom on a Sunday morning at the turn of the last century.

Joyce’s book has been heralded as a classic, a work of English unparalleled in the English language. That’s why he gets his own day.

Now this is probably the point where I should come clean. I hate Bloomsday. I’ve lived in Dublin too long not to get profoundly irritated by the marauding crowds of arty types and tourists that clutter up the thoroughfares with glasses of Guinness and dressed up to the nines in approximations of Edwardian dress. If you wander through the centre of Dublin on June 16th you will find a selection of middle aged idiots acting like undergraduates and giving the book that is on more peoples “haven’t quite got round to reading” list than most others I can think of, the Rocky Horror treatment.

Let me get this straight. Bloomsday is not just a bit of harmless playacting, it’s irritating, embarrassing and teeth clenchingly awful! It’s the one day of the year when you get to see people who really should have more self respect, dressing up like complete idiots and hitting the bars like a back of feckless 20 somethings.

I’m aware that by saying this I sound (a) a total ignoramous and (b) rather unsure about where I fall in the whole cool young thing and old fogey scale. For starters I have read Ulysses. I read it years ago when I first moved up to Dublin while I was devouring anything that came from the writers that had helped to make the city famous. I was fairly voracious in my reading in those days and didn’t always check the postal address of my chosen read.

In those days I read Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw…I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to Behan…I think I got side tracked by Lewis Carroll. Anyway, at the time I was working on an antique stall in the George’s Street Arcade.

My boss at the time was working on a book of postcards all sent on June 16th 1904, that corresponded with the various locations in the book. He’d written a synopsis of the book to go with the images and, knowing that 19-year-old me was keen on writing, he asked me to check it, casually throwing me a copy of Ulysses to make sure he hadn’t left anything out.

So I read Ulysses. From cover to cover. I quite liked Leopold Bloom but preferred his wife Molly and couldn’t stand Stephen Dedalus, who I thought and continued to think was a pretentious little git. In terms of Joyce’s prose, while I get what he was doing from a technical point of view, it just completely leaves me cold.

I will freely admit that this could have to do with the never ending stream of postcards or my bosses synopsis but Ulysses would not appear anywhere on my list of books I would want with me if I was ever marooned on a desert island and I would be quite pissed off if it found it’s way there ahead of me.

I know that Ulysses is held up as a work of genius. I just don’t like it. I’m not denigrating Joyce as a writer in any way…The Dead is one of the best shorter pieces of writing I have ever read. I just don’t like Ulysses. I don’t like the fact that the men run the plot while the women are either leched over virgins, prostitutes or adulteresses. I don’t like the fact that the book that is now synonymous with Dublin is arguably the least accessible. I don’t like the fact that Bloomsday itself tends to be a rather snobby affair with pantomime overtones.

Dublin has produced many fine writers; Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, Sean O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, George Bernard Shaw. Writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, writers who deserve to be celebrated each year but who only get a look in for centenaries or on whims.

So I say, let’s give Bloomsday a rest. Next year let’s have At Swim Two Birds Day to celebrate Flann O’Brien’s lunatic masterpiece. The day could start in Grogans Pub off Georges Street and there could be cowboys in Ringsend, someone sitting up a tree proclaiming that a “pint of plain’s yer only man”, come to thing of that could the the city’s clarion call. We could have someone dressed up as the Pooka MacPhellimey and someone or something as Finn Mac Cool.

Instead of having a day where the middle classes dress up in straw boaters and give the day over to cataloguing the eating and drinking in Joyce’s novel, lets have one where the surreal and bizzarre takes over the city. Instead of a daytrip to Sandeymount and Grafton Street, lets see the cattle corralled in Ringsend.

It might actually work. And it would be a lot less irritating that bloody Bloomsday.

Preparing to Get Back to Work…Again

14th June 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

Tomorrow it’s back to work after a couple of weeks off that gave me a taste of a possible summer to come. As I’ve already said here I’m planning to finish my first novel over the summer break from the courts and I’m looking forward to the different pace that working on fiction requires.

Tomorrow though it’s back to the Monday List. The trial I’ll be there for is Thomas Barrett, from Kerry. He’s accused of killing father and son, Michael and Denis Hanrahan. 60-year-old Mr Hanrahan and 27-year-old Denis were found shot dead at their home in Moyvane, Co Kerry in March last year.

It’s a case I’ve been hearing about since it happened (given my line of work I tend to keep tabs on murder investigations – it doesn’t tend to endear you to people at dinner parties!). Over the past year, I’ve heard various rumours – working somewhere with a mix of journalists, barristers and gardai you hear all sorts of gossip about things that might concern any of us in the future and during the prolonged periods of waiting that are part of the judicial process gossip has a habit of spreading.

None of it’s more than gossip of course until the day the trial starts and we hear the opening speech from the prosecution where they outline their case. So tomorrow I’ll find out if the case is going to go ahead as planned and how long it’s going to last, also how big a story it’s likely to be.

So tomorrow is the moment of truth and I’ll find out whether I’m working for a few days, a week or even a fortnight. Tonight I’m just waiting and changing gear again. The lazy mornings with the manuscript and a red pen in the back garden will have to be postponed for the moment. It’s back to the day job.

Democracy in Action?

5th June 2009 / Abigail / 3 Comments

Today’s the day of the local and European elections, in Dublin there are two by elections as well. It’s a day that Fianna Fail probably have reason to be very worried about…public opinion, according to the numerous polls that have appeared in the papers over the run of the campaigning, is decidedly against them.

Now at this point I should probably come clean. I’m not a fan of Fianna Fail. Anyone who’s read this blog on a fairly regular basis could probably have guessed that but in the interests of full disclosure there it is. I would most definitely not be sorry to see them hurting come Monday morning even if our esteemed Taoiseach seems to be in deep denial about what a convincing arse whipping in these elections would mean to the credibility of his leadership. But this post isn’t about party bashing.

I’ve been giving out on Twitter over the past few weeks about the constant knocks on the door from the various party candidates. I know it’s an essential part of electioneering but once you’ve met them all once it wears a bit thin. I’ve got particularly aerated about the failure of certain Fianna Fail reps to grasp that they are not going to convince me to vote for them under any circumstances.

But today is voting day. The leaflets have been posted, the hands have been shaken and now it’s all done bar the counting. I know that there’s still the matter of getting the voters out but one thing I like about going to vote is that once you near that voting station the desperate babble has to ease because the buggers aren’t allowed within 50 metres of the polling station. It’s the first bit of quite we get after weeks of political chit chat on the doorstep and in my book, can’t come soon enough.

But obviously there are those who disagree with our need for a little peace and quiet to place our votes. As the husband and I neared the voting station on Cowper St in the Dublin Central constituency this morning we were greeted by a barrage of Fianna Failers. Tom Stafford and his minions had stationed themselves well within the safe zone, hidden round the corner so the garda standing outside the voting station wouldn’t call shenanigans.

They slapped backs and pumped hands and leered over little old ladies in a forced amiability that seriously smacked of desperation. Passers by noticed them encroaching on the polling station and muttered about Fianna Fail being a “dirty word” in these parts. Another, clocking the distance asked “is this an example of Fianna Fail using the letter of the law as opposed to the spirit of democracy?”

Stafford insisted that he wasn’t illegally campaigning but merely talking to friends. Well he had a point. I often chat to my mates clutching bundles of hundreds of Fianna Fail election leaflets…

It was just another sign that, whatever their leader thinks, the rank and file of Fianna Fail are worried and rightfully so (I hope…) We shall all just have to wait until the votes are counted to see what the country has decided.

Signing on the Dotted Line…

4th June 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Today I officially signed with an agent. One of the most exciting things about writing Devil in the Red Dress has been the opportunities it has opened up. It was impossible to guess when I went into Court 1 in the Four Courts a little over a year ago that the trial I was about to cover would actually change my life.

We knew when Sharon Collins and Essam Eid first came into court that it was going to be an interesting trial. Not many trials pass through the Four Courts that have quite that combination of sex and scandal. There was money, there was an internet plot and Eid himself looked like the quintessential mafiosa…he even had a Las Vegas connection. Even though nobody had died, or maybe because of it, it had all the elements of a first class thriller. It was hardly surprising that one of the main topics of conversation during those long weeks the trial was running, revolved around who would play what in any eventual movie.

Even the accused chipped in to that one. Eid was quite happy to offer the suggestion of Al Pacino to play himself. Sharon wasn’t quite so forthcoming – I think she had her sights set on writing the script herself!

As far as I was concerned it was a book waiting to be written. I had been wanting to write a book for some time and had been looking around for the right plot. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was little…I used to look at the books on the shelves in the library and dream of my name being on the spine of one of them. Ever since I can remember I’ve made up stories. I became a journalist so that I could earn my living from writing and telling stories – even if they weren’t ones I had made up myself.

I might have got waylaid for several years in radio but I’m finally where I set out to be…writing for my living. Devil was something that was an extension of that living, a true crime book like those written by many of my colleagues. I’m proud of it and still get a kick out of seeing it in book shops but I didn’t really expect it to lead anywhere beyond that. A local story for the local market. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do and Devil won’t be my last foray into the non fiction market but true crime books written about high profile trials don’t always have a very long shelf life.

What’s been remarkable about Devil is that is has opened more doors than I thought it would. For the last few years I’ve been working on a novel. It’s very, very different from what I do on a day to day basis but it’s something I love doing and I have always believed in the story. In case you’re curious it’s a satirical fantasy, not the swords and sandals variety but more rooted in reality, a little like the work of Jasper Fforde or Malcolm Pryce although it sounds so cheesy to compare myself to two successful authors when I’m only starting out.

Being totally subjective I’m not even sure it’s as funny as either of them or if I’m even making a fair comparison. I’ve spent so long pitching the book to various agents around the place that pat comparisons like that have a habit of tripping off my tongue whenever I describe the book to anyone – something I’m going to have to work on if (when?) it finds a publisher. Basically the plot, without going into much detail here and trying not to be overly cryptic, has journalists, a referendum, dodgy politicians and a sociopathic, womanising mythical beast as one of the main characters. As I said, it’s a little different to the stuff I write on a daily basis…I don’t do the politics beat.

Before Devil came along the novel had been sitting in a yellow folder in the top drawer of the filling cabinet and, to be honest, I was thinking of passing it over and started on something else. But last summer changed all that and that is how I came to start this post with the sentence “Today I officially signed with an agent”. She will be handling the novel, and it’s two sequels and, as anyone reading the last couple of days posts will have realised, this summer I will be working on fiction rather than fact (except when I have to pay the bills).

I still feel slightly awkward writing about fiction in anything other than a purely theoretical basis. I normally write this blog as a journalist and changing key in this way feels like baring a private part of myself that I’m not used to sharing. But this is getting serious now and with any luck I’ll be writing the blurb by this time next year. Today was the first step towards that and I’m looking forward to the work ahead.

Rambling About Not Very Much At All

3rd June 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

I’ve been sitting here for some time trying to decide what to blog about today. The courts, as I’ve mentioned before, are on a two week break, so I’m focused on other things. The problem is that these other things are rather removed from the day job so when I drift back into reality I’m left with not a lot to write about.

I had always meant this to be a blog about writing, but now I’m actually getting down to writing I’m beginning to see a distinct problem with that.

Writing fiction isn’t like following a story. I’m not necessarily going to have daily updates of proceedings to share. Or rather, if I did it wouldn’t mean anything much to anyone but me because I’m talking about characters and situations that no one else knows about for the moment. It’s not a question of writing up snapshots of what’s going on at the end of every day. The day to day process of editing just doesn’t really translate to daily updates.

So when I sit here my mind drifts in all kinds of directions – and I wouldn’t lumber the net with my distracted musings! When I’m not in court I’m as likely to ramble on about the state of my (very small) back yard or the vagueries of baking than the latest murder. When I’m writing intensively then even the garden and the kitchen get ignored so there’s not much left to write about or I get obsessed with something that feeds into what I’m writing in some way. Last summer when I was writing Devil it was the fabrication methods of various toxins (purely theoretical I hasten to add!), this summer it’ll be the finer points of grammar (I should think).

Anyway, bear with me – it will all make sense eventually. I hope.

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