I’ve been trying to get down the first scene of the new book for the past week and a half.  The blank page is always a little scary but I think I was thrown by starting something so completely new.  My characters were waiting in the wings ready to start the action and I knew where that action was going to take them but the opening sentences I’d tried up until today just didn’t set the scene I wanted to set.

So I fell back on that old reliable – a change of scene.  This morning I packed myself up and headed into town determined to banish the blank page and make a dent in Chapter 1.  I love writing at my desk at home, surrounded by all the the junk that I like to think are prompts when the muse is stubbornly absent.  I’ve had the desk since I was school and it’s always been a little oasis where I know I can work.  This summer when, for various reasons, I couldn’t work there to finish my last book I spent a week going absolutely distracted as I got used to my new surroundings.

But sometimes the old familiars just don’t work.  It’s nice to have the luxury of a writing space at home but as a journalist I’m used to working wherever there’s desk space if a deadline is looming.  With fiction I’m a little more picky, I have bolt holes that I know will always have a condusive atmosphere to get me over a hump, where I can sit undisturbed and write, preferably with a handy plug socket for when the laptop battery starts to die.

When I headed into town today though, none of the usual haunts appealed.  This new book is very different to the fantasy I’ve written up to now (that’s in terms of fiction…not journalism) The character who tells this story had his own demands and I ended up in Starbucks upstairs in BT2 on Grafton Street. As I said before, I tend to be a little bit method when I’m working on a new character.

Normally the clatter of the ladies-who-lunch and the students from Trinity yattering over their lattes would keep me at bay unless there was a particularly pressing deadline.  Today though it was what was needed and the words soon started filling the page.  By the time I’d finished my non-fat latte (well, when in Rome and all that) I had 1100 words of an opening.

It’s only a first draft and will probably go through numerous permutations before I’m happy with it but there is no longer a blank page and the story is suddenly a concrete thing, a real “work in progress”.

Which reminds me.  Having written two books using Word I decided to try out some dedicated writing software this time round.  I’ve been using Word all my working life and it’s second nature but negotiating your way around a100,000 word manuscript can be a bit cumbersome to say the least.  I’ve also been caught on numerous occasions when my computer crashed when I had been caught up in the flow of a scene and hadn’t saved.  Even with Autosave I’d usually lose the last paragraph at least.

I use Twitter a lot these days and it’s a great place to keep up with the more techie things that are going on in the world.  It hadn’t occured to me that software existed for writers – I’d heard of programmes that helped you plot a novel that seem to be marketed to all those desperate to write the next generic blockbuster but a programme that simply existed because writers aren’t necessarily best suited for the standard office word processing programmes.

I decided to investigate and found PageFour.  There are a lot of these programmes out there these days but I’m happy with this one.  You write directly in the programme and your work is saved as an Rich Text document.  This means that your formatting will show up in whatever programme you export to when it’s time to print or send it off (in my case this will be the old reliable, Word).  There are all kinds of handy little features like a search for words you over use and an easily accessible word count.  But the big thing I like about it is that whenever the programme shuts down, whether you’ve closed it or it or the computer have crashed, your work is intact.  When you open the programme again it’s there down to the last letter.

I’m using a trial version at the moment but I think I’ll be getting a license.  I don’t normally plug stuff here but I’m surprised at how handy the programme is so I thought I’d share.  I won’t be ditching Word, it’s what I use for journalism after all, but it sometimes pays to be open minded.

OK sales pitch over and I’m heading back to my chapter but it’s a good feeling to know that I’ve finally made a start and the new book is underway.  Now the real work begins.