Trilogy History Book 2

G'day

I went straight  into Book 2 the day after finishing Book 1.   We were still in a flat in Sydney, Felicity at work and me home - what else was I going to do?  Taking a break in the circumstances (where my wife Felicity is working to support my writing habit) did not seem politic besides my reading of the many tomes on "How to write ..." almost universally suggested letting a newly completed manuscript gestate a week or two before revising. Who am I to argue?

October 2000 we returned to our Ironbank home in the Adelaide hills and me to the the Blackwood Writers Group  - hereinafter BWG, not that I ever left in spirit thanks to the internet.   I came back with six chapters of Book 2 which started with the daughter of main protagonists - a generational change - 20 odd years after the closing event of Book 1   (incidentally book 1 covered a single year)

Koala Ridge Ironbank design by built by me, home for 20 years

About now I ran out of steam - not writers block so much as I didn't like where the story was going , it was on a side track heading away from the goal I had in mind and getting bogged down.

I decide to quit and revise book one for insights but that's a whole other story of which this is a quick summary  Revision 2 finished Dec 2000 at 196,000 words -  It went to 9 revisions  topping at 210,000, was broken into two books (hence later the 2 parts to each book), reassembled, culled and  revised endlessly with the object of sending it out while I worked on book 2.

However Book 1: The Break of Civilization  (Break) still needs work ( it's on the net if you want to help) but  I have decided to finish the whole trilogy then revise bearing mind what's to come. Still there is something to said for the naivety of the characters when I and they didn't know what was to come.  Too much editing is often worse than not enough.
 

Back in book The Face of the Goddess ( Face) two I started working backwards from the opening to fill in the years between Bk1 and Bk2. Several attempts, prologues and opening chapters were written and thrown away.  I felt, quite literally, like I had lost the plot. To cut a long story short.  It has taken from  2001 to 2010 (9 years)  to get book 2 from 6 chapters to near completion as it is now.   The original start is now chapter 14.  60,000 words have been inserted.   

 9 years - LIFE got in the way - Health issues,  a house move  and new bookshop - a 7-day coffee-shop/post-office/bookshop  as below. (those three years devoid of writing)  an operation,  a world trip 2004 (recuperation), two house moves, another world trip 2007 just in case  (during which I plotted in broad strokes the rest of the trilogy) Another house move 2009 and another operation 2010 (see my blog "That's Life" )

My second bookshop ~ the BookPost, Charleston, Sth. Aust.

Funny how I used to think a book shop the perfect business for a writer.  I tried it twice; the first failed because I wrote - the second thrived but I wrote almost nothing. There's a moral there somewhere.

Next post will be as I start book 3,  sometime next week -  Yaye!

'Ooroo