Over

Two bits of bad news. Firstly, I'm reading Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which is slightly disappointing. Great style, no doubt, some worthwhile insights but not a writer I could love. It is supposed to be funny and I haven't laughed yet.

Worse, though. It brought on that awful feeling of, 'I could do this'.

I know I can't do it. In the past, decades ago now, I used to try. And I found I couldn't write fiction at all. Once it was several short stories imitative of William Trevor, who I thought was the best thing.Then it was Mishima and various Japanese writers that made me want to do it. I had a story, A Brief Lapse of Confidence, published in a magazine called Fisheye, and gladly eventually forgot about it.

Unfortunately this time I have an idea that I think might work, although whether it will stretch to the 50 000 word mark that the Wikipedia entry says elevates a story from novella to novel, I don't know. This morning, I've done 430 words, so I need to do that more than 100 more times.

It's called Over and concerns the last week of a relationship between Doddsy and Madeleine.

I expect I'll run out of impetus quite soon but in the meantime I can say I have a novel in preparation. It would be great to have something one is happy with to keep in a drawer forever. The main reason for not wanting to try these last twenty years or more is that the investment of time and effort was never going to be worth the poverty of the thing it produced. I'll see what happens this time.