The Biggest chop

Hello Friends in Blogland,

I don't know if you read this tawdry blog of mine much anymore. I seem to read everyone elses than to pay mine any attention. This is just a quick post to say, I haven't forgotten you - and please keep posting away on all things fabulous  - books and creativity - I am reading. It brightens my day between the umpteenth load of washing or train commutes. 

I have not only been busy with the Pixie who has now turned one, but I have been (with encouragement and support) been making the biggest chop of all to my once 189k novel. Slowly but surely a leaner version is appearing. At 110k, she is looking very svelte indeed, if a little malnourished to my eye, but hopefully like a dancer, able to swoon to great heights because of it. 

Because of my editing, my brain had started turning into an editing machine, no novel safe, or newspaper article. Biographies have seemed immune, so I have read Speak, Memory by Nabokov - a liquid memoir, fully of vanished Russia and pithy observations of the writing life and exile. The whole premise that it was written for his wife was lovely and concludes with the birth of their son. I loved the descriptions of Vladimir pushing his son around the streets of Berlin, descriptions of moustached pansies echoing the chants of Hitler. The one thing I found strange was, he didn't mention anything of meeting or courting or wedding Vera, his wife. Though perhaps this absence is a more truer love letter than if he included it.

Perhaps, their relationship was edited out to preserve it?

I don't know. 

What I do know. Is that I am feeling lax about my blog, happier that my novel is closer to print than this time last year, my Pixie is thriving and that I can return to reading novels again...The Quickening Maze already captivating - about John Clare the mad poet, written by a poet, and can I say, edited perfectly, every sentence a perfect morsel.

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