Marmalade, second-hand books and Feeling despondent

27. Saturday 31 January 2026

I rewrote/copied/edited one chapter today, which I see as a bonus extra as I haven’t factored in working on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s far from being my best chapter but it takes me to chapter 39, which will have to be a complete rewrite and a very short chapter. Chapter 40 is one of a few chapters dedicated to lesson six of six and then there are only a few more “incident room” meet-ups and wrapping-up chapters.

                I know it will be great to finish version 3 but I can’t stop feeling disappointed that it’s barely better than my initial draft.

                I drove to Selkirk today, had a walk around Haining Loch and around town and bought a few provisions, including, most important of all, two jars of homemade marmalade. There’s a second-hand book shop, Scott’s, in Selkirk, from which I bought a 1946 book called Mac’s Croft about life on a croft in a remote area of Scotland. I thought that reading it might make me appreciate how comparatively easy it is living in a partially off-grid 1760s farmhouse in the middle of remote Scotland. Anyway, the point of going into Scott’s was to buy marmalade. Homemade marmalade to go with my homemade sourdough. Living the dream.

Haining Loch (oil painting from photo)

                While in the car, I listened to Radio 4 and heard Mark Haddon talking about how he’d written other books that were never published before his huge bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. He said he never wants those books to ever be published and said that he should get rid of them so that no one finds them after his death and decides to get them published. He also said that writing those books was extremely useful as it taught him how to write.

                Crime Writing for Beginners is my sixth novel (though I’ve also written a few that for various reasons I never finished). I’d kind of thought number five would be “the one” and it did get significantly closer than any of the previous four to securing an agent (one agent requested the full manuscript and I think five other agents wrote something encouraging/complimentary and personalised in the “thanks but no thanks” rejection emails. My theory is that number six, this one, will be the one. I mean, surely, six novels, you’d think number six would make it?! I am having a phase of feeling very despondent. It doesn’t feel good enough, not exciting enough, possibly too complicated (there are sort of two timelines, it jumps between before James died and after James died), too many main characters, too much speech, is it weird there are currently no speech marks (I have my reasons, and I will explain one day), is it plausible, will other people like the characters as much as I do, are the characters different enough, have I followed through with everything … I could go on and on.

                I’m fairly sure most people have feelings like this as an unpublished author. I know I’ve said this before but I think I am particularly struggling because I’m on the second rewrite, the third version, and it still feels like a draft. Every book I’ve written before has felt less draft-like after one rewrite.

                I have no suggestions, other than to keep going. But I do know that I am not alone in having days (weeks??) like this. Maybe I’ll be writing here in a month or so and I’ll have dealt with the sludgy, slow sections, I’ll believe that the story works and I’ll feel happier with how it’s written. I really hope that day comes. I know I’ve felt like this before and my last two novels ended up being, I thought, pretty decent.