Swallows, sunshine and editing

58. Tuesday 7 April 2026

Every time I finish a stage of editing it feels a bit disappointing. Today, with the exception of one paragraph, which is a fictional blurb of a book, I have gone through all highlighted areas. I definitely feel I’m near the end, but I think the looming round of agent submissions is making me feel gloomy. It must be great to be published and already have an agent and not need to finish a book and then have to send it out to agents, which is a thoroughly demoralising and slow process.

                I think I also feel a bit sad because my time with these characters is coming to an end and I’ll miss them.

                Once I finished the highlighted sections (and realised I’d done more than I gave myself credit for having done over the Easter weekend), I then wrote out the chronology, ie there is “before the death” and “after the death” and they’re mixed. I’m kind of pleased with how I’ve framed it because it’s largely set over the six weeks of the Crime Writing for Beginners class. I’ve used the investigation into the is-it-an-accident-or-is-it-murder to be structured around their going through each class, so when they move onto “evidence” from the next week, the chapters revert to the corresponding class.

                My plan now is to read through it all chronologically and, I suppose – I was going to say I’ll correct/alter as I go but I’m now wondering whether I should just highlight any sections I’m uncertain of and see this as a read-through more than an edit. I do feel a need to lose a few thousand words though.

                I also have one reader who knows virtually nothing about the story. He’s my friend Nicky’s brother and we chatted about writing when we were at Nicky’s wedding almost a year ago. I think he’ll be a useful critic as a) he offered and b) he doesn’t know me well and c) he has no insight into what I’m writing about or even how I write and d) this is not his usual genre to read. The latter could also be a negative but I think his perspective might be interesting. I would like him to have a one-liner and a blurb so it’s as if he has picked the book up in a shop. So I’d like to try to write them over the next few days.

                However, the one-line pitch and the blurb are things I struggle to write so I know it’d be a massive accomplishment for me to write them this week.

In other news, it was sunny and warm all day. I slept in the cabin again, there was frost first thing. Then it got hotter and hotter. Chris and I had a late breakfast and lunch sitting on the decking over the stream, and it was beautiful. And, best of all, I saw the first two swallows of the year. I love the barn swallows and their digital-sounding calls and how they fly. I made the comment about one swallow not making a – I said “spring” but Chris pointed out it’s actually a summer. But here, we’re so far behind that I’m going to take their arrival today, a day of sunshine and 17℃, as being the start of spring.

                I also had a proper long walk along Tima Water, during which I was too hot!