Rewrites

I'm rewriting 'The Coincidence Authority'. This is a good thing by the way. I've decided that the first-person voice that I used wasn't the best perspective to tell the story. So I'm going back through and rewriting in the third person, through the eyes of an all-seeing narrator.


It wasn't an easy decision. I know that John Irving did the same thing for 'Until I Find You' (one of my favourite books, as it happens), and it took him the best part of a year. (And he's a full time writer to boot). My target is more like two months, snatching time between work and leisure. I'm planning a week off work to wrap it all up. Anyway I've had fantastic support from my editor, so that's good. But if I'm grumpy and disagreeable over the next few weeks, then this will help explain it. And it means that work on 'Forgetting the Whale' is on ice for a while. But that's quite a good thing for a novel I think. Sometimes you spend so long with a novel, that it's only when you've had a break that you can see the things that need fixing. You could say that this is what happened with The Coincidence Authority.


Only six weeks until the launch of Maximilian. I'm really rather nervous. It's a very personal book, and I'm starting to wonder if I'll cope with all my friends and family and colleagues poring over some of my most tender memories.


I'm doing an article for the Guardian on one of those memories. This was the idea of my brilliant publicist at Orion. I've written eight hundred words on an incident from my teens when Lorraine and I were held on a train at gunpoint by a drunken detatchment of Idi Amin's army. Let's hope the Guardian uses it. Although, apparently, I won't be able to mention Maximilian Ponder. So I guess the publicity will be limited.


I've been back and forward to Riyadh and Dubai in January and I'm off to Istanbul next week, and then back again to Saudi in March. I spend too much of my life in airport departure lounges and squashed onto planes. But I really should never complain. I'm lucky to do what I do, and to be a writer as well.