I have achieved today.
Now there’s a thing I don’t say often enough.
The wonderful organisers of Virtual Noir at the Bar have asked me to do a spot on July 8th. They’re offering 10 mins of reading from my next-to-be-published book. That’s scary. I’ve known about the event for a weeks. When first offered, I chatted to Vic, the host, and she was wonderfully understanding because the offer came just after my depression hit. I haven’t been sure I was ready for it, so I’ve been putting off finding the right passage.
Picking such a section is harder than you might think. There are a number of ways to approach the selection. The ones I look for are the hook or illustration of either main character, or main theme.
The book is split between two locations, and two sets of characters, which makes selecting one character to focus on difficult. This is also a standalone book, unlike anything I’ve produced before so I wasn’t sure who to pick.
The hook is good, but if I start at the start and read for 10 minutes, it stops partway through the introduction of two characters I love.
The theme is about the revelation of identity. Who the characters really are. I’ve got an absolutely wonderful scene in which two characters are revealed for who they really are, but that reveals too much of the overall plot.
I felt lost for a direction.
So I returned to the start, there’s a scene in that’s important when you read the book needs to be there, but I’m promoting the book, so I took a chunk out, read it out loud and it’s down to 9 minutes. That’s perfect.
This means that, rather than dreading it, I am finally looking forward to the night.
The Write Route 