Gert battles on

Two weeks down the track, 28,000 words written, but do we know where we're going? Not really. The saying 'you write to find out what you want to write' never applied more accurately to two writers. Where did we start? We thought we'd try a central character that was never physically described, who had a destructive presence, but not in any specific way, a self made Guru who with a close group of followers who struggle with his gnomic utterances, and a nice put-upon woman who is persuaded she has run over the destructive one. The nice woman is Freddie Todd. One of us found her uninteresting to the point of being annoying, and thought she had too much of a bland influence on the narrative. And where was the narrative? This was the first week. Now somehow we have a policeman with a feisty young daughter who teaches him how to 'do' the computer, and two gay men who have a loving relationship but financial worries made worse by a plague of mice.  Cats feature in the story also. Two men have bonded over weight problems, the destructive woman is spreading rumours and causing trouble in the town. Freddie Todd has attacked the destructive woman and turned into a complete virago. Some time in the coming week we plan to murder the destructive woman, have police come up from Sydney, and who knows what else.
And one of us has discovered an unrealized talent for writing slash fiction. e.g
She ran the knife oh so delicately down from the sweet dip in his throat, along the fluted sternum, plunged it just a little deeper into the yielding skin of his abdomen so that a fine trail of blood sprang up. She thought of the intricate intestines so close below the surface, of plunging the knife suddenly in, in and down, and dipping her hands… 

Aha, that got you in didn't it? 

Gert saddles up again

The time has come for Gert to take up her pen again. What will it be this time? Every time we start again we try to do something we haven't done before. Our first book Crane Mansions - a novel about the redeeming power of cake was a sweetly Gothic tale of redemption set in a school run by a man obsessed with pigeon-lore. Then followed Writing is Easy, the story of an epic battle of egos between two self-obsessed writers running a workshop at a luxurious country retreat. For something completely different, The Art of the Possible dealt with the wonder youth drug Optiviva.  Prime Minister Flattley didn't intend to let the truth about its real effects to get in the way of his financial dealing or his re-election, but he reckoned without Dr Frank Owlbrother and his mythical steed Hrafni. Next we wrote The Lies and Life of Bella Hatherley, the story of a little girl who isn't sure if she's a liar or just has a very good imagination.  A YA book was next, seeing we'd never tried one. In Dark Pools of Selena 14-year-old Ali leads a privileged life in the rigidly-structured society of Hadur but she can’t rein in her effervescent, questioning spirit.   Falling in love with the glamorous, charismatic cameraman Ash, she is drawn into underground resistance forces working to document the injustice and cruelty of Hadur. Not so funny, this one, a bit po-faced really. 

Now we're out to do something a bit against type, not so broad and rumbustious. Something slyly funny but with a touch of the melancholy of a Muriel Spark. We've discussed the general drift of it, at least where it starts, but as usual we really have no idea how it will unfold.  Monday June 18th is the starting day.  In thirty days we'll have a 60,000 word draft, good, bad or just plain plodding, but we will have that draft.