Gert comes to the end

On Sunday 15th July we achieved the completion of our sixth joint work. We commenced on Monday 18th June and wrote our 1,000+ words a day until now we have 61,391.
But are they good words? Are they elegant and artful? Do they tell a tale like no other? Does the pathos wring our hearts and the humour cause us to fall backwards drunk with laughter? We think not, at this stage.
We have made a start, something has begun. Unlike our previous works which have leapt fully formed from our busy fingers, the as-yet-unnamed work is partial. We see the seeds of something more, the town needs to grow, the planet which guides the destinies of our characters is yet to be chosen. But we are excited. Something new has taken place. For the first time we truly know the meaning of 'first draft,' and see the path leading to 'second draft,' even 'third draft.'
Who can tell what turns we will take. For the moment we lie fallow and wait.

Some serious questions

Some disagreements have arisen as Gert struggles to extricate herself from the tangled web she has created with what has turned out to be a kind of murder mystery. We have had to consider:
does Pourgues want a sex-change operation?
is Gandharva a fraud?
why did Harry lend Alex the black Golf?
would you take a heavily-laden backpack on a romantic stroll in the moonlight?
is the headless body in the Walwa state forest just a red herring?
why, oh why, is Alex so mean?
and, crucially,
can you keep on loving someone who has called you a fat fool?
As we approach the finishing-line we have solved some, but not all, of these dilemmas.
We power on to a conclusion that has at least become vaguely clear with the motto, 'We can fix that up later' .

Gert flounders about

Nearly three weeks in and we are still at sea. The problem is the task we set ourselves of writing more naturalistically than usual. In previous books where everything is slightly (or a lot) larger than life we can indulge our taste for caricature and the bizarre knowing that our readers understand that's what they're going to get, and they'll happily go along with the unlikely logic of the book's world. But this time our setting is the unadorned everyday and our characters, though we're fond of some of them, not particularly memorable. We are about to murder our nasty woman but we're still not sure who did it - many have motives. We're beginning to have great respect for those sturdy writers who construct plots and work to them, rather than just seeing what comes along. Ah well, we're keeping up our 1000-wd-a-day-each regime, the story is moving, here, there and everywhere - and in the end, who knows?