All done!
Entry posted by The Augusta
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I'm patting myself on the back for two reasons today. Not only did my lads give an entertaining account of themselves (yes - note that word: 'entertaining') against Birmingham to start the new season off with 3 points and 63 home games unbeaten (not to mention Manure's humbling draw), but MORE IMPORTANTLY - my draft of 'Livia' is complete! Those of you who have followed this sad little tale of woe will know that I was struggling with a Tolstoyan word count earlier on, and now find that my complete draft is done at around 140,000 words. So, I now put her away for a week, before taking her out again for a one-off revision. I have suffered with her through countless disappointments and trudged with her through Spartan forests and Campanian dirt-tracks to find myself exhausted with churning out prose and dialogue. The empress has possessed me like Puzo possessed Regan over the last few months, and I will be glad to have a little rest from her constant babblings in my ear. When I reached the last few exchanges, I thought 'Is this really the sweet little thing from page one?' So - I must have achieved what I set out to achieve, and I will now set about her with a ruthless red pen and hopefully, not too much re-writing will be necessary. Oh, Liv - it's been a long hard slog, but we've got there in the end, you and I.
I know that there are one or two other budding writers on the board - not to mention our esteemed Flavia, who will have been through all this rigmarole years ago - so I do have allies in this world of insanity. And insanity it is - let me tell you. Have you any idea what it is like to try to sleep at night with 'scenes' and dialogue exchanges buzzing in your head, so that you have to get back up, turn the computer back on and get them onto hard drive before they fly away forever? I now feel that I could walk up to Tiberius Nero in the street and slap him on the back. (And he did the dirty on me as a character. I wanted him to be vile and he took over my brain and made himself quite sweet in a dreary, droning sort of way.) I see actresses on TV and shout 'See - she's a Livia type' because I have this face in my mind's eye 24/7! As for my four totally fictional characters - I now want to know why they're not mentioned in Plutarch! I tell you, guys and gals, to write historical fiction I do believe you have to be just a little bit mad! And I now know why Roberts Graves went to Majorca to live on a bottle of vodka and 40 cigarettes a day!
But the hard work and the main story lines are all done now, so I am sitting back tonight with a well-earned vodka and coke (decaf, of course) and preparing to print out a rain forest of paper to attack in a week's time. Or I may even leave her a little longer than that, while I remember that I have another life... Is there another life? Oh, yes - there's UNRV and the Premier League..... and work, of course.... lots of patients with left ventricular hypertrophy and left main stem stenoses. Nah! The real world isn't half as good as writing.....
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