I made a list.
I’m doing quite well with it—ticked off more than half, and others are ‘in progress’. I’m not going to finish it before I start work again, but I’ve given myself permission not to get through everything, and I’m okay with that.
One of the things I don’t think I’ll finish before the summer is the novel that I started writing back in… 2009 I think, or possibly earlier. It’s not A Momentary Lapse of Reason, although it is set (mostly) in Cambridge, and it’s very definitely lab lit. (AMLoR is finished, by the way—we just haven’t finished serializing it yet.)
It’s been a project that has been on and off. Real life (jobs, children) got in the way. My main characters spent 6 years in the pub as I tried to figure out how to get them out and back to work. I last made significant progress (getting said characters out of said pub) before Covid.
But over the last couple of weeks I’ve written about 20,000 words and pulled together all the disparate bits of ideas and plots and devices, making sense of notes such as “The Gavin sting” and “don’t forget the mascarpone”, and I finally know how to finish it.
This year, I promise. I hope you’ll like it when I’m done.
