Jack the Ripper, writing and dogs

Is there a through line? No, but bear with me

I am writing a new book and I am knee-deep. It’ll be my fourth, (which feels mad, still), and my third novel with my lovely editor Ann. Ann does not ride me, she is not scary or intimidating, perhaps knowing that I am a North London girl and this tactic will merely serve to make me raise one eyebrow and fix her with the evilest look known to man (you’ll have to trust me on this, it’s Medusa level terrifying, I spent the entire year of 1997 practising it. There was no TikTok, I had the time). Instead she is kind and patient at every step, with only one truly maniacal tactic. She makes me file books on her birthday. It’s genius really, if I don’t do it, I haven’t given her a present. Even if I’ve already gotten her an actual present, I will still have failed if I don’t also email her a draft of roughly 95k words on the 31st of March. 

This demand has become tradition, a yearly ritual I dread. At first I laugh, she laughs and we move the conversation on. But soon enough, I start thinking about March in a vaguely abstract way. That’s seven months away, almost too much time, if I start now I’ll be early, and to be early is an unforgivable crime. I wait a little longer, relaxing into the writing, taking breaks, where I feel footloose and free. Then I realise Christmas is approaching and I begin to carve out an actual routine so as to hit an (arbitrary) word deadline every day. It’s still pretty chill at this point to be honest. I’m letting the ideas percolate, that’s vital right? God I love the word percolate. Once Christmas is in the rearview mirror, I begin to feel the start of something akin to fear. Three months is no time at all. In three months I could feasibly do nothing of inherent value for anyone, not even myself. That’s when I really knuckle down, but I’m still allowing myself weekends off. Ann wouldn’t want me to work weekends right, she’s not a monster. But then I speak to Ann and we have a lovely chat for a good twenty five minutes. Again I make her laugh, she makes me laugh and at the end I’ve almost forgotten why we’re chatting until she mentions her birthday. It’s a codeword see? A threatening, menacing codeword, one said to a police responder because the kidnapper is within earshot in a bad movie. That’s when weekends go out the window. So far, I’m at 52k words. Every single day I check the word count (I’m lying, I do it about fifty times a day) and then open the calculator app on my phone (I spent so long at school learning maths and questioning the point. With a sigh, the teacher would tell me we wouldn’t always have a calculator to hand. Boy must she feel silly) and check how many words I have to write every day until March. Currently I have to do 1.4k a day in order not to let Ann down. A disappointed Ann is hard to face. So my thoughts on everything apart from this as yet unnamed book are vague and mushy (I am always open to title suggestions). But here are some of my recent ones, if only I had time to flesh them out.