Damned cat is ill. I should take the daily stroll but the damn cat is ill. Seems he has now and then pain hitting while walking, hisses or meows loudly. Took him to vet last week and they found nothing, must book a new time for an ultrasound scan.

So, instead of outdoor activities I decided to blow cobwebs off Scyllaclough Study. This blog, that is. I hardly recognize the earlier posts. Seems I abandoned this, let’s see…six years ago. Wow.
Not much progress during that time. Except that I finalized the manuscript of my debut novel, which I had initiated during 2013, at least that’s the oldest backup I found, maybe a third of the final version. Mutilated it and finally finished it now in less than six months.

Of course they’re never ready. But I’m not going to fiddle with it before the literary agents I’ve sent queries give such feedback. That’s correct, I pressed the “send” button lately. Didn’t cause any tickles in spine since our ill Ace the cat demanded attention at that exact moment and I just hastily clicked that fateful button.

Saying that I’m not very positive about the possible outcome does not affect my writing. For me writing is great fun even if the works never find their way inside a dust jacket or e-readers.
No, it’s not a ghost story this time. I may get to details later. However, some observations from the process:

• I hate THE articles
• Your characters should be your friends, you should know how to describe them down to their boots. Imagine a situation where you’re discussing about one of your friends with a total stranger: ‘oh, he’s/she’s very pleasant.’ But then: ‘how does he/she look like?’ Uh-oh. Apparently you have invisible friends. It’s not enough to ‘well, she does have a most charming pimple in the middle of her nose.’ That’s the hard part, you seldom describe anybody’s looks to somebody unless gossiping. Especially if you are producing a belligerent story where lots of people die: You may have presented more than a dozen names of people who die in the process and all you’ve been able to say is ‘He was pleasant/grumpy etc.’
• Alright, let’s find out how many conflicts there are between “that/which” to be addressed(Thx son!)
• Brainstorming The Sequel, thought it would be hard, but suddenly the plot emerges and runs through my head from some mystical nowhere. Great! Needed a break from the first one, I’m totally blind for it…
• Built chapters. Surprise: 13! Superstitious? Update: ok. For novels with 70k-90k words should be perhaps 15-25 chapters(source: somewhere in the Net…). Currently 17.
• This is hard to explain: I used the editor module of the software and it revealed doubled “the the” articles. Or where they? I promptly deleted the doubles, not checking the whole sentences around. Now writing some more I noticed I use to mistype “then the” without the “n” there. Alas! I might have removed words “then”…Good luck finding the spots, there are 6,000+ “the” articles around… Sigh. I have to read through the garbage(Hey! Have a little faith there, you moron!) again anyway. No, I have no version control(Sigh!)

Nuff said, during these times of The Disease I skipped from frightening the people with the Halloween mask, that is my own everyday face. The leaves have fallen, I’ve got winter tires in my tin box, we’re back in the standard time from that darned daylight saving time. So, let it snow and let the light of the winter illuminate us.
I’ll be back with more rant or hopefully some news.