Last week I said I was going to print off my novel, Jacob’s Ladder, read it and start editing. My son had given me a printer they didn’t need and his girlfriend gave me a load of paper that was going to be recycled. The meeting of perfect circumstances?
Well, at first all went well – the printer started spitting out pages as if it was born to it. Then something got stuck and I also realised it was only printing even numbers. Once the blockage was resolved I started again, but the printer wasn’t happy and reluctantly forced out one page at a time and even that was smudged so I couldn’t read the page numbers… Ultimately I had two piles of paper: odd and even, with so many missing pages I had to go through and put them all in order and make a list of each, individual missing page. Aargh! So much for my stress-free productive evening!
In the end I had to retire defeated and came back to it in the morning. Obviously a good night’s sleep had restored us both – the printer obligingly produced all the missing pages perfectly, without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Heavens be praised.
So this week I started to read the novel. To be honest it’s my favourite of the three I’ve written. I love my main characters. Flawed but hopeful, they feel very real to me. My invisible friends! 50 pages a day I’ll be finished by the beginning of next week. If nothing else goes wrong!
Ali Thurm 