Last week I had to bury one of our dogs. Relax, it was already dead. Typically it chose to meet its Maker and move to the Great Kennel in the Sky on one of the coldest days of the year, thereby greatly adding to the effort required by me to dig a suitable grave for her (for it was a she).

* The picture is of a nearby cross erected to mark the location of a World War One plane crash, where a Canadian pilot was mortally wounded.

Stop press: Boxing Day and I've just completed the first draft – 105,000 words in total. Now it's off for a quick celebratory drink then I'm starting on my first set of revisions/rewrite to knock off the rough edges plus a few inconsistencies and unsatisfactory bits. I may even have to kill-off some of my darlings if they get in the way of the plot.

* For the record, I started on 1st August and – despite not writing every day (I do have a day job plus I also had some serious distractions business & private-wise this autumn) this still comes down to an average wordcount of 700 words a day.

Monday 13th December – just past the 100,000 words mark on the novel !

Been playing the track Badge by the old 1960s band Cream on the sound system. I always do this time of the year – some kind of race-memory of mine dating back to my days at Leeds University about 500 years ago.

Now back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leeds Uni's Student Union had a reputation for putting on some of the best gigs (although they were called hops in those days) in the country. Acts playing the university in my time included The Who (as in the Live at Leeds album), the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Family, John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, Paul McCartney & Wings, Rod Stewart & The Faces, Emerson Lake & Palmer and on and on.

My least successful gig was Leonard Cohen – fantastic show but I didn't get the girl I was with. My most successful was the Edgar Broughton Band – terrible show but the drummer broke his sticks, tossed them into the audience, I caught them, gave them to the girl sitting next to me and she was seriously impressed (and grateful). However, the track I most associate with Leeds is Badge. Here's how it happened…

In the old coffee bar in the Union Building, there was a juke box and a bridge foursome. The bridge party was headed by Hugh Edwards – best known to the outside world for playing the character 'Piggy' in the 1963 movie version of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies.

To my recollection, the bridge party lasted pretty much 18 hours a day for at least three years – rumour had it that Edwards even had bridge conventions (whatever they may be) named after him. More to the point, at least once every 15 minutes, one of that party played the track Badge – hence the fact (as I spent most of my university time drinking coffee in that coffee bar) the tune is burned into the cortex of my brain.

Now for the really obscure, trivial pursuits point. Badge was a joint composition by George Harrison and Eric Clapton (Ringo Starr contributed the line about the swans in the park). It was originally an untitled track but during the production transfer for the Cream album Goodbye, the original music sheet was used to produce the liner notes and track listing. The only discernible word on the page was 'Bridge' – a notation intended to identify the transitional moment in the song. Harrison's handwriting, however, was so bad that Eric Clapton looked at it and thought it said 'Badge' – so the band named it Badge.

All of which leaves me wondering: did the bridge party know the song title came from the annotation 'Bridge' and therefore provided a kind of ironic theme tune to their endless round of bridge rubbers? We'll never know – and, to be honest, we don't care.

First off formatting apologies? I'm posting from an Apple iPad and the browser does not support rich text – so it's this typeface and size or nothing. I'll fix it later.



So, progress report: three months into the project (I started on 1st August) I've just past the 82,000 words stage and am now on the home straight towards the conclusion of the novel – although that will still involve six key incidents/set piece scenes. And I'm also clear this is now going to be the first volume in a trilogy. Given the day job writing is currently going through a particularly manic phase, to be averaging just under 1000 words a day is particularly gratifying.




As for the actual writing and plotting… despite all the notes I'm writing to myself, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of earlier parts of the novel. However, rather than keep cutting back to check and/or amend the manuscript, I'm just ploughing on. (This is a particular problem with the iPad where the WP app I'm using has a limited interface.) I'll worry about tying up some of the many loose ends when I've finished this draft but, like a mountaineer in site of the summit, although I can see the base camp is in shambles, I'm too near the prize now to turn back or be distracted by the inadequacies of the earlier parts.




The plan now is to finish this draft – possibly still a couple of months away. Then print it out in hard copy format – it's already reached the equivalent of 400 pages of A4 – for an edit and to identify the weaker parts. I can tell some of the characters are totally implausible in their actions and motivations. Likewise, I realise some of the early plotting and dialogue is clunky. Then I'll produce a rewritten second draft and worry then about what to do next.




What could possibly go wrong? Well I am worried that when I read it, I'll discover that I've become the Jack Nicholson character in the movie “The Shining” and that I've written 600 pages amounting to little more of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”