Insomnia

Men With Axes’ is giving me sleepless nights – If only I could use the plural of the noun, but unfortunately it is the book rather than the troupe of Mountain Guides that is keeping me awake at night.

Every recent night, it has not been the howling dogs keeping me awake, nor the doodling cocks, nor the asphyxia from the weight of four ancient fur coats piled onto the bed against the bitter cold of high altitude winter in a stone house without heating, nor the loneliness that the wind whips in, dumping half the pueblo’s garbage in my garden and a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ layer of thick dust over everything, even the toilet roll. I stopped complaining about the mini tornadoes that whistle through town during dry season after visiting my friends Paul and Mary at their two-year-old boutique hotel project that is still an open-air building site. The washing machine is sitting out on the pile of ancient stones that will one day be the patio and they have yet to negotiate access with their neighbours in order to remove many skiploads of dust and rubble. After the winds, Mary has half a skipload of dust and rubble in her knickers but she is still cheerful enough to offer a tumbler of the heady 45-year old jerez

they found buried under the stone kitchen.

I am kept awake by structure. ‘Men With Axes’ has its own website in production and I am keen to upload the first few chapters or 25,000 words and beg an early opinion from people who have been kind enough to say they’ve enjoyed reading my work. These are the people I want feedback from – not the so-called professionals who can’t distinguish slush from gold unless a celebrity has (ghost)written it. Every one of whom turned down the original ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript when JK sent it out.

When you have lived with your own book for a number of months or years, you too find it difficult to distinguish silk and sow. It is easy to suddenly see every word as cliché, trite or already said by someone smarter and younger. I have met many authors who have simply given up at this point. Not all of us have the time remaining to be like Anne Michaels who spent twelve years writing her second book after ‘Fugitive Pieces’ because she feels she owes the reader the perfection of minute reality.

So I lie awake thinking about the pace of the first chapter, the rising arc of action, the inciting incident, the characterisation – I want the women to be realistic, not handbag-obsessed dildoes. Does the resolution involve the reader enough to want to continue this journey around Argentina

and relationships with her hombres. And by day I cut, paste and pillage attempting to ferment it into a decent vintage.

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