Rick Goldsmith

FIRST DRAFT was completed in one long glorious outpouring over the Summer. I felt like a WRITER and would spend hours thinking about the plot and characters happily inhabiting my imagination for hours on end, pencil in-hand. Plus, I didn’t have to do any major re-editing. Yes there were crossings-out and paragraphs to refashion but on the whole it was a typical first draft rush of getting ideas down on paper.

However, life and work intervened pretty quickly and that first 120-page draft sat on the shelf (and in my heart) until the following summer. This was a painful pattern which recurred many times when it came to my poetry and prose writing. I had a business which took up a huge amount of creative energy and time, and I’m also a home-bird who enjoys spending time with my daughters and my wife, which meant attempts at writing anything longer than haiku-like jottings have traditionally suffered from a maddening lack of continuity. I’d snatch a few hours here and there and have many short stories stashed in notebooks or hidden-away in folders that really could have done with more focussed attention. Without that, stories can remain a little too self-satisfied or half-baked for their own good.

SECOND DRAFT. It took a whole year to get back to writing the novel in earnest. I reviewed my first draft and felt it needed more intellectual heft, more existential musings and deeper explorations of the characters. Now looking back on both of the drafts I doubt whether a single word of either of them exists in the final manuscript. After the second draft was completed – a slightly more ramshackle 150-pages – the novel stayed well and truly on the shelf for nine years. I never doubted the book but life happened: we moved house and it needed a lot of work, my daughters went to college after which one worked abroad while another chose university, my wife broke her arm twice and we experienced one of our busiest and prolonged periods of work with our company. Added to this my father died in his sleep after coping with chronic pain for many years. I should have said, life and death happened.