The Watchmaker's Chain - update

In my last post I mentioned that I had been struggling for some time with aspects of the plot - aspects that were complex, but critical to subsequent plot structure - and that this had prevented me from writing any more of the book.

Well, I'm glad to report that after what seems like a very long time in the wilderness, I've managed, finally, to pin down those plot details, and The Watchmaker's Chain is once more a work in progress!

The Watchmaker's Chain is a contemporary mystery thriller, seasoned with a little science fiction. I started writing it in 2011, but decided to put it on ice last autumn while I worked on getting The Testing of Archie Rathbone ready for publication. I have to say that picking up the pieces like this has been much more difficult than I would have expected, and I'll certainly try to avoid having to repeat the process. I hadn't realised quite how complex and involved the various plot strands were that I'd left hanging there, so when it came to picking them up again it wasn't just a case of trying to resolve the unresolved details I referred to earlier, but also of having to remind myself of all those little complexities of interdependency that I'd already designed in - the details I'd sown as seeds earlier in the story that later on would grow into plot twists, or clues to other mysteries.

This is one aspect of writing that I find particularly challenging - not the process of designing a necessarily complex plot, but judging just how complex it really is. If you 'engineer' a complex and interwoven set of plot strands that ultimately lead the reader to what you hope will be a satisfactory conclusion, it's very difficult for you the writer to see it as the reader will - you already know the answer to every riddle you place before the reader.

The Watchmaker's Chain currently stands at around 32,000 words - that's 72 pages of A4 (if that's any more meaningful), or perhaps equivalent to around 110 pages of a 'traditional' book. I don't know how that will compare to its ultimate size, but I'd guess that I'm about a third of the way there.

If you're interested, I'm going to try to post regular updates as to how The Watchmaker's Chain progresses (along with occasional updates on the download figures for The Testing of Archie Rathbone). If you've read Thes Testing of Archie Rathbone then you'll find my second book quite different, but still, I hope, enjoyable.