{"id":3191,"date":"2021-01-20T08:23:56","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T08:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spiffingwebsites.com\/douglas-watkinson\/?p=3191"},"modified":"2022-08-17T09:25:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T09:25:39","slug":"the-muse-steps-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/post\/the-muse-steps-in\/","title":{"rendered":"The Muse Steps In…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finished White Crane (the latest in the Nathan Hawk Murder Mysteries) and dead pleased with myself I rolled it off and gave it to The Muse to have a read. It took her two days of intense work, interrupted by the demands of her own business, and I did my usual thing of \u201cpopping in\u201d to see \u201chow she was getting along\u201d. In other words did she like it? On several occasions I noticed she was wielding the red pen \u2026 not to circle misspellings or repetitions, but to make notes. Some of them quite long. Spirits plummeted. I asked outright what she thought of it. Terrific, she said. Spirits rose again.<\/p>\n

Finally we sat down in the living room – dogs, log fire, coffee, faces smiling to the point of aching, and she waded in. She liked the book, she said. Spirits rose. But \u2026 Spirits sank again. The last third of the book needed work, she thought. Spirits sank even lower. I pretended I was grateful for her input when, in truth, I could have killed her.<\/p>\n

\"\"The thing about all this is that we\u2019ve done this macabre dance time and time again over the last xx years. (Number withheld for various reasons) I\u2019ve written literally hundreds of scripts for television and not one of them left the house without The Muse had the final say. It\u2019s pissed me off every time because, like every writer I\u2019ve ever known, I\u2019ve always believed (at least for a while) that the first draft is the definitive one. The fact that even a humble episode of Boon or Lovejoy often ended up with a second, third or even fourth draft is irrelevant.<\/p>\n

She even reads these newsletters before I publish them, by the way. So any criticism I make of her is offered in a caring way.<\/p>\n

Anyway, apart from some \u2026 reasonably sound story points The Muse made about \u2018White Crane\u2019 she also also said that Covid19 is apparent in the book. Not that it\u2019s mentioned once! What pokes through, according to her, is my attitude to my fellow man, life itself and outfits like Waitrose, Costco, and Land Rover. The Muse says they\u2019re over the top. By which she means bad-tempered, irascible, grumpy \u2026 you name it. I call them honest. Whatever the truth they\u2019re the result of being cooped up like a chicken for a year. So White Crane will take another couple of weeks while I sort out the tone. It\u2019s pretty mean of The Muse, though, when she knows I\u2019ve got another book in the Nathan Hawk series ready to be written but she\u2019s probably right. Mind you, I can\u2019t promise my attitude to Waitrose will change that much \u2026 I mean over-priced, small fish counter, small meat counter, indifferent deli, etc\u2026<\/p>\n

\"White<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m in a critical mood I watched the first episode of Simon Nye\u2019s new series \u2018Finding Alice\u2019. It\u2019s a dark comedy drama, witty and beautifully written, and with a cast who are all on the same page as far as style is concerned. We thought we would binge on the rest of it, only to find that ITV doesn\u2019t subtitle episodes two onward and (here comes the complaint) the sound quality is less than perfect. Too much wow and flutter so that a lot of the nuance goes unheard. And, alas, there is one actor in it who doesn\u2019t help \u2026 a young actor who should have learned from the rest of the cast how to be heard on telly.<\/p>\n