New Content? Did I say ‘New content’?

The comments on Joshua book 1 version 2.0 are in. After a lengthy meeting over fennel tea and swiss chocolates (aren’t we girly?), The Editor and I had a frank discussion of what still isn’t working as well as it could. And from this emerged, yesterday, my new draft of the plot for v3.0. The exciting part for me is that it calls for New Content.

Yesiree. Editing where you’re just cutting is no fun, not to me anyway. There’s a sort of masochistic pleasure to it. Ha! I’ll cut out my favourite chapter then, see if I care! That sort of thing. But adding in New Content is lovely. I wrote one new chapter for version 2.0 and writing that was the best bit.

But version 3.0 calls for the restoration – in suitable form – of two sequences which originally appeared in ‘Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist’, the oft-rejected ms which provided the central concept for ‘The Joshua Files’.

And they’re two really fun sequences, too. I’m relocating one to an even more evocative setting – originally set in a Cotswold village, it will now be set in Oxford’s-canal based neighbourhood, Jericho.

It’s my first experience of being edited, and I’m really impressed with the attention to detail in a second edit. Little things get picked up, like the consistency of a particular character’s diction.

I’m going to film myself writing one of these new chapters and put it on Youtube after the book is launched. I got the idea from my mate Noam, about whom I posted a few weeks back. I might even go to Jericho to write it, on my little red laptop.

Hmmmm.

(In an aside, Caitlin Moran writes in The Times Online:

“Big Brotherly love
Quick note to all those who are saying that they are “Not going to watch Big Brother this year, actually” – YOU ARE DELUSIONAL. Get out of denial and put the telly on.”

To which I say…Get behind me, Satan!

Oh help. It’s Friday night – eviction night. Must find salsa event to attend….)