I have a friend, Ross, who manages to set aside a couple of hours every day for writing. And he's been successful — a published collection of memoirs that has sold more than 2,000 copies and now a three-novel contract with a Toronto publisher for his medical mysteries, including an excellent first novel that is due to be published in spring of 2009.

And I have a friend, John, who is now retired and is a full-time writer. He has completed several novels of exceptional quality and, I trust, is currently in the heavy marketing stage. He certainly delivers the goods and should be able to find an agent and/or publisher fairly quickly.

And then there's me. I struggle to get my life organised enough to set aside two or three hours each day (even one hour would be great) for writing. There's always something that needs to be done: the lawn mown, the dog walked, dinner made, etc. So I end up making very slow progress on my creative work. I wrote my first text book almost 10 years ago at a time when I was still young, I lived in a tiny apartment and my partner was overseas at University. I worked every night after work for two to three hours and finished the 300-page book in just under three months. Amazing, when I think of it now.

So I know I have to start playing with my schedule to figure out when I can write. Ross writes early in the morning, before his work day begins. I could try that. My partner and the dog are usually still asleep then so I would have fewer interruptions. But I already get up before 7 so how early would I have to be out of bed? Yikes.

I was successful with the text book by writing in the evenings. I could try to go back to that. But that's when life comes to call more often and I'm tired from a day at work.

I'll have to keep plugging away, trying to find a niche of time. Perhaps I should write every day through my lunch hour at work. Not a bad idea but lunch tends to get eaten up (so to speak) by phone calls and e-mails and people dropping in and projects that leak into the break.

I am recognising now that my first two Phillip Gold novels are pretty good as early efforts go but I need to get stronger and more consistent as a writer and I need to take the full-developed characters and thrust them into new adventures that help them to grow further. I like the first two novels; I'm proud of the first two novels. But maybe I have to accept that they were necessary experiences to put me into the position of writing one that will sell.

So I need to make the time to write.

Tags: Three-Day Novel, Writing, Ross Pennie

I'm currently working on two short stories and two novels featuring my hero, Phillip Gold. It's an interesting process. I created Mr. Gold about a decade ago while attending writing classes at a Canadian University. He's an homage to the great hard-boiled detectives of the past, like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but with the legal twist. Early in his career, Gold is finding the law thing isn't going so well but that he seems to have a knack for investigations. He solves a couple of cases and things start to snowball to the point where people seek him out as a PI rather than as a lawyer (see Sharon Kyle in The Gold Figure). Gold resists the shift but ends up having to accept the inevitable.

My plan is that, at some point, Gold will investigate and then represent in court, finally taking the first steps towards establishing his skills as a lawyer too. We'll see how that goes.

I made a major push last year to find an agent to represent me and Mr. Gold but to no avail. Although I got little feedback, I realised that the two first novels (Fleck and Glisters) don't start with enough punch. I need a flashier opening (since that's the only part most agents you approach will see) and then a more consistent tone. I'm getting contradictory feedback, however: many readers really like the sarcastic, witty, metaphor-filled style while others would like to see it go away entirely. We'll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to write a couple Gold short stories to see if I could get them published in a mystery magazine of some kind. It's always easier to sell your work once you've sold your work. Writing short stories is very different, however, from writing novels. The plots have to be more simple, the characters less fully developed and you have to keep the pace going throughout — no time for a reflective pause. Well, at least not much time. So it's a battle.

But I'm getting very helpful feedback from my old writing buddies, Ross and John, and my partner is amazingly good at spotting "inconsistencies" of both a minor and a major nature (like when a character sits down on a couch and gets up from a chair or when a character is shot in the side of the head and fall forward). I'll keep working. The first story is complete but in the revision stage while the second one is still being written.

Revision is something I really need to focus on. I tend toward verbosity and I often don't have the patience to set something aside, wait for a month or so, then go back and revise and edit it. That's what you have to do to end up with really polished writing. It's something I have to learn to do.

So now I've spent the last ten minutes reviewing and revising this blog. Can't start practicing too soon!

Tags: Phillip Gold, Writing, Mystery