I wrote the final chapter last night and now can not wait to get started on the edits. To celebrate, I have posted a new extract here: here.

Now begins the long editing process, shaping, deleting, adding and cajoling the words into a readable, coherent and – hopefully interesting – second draft.

Like the other extracts, this is a first draft.

the american

                The photo taken in front of the Vegas wedding chapel was a rebellion against her “stiff-necked Republican parents”. The marriage lasted three weeks, ending when she realised her Biker Dude had more love for his Harley than he would ever have for her.

                The nude paintings hanging above her sofa were by her second husband, “a gorgeous but obsessive Parisian” who left her for a new muse when she was 23. She had a weakness for certain men and having recognised this after the collapse of a three year long affair with a married Muslim during her time in Cairo, now, at the age of 32, she had sworn off relationships for life.

                ‘You’re not looking for one are you?’ she said, as we lay on damp sheets, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing patterns in the freckles on her arm.

                ‘I don’t think I’ve ever looked for one,’ I said.

                ‘Why not?’

                I shrugged and her head rose with my chest. ‘Just ‘cos.’

                ‘Just ‘cos?’

                ‘Yeah. Just ‘cos’

                ‘Is that some kind of English phrase?’

                ‘Yes.’

                ‘Well, okay. Anyway, I’m too old for you.’

                ‘I’m hardly a child.’

                ‘Six years is a long time. Especially when you answer perfectly reasonable questions with “just ‘cos”.’

                The smell of onions and cumin wafted in through the vent in the wall. Through the open balcony door – a rectangle of hazy blue sky – the rising sun brought with it the sounds of fishermen returning with fresh catches of hammour and traders opening their shutters for the morning bartering. A gull glided into the middle of the rectangle and turned 90 degrees, getting smaller and smaller as it flew away over the narrow alleys and the creek, over the muddled roads of the older shopping district – outdated just 15 years after opening – and out towards the newer parts of Dubai: the construction sites and offshore islands, the golf courses and freezones, the skyscrapers and villa compounds where thousands of other expats were waking next to strangers with sore heads and dry mouths.

                Her hand moved to my groin.

                ‘Give it another five minutes,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while.’

                ‘How long’s a while?’

                I ignored her question and her hand dropped on to the bed.

                ‘So what’s your weakness? What’s your type?’ she said.

                ‘I don’t think I have one.’

                ‘Everyone’s got one.’

                Maria. In a bedroom somewhere else in the city, her boyfriend asleep next to her. Or on top of her.

                ‘I think it’s been long enough,’ I said.

                Grace moved her head downwards from my chest, my hand tangling her hair.

                ‘Let’s see.’

Whilst I know how the book finishes, there are still a few final miles to overcome to get there and still some decisions I have to make. And behind me lie 114,000 unedited words. I actually can’t wait to take those words and sculpt them into something vaguely readable but am trying to stay disciplined and get to the end point before the analysis (and rewrites) begin.

Just need to get me some lucozade and a new pair of trainers.

It is quite a challenge to keep telling myself not to give the main character the benefit of hindsight – to make sure he doesn’t have the knowledge that I have now. That is one of the challenges of writing in the first person – to keep asking yourself as a writer “what does my character know?”

a long one – 6300 words so it’s going to have to be edited down but that can wait. For not, I can put it to one side and move on to the next.

I think it works well – I use a non-linear narrative to tell the story of a drunken night which is revealed to Johnny as he lies in bed hungover the next morning, and memories come flashing in. The Dread hits him as he realises his drunken mouth has said some things it shouldn’t have.

Now on to the next chapter and I am moving into 2008, the year when Dubai started to unravel!

I’m now on another tough chapter – New Years Eve 2007 – where Johnny’s two worlds collide when friends from England come to visit him. It’s a struggle to be dealing with a large number of characters in one scene but I am trying different ways of telling the story of the scene and am determined that by the end of tomorrow I will have done it.

It’s time to ramp things up and do two chapters a week if I am to meet my target of finishing the first draft by the end of August.

The potholes and perils of falling into clichés and generalisations when writing about ‘The City Built on Sand’

Walking through the reception of the single story office in which I had worked for the past seven months, my eyes were concentrating on the phone in my hand so I didn’t notice the assortment of colleagues, gathered in small groups, chattering in excited whispers. It was only when I got to my destination – the door to the men’s washroom – that I looked up from the phone and straight into the chest of an exceptionally tall half-man/half-gorilla, wearing a large badge that said ‘SECURITY’ and a grimace that said ‘I’d like to crush you but I am currently busy”. But armed with a lack of respect for figures that assume some form of authority due to the badge on their jacket or the whistle in their mouth, I politely asked him to move, as I needed to get to the toilet. Ape Man looked down at me from on high and slowly shook his head. Angered by his self-imposed jurisdiction, I raised my voice: “Sorry mate, this is my office and I need to go to the toilet”. The hulking simian just stared straight over my head, not granting my statement with even a flicker of his eyes. From behind me, one of my colleagues loudly whispered. “Charlie. You can’t go in. Michael Jackson’s in there”.

The fact that the King of Pop was urinating in the washrooms of my workplace would have seemed absolutely unbelievable in my previous employment. But this was not an office in Birmingham: these were the corridors of one of the largest property developers in the world, at the epicentre of the building boom in arguably the most bizarre, ostentatious and mind-blowing city on the planet at the time: Dubai.

These three adjectives: bizarre; ostentatious; mind-blowing, were words that visitors used but that those of us who worked there rarely did. It was November 2005 and I had only been living in Dubai for seven months, but already the absurdities had become normalities. Michael Jackson taking a piss in the toilet? Not surprising. Writing a speech for one of the most important statesmen in the country? All part of the day’s work. Organising a tour for The King of the Zulus? Oh, do I really have to? Alright I am exaggerating (not in terms of the events but in terms of the reactions)– of course these things were exciting and stimulating but they did become unsurprising. To use a cliché, those of us who lived and worked there quickly learnt to expect the unexpected, and as time went on, these sorts of things just caused the small raise of the eyebrow.

So instead I am spending the time looking back at all the important things which as a first time writer you kind of ignore when you hurtle into the typing – motivation, conflict, purpose of antagonists etc. I am hoping that this will inspire me for the next chapter which I think I am finding a challenge because it is a collision of Johnny’s two worlds when his friends from London come to Dubai for New Year’s Eve. I need to intimately know these various characters and the point of them to be able to write this chapter. I hope that taking this time out to ensure I know Johnny’s ‘arc’ and his motivations and reasons for motivations  will help and I will soon be powering on again.

‘The American’ (which at some point I will post on the website) shows the forming of a relationship between two characters over the course of four separate events: the immediate moments after the first time they have sex; a morning meet in a cafe; an afternoon on a beach; and a date in a hotel beach restaurant, and uses this structure to show the differing relationship and sexual histories of the two character.

Of course a few hours after sending it in I received some feedback from a fellow student in an Advanced Creative Writing course I have been taking who gave one fantastic piece of advice which would have been an improvement had I not already sent off the entry. As the story uses a lot of flashbacks, she suggested that I use the past tense for the sections in the present day (ie the forming of the relationship) and the present tense for the flashbacks. I wish I wish I wish I had got that email before sending the story off. However, if is great advice to apply across This Desert Life which does contain a lot of flashbacks.

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