Hesitant Scribe - Limping Along Novel Racer

Who am we? A good question.

I am the Hesitant Scribe because I am quite terrified of writing fiction badly, and that makes me, well, hesitant.

I am writing a novel called Out of Place for my PhD in Creative Writing. I thought I'd kill two tasks with one pen, but have since found it to be, as someone put it, Difficult Squared. I am 30,000 words in and limping along. If I were in a marathon I'd be the one near the back with a swollen ankle but still hoping to cross the finish line.

I'm trying to sum up what my novel is about, and can't, so I probably ought to fix that before I try to sell it, eh. I can tell you that it is set in Spain and is a mixture between a short story collection and a novel, i.e. a short story sequence, and that it should, if I get it right, make you laugh, and cry, and think about life, and get to experience what it's like to live in a foreign country. If you had to stick a genre label on it, you could call it a 'coming of age story' but it will probably end up being (I hope) literary fiction (which means I won't sell many copies unless I can get some academic to stick it on a lit reading list!).

Writing is my life. Always has been. Always will be. I hate it almost as much as I love it. There. I pass the baton on to the next Novel Racer... Who is you?!