Daniel Kemp

I can’t speak for other people, but whenever I get to the end of a novel to type those two innocuous words —The End—I’m overcome with conflicting emotions.
The first to strike at me is elation—wow! If for no other reason I should be proud of myself for creating something original. The next feeling is. I think, —I’ve got to read it;—yet again. This time with my eye on every last detail.

My publisher has an editor, as well as a proofreader, but it’s my work and I want to do most, if not all the editing myself. Plus, I don’t want the proofreaders to know what an imbecile I am when it comes to English grammar, now do I? Mind you, they might already know.

Anyway, let’s get to the point. I wrote the two words —The End—yesterday afternoon in a novel I have been trying to write since late in 2019. I can’t be more explicit than that, as I didn’t keep a diary because I did not think there was a need, nor would it take this amount of time.

I’ve had a variety of health issues that I shall not bother you with other than saying I had my first operation in January 2020, with writing pushed firmly away to wait on a Word Document inside this computer. The novel, my only work, was on hold for over a year until my health improved and I thought I was up to adding something to it.

I then poured another cup of coffee all over the keyboard. My second computer in my investigations into discovering if Apples like Kenco coffee.

After several hours spent on phone calls to Apple’s brilliant helpline (I couldn’t go to the shop. I even had to get a neighbour to go there to buy it for me, along with the correct download cable) I was successful in transferring the files from the old one to the new computer.

According to my Apple Expert Helper, my accident couldn’t have happened at a worse time in the whole of computer history. There had been one huge upgrade in the same week that meant some of the stuff on my ruined machine would not transfer—-Help, I screamed at the download downloading for hours without telling me what was happening.

Fortunately, the material that would not transfer was not important and I still had the fledgling untitled novel. That book was intended to be the third one in The Heirs and Descendant series, where The Desolate Garden and Percy Crow are Book One and Book Two, but as soon as I finished reading through it from the beginning, I had to have some other medical complaint rectified which meant any attempt at writing the story was abandoned.

From the backend of last year until now, apart from one operation on my right hand, (the left hand should be operated on later this month) I’ve had a medically clear time. Add that time to an increased disability in being able to walk, and it gave me plenty of opportunities to write.

During my relatively inactive time, the story started to build into what became my life, giving me more broad windows with fictional views. Not only did I have the beautiful garden I look out on every day to inspire me I now had the pictures my characters were looking at, as well as the sounds their ears were listening to and, in certain circumstances, the perfumes that filled the surrounding air. In all, I had several other lives I had to control. Lives where I could decide when death knocked loudly on the door to the room where they were, but I also controlled the way death arrived, and how it was administered.

This story just would not stop my fingers from typing it, yes, I deleted, I retyped, I moved paragraphs, I changed characters’ names. But to actually stop, no! Not until yesterday, after some 632 pages and 208,000 words.

I’m going to TRY to split this epic into two, making it books three and four in the series I mentioned, in order to make this series the same as my other series of four books, but I’m not sure if I can manage that. I’ll see. For now, I shall listen to the chapters of The Widow’s Son I’ve yet to hear from the narrator who’s on chapter twenty-six and I’m only on chapter eighteen.

I might be able to get outside in the garden soon and then, who knows, I might find my walking legs!

Daniel Kemp
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