The innocuous death of irving crabbe

Saturday 6 April 2013

Greetings, dear reader.

This is a short post to formally announce that I, L Phillip Lucas, have officially commenced writing my first piece of long fiction, a novella titled 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'.

The makeshift cover I have mocked up for myself, using some image stolen off the internet somewhere years ago.

With a grand total of 2,878 very raw words so far, it's not much, but it is a start. (At the risk of exposing my feeble mathematical skill to the scorn and ridicule it deserves, I believe this equates to 5.756% of the wordcount of the finished project, which actually sounds much more impressive). The plan is to get that number to six thousand by Monday.

It's not without a sense of guilt that I admit that, since studying abroad at the University of East Anglia for the first half of 2011, I have neglected fiction. First I was distracted by finishing my studies in literature and linguistics. Then work got in the way. But finally I applied for and have been accepted into a Master of Creative Arts by Research at the University of Wollongong under the supervision of the magnificent Dr Merlinda Bobis, and I can't convey how much I'm enjoying (after only one semester away from uni) escaping the hideous, lucrative corporate world of business English and offices and technical editing, and returning to the wonderful world of research, reading and writing. 

And I actually believe the hiatus has done me good. I have a much clearer vision now of how to write than I did when I finished the Creative Writing portion of my degree. Those few extra years to think, work, mature, read, and write in other forms have left me a slightly different person, I believe, and a slightly better writer (though still, I constantly fear, not better enough).

I plan to blog often about the process along the way, but I don't want it to get in the way of actually writing, and I don't want to be blogging utter rubbish, so not too frequently. But please, stay tuned. Get involved. Tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading.

LPL