Colour-code your characters. It’ll save a lot of confusion.

The Nebraska Sandhills, where most  of the new novel takes place

‘What is writing a novel like? The beginning: a ride through a spring wood. The middle: the Gobi Desert. The end: going down the Cresta run.’

That Edith Wharton knew a thing or two, didn’t she?

I surprised myself by starting a novel in Scotland. I got 20,000 words down in quite a hurry. And I fooled myself into thinking it really was going to be that easy. Twenty thousand a month, I calculated, meant 60,000 by midsummer. Another month for straightening out the bends, and bingo. Should be done by about August.

Yes. I know. And thank you to that part of my brain which always – always – wants to reduce everything to simple mathematics. Will you please shut up?

The beginning was such an easy ride. I had a character on a long journey, by car. Portland, Oregon to western Nebraska, in a winter storm. He’s eighty years old, so he can think about all kinds of past experiences as he ticks off the miles along Interstate 80. He can spin yarns, reminisce, express opinions. All good entertaining stuff. When he arrives in the Panhandle, he puts up in a hotel, and thinks about the ordeal ahead of him: a visit to the ranch where he grew up sixty years ago, and to the nursing home where his sister has had a stroke. I skipped through that lot. It was a piece of cake. Not so much a ride through a spring wood as a barefoot run across warm sands towards a tropical sea.

And then. Then I started to ponder how to take it forward. How to account for my man’s life over the past six decades. How to explain his refusal ever to return home over the same period. What exactly was the unspeakable act by his father that drove him away? Why didn’t he even come back for the old man’s funeral? And so on.

Over the past six weeks I have written endless notes to myself. I have compiled  timelines for several major characters, both living and dead. I have stared out of the window even more than usual. I have sweated over a huge wall-chart where all my characters’ lives are laid out in parallel. (It’s a pity the wallpaper I used didn’t let the post-it notes adhere to it, meaning that half of them are now on the floor. How I wished I’d stuck to my plan and colour-coded them.)

And then the problem of how to relay all the information I have about the guy’s father (dead these thirty years), his grandfather, who conked out in 1953 when my protagonist was thirteen. Throw in a character we have yet to meet who may be my man’s real father and will most likely have to be murdered before I’ve finished – or at the very least ‘disposed of’. And weave in a role for the author Mari Sandoz, who was courted by pop for twenty years until she shook him off.… These things can tax a fellow’s brain.

However. I have somehow squeezed out a further 12,000 words and am ready to set out across the Gobi (see Wharton, above).

Still crossing sand, and no whiff of the sea. Yet.

Nebraska Tour Up and Running

The Nebraska Book Tour is up and running. I have completed my first two engagements and can report that they went pretty well. Why exactly I am sitting here in an adobe house in Taos, New Mexico, watching buzzards, takes some explaining.

One of the buzzards circling the house where I'm staying

The fact is, my next SIX engagements all come in a rush around the middle of the month - so, like it or not, I found myself looking at a nine-day break. I have friends in Taos, also in  Albuquerque. And a portion of my heart has resided here since my year at the University of New Mexico in 1986-87. Ask anyone who has spent any substantial period of time in The Land of Enchantment. Ask D H Lawrence. Ask Georgia O'Keeffe. Ask Mabel Dodge Luhan.

The talks in Chadron went well, I believe. It's always hard to tell. But I made people laugh now and then, and they stayed to ask questions and buy books. The organisers of the Sandoz Society Conference were very pleased with the turn-out - the first time they have added a Saturday session. The place genuinely was packed - and how wonderful it was to see a lot of familiar and friendly faces.

I was, of course, exhausted after my journey, more so after delivering the talks - even though the library session was a fairly simple account of my writing career and the long path that led to my writing and publishing Cody, The Medicine Man and Me. Performing can be very demanding. It ceertainly is for me. However, I had a schedule, and decided to drive down to New Mexico on Sunday. I miscalculated.

What I expected to be a six-hour journey (Chadron to Raton, just across the border from Colorado) took me ten. Worse, I found that I didn't have a Colorado highway map with me, just a list of the significant juncrtions I'd copied down the night before. The last three hours or so it was dark and I managed to get lost in the dreary flatlands approaching Hoehne and La Junta.

When I finally hit Raton, my head pounding, it took me half an hour to locate Melody Lane Motel. Up and down the main drag, in an out of gas stations seeking advice... and in the end I called in at the Budget Host, simply because it seemed to be roughly where Melody Lane ought to be. Surely they would be able toput me right. 'Oh yes,' said the lady at the desk, 'Melody Lane. Old name! We changed it.' (To add a final twist, as I hauled my case into the room - it was an exceptionally nice room - and started to unpack a few things, out popped my Colorado highway map.

Tomorrow, lunch with a flute-maker. Wednesday, Albuquerque.