Getting the first (writing) lap of Ireland in the bag

First I ran around Ireland, then I wrote about running around Ireland. Now I have to go again; editing my writing about running around Ireland

All smiles on the Ha’Penny Bridge after the first lap.

I touched the Ha’Penny Bridge in Dublin again last night. In my writing. I completed the loop, writing about that moment I came running down alongside the Liffy with a posse of runners singing Cockles and Mussels. It’s only a very rough first draft, which is about 25,000 words too long, but it felt almost as satisfying to reach the end in the story as it did in real life. Though the post-run Guinness tasted better in real life.

So 115,000 words written, splurged out across the white spaces of Scrivener, and now the third lap begins, the editing process. I’ll do two more laps before I hand it to my editor at Faber, and he’ll do a lap, before I then do one final lap, and then hand it over to the copy editor, and then the proof reader, both to take a lap each. So there’s a long way still to go.

But the laps do get easier, starting with the actual physical running lap, in which, boy oh boy, looking back, I was really hanging on at the end, wracked with illness, pummelled by bad weather, our van falling apart. Somehow we made it, limping over the line.