Hannah J Boddy

I am vividly aware that all writers complain about the editing stage of their works, and I used to think that this was purely melodrama.

Yeah.

I do not think this anymore. I get the complaints so much more than I ever thought I could. It is fun! In a bizarre, masochistic, sadistic, cruel kind of way, I am enjoying ripping this apart and rewriting the whole thing. I’ve had to completely change the perspective it’s written in — abandoning my love of the third person in order to voice the whole thing through the ‘mentor’ figure of Rowan.

Rowan, who has grown from being vaguely grouchy and vaguely powerful to a figure with an enormous amount of guilt fuelling her through her every action. I had given her the most traumatic backstory of the lot, and yet I now find myself feeling like her trauma is secondary to the weight of her own self-loathing. To the extent that in my plan, I have listed ‘Rowan’s self-loathing’ as a separate character…