So I have gone through the first seven chapters of Slipwater – tidied it up, trimmed the fat, tried to squeeze as much story out of my words as I can – and although writing a novel is somewhat like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge (in that once you reach the end you head back to the other end and start again) it’s getting to the point where I’m really happy with the story on a sentence by sentence level.

The problem (if there is a problem) is… distance.

Slipwater is the town central to the plot of the novel, but I have played a little fast and loose with its distance from other locations in the story. Ideally it needs to be further away, but then that interferes with how long it takes to get there, which also means my day/night cycle is turned on its head, which in turn doesn’t really work for the characters involved in the travelling…

You get my drift.

I appreciate all of this is without context and therefore completely meaningless, but the more of the onion that I peel away the more apparent it becomes that I will need to fix this before I can send the novel out for publication.

I could probably get away with it – most readers would likely not even notice – but I’ve been sitting with it for a long time now and these logic issues scream at me from the virtual page. If I’m going to give myself the best shot at success… I need to ensure that what I send out is the best it can be.