I continue to limp deeper into the retype* of ?Was It A Rat I Saw?, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. I haven’t read the book in years and retyping also means rereading, which holds surprises for me:

• I’m always my harshest critic but I like ?Rat? although I would do everything differently now.  I have resisted the urge to rewrite – that way lies madness.
• The real brain science still shocks, chills, excites me.
• I don’t remember much of my own book and the retyping gets derailed when I read ahead to see what happens next.
• I couldn’t write this book today. I am not the same person. This book captures a slice of my life, perspective, attitudes at a particular moment that is now long gone.

I had a plan to publish each of the four sections of ?Rat?, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August. There are several chapters in each section. This week, I published one chapter. Not one section. One chapter.

I call it a sign of psychological health that I no longer calculate how behind I am.

I believe the retype should now pick up speed. First, I have adapted to being back at my day job and getting All Else done in scattered shards of time. When I started the re-type, I was home lounging around after hip replacement surgery, with nothing but time. Second, I have just finished a first draft (yahoo!) of my latest novel, the fantasy detective series opener Frames. That is written in a different style than ?Rat? and I backed off from retyping when I realized it was influencing the style of the new book.

Good excuses for the slowdown, eh wot? No doubt next week I will have occasion to manufacture yet others.

*?Was It A Rat I Saw? was previously published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Now I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.

Here are some ?Rat? Reviews on Goodreads.