Which way is up?

While drinking hot chocolate on this icy cold winter's night,  I pondered my next literary move. It was, as the modern idiom goes, a no-brainer: I have to write what appeals to me most. At each time.
It's a funny thing, but to have got this far, and to have come up with what I have, is hugely down to all of the influences from my early life right up until now. In short: my own instinct as to what I would have liked to read and write, had I been looking in any bookstore. This had to be something I hadn't read before, nor seen/viewed in a movie. And I've read a million books and movies...  I needed to trust whatever it was that brought me to this point.
So, consider this: I walked the streets of Shields and Newcastle, by day and night, in all kinds of weather standing in such places that appealed to my sense of 'witness', imagining what may have happened in these places. Afterwards, I discovered that Charles Dickens did the same. Bits of Dickensian life are dotted about my story. I feel like I'm walking the same path as the great man. Of course, his reputation and history is rather up there, while mine is somewhat 'down there'.
Unless I get it right, I'll always be on that lower level! Gotta dig deep...
I'm off from the 27th for eight days, during which time I'll have written stuff that will take me further down the road to completion. It's a long job and no amount of trying to speed things up is going to help. Once I've written most of the book, I'll return to the beginning and polish the good bits, eject the poor bits, and ensure the beginning reads more as I intended it to, not how it ended up. But nothing is ever as bad as it seems, and the slow burner of a beginning can, with a few tweaks, begin to rev along at a faster pace. It's fun, serious fun, but enjoyable, too. Got to keep on!
The plot Dickens - erm, thickens... ;-)

And so, into 2013...

As I've said, ad nauseum perhaps, I will finish writing this first book this year. Looking at how things have gone, and discounting the length of time it has taken to get this far - I had barely an idea when I started - I've got to be pleased with what I've done. But now, we are about to find out if I'm any kind of writer: I've got to complete the job.
I will resist my initial impulse to dwell more at the beginning - or, at least, the step I erroneously didn't take after the first three chapters. The chapters I have done after these three are destined to come later. They are vital to the knowledge of the hero (I still refuse to use the term 'protagonist' - Snow White was a protagonist, would you believe - it sounds like someone wearing a cape and mask, carrying a dagger to stab someone in the back! I've met a few in 2012, but let's not go there any more. Can't believe a writer thought up that term for a leading man or woman.)
I'm going to pick up chapters already listed and planned and try to put as much into them as possible. Hopefully, the knowledge and experience doing that will assist in the writing of a beginning that must match up. The better the rest of the story is, the better I must make the beginning. I know where the beginning now goes, just I want more information in order to write it out properly.
2013 will see me out and about more. Not too greatly, as writing will never allow me to be as I once was. But I can't carry on as I did during 2012. I feel like I changed in 2012. Time will show what it all meant.
To all my readers of this blog, I hope you have a 2013 to remember. Way into the future, if you remember reading all this, it might mean we got to where we intended to go... x