Dogs, writing,a crisis of confidence and a book launch

It's been a while. I've been to Inverness - Moniack Mhor Writers' Centre - as I do every year, and when I say I'm in recovery from that, I'm not joking. It's a week of writerly stuff that goes on up there, but the hangover is intense and long. Last year, when I was up there, Nick Royle at Salt Publishing agreed to publish my next novel, 'Gamble'. This year, I'm writing my next one, and, having spent a week up there, realised I needed to change things. So, whilst I'm regarding that as a bit of a crisis, that realisation that a lot of changes need to be made, essentially, I know it's part of the process.

However,

the launch of 'Gamble' took place on 19th June, 2018 at Waterstones, Birmingham, and I was talking to Neil Campbell and Alison Moore there about their process of writing. Hard to pin down, was the conclusion I drew, about process, and those conversations made me think about what I'm actually doing with both this novel and this PhD. Overrunning the tale, I have acquired a dog: Rufus. A Border Collie. Which means I'm doing a lot more walking, and running, usually by the canal, and this has has helped me formulate a better plan for this novel, and my thinking is that I need to focus in more on the main character (whose name I have changed) and to make it a little more unsettling by changing what my agent would call the 'narrative drive' a little. I'm still working on that. But I've also been reading Dominique Hecq's article 'Creative Writing and Theory: Theory without Credentials' in Research Methods in Creative Writing, ed. Kroll & Harper (2013) in which she says that what is really interesting in creative writing research in both the process and the processor, so what is therefore interesting is how processors access process, so how they access the unconscious and how they manipulate that (p165). She states (obviously, really) that there is a difference between theory which produces creative work and theory which informs creative work. Of course, she's right. I'm still reading that paper, and will continue to because I think she might nail a main idea for me, and I know it's the critical part of this research of mine that I have to pin down. In the meantime, I took this picture today:

Which I thought looked remarkably like this:

And which made me realise I also need to find yet more research on walking.