Today I finally stopped messing around (clearing my desk, catching up on household chores, dealing with emails, fetching logs, photographing sunsets), and got out the file of my novel Border Line, worked over the first chapters and made another submission. I nearly failed to jump the last fence as I feel the title needs changing after the shift I made in my last major revision. Then I decided I was rearranging the deck chairs, and pressed the Send button. The title needs to be right, but if the text is good enough it is unlikely to be the rejecting factor.

Looking for a new title took me on a very pleasurable, though off piste, journey through my poetry shelves as I followed the lead from Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, through Graves and Donne and back to Rehearsal (by Eleanor Green), which had been one of the original stimuli for the novel. I still have not found the title, but here are the first four lines of Eleanor’s poem and the reason why actor’s exercises became central to the story of Border Line.

Rehearsal

for an exercise
I look at his hands
to improve our relationship
onstage?