Time to Clean out the Pantry

When we renovated our old home, I wanted a walk in pantry for storage. It’s great though seems to harbour fruit flies and pantry moths I constantly battle with. My daughter also goes through my fridge and pantry every now and then and throws out of date food out when she cooks at our house (I don’t think her husband is game to eat anything I cook) - and whilst I feel I give our pantry and home a spring clean each year, today I decided to give the pantry a thorough clean. The result? 90% of pantry foods are now in the food scraps bin thanks to the fact that when I went through each container, most of it was well and truly past its used by date.

So why am writing about my pantry cleanout?

Well, I have done a lot of spring cleaning lately - (in Australia's Autumn) including my writing. I have been working on a novel now for some three years and seemed to get stuck after receiving feedback from my editor. I was more than frustrated with what I had written and it's been the hardest novel for me to write.

I love crime mystery, though seemed to missing a key ingredient - Point of View. My 'Head swapping' wasn't clear to me until the editor pointed it out and once I re-read my book (for the fiftieth time) it became clear. This made me realise that perhaps it was time to go back to some learning.

So I enrolled in a crime writer's course by the Australian Writers Centre. It's led by a great crime writer, L.A Larkin and even just after the first lesson, realised that whilst I had the key ingredients in my novel, it needed to be re-written.

I've been reading Phillipa Nefri Clarke's latest crime novel and she does this so well. Creating mystery from the first chapter and really building the profile of her characters. This is what my novel needed.

And so back to cleaning out my writing - starting again can be frustrating- and time consuming, however I know that in the end, my readers will thank me for it with a better novel.