The Happy Dancer

Many years ago I went to the Philippines in the aftermath of a maritime disaster that was even worse than the sinking of the Titanic; and in 1998 it inspired me to write a short story, “Juanita”, which was the first I ever published. A year later I went back to Manila and Cebu, to research what I had decided was to be my next novel.

Then life intervened. I got very ill, which provided a useful idea for a twist in the plot; and when I recovered and wrote the opening chapter, it won a couple of competitions (see “Queen of the Islands” in the drop-down menu). Yet as a famous author once said, every book has a beginning, a muddle and an end. I wrote a great beginning, a good end… and a ghastly muddle in the middle.

All authors have a drawer full of rejection slips; and the ones I collected for “The Happy Dancer” eventually convinced me of what I already knew in my heart: the book needed a total overhaul that I wasn’t in the right state to undertake. So it went into the drawer and stayed there for fifteen years. Now, with sufficient distance, I can see where the focus should have been all along: and it involves changing the main protagonist from the first-person narrator who opens the story, to a character I had foolishly killed off in chapter four. One of these days, I may even get around to writing her back in…