sorry, Ma, that there well done gone run dry

photo by f_shields on creative commons licence for flickr

At the end of September, I finished a book a month early. I sent it to my agent, who sent it to my editor. I took two days to go house-hunting and do laundry. I then immediately launched into writing another book, a 30,000-word novella, which I wrote in three weeks. I revised and submitted that to my other editor. We also sold our house, made an offer on another, found a solicitor and a mortgage advisor, consulted our accountant and the taxman and booked surveys and checked insurance. By this time, my editor had come back with revisions for my big book. We agreed a deadline of two weeks would be about right.

I went on retreat with some wonderful writers, to talk writing. I came up with an idea for my next book. I went to lunch with other writers, to talk writing. I went to dinner with other writers, to talk writing. I came up with an idea for another book. I went to a book launch with other writers, to talk writing.

On Thursday I sat down to write a new scene for my book that I'm revising. It's not a long scene, but it's an important one: a flashback to a time in my characters' lives when the foundations were set for their current conflict. I wrote the scene in a couple of hours.

The insightful Emma Darwin mentioned at one of those talking-writing events how sometimes writers who have written a lot can come up with something that is technically competent, but not at all exciting. It was that. It ticked the boxes, but it was lifeless. I can't possibly put it in a book that I care about, not as a key scene.

As usual, I've been beating myself up about this. Have I lost the joy of this story? Do I not have enough imagination? Does the story just not carry the depth I want it to?

But it has occurred to me that it's none of these things. I can't write a good, fleshed-out, emotional, complex scene because I am just too tired. Not physically, but mentally. I've done too much creating and talking and thinking and writing in the past two months. And I've also bought and sold a house.

My well is dry.

Yesterday, I spent the whole day reading a book. Today and tomorrow, I intend to spend playing with my kid and watching films with my husband. Monday...well, Monday I'm not so sure. Maybe the well will be full enough by then to come up with something worthwhile. Maybe not. Maybe I'll have to move my deadline forward a week or two, but that will be okay.

I have enough experience now to know that that there well will full right up again, Ma. And what a wondrous and exciting thing to know that it will. Just give it some time.

Look out for Anna's post, coming soon. My grammatically-problematic title is in homage to Susanna's post on copy-edits, below.

Kudos and Copyedits

 © Yellowind | Dreamstime.com

Before I do anything else, I must brag for a moment, and let you all know that not one, but TWO of our very own Heroine Addicts have been shortlisted for 2012 Festival of Romance Awards:

Liz's THE CORNISH HOUSE is up for Best Romantic Read, and Christina's THE SILENT TOUCH OF SHADOWS is up for Best Historical Read! (Liz's agent and Christina's publisher are up for awards as well, as are several of our RNA friends, so lots to celebrate on this list).

Right then, on to the rest of the post.

You'll see, by the date, that I'm late again. I was supposed to have this up on Sunday, but in my defence I was working all weekend (and through most of Monday) reviewing copyedits of my book The Firebird, which I'd promised on my honour that my editor would have by end-of-day on Monday afternoon.

Copyedits very often are, to me, a Labour in the Herculean sense. I have a writing style that drives Grammarians to drink. I  like to boldly split infinitives. Write fragments. I don't think that prepositions are bad words to end a sentence with. And I can sometimes be stubborn, when it comes to commas.

© Tom Schmucker | Dreamstime.com

One of my early copyeditors, some years ago, hated my commas so much she took most of mine out and put her own ones in, where she thought they should go. In one memorable sentence describing a courtyard my characters had just come in to, I'd written: "The air was still, here." Meaning it was not moving. She took out that comma, too, leaving a sentence that still makes me smile (though it doubtless came as a relief to the characters to learn the air hadn't gone someplace else...)

The thing is, we have voices, as writers. And writing is made up of rhythms and structures and cadence and emphasis, things that won't always be bound by the strict rules of grammar. So the copyediting process, for me, usually begins with some poor copyeditor probably hitting the whisky and burning the midnight oil somewhere while trying to "fix" all my errors, and ends with me hitting my own whisky bottle and muttering into the night while I "fix" them all back. 

Well, all right, to be fair, I "fix" most of them back. I've been known to make actual errors, and good copyeditors find them and save me embarrassment, for which I'm grateful. And most copyeditors, after they've worked on a few books by one author, do start to "hear" the voice, and let it be. 

But I do wish they'd lay off my commas.

Do come back tomorrow, to read Julie's (always grammatical) post. 

Procrastinator… Thy Name is Brigid

Who you find when you Google "Procrastinator" (photo - Liz Fenwick)

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. I have signed up. I know what I’m doing and I’ve had a whole day to do my almost 2000 words. So it is amazing how many other things I have found to do instead. I will take you through my day and you can marvel at my ability to NOT NaNoWriMo. I have a funny feeling this could be what the whole of November could be like.

I woke up and checked Twitter as is my habit. Who knows what wonderful tweets could have found themselves on my timeline overnight? I mean there could be a cute otter photo that is just begging to be retweeted or maybe Disney has brought LucasFilms and Twitter is melting down about it… (such an unlikely scenario but you have to check JUST IN CASE!).

I then leapt out of bed ready to face this first day of NaNoWriMo, put on my running gear and went out into the rain and ran 2 miles round St James Park. Glowing I returned and threw myself wholeheartedly into a Jillian Michaels DVD… well you have to do strength and abs with the cardio! Don’t you know anything?

After refuelling and my daily ablutions I head to the cinema for a bit of NaNoWriMo research and inspiration. Skyfall! What better way to fire the creative juices than looking at a half naked Daniel Craig (the sacrifices I make). Who knew that the adverts before hand went on so long? So by the time I made it home it was time for a late lunch and a bit of prep for a work related phone call. Gotta earn the money sometime.

Then I realised that I needed to register at the gym. My sister has given me a six week gym pass for my birthday and she activated it yesterday so I didn’t want to waste it! Half an hour in the pool (Mr Bond in the pool in Shanghai was my inspiration) and I’m feeling smug and a tad tired.

As I walked home the sun was setting and I realised that I had yet to actually sit down and NaNoWriMo…

So now here I am on my sofa, writing a blogpost and googling the best abs exercises to do in the pool. Obviously having set myself a writing goal I am trying to do anything to avoid itt, might even end up fit instead. Maybe if I set the goal to run a marathon I might write a book. Of course I would then run said marathon collapsing somewhere around mile 12 and having to be removed from the course.

I am of course counting this blogpost towards today’s word count (hey it is writing and vaguely creative). Only another thousand words before bedtime. But maybe I can fit in a bike ride before that.

I think November is going to be a long month.

Come back on Sunday to find out how Susanna is getting on...

*edit* I managed 1731 in the end... 

NaNoWriMo

That mad time of year is almost upon us...no, not Christmas but National Novel Writing Month. It's the time of year that makes agents fear for their slush pile in December. It's that time of year when many people who aspire to write - try it for the first time. It's the time of year that I love. It comes at the worst possible month for me - always. November never fails to be one of my busiest months...personally and as a writer but I long for NaNo every year....

Why? It means freedom. It means stretching the writing muscle, writing for the sheer joy of it. Writing without thought to publication. It is the one time of year I can truly turn the internal editor off and write what ever comes into my mind. I write for me.

The first of November begins a month of just writing...bliss. It is even more appealing now that I've been published. The weight of expectation is upon me, but not for NaNo. No one has to see what is written - ever. If on day one I want to write a sci fi gothic tale of medieval chivalry...then I can and if on the second it becomes a dark urban fantasy that's good...on third it may move from first person present tense and on fourth to omniscient narrator...

The joy is... it doesn't matter...it's time to experiment and push the boundaries. Each day is nothing more than a creative writing assignment and it is so good for the writing soul. Two years ago I wasn't going to do NaNo but I woke on the first of November and began only with a title and not a clue of where I was going....bliss. The Summer of Black Hare was created and I wrote a long piece of fiction for the first time in first person...before I had been to afraid, to afraid of failure, but with Nano the only failure is not writing and that is a gift.

NaNo gives you permission to write what ever comes into your head...even if that is I want chocolate now....it's permission to experiment, it's permission to be total crap, to try all the techniques you have read about but were afraid to ruin the work in progress. NaNo means give it a go...

What NaNo doesn't mean is that you have a perfect work ready for the world - you won't. At best you will have a very dirty draft and worst you will have 50,000 words of drivel....but you will have used your writing muscle in a different way and have grown as a writer because of it. You will be stronger when you write your next proper book....

Are you doing NaNo this year? Even though I am doing edits on A Cornish Affair I'm hoping to wake on 1/11/12 and begin something fun but I just don't know what yet!

Good Bad Guys

(Photo from www.imdb.com)

I’ve just been catching up on some of the vampire stories that have been made into TV series – True Blood and The Vampire Diaries – and I’m also eagerly awaiting the final instalment of the Twilight films.

Something struck me about all these though – the fact that I don’t like any of the heroes!  I much prefer the other guy (in the case of Twilight) and the bad guys in the other stories.  I have to admit I thoroughly disliked Edward Cullen with his controlling ways and strange supposedly protective measures when it came to his girlfriend; Jacob Black is so much more passionate (and yes, alive!).  I find Bill Compton deadly dull (sorry, bad pun), while Erik Northman, the Viking vampire, is mischievous and fun in comparison.  And I can’t for the life of me like Stefan Salvatore.  His brother Damon may be evil, but he’s never boring!

Erik Northman (Wikipedia photo)

So is it just me, or does this seem wrong somehow?  Surely in a story we should be rooting for the good guy, the one who is trying to do the right thing (and in this case, abstaining from drinking human blood in order not to hurt anyone)?  Of course we all love a really well written “bad boy” story, but those normally end with him being reformed by the heroine and turned into the good guy at the end.  Or the reader is shown from the beginning that he’s just hiding his true colours behind a façade and needs to fall in love in order to be saved.  But that’s not the case with these vampire stories as far as I can see.

It could of course have something to do with the fact that I personally find the actors portraying the bad guys more attractive, but I read the books first and felt the same way.

Jacob black (Wikipedia photo)

I don’t really have an answer here, I guess I’m just kind of thinking out loud.  But I’d love to hear everyone else’s take on this – discuss please?

And please come back on Sunday to hear from Liz

critiques

image by parylo00

This evening, we had a committee meeting of my writers' group to decide the programme for the coming year. This is a fantastic local group that I belong to (I am Vice Chair, in charge of Vice)—we meet twice a month. One meeting is usually a workshop or a speaker, and the other is usually a manuscript critique evening, where we look at manuscripts up to about 1500 words long.

It's a fairly large group; there are thirty members, of which twenty-two or so usually come to meetings, where we can usually get through ten to a dozen manuscripts. Obviously, everyone has a different writing style, and a different critiquing style too. With twenty-odd people commenting on every manuscript, the depth and content of critiquing is going to vary a lot. Some people will love an aspect that other people will hate. Some will focus on technical craft, and some will focus on how it made them feel as a reader.

While I've always had good and useful critiques from this group, at times I've had surprising responses, too. I'll never forget the woman who harangued me for using Americanisms (I am American, and was writing American characters for an American publisher). I won't forget the time I wrote (badly) about a train crash and one of the members sent me several online resources giving me facts and figures that I needed to make my scene more accurate. One time I wrote an obscene word in my work, and a member (now long departed) told me that she could not read any further because it was the word that her ex-husband used to call her.

Tonight, we discussed the art of critiquing. Since several members have newly joined, we thought about maybe creating a resource for them to learn how to critique. But the problem is, it's very difficult to teach someone how to critique, and if you do, you run the risk of critiques becoming formulaic. We all agreed that a breadth of response could be valuable. We also all agreed that as a rule, while we listened carefully to all the critiques, we didn't always follow the advice we were given. That we had to follow our own vision in the end.

We decided to try to compile a document with our thoughts about critiquing, and how to respond to critiques, to put up on our website as an aid, or even just a way of starting a good discussion.

What's your opinion? What works, and what doesn't, in critiquing? And how do you choose to respond when you receive a critique?

Flirting

Long eyelashes needed for flirting?

Someone flirted with me the other day.  That might not sound like an earth-shattering event, but for an old married woman like me, it’s pretty rare.  In fact, I’ve almost forgotten how to do it and felt unsure how to respond!

I used to love flirting.  That tiny frisson that runs through you when you notice that someone has noticed you.  The frequent checking to see if they’re still checking you out.  Then eye contact, perhaps an exchange of knowing looks or shared amusement at some joke.  Finally, chatting, joking, talking in double entendres – saying one thing while your eyes are telling him something else.  All very exciting and great fun, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere.  (Although even better if it does, obviously!)

Yet, when you get married, you’re not supposed to do that sort of thing any more, so you stop (at least with other people).

But although I may have forgotten how to do it in real life, as a novelist, I love having my characters flirting.  In fact, it’s absolutely essential!  Because the best thing about a romantic novel (IMO) is the “will-they-won’t-they” part, where you know they’re probably going to get together in the end, but they have a lot of verbal sparring and flirting to do first.

I love the kind of hero who dares to gently tease the heroine, making her like him against her better judgement.  A hero who has a sense of humour is always good, and if he can use it for flirting, so much the better.  Some of Georgette Heyer’s heroes were superb at that, making the heroines flustered but excited.  Absolutely perfect!

I also like the kind of novel where the hero and heroine start off by being annoyed with something the other did.  This isn’t strictly flirting, but nonetheless it has the same effect.  As Def Leppard say in their song, “when love and hate collide”, that’s when the sparks fly.  And that’s when you know these two characters were actually made for each other, even if they can’t see it themselves.

When did you last enjoy a flirt?  If it was in the pages of a book, please let me know the title so I can buy it!