Into the Unknown

Well, this is weird.

For over a year, my life has gone a little like this:  go to work, come home, work on novel.  Days off?  Work on novel.  Holidays?  Hide laptop and work on novel.  And so on, and so on…and now?

It’s finally finished…well, finished enough that I even I can see that more fiddling is going to invoke the law of diminishing returns, so it’s finally gone to seek its fortune.  So it’s time to relax, right?  Time to make my days off actual days off, indulge in a bit of lurking without intent, and reacquaint myself with the mysteries of the ironing pile (shudder).

Only it doesn’t feel right.  Part of it’s down to the loss of control; the realisation that by sending out the novel, it’s become a thing apart, and I’ve run out of chances (for this submission) to keep polishing, to try to make it better.  And of course the hell of waiting to find out if it’s going to make the grade…did I mention I’m not big on patience?

But it’s more than that – I thought I’d be able to switch off, give the writing muscle a rest, but apparently it doesn’t want one.  It’s twitchy, it’s grumpy, it refuses to lie down and chill out, and right now, it’s giving me huge hints about one of the characters in the novel.    He came in late, in a fairly minor role, but you know, there’s something about him…

Hmm.  Maybe just drafting a plot outline couldn’t hurt…could it?

 

Money Porn – Why We Really Like Fifty Shades of Grey

And I promised I wouldn’t talk about that book…

Yes, I’ve read it.  Not sure there are many women left in the English-speaking world who haven’t, and with sales topping 40 million world-wide, it’s obviously just as popular in translation. 

Did I enjoy it?  Well, no, not particularly, but this post isn’t going to be an  E L James hate-fest.  Plenty of those around, and some of the vitriol directed against the writer sits a little uneasily with me.  Let’s be honest, it’s not an impressive book – it’s clumsily written, with unintentional but frequently hilarious results, and the main characters make Edward Cullen and Bella Swann seem like complex, literate intellectuals with more than one brain cell to share between them. 

And yet – women are reading it.  On the bus, on the tube, in coffee breaks and in their lunch-hour (half-hour, usually, these days, but still) – they’re forming opinions, and they’re talking to their friends about a book they’ve read.  As a would-be published writer, it would be churlish in the extreme to take issue with that. 

Of course, it’s the whole BDSM thing that has made headlines worldwide, sparking off debates about the healthiness or otherwise of post-feminist society obsessing over a series featuring a voluntarily submissive woman in a relationship with a dominant male.  For what it’s worth, I think we’re doing women a disservice if we seriously think Fifty Shades is going to have any impact at all on the way they live their lives now. 

For heaven’s sake, we understand that the writer is telling us a story.  We get that it’s all made up, okay? If a man actually approached us with a roll of duct tape and a gleam in his eye, we’d give him thirty seconds to sling his hook before we rang the polis.  And even if we were interested enough to make with the furry handcuffs in the privacy of our bedroom, at the slightest hint of coercion, our safe word would be ‘Get off, you bastard!’ accompanied by a swift squeeze of the offending dangly bits.  I’ve seen concerns raised about the possibility of the books influencing women to get ‘curious’ and wind up in dangerous situations, but honestly, if you really believe there’s a young, handsome, damaged but saveable multi-millionaire out there for you, whatever his taste in bedroom activities,  you probably shouldn’t be allowed out on your own much anyway.

And let’s be honest – so much of Mr Grey’s attraction is based around his huge,er,wallet.  He can give Ana the kind of lifestyle she seems singularly ill-equipped to ever achieve on her own, and she doesn’t have to lift a finger for it, just like Bella the Brainless.  If you think about it, there’s a long tradition of semi-sadistic, damaged alpha males, from Mr Rochester to – shudder – Edward Cullen, and their bank balances range from the well-off to the staggeringly rich.  Almost makes you think they’re compensating for something…

Just for the avoidance of doubt – I do think the books carry one very dangerous message, and it’s nothing to do with the whole whips and handcuffs thing.  If you read all three books, you’ll see that it’s basically a Mills & Boon type plot, with the traditional wedding bells and 2.4 children happy ending.  Christian and Ana probably still occasionally get up to things in the bedroom that would scare the horses, but otherwise their relationship is happy-ever-after land.   

I can’t believe anyone needs me to spell it out, but just in case you’ve not been topping up your brain-food recently, here goes:  If you’re in a relationship with a sadistic bully, He. Will . Not. Change.  Not by your efforts, not by you being the perfect partner, not by the production of children – He. Will.  Not. Change.  Got it?  Not unless he gets intensive therapy and acknowledges what a git he’s been.  And maybe – probably – not even then.  Don’t risk your or your children’s well-being by thinking he will.

Okay, rant over.  Look folks, you’re not stupid – enjoy the books for what they are, and don’t beat yourself up about it.  Though I suppose you could get your partner to do it, if you’re that way inclined.

My Kindle Cometh; Or, the Rise and Rise of E-Books

Picture a little girl, probably no older than six, crawling through the long grass on a windy day in the Highlands with a determined look on her face.  Clenched in her grubby fist are several ripped-up pages of comic book (actually, I was a bit of a neat freak even then, so it probably wasn’t that grubby, but you get the idea).  I don’t remember what the story was, and I somehow doubt it was gripping enough to warrant my commando-style progress, but I do remember the feeling of victory when I’d finally collected all the pieces and found out how it finished.

Since then, I’ve given up crawling through the long grass (except on very special occasions) but my need to read has remained.  I’m the person sitting next to you on the train, who’s just finished their book, and is trying not to look as though they’ve just seen a really interesting article in your paper; or if our paths should cross over breakfast, and there’s nothing else around, you may well see me perusing the print on the cornflakes packet with a slightly furtive air.

I need to read, it’s that simple.  And as a reader, having a Kindle has changed my life.  From being a sceptic, I’m a full convert to the joy of e-books; when you read as much and as quickly as I do, having something the size of a single paperback that lets you carry around half a library is something I find pretty amazing, even now.

But as a writer…okay, this is where things start to get a little tricky.  Broadly speaking, we want to be published.  We’ve spent months hunched over a laptop as the rest of the world passes us by, and we want to get our stuff ‘out there’, for people to read and hopefully enjoy.  But while traditional publishing is still the holy grail for most of us, it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to achieve.  By contrast, e-publishing looks like a slightly less impossible option; and yet…a quick straw poll of friends, published and still subbing, confirms that they’d only turn to e-publishing as a last resort.

In many ways, I think that’s a shame.  I pretty much buy only e-books now; the only exceptions are ones that aren’t available or are so physically beautiful that I have to have them on my bookcase.  I also buy a hell of a lot more of them now, because space isn’t an issue (and yes, they’re a little cheaper, but that’s cancelled out by the sheer volume I buy now).  And I’m not alone.  Look around you on trains, in the park – people are still reading, but they’re doing it on their e-readers.

Do I still want to be traditionally published?  Hell, yes.  I want to have the knowledge that someone likes my stuff enough to back it with cold, hard cash.  But I’m starting to think that a few years down the line, e-publishing (as opposed to self-publishing) is going to sound a lot less like traditional publishing’s poor relation.

Like riding a bike…

Haven’t checked in here for a while, which is very bad of me.  But while struggling with the final chapters of the novel, I’ve become aware that I am slowly succumbing to that most dread of ailments, ‘novel-writer’s posterior’.

Yes, I know all about the ‘apply seat of pants to seat of chair in order to produce your masterpiece’ school of thought, and sage advice it may well be… unfortunately, in my case it’s having the unwanted side-effect of making the seat expand until it’s in danger of no longer fitting on the chair

So I have been forced to drastic action:

Not that it was easy.  You’d think buying a bike would be simple, wouldn’t you?  Not if you’re only 5 foot  2 with short arms, it isn’t.  I’d set my heart on an old-fashioned, sit-up-and-beg style, like those posh Pashley ones people called Miranda or Genevieve pedal down country lanes in search of cream teas…sadly, all that would fit me was a tiny person’s ‘hybrid’ bike, which even I had to admit would look very silly with a wicker basket on the front

So far, riding it has not been an unqualified success, either – I did have a bike when I was young, which I managed to ride to school without major injury, but that was err-humph years ago, and let me tell you, riding a bike after that long a gap is not like, er, riding a bike.

Still, I’m determined to persevere – by September, when I’m going to the Festival of Writing run by the Writers’ Workshop  http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/events.html , I will be a shadow of my former self.  (And so will Mr HW, if I can persuade him to follow in my tyre-tracks!)

 

Jumping to Conclusions When the End is Nigh…

…appears to be the exact opposite of what I’m doing right now.

    Goodness knows, I’m not the fastest writer around…a good day for me, a really good day, is when I manage 1,000-1,2000 words.  A bad one…well, let’s just say I’m happy if I can crawl into triple figures. 

    Now before people think my bad days mean I’m just being a lazy devil, sitting here and staring into space, let me assure you that bad days include just as much frantic typing as the good ones (considerably more chocolate and caffeine consumption, but the speed at which I accomplish the said consumption in no way impacts on my typing speed, trust me).  It’s just that a really bad day’s writing can consist of the same paragraph, typed over and over, to increasingly loud moans of anguish.

     But in spite of my snail-like writing speed, the novel is steadily approaching its end – hurrah!  Only instead of having to hold myself back in a last-minute spurt for the finish-line, I find myself taking things much more slowly, for heaven’s sake.

    Part of this is a good thing, of course – the up-side of being so slow is that I don’t have much editing to do when I get to the end of a chapter, because I edit as I go – I mean, I micro-edit.  When I move on, I know that apart from final tweaks, there won’t be anything massive left to change in the final draft, because I will have looked at what’s there and made it as good as I can the first time round.  I keep a written chronology of events which I constantly refer to so no glaring inaccuracies can creep in, and I always double-check to see if someone closed their eyes before I make them open them again.

But lately I’ve been doing this so much it’s starting to feel slightly obsessive, even to me, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m actually scared of finishing.  Either I’m scared of messing it all up in the final chapter and having the equivalent of little green men landing to save the day/destroy the world, or scared of finally having to let the novel go and do its thing.

   Has anyone else had experience of this, or are you all usually dancing with joy by the time you reach the final few chapters? 

If this rings a bell with you, do you have any tips on how to deal with this and forge ahead?  I’m particularly interested in any involving posh chocolates and pink fizz…:)

 

The Road to Verulam…and Beyond?

It’s been nearly a month since my last post, which is, frankly, not on – I enjoy my blog ramblings, and hopefully this will be an isolated incident.

However I do have a reasonable-ish excuse, which may or may turn out to be the beginning of good things…in mid-February, I went to the Verulam ‘Get Writing 2012′ event in Hatfield.  It was a large event, very well attended, and I was delighted to meet a few people from WriteWords, my on-line writing group.

It was probably the coldest weekend the south of England has ever experienced, and the venue felt a little like a vast aircraft hangar, but the most nerve-wracking aspect of the whole event for me was the opportunity to pitch my novel to professionals in the publishing industry.  Nervous, moi?  Anti-migraine medication was being downed like sweeties, and I must have slept all of three hours the evening before…but to my amazement, both of the people I pitched to said they wanted to see more.  My friends from the WriteWords group said my face after the second ‘yes’ would be their abiding memory of the day!

At the moment, I’m working flat-out to finalise the draft and get it sent out.  I’m deliberately not raising my hopes too much – goodness knows, this is only the first step on a very long road, and it might end up leading exactly nowhere…but it is a first step.  It really, really is. 

At the risk of sounding too transatlantically-inclined, can I afford a little ‘yay’, do you think? Oh, what the heck – YAY!

Synopsis is a Four-letter Word…

Well, not literally, of course…even my maths isn’t that bad. But whatever kind of writer you are, it’s a safe bet that writing a synopsis is your least favourite part of preparing to submit your work.

On the face of it, the task doesn’t seem that daunting.  Most agents tend to prefer brevity (with good reason, probably -  I’m guessing the sheer volume of submissions they receive tends to make the eye glaze over and the brain beg for mercy after a while) so in theory, all you need to do is make your book sound like something worth reading, in 600-700 words.  How hard can it be?  After all, you’ve already written 90,000 or so…

And that’s part of the problem, of course.  You’ve probably toiled over your novel for several months, maybe years.  You’ve re-drafted, re-examined every word choice, and it’s now as good as you can make it.  You’re feeling endlessly chuffed with yourself for even finishing the bloody thing, for heaven’s sake…and now you need to compress the essence of those 90,000 words into a page or less (and no cheating with the margins or tiny fonts, in case you’re tempted).

It’s as though your imagination’s being forced to hold a closing-down sale.  Everything must go, all the little plot intricacies, the character nuances you’ve worked so hard on, and what you’re left with looks like…well, not very much really.  Certainly nothing that would tempt you to ask to see more, so how can it possibly work any magic on an agent?

Well, there are two things to bear in mind.  Firstly, I’ve attended workshops and writing events across the country, and the consensus amongst the agents I’ve heard speak is that they won’t usually turn to the synopsis first.  They’ll have a look at your writing and your cover letter, to decide a) if you can string two words together and b) if you sound like someone they could possibly work with.

If they think you sound like someone who won’t send them severed digits in the post if you disagree with their assessment of your work, they will then turn to your synopsis.  They will do this  to make sure that the clever premise and vivid writing of your first chapter doesn’t lead to a surprise intervention from little green men in chapter 28. 

Secondly – and I wish I had known this earlier – you don’t need to tell them everything in the synopsis.  The main plot thread, of course, and the events leading to the denouement, and the ending, absolutely…but you don’t need to detail every twist and turn and sub-plot along the way.  If you do, unless your novel is linear and simple in structure, you risk getting bogged down in unnecessary and confusing detail.  You need to give the essence of your story, not chapter and verse.

Luckily, there is help out there.  The incomparable Nicola Morgan has done it again, producing Write a Great Synopsis as an e-book.  Full of useful information and hints on getting it right…and, er, including a truly awful early-draft synopsis by one Highland Writer.  (Yes, take a look if you must, though I’d really rather you didn’t.  Nicola was really far too kind, I’m afraid – my only mitigating circumstance is that it was skewed rather heavily towards the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme.  For someone whose favourite writers include Stephen King, Ian Rankin and Denise Mina, you might just feel I’d taken a little too much liquid refreshment that day…)

You’ll also find reassuring and practical advice on the wise and sensible Emma Darwin’s blog here

Follow their guidelines, and writing your synopsis needn’t be the carpet-chewing trauma that mine became…best of luck!

 

 

 

 

Home For the Holidays

Actually, for various reasons, hardly anyone’s coming to us this year, and Christmas will be a smaller and more casual affair.

It’ll be a bit strange, but on the other hand, a little bit of quiet feels like the right way to end 2011.  And on a purely selfish note, I’m hoping to sneak in a bit of writing time – my word-count, never very impressive, has taken a bit of a nose-dive recently, but I really am on the home straight now with the novel-in-progress, so I just need to make time to put fingers to keyboard without succumbing to the siren call of t’internet.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

I’ll be back in the New Year, but for the moment, it’s goodbye from me and my very own Christmas indulgence…!

In Defence of ‘Tell’-Or How to Just Get On with It

Lord knows, I’m not the fastest writer around. 

I can sit and stare at a single paragraph for an unbelievable amount of time as I fiddle with a phrase here, a word there.  I’d like to say it makes the eventual product worth all the agonising, and mostly I think it does, but every so often, I catch myself puzzling over a new phrase, a new twist on an old idiom until my brain feels as though it’s turned to porridge and is gradually leaking out through my ears.

Just lately, though, I’ve been having a bit of a re-think.  Yes, of course we want our writing to be fresh, to stand out – but I’ve started to realise that sometimes, not only is it not necessary to be innovative, it can actually be counter-productive. 

A quick example:  supposing your main character is shocked by something she sees/overhears.  You can spend forever showing her white-faced, shaking etc – or you can baldly go (sorry, Captain Kirk) and state, ‘X looked shocked’.  And I’ve finally worked out that sometimes, balder is better. 

Why? Well, sometimes I don’t want to focus in on that reaction for long – certainly not for a whole paragraph – because there’s something bigger and nastier waiting just round the corner that I really want to hit the reader with.  I don’t want her to trip over a bump in the road when there’s a fully-laden juggernaut ready to crash into her half a page later, in other words, and unless I move the story on to that big, showy point, she’s going to come a cropper too early and my big effect will be wasted. 

Before anyone gets too irate, I’m not advocating the ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ type of thing.  All I’m saying is that sometimes, in filling in all the pretty (or in my case, gory) details, we can lose sight of the big picture of where we want our writing to take the reader.  And whether our writing feels like a roller-coaster ride or a genteel wander through the park, that can’t be a good thing.

Can it?

 

 

Is it Morning Already? Or, it seemed like a good idea at the time…

Urgh.

Sunday, 20th November…somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, my head is trying to reconnect with my body.  The body in question is deciding whether it’s given up alcohol forever, or just until I reach pensionable age…

It was Blondie’s fault, really. (Not the pop star, my feisty Aberdonian friend with the stunning platinum hairdo).  ‘We could do our own ‘Come Dine With Me’, she said – at which point I should have run for the hills, of course – I am to cooking and fine dining what Dracula is to garlic ice-cream.

But before I could blink, she’d called in Cher and Lady Gaga (nope, still not the pop stars), and somehow I found myself signing up to hosting our Invernessian version of the programme (lots of fun, no backbiting and considerably more, er, liquid refreshment…)

Actually, we’ve had three dinners so far, and they’ve all been tremendous fun.  Mine was on Saturday, and apart from Mr HW smashing my beautiful new ice bucket (don’t ask) , I think it went really well – no-one’s reported coming down with anything ghastly, and considering my cooking, that’s always a bonus   And as Cher observed, we’re all so busy that it’s easy to get into the habit of just eating, working and sleeping, without making the effort to keep in touch with friends.

Next weekend’s the last event, and we’re not going to choose a winner, but we are putting the winning tenners (what?  We’re Scots, for Goodness sake – we don’t throw money around!) towards a nice meal out, and we’ve decided to meet up more regularly for coffee or lunches.

As long we can relax and no-one has to cook, that sounds just fine to me

Back to writerly stuff next week!