Quick Update, OCD Writing Challenge and ROW 80 Check In

Quick Update:

 

On the weekend I started re-editing Sally Hunt to submit to the Caleb Writing Competition. Does there ever come a stage when you don't look at your own past work and despair? Okay, I have to admit, I have seriously enjoyed some bits, but the beginning was not quite as good as I remembered.

 

So, if you have been wondering where I've been for the past few days I've been madly trying to edit the entire book when I get home from work. Have re-written a good bit of the first and fourth chapters, and fixing up typos etc all the way through. Currently still only up to chapter 11, but it is definitely getting better as I go through.

 

So, bear with me as I recede from sight for a few more days to get it finished. It will be great to put in a much more polished work than it was last time (which was quite a few edits ago!).

 

To keep you entertained while I'm busy and not posting, I've got another challenge for you!

 

 

OCD Writing Prompt:

 

Okay, so I mentioned last week I had signed up for pinterest to develop a photo board for my 1920s romance.

 

I forgot to add a warning - Pinterest is super addictive!

 

So, I thought I'd just go through and give you a writing prompt based on one of my favourites that popped up:

(originally pinned at: http://pinterest.com/sstamatis/funny/)

What I want you to do is write the introduction scene for this character.

 

Have fun!

 

 

ROW 80 Check - In:

Have been editing lots, but not getting any of my posts done! However, for a week I'm happy with that.

Have just posted on Personal Fitness Base Camp last week's Half Marathon Training and a discussion on recovery.

 

And I've got one volunteer for the 8 Hour Diet, but it is still open if anyone else wants to give it a try as well! Just go to my 8 Hour Diet post and leave a comment for a free copy of the book.

 

Caleb Writing Competition and ROW 80 Check In.

Courtesy of pear83 at stock.xchng

For those of you who don't know, I finished my very first complete first draft a year ago. Wow, only 1 year?

I hurried the completion in order to enter it into the Caleb Writing Competition, a Christian writing comp for unpublished manuscripts.

 

While I didn't win, I did get some very good feedback on my Sally Hunt book 1, which I implemented.

 

I had thought of sending the manuscript in again this year, but when I checked a month ago, I couldn't find the page for this year so assumed they weren't running it. I then forgot about it.
 

Well, last week a good friend emailed me saying 'I thought you might be interested in this:

http://www.omegawriters.com/wp/?page_id=270'

 

Yup, the link to the very writing competition I had been meaning to enter!

 

So, I'm going to try my luck again. Sally Hunt is in much better shape, and I still have 11 days to polish her off a bit further.

 

If there are any other Australian Christian writers out there looking for a foot in the door, why not give it a go?

 

 

ROW 80:

Last week was definitely not one of my better weeks. But I'm blaming that largely on work. I literally did 9 days worth of work in 4 days. Not doing that again, team target or not!

 

I did write half a post for Personal Fitness Base Camp on the 8 hour diet. I'm still not completely convinced about the validity of the claims of the diet (eat whatever you like 8 hours a day and still lose weight!) but I'm going to be offering two free copies of the book to readers who are willing to test it out for two weeks. So check in at PFBC later this week if you are interested.

 

I also wrote half a post for 100FD on the next in the KOP series. Will be posting that probably tomorrow.

 

So, have a long way to catch up. Still planning to do at least 1 post/article per day for 5 days. Might not get to do it at lunch time, now that I have to look like I'm working more, but will try to stop working before I get completely brain dead so I can do my work when I'm at home.

 

Finally: if anyone has some free time in the next week and wants to proof read a chapter of Sally Hunt and make suggestions, just let me know!

Well That Solves That Problem: I'm Not Meant to Be a Full Time Writer

Today was my first day back at work. 

It was also the first time in a week that I wrote for about 4 hours. 

I had a total of two, maybe three, successful full days during my holidays, and a lot of that included working on this blog and writing agent query letters etc.

The concept of a full day where I have nothing to do but write I thought would be amazingly liberating, would let me write so much more!

Wow, was I wrong. 

It was horrifying. 

But then I started to think that maybe all writing had become horrifying, that maybe I had just lost my will to write.

But no, do not fear. I just needed to be a bit more busy.

Was listening to Writing Excuses last night, an episode called 'pantsing'. They were talking about discovery writing, also known as by the seat of your pants writing, which is what I am currently doing a lot of. One of them was pointing out that when you do discovery writing, you really need to have a large block of time so that you can really get into the narrative flow.

Then another pointed out that this wasn't always good. Writing expands to fill the amount of time you have, like a gas. Having very strict writing times can actually help you to write more.

Wow, I thought to myself, wow. It's like they are talking about me!

Though, that was not all of my problems. It is definitely true for me that if I give myself too long a period, I just slow down and also get intimidated by the amount of time. However, it is also true that if I say I can write at any time in the day, I can very easily end up not writing at all. 

The third thing I found out today is that part of the problem might be the Castle Innis series. Well, not it, but me, but me to it, not just me. If you see what I mean.

I sat down again this morning to continue the amazingly slow work on book 3 (slow, largely because I haven't spent that many hours on it but also slow because it just isn't coming out). I then got a text from my sister saying I should try to get my first book published in Australia, and John Marsden's publisher, Pan McMillan has Manuscript Monday, where anyone can submit the first chapter of the manuscript along with a 300 word synopsis, and they promise to read it. 

So I went back to my first novel, Sally Hunt Book 1. I had spent quite a few hours yesterday editing it (how did it STILL have so many typos?) and had gotten to the part where I knew I had to re-write an entire scene. This morning, after spending about half an hour on Castle Innis, I then went and spent an hour and a half editing then beginning to write this new scene. 

The speed and easy with which it came out was like watching champagne overflow down a pyramid of glasses; beautiful, delicious, bubbly. And it wasn't because I knew what was going to happen, because I didn't, I hadn't expected what happened at all! 

And tonight night came home from work and said I would start writing at 7.30. Since I finished dinner at 7pm, I started reading Stephen King's Gunslinger. However, after finishing the intro, I decided I wanted to move straight into working on Sally Hunt, just because I felt like writing.

I spent the next two hours and think I have nailed most of the new scenes.  I just need to weave it back into the old text. I also need to change one or two more things later on (evidently my readers did not like that I left a lot of things until book 2, so will give some hints at how they are going to work out). 

So, obviously my mind is just in a young adult's language mode. I have had no trouble writing in regency period English before, so it is strange that I have it now, except perhaps I needed more time to switch over. 

But this is the end of the fortnight. And since my next book is a children's story (think E Nesbit style of thing), I might keep the simplified language and come back to Castle Innis after I've done some other historical practice. 

So, back to work, back to writing, back to trying to have it all.

Second First Draft - Complete!

You know when something happens, and yes you know it is partially your fault because you could have stopped it, but all the same it didn't really have to work out the way it did, so you get really annoyed? Welcome to my world. I had just finished up writing today's blog entry, and I knew I was low on battery, but thought there was still enough, and was just about to save when... blank. The computer died. 

 

Plug it in, open it back up, and recover the documents...The entire blog entry is lost. It's about these times you just want an 'undo' button for your life. Just take me back to the last save point, and let me try again from there. This time I'll remember to save or plug it in on time, promise.

Ah well, it is a lesson I must keep learning. Do things while you still can. So now I will try and recall what it was that I wrote.

The most important thing and quite difficult to forget, is that I have finished my second first draft! Yes, in two weeks I have again written another short novel. And this one I had only about 2,000 words written before I started. I didn't even really know where I would start. Furthermore, I managed to basically write it from beginning to end, which is something new. Now, I think some of the pacing is a bit off, and I might need to go back in the second draft and add a few things in, but that is what second drafts are for. However, as it stands, I have just over 70,000 words which have a beginning, middle and extensive endings (as this is the final book in the series). Right up until the final day of writing I couldn't work out if there would be a fourth book, because I couldn't decide if I would be able to deal with all the wrapping up I needed to do, or whether it would be better to take one or two points and turn them into a new book. But, as it happened, I managed to wrap it all up, give everyone their just desserts and have an epilogue to give my main character and extra little gift for sticking with me so long. So, yah me!

It is a bit sad, though, as that is the end of Sally Hunt my first ever novel/series length character. Have I done right by her? Have I given her a happy enough ending for all the pain and difficulties I put her through? Will she go on to lead a normal life now, or will she have more adventures? I must admit, the very last line has hinted that there might be more adventures to come, but they might never be written. Sally might be allowed to have her quests in peace, without (hopefully) thousands of people reading into her life. I suppose I will wait and see if enough people want to see how Sally develops once she's at Uni. I will not break her peace and privacy if there is not enough demand.

And now it is on to an entirely new series. Unlike last fortnight when I tried to start the new series, I'm feeling in a much better place about it now. With the completion of Sally, I feel I am able to give my heart to a new series and develop a new set of characters to love and hate. I am also excited about being able to use more interesting vocabulary and elegant insults in my dialogue (teenagers these days, no imagination when it comes to insults). And I personally feel in the mood for a bit more romance. I watched Sally get with her man in the end (spoiler I know, but you don't know which man!) but it was really just a side plot. Now I get to develop and grow two amazing main characters and type to keep up as they go from hating each other to madly in love, with a swordplay of banter throughout. It should be pretty good. Haven't yet worked out who they are going to be exactly, but I'll start writing tomorrow and see how they want to present themselves.

The final thing I wanted to note was on how my brain was adapting to becoming a writer. I think it has taken things a bit too far. I noticed for the second time last night that part way through a dream my mind realised that the story was rather good, so then it went back and replayed the story so far, with a voice over from my brain working out exactly which words it would use to describe the scene that was playing out in front of my eyes. I woke up and thought I should write it all down, as each word had already been selected. However, when I reviewed the actual content I realised that it might be quite well described, but it was also weirdly insane. So I did not write it down. Though I think in future, if my brain continues on insisting to do this, I will write it all the same if only to give me fodder for characters' dreams in later books or if I decide to write an 'Alice in Wonderland' type story.

As to my reading, I'm almost finished All Clear, which is the second book after Blackout by Connie Willis. In the middle of this book I thought it was dragging and had lots of inconsequential parts. However, I then started to realise they were not nearly as inconsequential as I thought, which was a delightful surprise. The two things as a writer that Willis is extremely good at is first building excitement. I hate skipping ahead in books. People who flick to the last few pages before they read a book are, to me, violating the sacred trust between reader and writer. The writer has gone to all the effort to foreshadow and develop the plot, and as a reader you have an obligation if you want to read the book to read it as the writer has laid it out for you. And yet, with both Blackout and All Clear, I have had to constantly fight the urge to read ahead, to let my eyes flick to the next section of dialogue, because I am so anxious to find out what happens. Similarly, I would not recommend starting it late at night, because she does very frequently have cliff hanger chapter endings, so it is very difficult to put down.

The other amazing part of the books is how complex and interwoven all the events are. Things you're sure cannot be relevant later turn out to have been foreshadowing something else or a clue to working it all out. At points I've had to put the book down and just go 'so, if that's that, then she was there, and he must have been here, and then that thing from back there was actually this thing here, and that means...' etc. To full appreciate it, I'm sure it must be read twice. Unfortunately, a consequence of writing my own books so fast is that I have to keep reading at a similarly fast pace to be imbibing things related to what I'm writing at the time. So I probably won't get a chance to re-read it for quite a while. But still, as I am realising there are so many fantastic books out there in the world, it is amazing we ever stop to read anything twice. Though I do hope one day, at least one person will pick one of my books and be like 'Oh, that was good, I think I'll read it again.'

Misguided Beginnings and Finding the True Path

Well, shot myself a bit in the foot, but appear to have been able to limp back. To fully explain, I'm going to leave my entry for yesterday unedited (which I didn't get to post because of internet troubles, but I've worked out a way around it now, I think). And afterwards I'll tell you about today.

Starting from Scratch.

I am sorry Ben, I ignored your advice to my own detriment.

Instead of continuing on with the final book in my trilogy, I decided to start something completely new. Within minutes I realised that these next two weeks are going to be a serious test of my dedication to the challenge.

I started on the next book on the list, which is really the prequel for another story I have wanted to write and have quite a few notes on. All I knew about this story was that it was a historical romance which ended with her escaping from France with him, and them getting married. Not really a lot to go on. I didn't even really have a starting image (I just have the end image of the wedding), so couldn't even begin by describing that and seeing where that led me. (also, these two characters are the parents of my main character in the next book, so don't even know what they are like.)

So I started a few different ways, and realised they were more a brief summary of my main characters, rather than an actual story. So then tried just starting a scene: you come in with him being told by the hostess of the party that uninvited guests are always welcome, when they are my Lord Averley. I thought it would be a debutante party for hopefully my main character, and it is her mother greeting my main guy.

But he couldn't come here for her, because they have not already met. So he's come to meet up with someone else.

That led to secret messages and I soon found that I was in trouble of just making him the Scarlett Pimpernel, who has already been wonderfully written. But I did want him to have a purpose other than being an aristocrat, and decided it would be fun to write an adventure book, that just happened to have a very satisfying romance in there. So, not the Scarlett Pimpernel, what else is sure to involve adventure? Thought about smuggling, but then couldn't think of a way to make sure he was also honourable. So hit on spy. James Bond for the 18^th Century.

I started to write a new opening scene where my main character is escaping from a village earlier that day with secret documents.

Then came the huge problem. What are the secret documents? Who are they from? Why are they secret? I can write with enough detail about English society around that period, as long as I get to stay vague as to what year it is and what is happening other than the Gunning Sisters having been a hit and Mr. Brummel is leading society. But first of all, this was France, and second, if he's going to be a spy, might actually need to know something about politics and international affairs at the time!

This caused me enough angst that I almost threw away the idea. Instead, I went to grab a cup of tea.

On my way back, I glanced at my bookshelf and noticed Matthew Reilly's 'The Seven Ancient Wonders', and thought that archaeology is something I know a bit about and remembered (possibly from Lara Croft Tomb Raider the second movie) that Napoleon was supposed to have mounted a expedition to Egypt. So what if my main characters get in a race with Napoleon to find some ancient Egyptian artefact that would change world history?

I started to read up a bit on Napoleon's expedition, which really just pointed out to me how very little I knew about the period, and so did what any writer does when stuck, went and had a nap.

In my dream I started working out a brilliant story and writing it down, but on waking up realised it wasn't quite as good as I thought it was. (It did involve my main female character passing herself as Chinese, Indian and then French. But totally worked in the dream.)

So came back to the computer and started doing some random history searching for what was happening at the time, which just reinforced that I knew nothing. So tried to continue writing the story as vaguely as possible, thinking that if I got something out, then I could check out the details etc. later. I know this is not the desired way for historical writing, but remember my aim is to write first drafts to see if I like the style, not spend weeks doing research and then finding out I suck at writing action sequences.

So have now been working for many hours, and have a total of just over 3,000 words, which still hasn't really helped me know where to go or even when I'm setting it.

Now I have become caught in an awful time pressured loop: can't write until I have done more research, don't want to do research because I have no idea what I'm writing and can't waste time researching anything that might not be useful.

I still think there might be something in doing a Napoleon race to save the world from Egyptian artefact, but not sure.

I would need to work out how they could actually know anything, since this is really at the very beginning of Egyptology and very little was known. Then I would also have to work out what Ancient Egyptian artefact I was going to get them to find, and its powers.

Though, instead of starting in France, if I start somewhere I know like Oxford, could get myself going before needing to seriously panic. Not much at Oxford has seriously changed in the last three hundred years, I should be pretty good (except for the girls, need to take out the women, of course).

So, the next two weeks are going to be interesting. My biggest fear is that I just won't be able to make myself keep writing when I don't know where I'm going and don't have anywhere near enough research at hand. Can the academic in me let go of the reigns to let the creative youth just make it all up and then in the second draft check out if it all works? Also, I am now 10,000 words behind, if I don't use anything I've done today. So it is going to be a long two weeks, but hopefully fun.

So that was the end of my post for yesterday.

This morning I woke up, had breakfast and sat down to write and got struck by fear. In the night I had thought of a few ideas, a few starts, but it was no good. I realised that my Muse just wasn't with me. He might be with me on the idea in the future, but right now wasn't really interested. He wanted to complete the trilogy I had started. Wrap it all up nice and sound while it was still fresh in my head

(Yes Ben, God agrees with you.)

So I then moved over to my final book (I think), in my Sally Hunt trilogy, and started writing. I knew very little about this one, except of course all the characters. I won't tell you the end of the last book, in case I can convince you to actually read it, but basically it was a bit of a shock, even to me (I thought it was going to happen in this book), and left me starting this book from a totally different place.

However, managed to get 3,400 words done before gone to work and tonight, with full use of the flow (joined a new gym and had a really yummy dinner) I got up to 8,465. So, will need to keep working at the super pace as I'm one 10,000 word day behind, but my Muse has not abandoned me!

Will be interested to see how I manage to wrap it all up. I know there must be something big, but the big thing I was expecting already happened in the last book! So, like all of you, I will just have to wait and see.

And if you think an Ancient Egyptian/18^th Century romance/adventure novel could work, let me know. All ideas welcome. Also, if anyone could suggest any good books to read about the period, that would be great.

Finally, just to let you all know what a sense of humour my God has: have been praying for either a motorcycle (cheap, but fun) or an old MX5 (hey why not be outrageous? I look really good in a convertible, except the end of my nose tends to get sunburnt and then peel, but still). I thought either of these two would add to my eccentric image which I want to cultivate as a writer. What is the point of spending the majority of my time locked away writing if when I come out I don't get to be weird? Well, guess what? Just got given a free Holdon Vectra, circa 2001. Might not be adding to the 'eccentric' element of being a writer, but my inner 'impoverished' writer is loving it. So big thanks to my Aunt Louise! (She is also writing a book, though hers is all serious. But when it comes closer to actually coming out, I'll tell you more.)