Order out of chaos

Other people's blogs can be such a rewarding place and I recommend a trip over to anita's to discover the organisational skills a writer needs. I use some of them, I suppose we all do some of them. I like little spiral notebooks, 4 inches by 3 inches which open vertically rather than horizontally. I find it much easier to write notes and read them back in this format. It fits in the smallest handbag, or a pocket, sits in the car dash pocket ~ and it really is a go anywhere pad. I'll probably end up with one for every novel I ever attempt.

I finally mastered using the Style button to highlight my chapter headings. They then come up in a separate pane at the left side of my screen, and with one click I am transported from chapter 20 to chapter 2. Great for checking or editing. It had me going for a while though; I used to end up with the whole chapter in the left pane. I soon learned to be very careful about highlighting only what I wanted. On the other hand, you could include the first lines of each scene if you wished.

I have a spreadsheet that combines chapters, word count, page numbers and one-liners as to content chapter. Having read Anita's piece I shall now try her colour chart for checking POV/character as that sounds a really good thing to do. And I'm curious to see how even-handed I've been.

Vamos Rafa - good decision to withdraw from Barcelona.

Penrith, expected

I wish I had better photos of the speakers at the conference. I'm still getting used to my tiny new camera which requires a very steady hand compared to the bigger, heavier types I'm used to.

Anita Burgh, right, gave a very thorough talk on how to woo agents and publishers purely through the way you approach them with your submission.

Unhappily my pictures of the M&B girls Jenny Hutton and Meg Lewis did not come out well even though they were both so young and attractive. They told us they want diversity and variety, that too many people were sending in submissions using the same old basic plots. They advised "listening" to our characters and discovering new twists on conventions and conflicts.

Internal conflict should be the main focus of the story. It took me a long time to understand what M&B meant by IC; now I understand it to be the opposing forces within each character, whereas

misunderstandings, for example, are external conflict. An internal conflict might be fear of rejection opposed to a need for security, for example. The emotional repercussions of a traumatic past are what the reader wants - not descriptions of the traumatic past itself.

Make your stories work on a character driven basis. Start with the character, chart their journey, mark their growth and change, stay with the character rather than the plot.