Newcastle and dinner parties

I should have shots of daffodils and spring lambs dancing about the fields, but I've been struck by a tummy bug this week and spent 36 hours feeling miserable and lethargic for the rest of it. So while I'm on the mend now, which is just as well as I have guests this evening, it means another picture of Newcastle - this time looking underneath the Tyne Bridge. The menu for tonight (thanks to Nigella Lawson) reads: Pea soup, Ham baked in Coca-Cola, Sorbet and Gooey Chocolate Puddings.

Sounds simple enough, but let's see if I can pull it off without any hitches. I'm off to make the soup now, and all the time the scene I want to insert into KT is running through my mind. By the time I get back to the laptop, chances are I'll have forgotten it, or have it complete in my mind.

Let's hope it is the latter rather than the former!

Edits can be fun

Phew! After a whole day working on the new draft I deserve a little letting-off-steam time. Got through about twenty minutes ago, but I think I can see where I need to write a whole scene I
handled by having one character tell another- very briefly. I need that scene to give the whole a better balance. So tomorrow it is back to the drawing board and thinking caps on.

However, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed Janet Mullany's The Rules of Gentility. It's a Regency, but a Regency with a difference and a sly sense of humour. I must admit I've tried it before - only once - and put it away after the first few pages. But this time I must have been in a better mood, or a mood that matched the writing, and I loved it.

The opening lines will give you a taste of the style - after opening with the "truth universally acknowledged" line the heroine veers off into this: "I consider the pursuit of the bonnets and a husband fairly alike - I do not want to acquire an item that will wear out, or bore me after a brief acquaintance, and we must suit each other very well.....and of course, with a gentleman you cannot replace the trim from another to make the perfect object..."

I've begun Labyrinth (Kate Mosse) but I'm not sure about it as yet. It seems to take pages and pages to get at a chunk of story. Already I've begun to skip over the descriptions (endless, it seems) of food. And the little vignettes of everyday life in Caracassone. I may find they all tie in to the main storyline, but so far I doubt it. If I turned writing like this in to my critique group, I'm sure they would be wailing Too much - info dump - cut to the story. Yet because I enjoyed Sepulchre, I picked this volume up with great eagerness. Let's hope I get into the long swing of Labyrinth before too many more pages.

PS If you saw yesterday's photo, you should recognise today's close-up!

Edits and kitchens

A lone fisherman on the banks of the Tyne no doubt hoping for a spring run salmon.

After six days of reading everything I could lay my hands on, I think I have a handle on what I need to do with KT. Cut for pace as they say in the trade. I have cut. I've also improved what was there by re-writing some dialogue, sharpening up the interaction between the characters, by having the hero share info on the villain much earlier. Now when the readers meet him, they will already have expectations of him. The heroine, of course, isn't privy to the information. So, I'll let that simmer for a couple of days and then go back to it.

On other topics, I'm happy to see that Nadal has won the championship at Indian Wells in California. Murray did well to get to the final and can be happy he beat Federer on the way even if he couldn't handle both Nadal and the 40 mph wind.

On the home front we are having new counter tops installed in the kitchen as I write. The sink has been out of action since Saturday morning as hubby wanted to be sure he could isolate the water supply - which means we have water everywhere else but the kitchen sink - without any hitches. He succeeded, and I can't tell you how many times I've turned to empty coffee dregs into the sink and realised just in time that it isn't plumbed to the waste outlet any more. Grrr.

Switching and pitching

The cold weather is back again, and this cold grey pic of the Tyne estuary says it all, I think. My toes are cold while I sit here in our smallest bedroom (easiest to keep warm, and my study) and type this because we are trying not to use the central heating overmuch. It is expensive now to run it like we used to. I am trying to ignore the fact that I have to visit the dentist this morning. I can safely say I am not looking forward to that.

So, I concentrate on working. I have three completed stories and I'm working on them all.
It's not exactly revision, except for Shadows. An e-publisher in the States has asked if I can escalate the internal conflict between H/h, so I'm going through and giving the pair of them a tougher time. Keep Trust lacks plainly stated goals/motivation on the page, according to my critique group, and I think they're right, so I'm going through and doing that before (I hope!) I get any bites from the partials out on the story.
Happily I finished my final revisions on Till The Day Go Down yesterday and it is with my publisher awaiting his comments. So now I'm working on two stories instead of three. It works quite well, for switching, I find, prevents boredom.

I read an interesting comment yesterday about the difference between marketing and publicity. The former is mostly selling what you don't have and teasing peoples' interest in it. The latter is selling something you do have. So once a book is published, Marketing becomes Publicity.

Marketing is the interesting bit. We're told to Pitch to Editors - should we ever see these rare creatures. If I lived in London it might be a possibility, but here in Tyne & Wear I doubt there's two to meet together. There is a poetry publisher - Bloodaxe Books - and I remember the man who runs it was at uni when I was there. There's also Myrmidon and Ed Handysides, but I hear little of them and he is not into publishing romances.

Back to the main point. Pitch to Editors. Boil our story down to a couple of sentences we can tell others and get them interested. Invent a catchy slogan or a tight logline that hints at the beginning, middle, and end of our hero’s adventure, and this will give a better chance of selling the project. They say the discipline of doing this makes the writing of the story so much better as well, but since I haven't come up with a good logline yet for any of the three books I've written, I can see that disaster looms on the horizon.
So, life was never so easy as to cross a field.

Writing, Nathan and Bookbag

"There's good reason for this rule to apply -- one of the absolute most important attributes of any successful writer is the ability to scrutinize their own work in order to improve it and make it better. The minute a writer starts thinking what they write is genius is the moment they stop scrutinizing their work for places where it can be improved upon, changed, or, most importantly of all, removed. A healthy skepticism is an essential tool in a writer's arsenal. Also bourbon."

This quote comes from Nathan Bransford's blog and it is so true.

However, it is too late for FAR AFTER GOLD. In exactly one month's time, my book will out in the world for public scrutiny. I cannot improve it now, but believe me, I worked hard on it, and I learned a great deal about writing while revising it. The picture above is my image of Oli, one of the characters in the book. Elaine Dingsdale of Bookbag says in her review: He's a beautifully depicted character who really brings the book to life with his hero worship of Flane and his empathy with Emer, whom he immediately recognises as a kindred spirit and fellow misfit. His maturity and attitude were tremendous and with wisdom beyond his years, I was moved close to tears on several occasions."

This time of year is for reflection on what has gone and what is to come. I'm comfortable with what I've achieved in 2008. I'm not one for making resolutions and even less do I broadcast the ones I think about in my deepest thoughts. What I will do is spend the next month publicising my book whenever and wherever I can. It needs my help. I'm an unknown name and I don't want Quaestor to regret that they took a chance on me.

I'll still be working on KEEP TRUST, which is going well, but I must become a PR person. It doesn't come easily. Those who ask me about my writing must think I don't want to talk about it, because I can never think of anything witty or interesting to say about it. To say creative writing takes up most of my waking hours sounds pretentious and dreadfully snobbish, and unless the person you speak to does it themselves, it is hard to make the subject interesting.

Perhaps when (if, girl, if) I become established, (if ever) I'll have learned how to talk about what and how I write and an interesting and friendly way. I remember how Phillippa Gregory performed so confidently at Bowes Museum and applaud her. At the moment, I feel tongue-tied with embarrassment. And I notice my over use of the word interesting in this piece.

Christmas Battles

Here's one incident I observed over Christmas.

Now I'm not usually this nosy, but...look at this. A heron and a crow. Not a normal sight on our neighbour's roof ridge.

And not just one crow.

Two crows.

Two distinctly aggressive crows.

The battle went on for ten minutes and you may notice the effect it had on the heron by observing the roof...shortly after that, the heron departed.

Our Christmas has been updated almost daily by photographs coming via e-mail. The offspring are travelling, and we received pictures of their various stops as they travelled west to east across America, and north to Tremblant in Canada. The Canadian party of two almost didn't make it as their plane from New York was cancelled due to snow. They got to Montreal and somehow made it to Tremblant where they reported temperatures as low as -40 but I think that was at night. I hope it was at night. Two days later they reported rain washing away all the snow. They were not pleased. I believe a retail therapy trip back to New York was negotiated by one of the party.

The second party of two will be travelling on to France and Switzerland soon, and we shall meet up with them in Zermatt. The other party head back to Oz after New Year.

We have been going for long walks across wet muddy fields, and peering into all the nooks and crannies you can't see in summer for the abundant vegetation. Houses we didn't know existed have suddenly sprung into view now that their shield of leaves has vanished and left them open to the wild winds and my gaze.

I had a couple of days relaxation infront of the tv and I'm still going through the cds that make up the boxed set of Shogun, which I bought to fill the gaps when there was nothing but rubbish on the box. Christmas stuff is usually so sentimental that I can't watch it. Black Beauty, for heaven's sake, drives me out of the room and I dare not switch over to Lassie. Even Johnnie Depp as JM Barrie had me surreptitiously sniffling in my handkerchief.

Then it was back to work. Today I managed 1600 words very easily between Daisy and Rookhope. KEEP TRUST seems to be going very well now I'm concentrating on only one story.