Our long hot summer

  

Doubtful Bride has replaced The Matfen Affair and I'm currently working on re-editing The Gavington Affair which will become Runaway Duchess.

I have yet to make a cover for the Duchess.  There seems to be a dearth of pics of Victorian ladies but I'll find one somewhere - if I have to use my grandmother's picture, that would be authentic, wouldn't it? Not that she was a duchess...

Gardening has been a major thing in my life this year. It is the first year we haven't gone to France but the journey to the Dordogne has grown less and less appealing over the last three or four years. We've had French weather here in our own back garden this year, so I should think we have still had our ration of vitamin D. On these hot days we are just lying around like the proverbial loppy dog. Sometimes we give up and go inside to be cool. Unheard of, I know. But not going to France has certainly given me time to think about and do something about my books, so that cannot be bad.

How long can this go on?

 Ten days later and I am still struggling to finish the latest wip! The tale is nearly done but the word count is rather lower than I am used to. Perhaps it is really not necessary now to go the whole 70k words in a historical romance, for I have found a lot of books I have read lately in that genre have ended before I was quite ready for it.

Some of these stories now seem to rely on whole episodes describing sexual encounters - pages and pages of it! It's not that I'm 'disgusted of Chichester' complaining but the pages have an unhappy habit of being so like other author's attempts on the same subject that it becomes a tad boring. After all, there are only so many ways a couple can copulate and I'm beginning to feel cheated of story. 

But then again, perhaps the authors have found a similar problem with their stories as I have - they struggle to find something new to write about! The genre has been popular for such a long time and finding a new plot is a struggle. Every author can write a popular plot in their own style and come up with something that seems new and fresh, but eventually the new and fresh becomes old hat too.

I do wonder how long this can go on.

Head Hopping

Kahina Necaise has written (for the History Quill) a clear  description of the fault that often annoys readers – and so I have  jotted them down here to remind myself of What-Not-To-Do.

Read the whole thing here: Head-hopping: what it is and why you shouldn't do it - The History Quill

 

1. Head-hopping disorients readers, preventing their immersion in the story

2 compromises the emotional coherence of a scene

3. hinders connection with charactersBottom of Form

4. signals an unfocused scene

5. comes across as clumsy

 These notes are for me to remember:

 Less common in today’s fiction, the omniscient POV is still a perfectly workable and engaging way to tell a story…..

The  omniscient POV presents the story from the perspective of a single character: the narrator, who has a distinct voice. Even when it dips into the thoughts of a particular character and colours those thoughts with that character’s voice, it’s clear that this is not the narrator’s voice. We’re still anchored in the narrator’s POV………..

An omniscient POV narrator’s switching from one character to the next is strategic. All the POVs that it presents fit together in a way that supports the scene as a whole.

 

How do you write?

Most authors write the same way. They write, they edit, (again and again) and finally publish. Seems so simple. But there are so many divergent pathways on the simple route map. Some authors plan the whole thing by doing a synopsis or a chapter outline and some stick to it and some don’t. Others claim to sit down each day with no clear idea of what is going to come, but just write. The thought of a lot of dead ends and judicious weeding, if not downright chaos at the editing stage, puts me off this method.

My efforts usually begin with a rough plan centred around a character, sometimes male ie Matho in Abduction and my current wip and sometimes female, ie Daisy in The Craigsmuir Affair. I start off knowing what they want, but not always how they’re going to achieve their goal. If the character “lives” the plot usually moves in spurts as I think of a good idea and weave it in. If the character is more dead than alive, the plot fails to develop and I let it go or change my character.

I belong to a critique group and usually wait until I’m doing a second draft before sending each chapter off to them. I’ve tried doing it as I go through the first draft, but that puts pressure on thinking the thing up and often gets messy with plot twists. Few chapters return without requiring changes, but I feel I’ve achieved something if the worst they can do is indicate where I’ve missed a comma!

My last chapter came back with several critiquers saying that I’d set up problems and I saw at once what they meant, and hastily made appropriate changes. Once I get to the end of the critiques, it’s back to the beginning again to read through to see if the whole plot hangs together. Then there’s another check for mistakes and typos. Then a final check to make sure it’s as good as I can make it. That’s about five edits in all, and that might not be the end of it. Somewhere around the end of the second edit I’ll start thinking of publication and covers, whether it is worth sending out to agents or not.

All in all, it’s a lot of work. Sometimes taking the dog out for a long walk seems so much easier!

When a book lets you down....

Wingspan by Jeremy Hughes

"Set in America, England and Wales, Wingspan consists of two stories fifty years apart, of quest and discovery, secrets and mysteries, love and death, betrayal and fidelity.
In September 1943 an American Flying Fortress returning from a mission crashes in Wales. A farmer is first on the scene to discover that its crew of ten have all perished. When the police arrive, only nine bodies are recovered, and so the mystery of the pilot begins.
The pilot is stationed in Suffolk long enough to meet and marry Gail, and together they have a son. It is only when Gail dies just before the son’s fiftieth birthday that he feels able to search for the father he didn’t know. Discovering that his father died in Wales, the son sets out to find the crash site. It is the beginning of a physical and emotional journey which will change him fundamentally."

I have just finished reading this, and am a trifle perplexed. It is all the things the publisher Cillian Press says in the blurb. It is beautifully written. It is not onerously long and presented in good clear font. Reading was easy. But now I'm finished, I don't quite know what I've read.

It is two entwined stories, and I don't mind that. But I do mind not being able to tell, a lot of the time, which story I am reading. I spent time flicking backwards and forwards trying to discover which I I was reading, if you see what I mean.

I do mind that the two stories are told in scraps and patches, with a fifty year gap between the two. I mind that the central question, which made me pick up the book, is never answered. What happened to the missing airman? Was he ever there? Did he live on? Was he the odd figure on the skyline at the end of the book? What are all the letters from the police supposed to convey?

Perhaps it is all just two clever for me. I kept thinking I would get the hang of what it was all about, but sad to say, I did not. Maybe one day I'll try reading it again. Perhaps it will all become clear second time around.

Just to cheer myself up, here's a reminder of the beautiful Northumberland coast on Wednesday.

Bad Yahoo

Yahoo has just complicated my life by changing the entire format of at least one critique group - I haven't checked the other as yet but no doubt it will be screwed up  in the same way. Now I have to take aeons to find the things I want, and I am filled with horror that everything else may be about to change as well. I don't need this! Plus which the new layout isn't anything like as clear as the old one. Bad move, Yahoo.

Got a good start today, apart from Yahoo, of course. Up and out for 1,200 steps with pooch  before eight and there's a lovely clear blue sky with warm sunshine sparkling on the dew-kissed meadow. (Yesterday we managed 8,939 steps, so we're getting better.) Have already checked e-mails (not many) , Twitter, Facebook (slight changes there, too) and hung out the washing to dry. Clothes dry in no time this summer and the fresh air costs nothing. Some people never hang any washing out, so I presume they dry it all indoors, which can be a costly process. I'm told dryers eat money.

While I wait for the last few critiques on To Capture a Queen, I'm going back to Blood Feud, which means a completely different time period and thought processes. For a long while I couldn't think how to move the story on after chapter 6, but last night the ideas starting flowing in and I will have to sort through them this morning and see which is the most feasible, which will seem the most logical and lead on to bigger and better happenings. It is an enticing prospect, and I'm really quite keen to get started before pooch wakes up and decides it is time for the Big Walk of the Day.

Thou Shalt Not Bore

A whole industry seems to have sprung up about creative writing in the last year or two. Words of wisdom abound on the internet, books pour out of the presses, universities are advertising horrendously expensive Creative Fiction courses and lastly there are often programmes on tv and radio devoted to the subject. The latest of these is The Sins of Literature on BBC Radio 4. Part 1 was broadcast on 5th August and is available on iplayer for those in the UK.

I listened last night, and discovered nothing new, but it was interesting to hear the authors using phrases most of us need a dictionary and a couple of minutes to translate into everyday sense. Setting the tone is important for the work in progress, they say, for both author and reader. One author described the incentive to write the story as a buzz, music in the head. Another described it as a frisson, another an image that would not leave her. All agreed that the first sentence can launch the book, sets the tone and the author simply carries on working out the rest of the book. Sometimes it is easier to work through the whole story and then write the first chapter, because then the author knows the important aspects of the work.

What happens next? Well, then comes plot, landscape and characters and the most important of these is character. One author spends days "being that character." Will Self is more interested in relationships, in how characters re-act to each other, than character itself.
Some authors begin with a bang and lose their way in the middle - this fault is common in hundreds of books.
The authors excelled, all of them, at quoting famous authors. Mickey Spillane: "Nobody reads a book to get to the middle." Or Philip Larkin's comment on a book: "A beginning, a muddle and an end."
Stephen King has good advice i.f things get difficult: walk away from the problem: you should simply "Let the boys in the basement sort out the problems overnight." By which he means let the sub conscious fix things while you sleep.

A little shameless

A little shameless self-promotion today - and why not? Looking back, Banners of Alba was a complex subject for a first book, but my heart was in it and I'm not telling porkies when I say it was a labour of love from start to finish.

Shakespeare was to blame, because he maligned the character of MacBeth for the sake of a play. It was a good play, but I decided to look into the story of the real MacBeth. There wasn't a lot of written history available to me, and so I had to use my imagination. Gradually the shadowy figure of the king who reigned for seventeen years and thought of Alba as one united country morphed into my version of what kind of man MacBeth might have been. Because it is fiction and not a biographical study (not at all!) I gave him a new name - one I could spell, and a Gaelic one whose spelling I had to check every time I used it.

If I wrote it today, I suspect it would be shorter, but it might just lose something in the process. Best to leave it as it is, I think.

Spring and writing

There may be writers who take half a day to decide where a comma should be placed in the wip, and there may be those who write sixteen thousand words in a day. It doesn’t follow that the former is a better writer or that one finished product is better than the other.

"Efficiency" and writers don’t seem to naturally go together.  Words like “muse” creep into conversations.  I agree with the writer who said that the slowest and dullest writing happens when she didn’t know what happened next in the story. The reason was because her writer's instinct didn't know what they should be trying to do, and so the right words failed to materialise. I agree: it makes an astonishing difference to my writing if I know what’s going to happen, and – just as important - why it is happening.

Thinking time is valuable.  One writer said she found time at the ironing board great for thinking out wriggles in the plot, so the next time I had the ironing board in place, I started thinking about my next chapter. Before I finished ironing the shirt, my mind had wandered to what I was going to cook for dinner. I wrenched it back to plot, and began another garment. Before I completed a sleeve, I was thinking about my last holiday and my next holiday, anything but plot. I need the discipline of sitting down at the computer to concentrate my mind so I do a few notes, or a chapter outline. A few notes about the progression of a scene works for me, too, and saves that awful feeling of getting triumphantly to the end and then realising you’ve omitted the most important fact of all. But if you can focus on plot while doing something else, do, because it is an invaluable skill.

Something else I’ve noticed is that writing about certain characters is easier than others. I assume that means I have more empathy with the character who comes to the page more easily. Subsidiary characters ought not to be cardboard cut-outs, but they are understandably less charismatic than the leading characters.

Most important of all - it’s important to get the story down, to have a first draft that you can then edit. To write effortless prose while working out a plot-line is something only the few can do. Editing too early in the process can soon stifle the flow. No matter how much the story changes as you charge along, getting to the end is vital. You can always go back and edit, as long as you have something to edit.