No story goes to waste

Having fun on Seaton Beach, Cornwall with Artoo

After working hard on You. I. Us. and turning a novella into a novel for most of this year, I'm now looking back at some of my older stories and wondering if I can create something amazing out of them.

I do this on a fairly regular basis, with various levels of success. One of the stories from You. I. Us. - Redemption - was based on a story I wrote around 1997. The actual story bore no resemblance by the end of the re-write, but it kick-started me, and allowed me to tell the story I'd wanted to initially. Sometimes I find my own improvements as a writer enable past stories to be revitalised in a way that I could never imagine.

I'm currently attempting this process with two stories at the same time. One is basically a piece of description that I'm hoping to squeeze a plot out of, and the other is the first part of my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel.

But I'm going through the whole spectrum of writing within one page. I'll write a sentence I think is perfect, then another which is rubbish, then I'll decide the whole idea is a waste of time, then I'll sweep right back to writing something brilliant again.

This makes it really hard to know if I'm actually writing anything that's any good. In fact, the original title of this post was "How do you know if you're writing a good story?" but that sounded like I was going to give advice and actually explain, rather than appeal for help myself.

(If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll know giving advice isn't my forte!)

As far as I can tell, from my own experience, you know when you get that gut-feeling. I've had it many times, and I'm usually right. Which should mean that when I don't have that feeling I should give up, right?

But I won't. Because I'm stubborn.

How do you decide which projects are worth the effort?

Have you ever shelved a story and gone back to it?

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In other news, You. I. Us. has been getting some really great reviews recently. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon.

Whenever I get a good review, I treat myself to some chocolate - and you should know how much I like chocolate by now, so I really appreciate it on a whole new level.

Blog Tour: Day 7, chatting with M.J. Fifield

(The link is live now, sorry if you tried and failed earlier.)

I'm very happy , because England scrapped into the last 16 of Euro 2016. I wasn't so happy last night, when they played a very average 0-0 game. But, at least they've got a week to get better! Can they? I don't know...

I'm having a few computer/internet issues at the moment, which is making commenting on my guest posts quite difficult. Randomly, my computer will just freeze, the internet will vanish, my cursor will disappear or my words will take several seconds to register on the screen - all of which is making this blogging lark mighty difficult. Please bear with me.

Anyway, today, I'm chatting with M.J. Fifield about my writing process. I hope you'll pop over and witness my oddity for yourself!

Here are some dog-walking photos - when I'm struggling with my WIP, the dog always gets extra walks.

My to-do list keeps getting bigger

I would like to say a huge thank you to my guest bloggers/interviewees over the past couple of weeks. Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of writing, everything else goes pear-shaped - I'm lucky I remember to go to work, some days!

I've been deep into some serious rewriting for a resubmission - so serious that my 39,000 word novella is looking like it's going to be a 50,000 novel. Possibly longer. I'm not sure how I feel about this at the moment - the story I wanted to tell is getting lost. I'm going to keep going, but during my re-read it might scale right the way back to 39,000 words again. But, obviously, different ones!

As well as writing, I'm trying to keep on top of marketing my new book. You know the one. It's over there, on the left, keep going... That's it, the one with the amazing cover.

Today I was told that all the pre-order links are live - print and ebook. If you'd like to check it out, click here now, to find the pre-order links, add it to your Goodreads TBR list, or to look around the site and find other great titles.

I've got three events coming up - two book signings and a book fair in my hometown, all within a couple of weeks of each other. I just hope I've got enough books to sell - and that the locals don't get bored of me. Because of those events, I'm designing a large banner to take around with me. Well, okay, I'm not, but my wonderful husband is - right now, in fact.

On top of that, I thought that maybe my web site needed an overhaul, so I'm currently trying to tie it in with the new banner and some business cards. I even thought about having some new author photos taken, but given the fact I'm procrastinating over my passport photos, it's probably not a wise idea.

Oh, and I've got the posts for my blog tour to write and send out. If you've signed up as a tour stop, rest assured I haven't forgotten you.

You know, I thought by writing it all down, it wouldn't seem such a mammoth list. But it is, isn't it? I'm not complaining - before my first book was published, I used to look enviously at all those writers who were juggling their tasks. Plus, the wine I'm drinking is helping. How many other jobs are there where drinking wine is practically a prerequisite?

What's keeping you busy at the moment?

Bad week got better

Thank you for all your support and hugs after my last post. Today I finally got to the end of my revisions, only a few days late!

After realising the best words I'd ever written had disappeared into the ether (and therefore I can pretend they were the best words ever), I got down to re-writing them pretty quickly in case I lost the thread of what I'd been trying to say.

Some of you suggested waiting a few days, but I was far too worried to do that. By Wednesday evening, just before Castle started at 9pm, I reached the stage I thought I'd got to on Monday evening. And from there, I was able to proceed to the challenging end-of-the-novella. It's not the best ending in the world, but I'll be having another read through next week, and hopefully some new problems will rear their head.

Am I alone in thinking that if I can't find a problem to solve, the whole thing must be atrociously bad?

I'm pretty pleased with myself because since starting to rewrite this novella at the beginning of February, I have added 9000 words, hopefully made the main character a little more sympathetic and made the 'nasty husband' slightly less nasty so the end of the story makes sense.

My aims for the next round are:

• turn the colours blue and green and red into more descriptive colours using this site
• make sure the weather accurately portrays the time of year
• possibly cut a few words, depending on whether I want to enter it into a competition or submit it

So, that's it. My goal for March was to get this novella finished, and I'm very securely within that. I deserve chocolate!

Did you have goals for March?

How are you doing with them?

Write, submit, walk the dog, repeat

My favourite bridge, from the opposite direction

I'm sure I only closed my eyes for a moment, and now it's July! I went away for the weekend last week, and it seems to have thrown me completely out of sync. It was a very warm weekend, and I didn't sleep well, and I was on the go the whole time.

While I was away, I decided to write some short stories. So I hunted out a new notebook and wrote. But they're all really daft and will need a lot of work to get them up to standard.

I've been submitting my first almost-novel (it's only a little bit short) to agents. Nothing's happening there yet, but it's early days. Although I woke up in a hot sweat last night when I realised I hadn't added contact details to the latest attachment I submitted, so all they have is my email - no address or phone number or anything - assuming my email and the attachments don't get separated. I did it wrong! So very wrong!

And finally, I'm rewriting one of my oldest stories, changing it from 3rd person/past tense to 1st person/present tense. I've had to cut 1000 words off the first draft because some of it was from another POV. But I hope this will make the story tighter. I've missed the deadline of the market I was aiming for though, sadly.

I'm now going to visit all the blogs I've been neglecting (ie. all of them)

Always check before you submit!

Luckily, I did check... but what I almost did was submit a novel without making the final changes. I still had all the 'track changes' mark-ups intact. Oops.

In February, I sent my novel out to three wonderful ladies, who said my novel was great and made several very good suggestions for improvement. I incorporated the changes, using 'track changes' so I could un-change them later if I thought of an even better idea. Then I put the doc to one side and got on with lots of other stuff.

And completely forgot about it until this week when I decided I should submit it. At first I thought it was a few easy 'accept change' issues, but then I got to a part where a character arc needed to be clarified - going right back to his introduction, I think. So now I'm heavily into revision mode.

(You'll note I'm finally using the word novel... It's 50,600 words - which is very, very long for me. I just hope I don't revise too much and bring the word count down too far.)

I did manage to submit another piece though, which came back a day later saying 'D'oh, check our guidelines, we don't do this!' - which would have been fair enough, if I hadn't tweeted them to check the very thing they complained I hadn't checked. I was a little bit annoyed, so I immediately sent it out again - at about 11pm last night. I'm not entirely sure I do my best work at 11pm, so I'll just have to see what happens.

Have you ever made/almost made silly submission errors?

Nothing to declare!

So, the big question is: what do I blog about when I've got nothing to blog about?

I've been pretty busy this week, but not with writing so much. I spring-cleaned my bedroom - I even (for the first time ever) donated four books to a charity shop. I don't usually donate books, because I can't bear to part with them... But the four I donated were different, so they went. Of course, it means I still have piles of books in my bedroom which need shelves, but probably will never get them.

I rewrote a short story, although it's still not exactly what I was hoping it would be. Do you ever have a vision of genius, but not the skill to pull it off? Yeah, that's what happened with this one. I'll probably submit it to a competition anyway - I'm at the stage where I just need to feel my work is being considered by someone.

Today, I might start on another rewrite. Or maybe it's time to sit down and read one of the books I've been buying recently?

Or I might go out for a very long walk to pre-empt all the calories I'll be eating when Hubby comes back from tour with the customary box of Belgian chocolates.

Have a lovely weekend!

An IWSG update

Thank you to everyone who commented on my IWSG post this month. If you didn't see it, I was trying to decide whether I should cut words to fit a specific market, or continue with the story as I wanted to tell it.

I decided to cut words! I realised I had no choice, I would kick myself if I didn't at least try - on account of my huge crush on this publisher! It was only 3300 words over the absolute maximum (and I checked, there's no leeway), I could cut that easily... In fact, my words in the IWSG post was easy peasy.

Oh dear... those dreaded last words.

As I started to cut a few words here and there, tightening sentences that admittedly were already pretty tight because I can't write any other way, I also started to add words: I needed to clarify a certain point I was trying to make, I'd cut off a train of thought halfway through. And I'd forgotten Christmas. When you're trying to denote the passing of years in a small number of words, Christmas is always a great bullet point.

My word count now stands at 4000 words over the maximum. Looking at the numbers alone, I can see where I can slice it - the story is top heavy, the first chapter is over three times the length of the final one. But I've read and re-read, and I just can't slash any more words without losing the impact of the story.

It looks like I won't be able to submit to this imprint after all...

The ending

I'm, once again, getting to the end of my novel. I've been redrafting a novel I first completed over a year ago. When I got to the end that first time, it wasn't as dramatic/amazing/perfect as I'd hoped.

I knew it needed more than just an edit, so I typed the whole thing up again from scratch, which helped because I've added a few scenes that have helped with the flow of the story and moved some chapters around.

But, with only about fifteen pages of the story left, I still haven't found my perfect ending. (By the way, fifteen pages for me is like fifty or sixty for you guys - there's still a lot of story to tell.) I'd hoped, once I got into the heads of the characters again the solution would be obvious. But it isn't.

People who read this novel in its last incarnation said the ending was good, perfectly fine... so maybe I should be happy with that. But there's just a part of me that wants to write something brilliant.

Do you sometimes know you can do better, but you're not sure how?

How do you overcome this?

Where's the fire?

It's a phrase can be used to mean What's the hurry? of course, but today I'm going to take it literally.

Yesterday my WIP flew from my fingers onto the screen, running free and wild, as I watched my story taking shape... Until the moment one character noted that the fire had taken hold of part of the building and the firemen were retreating and regrouping.

Oops!

What was the problem? I had not even hinted at a fire in the previous 2165 words, not a plume of smoke, not a smell, not one person pointing out the rescue of two trapped people might be hampered by the extensive heat.

How had I missed something so vital? Erm, I don't know. I was working from handwritten and typewritten versions, trying to merge them into something slightly different, and this fact kind of got missed off. In another part of the story that I've already written, a character mentions that even two days later the smell is still lingering, so you'd have thought I'd have remembered that at least! Except, I wrote that part of the story last week, so maybe not.

My choices are to delete what I've got and start again, or slide the fire into the scenes I've already written. I'm going to go with the second option, mostly because this is a first-and-a-half draft, and I know it will bear no resemblance to the final section anyway. I am in awe of people who edit as they go and have publishable work at the point they move on the next chapter. Me? No...

When I was at school, I loved technical drawing. If anyone has ever done it, you'll know you start of with a lot of pencil marks and the page looks like a complete mess of unintelligible lines. Then you flourish your 0.5 black liner and slowly, out of the jumble of pencil, comes a shape that makes sense - a 3D box or, more advanced, the floor plans of a house. That's what my writing is like, a jumbled mess until ta da!!

So, yes, today I will be squeezing a fire into my chapter, and shattering the zen-like calmness my characters had chosen to adopt!

What mistakes have you made when you've been writing?

Have you ever made glaring omissions?

Today's IWSG is brought to you by the letter O

Posting today because Alex is! :-)

Oh dear.

I've come to a realisation.

My writing has definitely improved! Yay!

How do I know? Well...

It all began about a month ago when I realised that I have a good number (about ten) short stories that have been published and/or won prizes over the course of the last... ahem... eighteen years that very few people would have ever read. This is because they were published in very small press magazines, or they won prizes but weren't published, or they won prizes and were published in little more than commemorative booklets.

So, I thought I'd gather them together and ebook them. Easy, I thought, they've already been published so I won't need to do much to them. And in some cases that's true - some of them don't need anything more than a little updating (I've got at least two stories where the characters are queuing to use a phone box!).

In others... oh dear...

You might remember me mentioning one particular story where I dreamt the opening lines, woke up, wrote the story without stopping, barely re-wrote and had it published within the year. I've spoken about it on this blog, I've mentioned it in my comments on other blogs...


Yep - that story is awful! Okay, not awful, but not very well done. The prose is clunky and repetitive, and there's a lot of telling and not showing; some of the sentences make no sense. And yet it was published - I earned the grand total of £12 for it!

The premise is brilliant - I still love the idea, and the characters, but it needs some serious red-pen intervention before I'll let anyone else read it. I've already gone through it once, cutting and adding, and moving and slashing - and now it's in a folder waiting for me to be strong enough to go through it again.

So, this month's insecurity is that as a writer I have never been as good as I'm going to be, and yet those stories I think are not so good will always exist. Someone, somewhere might have a copy of the magazine - as I do - because their story is also featured. Which means one day, they might find it and flick through it and find my story before their own, and possibly even read it... and I have no control over that.

My advice: always be as good as you can possibly be, and then maybe you won't have an oh dear moment of your own!

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It's been a while since I included the list of IWSG participants, so here they are. If you want to know more, please follow this link to Alex J Cavanaugh's blog.

Murdering my darlings

Phew... the past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, without a single word of new material written. So, at the weekend, I put all thoughts of marketing for Cat and the Dreamer on hold and got out my soon-to-be-submitted trilogy of novellas and read them as a whole, and - yay! - they worked. I held my breath, I got goosebumps, I wanted a character to do the opposite to what she was planning. I got caught up in my own stories!

Except for one. The second story in the collection was the first to be written - written eight years ago, to be exact. And as I was reading, I spotted a lot of changes that needed to be made. Even the first sentence, which I thought was spectacular when I first wrote it, now seems dated and cliched. And then, I saw it. I saw the worst piece of writing - a whole section that I'd shoehorned in, because I needed to get my character from C to D.

Out came my red pen, and... my darlings are gone - all 2000 of them. Murdered, slashed... gone :-(

Deleting words is not usually something I do. Not because they're all good, you understand. But because my work is usually shorter than I'm hoping and I spend a lot of time increasing the word count.


Currently there's nothing instead - just a big gaping hole in the plot. In this section, the MC has to lose her job,  introduce another character to the guy she likes, watch them flirt and then have an argument with him. It sounds easy enough, doesn't it? But the spectre of the old version is lingering. Even though I'm sitting down with a completely blank piece of paper, with my beautiful fountain pen poised, I'm struggling for inspiration.

So today's question is: have you ever needed to delete huge swathes of your work, and how did you fill the hole it left behind?