Category Archives: writing

Twiceborn is out!

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How long have I been writing? Depends on what you count as writing.

There was that little Easter story I wrote and illustrated for my mother when I was about seven. So cute! Or the three exercise books I filled with the story of the Romney children when I was in fifth class. It was a blatant Enid Blyton Famous Five rip-off, but despite all those words, I never finished it.

My next big writing spurt was in Year 8. I had a fabulous English teacher, who was very encouraging of my writing. (As it happened, his name was Brian Caswell, and he’s now a well-known writer himself.) I actually managed to finish a book that year. By then I’d progressed from Enid Blyton rip-offs to Georgette Heyer ones. I shudder now to think of it, but to his credit he read it with a straight face and urged me to keep writing.

So I did. But, being me, the finishing part was a real problem. Sure, I started lots of novels over the years, always with much enthusiasm. I even remember declaring 1994 to be “the year of the novel”, but that teenage Regency romance was the last one I finished until 2007, when the ducklings were at last old enough for me to be able to string two thoughts together in a coherent manner again.

It was also the year I discovered NaNoWriMo, which has been a huge motivator for me ever since. I completed the first draft of a contemporary romance that year, and was hugely proud of myself.

But of course, “first draft finished” and “publishable quality finished” are two very different beasts. I did NaNoWriMo again every year except one, and produced many more first drafts, but I didn’t revise any to a publishable stage until this year, 2014.

That novel is Twiceborn, and the ebook is available now on Amazon.

Or to put it another way:

OMG I PUBLISHED A BOOK!!!

I’ve been waiting such a long time to say that.

From character flaw to superpower in one easy lesson

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 It’s November, which means it’s National Novel Writing Month, that crazy, stressful, sometimes blissful time of year when hundreds of thousands of people all over the world decide to write a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

Did I mention crazy and stressful?

And yet, every year I do it again. Which means that it’s also that time of year when I feel an urgent desire to quilt. Or crochet. Or even garden (and I hate gardening). Basically, when I have to write, I desperately want to do something – anything – else!

I mean, sure, I like writing (or else this wouldn’t be my seventh Nano, right?). Yet I have this odd character flaw, that I’m a real grass-is-always-greener kind of person. If I’m writing, I’d rather be quilting. If I’m quilting I’d rather be scrapbooking. And if I’m scrapbooking … you get the picture.

Yet I always force myself through the wordmines of Nano each year, because I’m basically lazy, and the added pressure of the Nano deadline really works to make me finish a first draft in just one month. Any other time of year it takes me at least two.

This year, case in point, I was working on the first draft of another novel (the third in the Twiceborn series), which was meant to be finished before November, but I just hadn’t been able to push myself to get it done. I only had about eight scenes to go, but I had to set it aside in order to begin my new Nano novel. (And yes, I did consider skipping Nano in favour of just finishing the damn book already, but since Nano is my big chance to get a whole first draft in one month, I didn’t want to give up that opportunity.)

I told myself I could work on both at once, but I’ve never been able to do that before. I have enough trouble coming up with one novel on the fly, without trying to cram a completely different story into my limited creative brainspace.

So I was plugging away on my Nano novel, but feeling more and more guilty about the unfinished one, when I decided, dammit, I was going to give it a go.

And lo and behold – what happened? Instead of being harder than writing them individually, it was actually easier! I wrote faster and with more dedication, knowing I had to make my wordcount on both of them each day.

But it was more than that – it was that whole grass-is-always-greener thing coming into play. Suddenly what had been a character flaw started working in my favour. When I was working on one, my subconscious would be mulling over the other one, getting excited about the next scene coming, and I’d happily switch. Then when I got tired of that one, or ran out of inspiration, the other would be calling to me.

Yesterday I wrote nearly 4,000 words on one and 2,500 on the other. (And yes, my shoulders are killing me, thank you for asking.) To quote the great Vizzini: “inconceivable!”

So I seem to have acquired writing superpowers. Just in the nick of time, too.  I hope they stick around for a while. As long as I don’t also find some writing kryptonite, November should be a very productive month.

What about you? Are you doing Nano? If so, have you found any ways to make yourself more productive?

3 great writing tips from Baby Duck

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Baby Duck and I were chatting about writing on the walk to school this morning. I said I was hoping to get a fair bit done on book 3 of the Twiceborn trilogy today, since yesterday was the first day I’d worked on it since Friday, and I only got about 1100 words done.

“So are you going to start writing as soon as you get home?” he asked.

Low blow! This kid knows me too well.

“You should do that instead of spending all your time reading random websites on the internet, you know.”

Yes, I do know. In fact I tell myself so many times every day. I thought about telling him I was building up my presence on social media, but I knew he wouldn’t accept any such namby-pamby excuse. Writers write!

Except, you know, when they don’t …

“Sometimes it’s not so easy to just sit down and write,” I said. “You have to know whatyou’re going to write first, and I’m not too sure yet where the story is going.”

“Then why didn’t you spend time on the days you didn’t write thinking about the plot?” he asked.

This is why Baby Duck will probably be a better writer than me one day. This kid is organised. I mean, scary organised. He comes home every day and sits straight down and does his homework without being told. He starts his assignments weeks in advance. Weeks! It’s not natural!

I flailed around a bit more, put on the spot by my eleven-year-old son.

“Well, I know what’s going to happen in a general way. But it’s hard to plan, at the really detailed level you need for scene-writing, exactly what’s going to happen. Whenever I start thinking about it I usually get distracted by a million other things.”

“You should start at the end and work backwards,” he said. “Then you’ll know where you have to end up.”

So there you have it, straight from the mouth of my tiny writing guru:

  1.        Resist the temptation to goof off on the internet. When it’s time to write, write.
  2.        In between writing sessions, plan what to write next.
  3.        If you get stuck with plotting forwards, work backwards from the end instead.

I should hire the kid out to writers’ conferences.

What about you? Do you have any good writing tips? Anything that works for you as motivation, or to get you past a blockage? Struggling writer wants to know!

The bathroom: most creative room in the house

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I was going to say it was the “most productive” room in the house, but I didn’t want anyone leaping to the wrong conclusion.

Baby Duck came in as I started writing this post.

“Why is it the most creative room in the house? Oh, I guess because you spend so much time sitting there.” Then the most evil grin spread across his face. “Or should I say …”

I quickly cut him off. “Sitting is fine.”

Cheeky kid.

“Where do you get your ideas?” is a question writers hear a lot. My number one answer in general is “in the bath”. When I’m drafting a novel I hop into the bath nearly every night. Something about the relaxation of it – or maybe the sheer boredom of sitting there with nothing to do or look at – prompts the ideas to flow. I can almost always rely on a nice long bath to give me a breakthrough when I don’t know where the story is going next.

But that’s in general. Today I want to tell you about the time when a bathroom gave me a very specific idea, which became the genesis of my forthcoming novel Twiceborn.

It was on a visit to a Gold Class cinema. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a very swish movie-going experience. There are only about forty seats in the whole theatre, and they’re big reclining armchairs grouped in pairs with a table between them. There’s a separate bar area where you can order meals and drinks to be brought to you during the movie. Obviously it’s more expensive than a regular trip to the cinema, but it’s a nice luxury for the occasional treat.

They also have separate toilets, which are a lot more upmarket than the ones for general movie-goers. Spacious and gleaming, they feature beautiful tiles, automatic taps – and the ones at our local Gold Class have the most enormousstalls. The first time I visited one I remember thinking, wow, these are like personal change rooms. You could do anything in here!

Which of course started the wheels in my little writer’s brain turning over. I pictured a pregnant woman entering such a stall, then stripping off her clothes to reveal the pregnancy was only a prosthesis, which she then removed. Then she dressed in a new outfit, complete with wig, and walked out of the bathroom a completely different woman to the one who walked in, deceiving the people who were watching for her.

Who was this woman? Who was following her and why? I knew she was in danger, but not what form the threat took.

I needed a lot more ideas to make a book, but that’s how books grow. You start with one little glimmering of an idea, then you hurl a whole bunch of other ideas at it, till something new and sparkly results from the collision.

That scene in the bathroom became part of the first scene of Twiceborn. A whole 90,000- word novel resulted from one moment of marvelling at the size of the Gold Class bathroom stalls.

Best bathroom visit ever.Where do you do your best thinking? Ever had a great idea in a really odd place?

Dr Who and the Disappointing Dinosaur

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Well, the new season of Dr Who premiered last night, complete with new Doctor Peter Capaldi. The verdict at our house? Overall, a resounding “meh”.

Baby Duck thought it was great, but his logic works like this: I love Dr Who. This was Dr Who. Therefore I loved it.

The Carnivore, about halfway through the episode, said: “If this was my first ever episode of Dr Who, I’d never watch it again.” Ouch.

I’m keeping an open mind about Peter Capaldi. He spent a lot of this first episode dazed and demented from his regeneration, so we don’t have a clear handle yet on how he’s going to play the role. There were some amusing one-liners and a great rant that give me hope I may one day come to accept the loss of Matt Smith (sob).

But the writers did him no favours, with a pretty ho-hum episode. It started off quite promising, with the Tardis arriving in Victorian London inside a time-travelling T-rex, which then chucked it up into the Thames.

Cool! You can’t get a much more dramatic entry than that. Plus, what’s not to love about a dinosaur in Victorian London? I was intrigued to see where they were going with this.

Sadly, the answer was “nowhere”. The dinosaur played no more part in a story that dragged its way through many not-very-exciting conversations to arrive at last at a mildly interesting cyborg plot.

The whole dinosaur thing reminded me very much of how the advice to “start your story with action” is sometimes misinterpreted by beginning writers. It can’t just be action for its own sake, and it mustn’t be action that has nothing to do with the bulk of the story which follows. No high speed car chases that turn out to be dreams, or murder scenes which are actually something being watched on TV by the main character.

No dinosaurs which have nothing to do with the rest of the plot.

The writers of Dr Who are definitely not beginners, which makes it all the more surprising. Let’s hope the rest of the season only has surprises of the good kind.

 

Did you watch it? What did you think?

Elsewhere, on the glorious Internet …

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Haven’t done one of these posts for a while! Baby Duck doesn’t like too many linktastic posts, and since he’s my main audience I like to keep him happy! But I’ve come across some interesting tidbits in my travels across the glorious Internet this week, so I thought I’d share them with you.

First some exciting news for Baby Duck and the legions of Dr Who fans out there: the new series starts in Australia on Sunday 24th August! I have a worrying suspicion that I won’t like Peter Capaldi as much as Matt Smith, but I’m keeping an open mind. The BBC has some photos from the first feature-length episode “Deep Breath” here.

Next, something that would have rocked my teenage self to the core: the dragonriders of Pern may be coming to the big screen! Warner Bros has optioned the whole series. Admittedly, movie options come and go all the time, and don’t necessarily lead to a movie, but still! I think it was the Pern books more than anything else that fostered my lifelong obsession with dragons. One day not too far away there will be a new dragon book in the world, written by yours truly, and Anne MacCaffrey’s marvellous series is partly to blame.

And speaking of writing: Tansy Rayner Roberts does a great interview with writer Foz Meadows as part of the ongoing “Snapshots” series. Foz voices her disquiet with the idea that everything about your life pre-baby should cease to matter once you become a mother. “You can love your children without being ready or willing to sacrifice the most integral parts of yourself on the altar of motherhood.”

This really resonated with me. My children are the focus of my life, but even so I was hanging out for Baby Duck to start school so I could start writing again. In the end I couldn’t wait that long, and snatched writing time while he was at preschool or watching TV. It’s so important to have some identity other than “mother”. I think it’s good for the kids too, to see that mum is a real person with goals and dreams that don’t revolve around them.

 Real people – even grown-up people – should have a little fun in their lives too. Author Kristen Lamb discusses the lack of “play time” in the lives of adults and is very wise on how our modern “all work and no play” culture is bad for creativity.

But luckily, creativity isn’t dead! For a beautiful burst of colour, check out Faith’s gorgeous quilt. It’s a fresh modern take on the old faithful “flying geese” pattern. Love it!

Savage writers and gentle readers

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You know how you’re reading along, enjoying a book, and all of a sudden the writer kills off your favourite character. Or something really terrible happens, and horrendous suffering ensues. Or maybe a really cute puppy gets kicked – but something the author does makes you think they must have absolutely no soul.

And when you look at the number of books out there where something gruesome and/or tragic occurs, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s a whole lotta soulless writers running around out there.

I’ve come to the conclusion (admittedly only based on a sample of one, so the data could be off) that we writers do come equipped with both hearts and souls. But writers keep their writer-selves in a separate box to their reader-selves. The kick a writer gets out of writing something horrific is very different to how they might feel confronted with reading that in someone else’s book. When you’re writing you’re thinking about plot and cool twists, how to make your characters suffer (because stories about happy contented people are boring), and all the technicalities of doing that in the most effective way. You’re not experiencing the story and all its emotional highs and lows the way a reader coming to it fresh does.

Case in point: I’ve started revising The Twiceborn Queen, the sequel to Twiceborn. When I wrote the first draft I killed off a major character from the first book. There were good story-related reasons to do so, but honestly? I was just bored with him. I could have worked to make him more interesting, but killing him off was fun.

As a reader I hate it when sad things happen in books. I know if I bought this book expecting a fun fantasy read, only to have a favourite character from the first book die on me, I’d be disappointed and angry. It might turn me off the series.

So now I’m torn. Do I let writer-me win and keep the death? Kill, maim, destroy!Or do I bow to my gentler reader-self, and revise him back into health and happiness? No wonder people think writers are crazy: not only do we spend half our time playing with imaginary people in our heads, but we argue with ourselves too.

What about you? Does it put you off a series when a favourite character dies?

Getting closer

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blurb-small

My novel Twiceborn is another step closer to finding its way into the world. Yay! Do you like the new supermultigrated blurb?

I’ve just finished a big revision job: going through and adding more details.

I’m a lean writer (sadly that’s a metaphor – my jeans are getting too tight again. Damn things must have shrunk in the wash …). My natural instinct is to get to the point, not waffle on about the scenery or what people look like. Of course no one wants to read five pages describing the view, but all my beta readers agree that I go too far in the other direction.

So what started as a 60,000-word first draft, which became a 72,000-word revision and then an 82,000-word revision, is now fast closing in on 88,000 words as I flesh out the world and the story of Kate and all the other characters I’ve grown to love. (Well, some of them I don’t love, but that’s okay. You’re not meant to like the bad guys!) By this time next week this final revision should be finished, and Twiceborn will be off to a professional editor.

It’s getting closer! Close enough to start getting excited, though there’s still a lot to be done. Close enough to start imagining what it will be like to hold a book in my hands that has my name on the cover.

I could get used to this authoring stuff!

 

Would you read this book?

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Okay, suppose you’re looking for a new urban fantasy to read. Would this blurb entice you to pick up the book?

“Whoever said ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’ had never been in courier Kate Donohue’s shoes. She can’t remember anything from a special rush job this afternoon, but whatever happened must have been pretty wild, because now there’s a werewolf in her kitchen trying to kill her. And he’s just the first in line. Suddenly Kate’s running for her life, but if she doesn’t remember what happened soon, more than her life will be at stake.”

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m working on the blurb for my upcoming book, previously only known by the highly imaginative title “Dragon novel”, but now tentatively titled Twiceborn.
I feel as if that last sentence needs work. It seems to kind of fade off, but I don’t want to give too much away. Blurb-writing is harder than it looks!
Here’s another, slightly longer version, with a different last sentence:

“Whoever said ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’ had never been in courier Kate Donohue’s shoes. She can’t remember anything from a special rush job this afternoon, but whatever happened must have been pretty wild, because now there’s a werewolf in her kitchen trying to kill her. And he’s just the first in line. 

It’s a nasty introduction to the hidden world of the shifters, but the news gets worse. It’s a world at war, and Kate will be a casualty if she can’t remember what happened – but first she has to live through the night.”

Any better? Worse? What do you think?

5 ways running is like writing

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As I shuffled down the road this morning, breathing so hard I sounded like an obscene phone call, it occurred to me that running has a lot in common with writing.

1.      I’d much rather stay in bed where it’s warm than get up and do it.

2.      I look at how far there is to go and feel certain I’ll never make it all the way to the end.

3.      Doing it is painful, but I want to keep going because the virtuous glow of achievement I get afterwards brightens my whole day.

4.      Doing it is painful – except for those rare moments that make it all worthwhile, when I feel like I’m flying and it’s so effortless I think I could go on forever. (In running, these are the downhill bits. In writing it’s generally the last few scenes as you race to the end of the book.)

5.      I know that if I persist I’ll gradually improve, so that there’ll be more flying and less painful staggering. At least I hope so!
At the moment my running prowess would probably get me a part as a zombie extra in a movie. Anyone got any good running tips for me? (Other than: don’t.)