Tag: Writing

Z is for… Zoom

Day 30!

I’m so shocked at how fast April has gone. It really doesn’t seem two minutes since I saw the A to Z Blogging Challenge on Talli Roland’s blog and thought it sounded fun… What was I thinking?!
Well, ok, it was fun. I’ll do a more thoughtful post in a couple of days when I’ve recovered, but initial thoughts are mainly that I’m really really pleased that I finished it. It’s been hard at times to come up with posts, but it’s also been great to know that I’ve got a good few words down nearly every day and not all of them total waffle!
I’ve launched my ebook, my husband’s business, celebrated my daughter’s first birthday, had a few rants and done a couple of stories I was pleased with. So all in all a successful, if speedy, month!

Now zooming onto the next challenge – over at Sally Quilford’s blog we’re launching into May You Write Your Novel. Think NaNoWriMo at a sensible pace – 80k in 80 days. This is around 1000 words a day (obv!) which I want to aim for anyway, especially as I really want to get this first novel finished and start on the next one which is driving me crackers!
So don’t worry, I’ll not be posting everyday now but I’m hopefully using MYWYN (My Win, how cheerful!) to cheer myself & other loons on to get some great word miles under our belts.
Thanks for putting up with me this last month!

X, Rated

X is an ex-tremely ex-asperating causing many ex-pletives trying to think of a post for the A to Z Challenge. I’d go so far as to say it should be ex-peditiously ex-pelled from the alphabet, but that may be a slight ex-aggeration.

So in desperation, and we’re talking scraping the very bottom of the barrel here, I’m raiding the dictionary and trying to think of a passage that contains the first X words from the dictionary (Ten. I meant Ten. See what I did there? And I’m not including that in my list.)

The words are: X-acto knife, Xanadu, Xanax, xanthine, xanthoma, xanthophyll, X chromosome, Xe, xebec, Xenical (this is Oxford Concise 10th Ed).

Here goes…

Xavier replaced his X-acto knife with a sigh. He’d spent hours cutting the model pieces and his wrist was aching. He briefly imagined himself in Paradise, his own private Xanadu where Xanthia made him Sex-on-the-beach cocktails every hour and the only models he bothered with were the blonde bikini-wearing kind. He popped two more Xanax, then considered briefly and popped another two. The anxiety attacks were getting worse and he snarled as he pushed the paradise image a little further away, since he wouldn’t even be able to get on the plane without going into meltdown. Xavier stretched as he stood and wandered over to the window. Xanthia had left some document on the desk that she was working on; some essay about xanthines. She’d always been the scientific one while he was more creative. His reflection in the window caught his eye and he rubbed absently at the xanthoma on his arm, the redness from his fingers temporarily overpowering the yellow patch before it glared angrily back at him. It echoed the trees outside, being devoured by xanthophyll, their leaves glowing red and orange and yellow even though it was only September. He wondered what it was about chemistry that fascinated Xanthia so; maybe it was something to do with her X Chromosome. It was one of her favourite jokes that men were not all there – a chemist’s joke, he thought sourly – and maybe that missing piece was the factual, analytical skills Xanthia excelled at. A bottle of Xenical stood on Xanthia’s work, covering up a sentence about Xenon. Funny, he’d always thought she made up those words. They sounded like some trashy sci-fi novel where the author had strung random letters together to form names and language. He looked over at the picture on the wall, of a pretty xebec on sparkling turquoise water, and began dreaming of his Xanadu again.

Phew! Now, if anyone who does writing advice blogs wants to use this as an example, I’m willing to negotiate…

Post Script:

If you really can’t be bothered to look up the X words, I’ve done a very concise summary here:

X-acto knife: utility knife with very sharp blade

Xanadu: imaginary, wonderful place

Xanax: trademark for Alprazolam (anxiety drug)

xanthine: Crystalline compound formed by…yeah, I’m bored already too (not a scientist!)

xanthoma: irregular yellow patch on skin formed by depostion of lipids

xanthophyll: yellow or brown pigment causing autumn colours of leaves

X Chromosome: If you don’t know what this is you need to refresh your basic biology. The joke, of course, is that XY (the male combination) looks like it’s missing a leg from the 2nd X in XX (female).

Xe: the chemical Xenon

xebec: a small, historical three-masted ship

Xanical: drug used to treat obesity.

Reviewing the Situation

It’s amazing how precious reviews and feedback are, I’m finding. As someone who has a fairly fragile ego (yes, I do. Don’t look so shocked. Or snigger) I’d have thought I’d either not dare show anyone any work or else put it out, and scurry into the corner with my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear any reactions.

On the contrary, I’m almost hungry for feedback and reviews and criticism. I’ve been lucky enough to get some lovely reviews of my little ebook on Amazon already, but I want MORE! On the one hand, yes of course I want to hear people saying “Darling, it’s simply marvellous, you are absolutely going to be a number one bestseller” but I also really and truly want to hear what I’m doing wrong too. I have a shelf full of writing books and they are nearly all extremely helpful but what I’m finding is there is nothing as helpful as actually writing something and having someone who knows what they’re talking about point out what you could do differently. Let’s not say “wrong”, as obviously all opinions are subjective but someone who’s been round the block a few times or looking at your work with no bias can spot errors or give suggestions that you yourself can’t see. And I need that so much!

I went along to a workshop given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators last night (SCBWI = Scooby. So I’m told) and if you were following me on Twitter you were probably sick of me going on about it. It was the first time I’ve been to a writing workshop and the first time (at least since GCSE English) that I’ve sat down with people and discussed different texts, looking for what works and what doesn’t. We started with some published (and very good) texts, both a picture book and a full-length YA novel, then moved on to anonymous critiques of members’ work. We did three picture book texts, a picture book synopsis and mine was the only novel excerpt – my first three pages. I’d agonised over whether to put forward my synopsis or my actual text and printed off sets of each, making up my mind at the last minute to choose text as I really wanted to know if the opening answered the questions suggested by the leader (if you’re interested I’ll do a post about those at another time as they’re really helpful). The really good thing about the anonymous critiques was that since no-one knew whose the work was they were more upfront and honest, I think, than they would otherwise have been. I know I was. This meant you knew that the reactions you were getting were completely based on your work and the question of whether people liked you or not was not colouring their perceptions. It also meant you saw how people read your writing without you piping up saying “Oh by the way, this bit means XYZ.” The work I took was my main WIP, a YA story set in 1816 about a young girl called Emma, and although I’ve had some very good and kind friends read it and be honest about it, it’s a different experience getting that completely unbiased opinion and actually sneaking a look at how people react when they’re reading it. I was so pleased – I kept hearing little chuckles and I heard at least 3 people (there were only 9 of us there) say they’d want to read the whole book. In the discussion people “got” how I wanted Emma to come across and the little hints as to what was to come. I even got compared, for the humour, to a prolific published YA author which gave me the most amazing boost.

All in all I went home floating on air. It gave me the motivation I needed to really push through and get that first draft finished, and encouraged me no end. I cannot stress enough how grateful I am to the friends I keep pestering to read my work; both them and my experience last night convince me that I might just get somewhere one day.

I know most people reading this are already writing and have probably had similar experiences already, but if by any chance you’re a new writer who is serious about wanting to improve, PLEASE be brave and ask for feedback on your work. Reviews and critiques and that fresh pair of eyes are what make you grow. On the flip side, leave reviews for books you have read as those authors, I imagine, never tire of hearing what someone thought of a piece of work they have put all their energy and talent into.

I said at the beginning that I would have expected myself to not dare put work out for review. Actually, a couple of years ago I didn’t. I maybe asked my husband for an opinion but that would have been the limit. The first time I did dare ask someone else, they were so helpful it encouraged me to do more and more. Lesson to self? People want to help. Let them.

UPDATE: As Kirsty points out in the comments, Emma actually took over my blog back at the start of the year. If you fancy having a read, here it is!

Opposite of Amber

So my first failure of the A to Z Challenge – I missed N completely. Totally stumped on that one. I could think of topics – names for example – I just didn’t have anything remotely interesting to say!

Moving swiftly on, O comes very nicely to coincide with a book I was planning to review on here anyway. Continue reading “Opposite of Amber”

Kidlit

After much humming and haa-ing I’m coming more and more round to the idea that I am at heart a Young Adult writer. I know I should probably have decided this by now. I’ve been calling myself a writer now for two years and been a Dabbler for rather more than that, but there you go. Some of us are a bit slower on the uptake than others.

The thing is, I have an overactive imagination and the attention span of a flea. I love so many different types of books – romance, adventure, fantasy; teenage or adult or historical or women’s contemporary fiction – that I flit from wanting to write one type to another. But I keep coming back to two things. Firstly, romance. You’d think this would be my first love because it’s probably my favourite genre for light reading; specifically, historical romance – even more specifically, Regency romance. I’ve said a million times on here that my biggest influences were Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. My husband certainly thinks I should write this kind of story because I love reading them so much and I know the world like the back of my hand. And I do love the times when I’m writing this style. I’ve got a novella on the go that I’m pretty happy with. And to be perfectly honest, it’s probably the easier (note I said ‘easi-ER’, I’m far from kidding myself that any book is ‘easy’ to write) book for me to write, simply because for so long I’ve lived and breathed Regency romance. I even have a half-made Regency ball-gown tucked away in the linen chest (seriously. It was for a charity ball but I ran out of time and can’t bring myself to throw it away. It’s another project I will finish ‘one day’).

But for a long time I’ve been awed by the scope of the Young Adult novels around. The authors I’m being introduced to (Gillian Philip, Nicola Morgan, Cat Clarke, Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo and the list goes on and on and on) and the stories they’ve written are amazing. There’s a to-be-read list as long as my arm and there seems no limit to what you can write about. The idea of putting myself alongside those authors feels a bit pretentious and getting too big for my boots but the truth is they are just so inspiring.

I remember being a teenage reader (pre-empting any cheeky comments, it wasn’t THAT long ago) and the excitement of losing myself in a book. Some of my childhood books are still my favourite books – Narnia, pretty much anything by Edith Nesbit or Enid Blyton (St Clare’s, anyone?) The Chalet School series, A Little Princess or The Secret Garden – before I moved onto Georgette Heyer then Jane Austen. I don’t know how those books would do today if they were coming new to the market and the books I’m seeing in the Young Adult sections are completely different, but the point is that the books I was introduced to as a young reader stayed with me. I want to write one of those books. Again, not another Railway Children, but a book that some teenager might read and keep on their shelves as an old favourite when they’re thirty or fifty or seventy. Maybe the book that encourages a teenager to keep reading when they’re on the point of being distracted by something shinier and noisier.

There are three story ideas dancing around in my head, and have been for a while. The first is my Regency – not a romance, but an adventure – which I’ve had on the go for a while and am making slow but sure progress with. The others are completely contrasting and more… involved. Not particularly complicated, but they are going to take a LOT of imagination and constructing an entirely different world to the ones I’ve been used to. The thing is, they’ve all come into my head as books for teenagers. It puts a lot of pressure on – I know how critical a teenager can be and the demand is basically that I write the best book I can and then make it better. Gulp. But it also opens up immense possibilities as to where the story can go, and that’s one of the things I find so exciting about kidlit. Of course, nothing is set in stone. I will write the best books I can and I guess that will determine what type of author I am!

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On a side note, I’m considering calling it a day with the A to Z Blogging Challenge. It’s been interesting and motivating coming up with a daily post, and I’m tempted to carry on because I’ve committed to it and it would be fun to see what happens (especially at W, X, Y and Z…) but I’m not sure it’s doing me any favours. Writing a post because it’s something I do daily probably isn’t producing my best posts, and I could be using the time I’m thinking of and writing blog posts on the fiction. And due to IMMENSE tiredness and the madness that is two small children, that time is precious.

On the other hand, it is getting me in the discipline of doing some writing every day. I dunno. I’d appreciate any thoughts from anyone? If you’ve been reading the blog, I’d be really grateful for any comments on how it’s going and whether it’s worth keeping up the challenge to the end of April. And thanks for reading so far!