Your Perfect Environment

Now, I saw something intriguing and my immediate instinct was to turn it into a prompt, but on second thoughts I just want to dispense it as a little tidbit of something interesting.

There is a club in London that plays only power ballads. ONLY power ballads. 'Ultimate Power.' And people go mad for it, singing their hearts out to songs of self-indulgence. Good on them. Its a place to indulge in less sordid guilty pleasures and I wish there were more places like this, quirky, specific, a congregation of people with the same thing on their mind.

What amazes me is that it's so successful when there is a very clear limit to their playlist. The only other example I can think of is the English church.

You could certainly use it as a prompt and as an indulgent 'what if': What if you ran a business providing people with your ideal environment and it became a phenomenon? What is it you wished everyone else could share? Peaceful serenity? Loads of noise? Labyrinths of wonder? Jungle climbing? Swimming pools with fresh river water? And what would be the worst thing to jeopardise your perfect place?

Posting Because I Ought To

It's summer. And although I never intended to take a holiday, this is apparently what I am doing. I've finished editing my novel and I am exhausted! I can't face writing these days, let alone talking about writing. Meanwhile I've been keeping busy with my crafts and learning how to make my own clothes. (It's coming on well.)

I know this sickness is temporary and already some ideas are itching at me to be written down and given birth. I doubt I'll be gone another month. There's just too much to do.

Meanwhile, here's my online shop of crafts:

(In the righthand column.)

Writing Exercise 13: The Water At Night

I know I did a water one recently but as I just finished an impressionist painting of the sea at night I found some beautiful online art, each very similar but different. Each of them hold a fantasy character (well, a victorian can be part of a fantasy) by the sea at night. And so I thought the perfect exercise would be to connect the characters. A bit of connect the dots fun. Each of them somehow knows, or runs into, the others. Each visits the sea at a different time in the same night.

The questions for you to answer are:
Why do they each need to visit the sea?
How are they connected?

I have my ideas but I'm going to keep them to myself. Let's just say there are some fun possibilities, involving romance and intrigue. :P


By the Sea by *QueerAngel8900 on deviantART


where sea meets sky by ~xxbloodyknuckles on deviantART


Bride of The Crimson Sea by *fallen-angel-24 on deviantART

Longer than expected

You may have noticed the sudden decline in my posts, even with the vague promise of returning. The truth is I have never edited any piece of writing so much in my life. Once, twice, possibly three times. Then I get bored and give up. This time I'm bored but not giving up. It feels like the five hundreth draft and there's still more things to fix. The only thing motivating me is that I have come too far to stop. Far too far. And what might happen if I finally produce something that is well and truly polished beyond my regular spit-shine? I am afraid. It's another thing slowing me down. What if it I can't make it better? What if at the end of all my efforts it still won't be polished?

This is a bit more personal than I like to get but it is the truth of the matter. And by acknowledging it I hope to banish it and move on, send it out and forget about it while throwing myself into the joy of creativity once more.

"If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything," - said some guy on a bbc business program. He's right.

Writing Exercise 12: Damsels with Balls

Cassandra by *mari-na on deviantART

As the title suggests, this is about a strong female character. The theme is 'Greek Myth'. Options for potential stories include a modern retelling, making a female the lead, or (this is my favourite) creating a new one where the heroine's pride leads to her downfall. Some confident gesture puts her in peril. Perhaps she spurns a king and is banished? There are a lot of familiar trials to put on your character to struggle free from.

That's the plot pretty much taken care of. Too formulaic for you? Then use this exercise to focus on creating a sympathetic character, despite her flaws, and creating reader empathy. Most importantly, focus on creating a gripping beginning. There'll be time for atmosphere later. (And isn't atmosphere the easy part for most of us? You'd hardly be stretching yourself to practice what you're good at.)

Good luck!

Where have I been?

It has been a while... Longer than I thought, actually, since I posted here. It's a shame but here I am again. Where have I been?

Writing by hand. Yup. I printed off a novel draft and have been spending the last month pouring over it with a pen and a biscuit. I really believed my computer was my oxygen until then. I've hardly used the web for anything other than emails and the occaisional episode of Homes Under the Hammer (my guilty pleasure).

I must say, since I used scribophile my editing has vastly improved. I was in the habit of just letting my first drafts lie, mistakes and all, because I was aware there were plenty of faults but they were just too daunting to tackle. No longer.

So this is a note to say thank you scribophile and hello to the internet once more. :)

Writing Exercise 11: Water

The elements are open to much interpretation. This exercise is about focusing on the aspects of water. It's inspired by the video for We Want War by These New Puritans, below. 

The only requirement of this exercise is to write about a character obsessed with water. Narrated directly or indirectly, you choose. He/she could be suicidal, considering drowning, could be rabid and terrified of water, could be a health nut or obsessed with cleanliness or just someone who loves water. The possibilities are endless.
But there should be one particular character that draws you more than the others you come up with and one aspect of water that best appeals to you: fluidity, clarity... etc.

Final ROW update: Ha Ha! Just!

I believed yesterday that I had nearly finished! Just one small scene to go, and actually spent the day celebrating rather than finishing! But just this minute have finished my first draft. I already have a list of issues to revise in the second draft but it shouldn't be half as challenging to edit than my NaNo, which sits, looking daunting, on a shelf.

Im off to have it printed and spiral-bound tomorrow! With an extra wide margin for red-pen notes.

Congratulations to everyone else who made it, and everyone who tried!

Writing Exercise 12: Funny Pic-Turned-Idea

I saw this comic and just had to laugh:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1vrwMu/cartoonist.name/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/bizzaro-1.jpg

But then I thought that there are probably lots of crazy unconsidered theories for the death of the dinosaurs.

This prompt is not so much about creating prose, as brainstorming ideas. (If you've read my conclusions on Wolf Hall, you'll know how it upset me that poor prose is acceptable if it supports a good idea. Let's learn by example. The idea is more important than the quality, in the eyes of an agent, so it's definitely an area that we can all work on.)

So go, and bring back insane but convincing theories as to who killed the dinosaurs. Mass suicide perhaps? The rat-like beings that preceded us tripped them all up? I'm sure you'll think of something better.

Characters: What Made the Greats Great?

Real life characters.

I'm mentioning reality because isn't it the aim of most writers to take great believable characters, even if they can be a little exaggerated, and putting them into neat little plots of our own malicious devising?

The BBC gives a list of resources with a very brief history tied to each name. You may be a learned scholar but I doubt that you'll know every person on this list. For example I didn't know Edward Jenner, pioneer of immunology.

These are the people that have stuck, the ones that are remembered (even if we're not as brushed up as we should be).

From the examples there's a lot of raw material to work with. Take one character and inverse them? Cross them with another? Adjust and tweak and I feel this may be the perfect source for strong characters.

If you have an eye you may pick up on a trend amongst them. It may be all you need for your own infinite source of majestic and long-lasting characters. (Notice that I never said 'good'. Check out Anne Boleyn. I had forgotten the end to her tale.)

Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/j.shtml

Row Update: the Winding Path to Victory

It seems I must always have highs and lows in writing - two days of absurdly fast scribbling followed by two days of wanting to write but constantly deleting each line written.
Today ought to be an up day! I keep thinking about the deadline. It has made my good days even more productive and my low days even less.
There's only so much self-slapping I can administer. =P

By the way, did you catch the moon illusion last night?

Row Update - Late

I had a day, I'm sure everyone gets this, where I took one look at my work and thought: 'Crap. I can't bring myself to work on this. It's awful.'

I've had them before. They go away with a good nap or a good outing. But that day I picked up my next book to read, Wolf Hall, got three pages in and thought: 'Crap! It's not just my imagination.' Then I picked up another potential book, written by a nobel prize winner in literature, and also found it crap. I think that, right there, shows I was having an off day.

Reading on with Wolf Hall, I realised I had reason, though it didn't occur to me at the time: half the time 'he' refers to the protagonist, who is names all of two times in every ten pages, other times it refers the rest of the rather massive cast of male characters. I could never tell who was speaking. Even so, the story's interesting. I suppose it proves a point: the idea of the book is more important than the quality of the prose. Yet I feel a constant itch to critique it a la scribophile.

So, back to progress, it's creeping forward, happy to say, and I'm starting to be happy with  half-finished query letter.

Alert! Authonomy! Alert!

'Ello, what's all this then?

Here I was hearing horror stories about how the publishing industry dictates what we get on our shelves, as a sort of automaton that picks based on random impulses. But (thanks to reading the fine print on the inside of Wolf Hall) I was lead to discover www.authonomy.com . 

Who of you knew of this site? It should be made known to everyone who likes to read, let alone write.

Participants can post the first 10,000 words min of a manuscript and readers dictate trends based on how much these are liked, which attracts the attention of the publishers and editors of HarperCollins. People who stories that grow on to become high-ranking are marked as talent spotters and their tastes given more weight. It really is a way for letting people other than publishers decide what should be published and I hope to see this website grow to bursting point with life and activity from the book-loving community, though I fear the exact opposite will happen.

Let's take charge!

Writing Exercise 11: Re-Writing Memories

The latest and most accepted theory about long-term memories in the brain is that every time we remember a memory, we re-write it in our brains. Usually as almost identical. These different versions, all stored together, combine to for the memory you will conjure up the next time, which will have another copy, slightly different, saved.

It's a bit of a concept to wrap your head around. Surely the memories you hold dear haven't changed in your mind. In essence probably not, though they have been updated with newer versions of the same thing.

Anyway, to the exercise.

1) Write a 200-250 word scene.
2) re-write it without looking at the first story you wrote. Just using memory.
3) Do this again, based on your latest version until you have three or four variations of the same scene.
What do they have in common?
What changed?
If it doesn't teach you about your writing style, it'll still help you realise the essence of your ideas which run through your stories and hopefully make editing less painful, knowing there are hundreds of ways to get your same essence across.


The Essence of Evil by *BlackMysticA on deviantART

ROW update

I must hang my head in shame.

I have been meaning, time and again, to work my hours. I think I've rendered the concept of deadlines moot. But life happens and my ultimate, final, be all and end all deadline is the end of ROW. I have to remember that and not wince at the lack of time.

I am sorry for not commenting on enough blogs. (I usually have nothing to say beyond 'I read your post.' How dull for a writer!) I have been reading quite a few though and it's good to know I'm not alone, though it doesn't make me feel less guilty.

Good luck to all who've made it this far! We still have time to reach the ultimate ROW goals, no matter how far behind, if we start getting really serious from now.