Being your own cheerleader

I wrote a little tweet last week about how, sometimes in life, you have to be your own cheerleader. You can't expect other people to understand your goals and your successes in the same way that you understand them. That tweet was in response to the fact that I'd just completed a 10 k run in the freezing cold and knocked a few minutes off my time. I got home, jubilant, sweaty and cold (an odd combination) and my husband was like 'Oh yeah, nice one' and then went about his business. I sort of wanted a confetti explosion, perhaps some applause - at the very least a high five. But as far as hubby is concerned, I've run 10 k before, so what was different about this time? He didn't know how I'd struggled up those hills, or how many times I'd thought about stopping or just walking, or considered taking a short cut just to get home earlier. How could he know that?

Similarly, when it comes to writing, you can't expect other people (non-writers, especially) to understand how some days are so much harder than others, or how some times it feels like you're never going to finish, and then other days it's like you've won. So at times like this you have to be your own cheerleader. You have to push through the tough days, and revel in the good days, and pat yourself on the back for even attempting to write a novel. No one else in the entire world - and this includes other writers - is going to know what this effort costs you.

But...a caveat. Sometimes we self-cheerleaders can be guilty of going too easy on ourselves. For example, for the past week or so I have been giving myself a break. No good reason, really, except a hard couple of weeks at work and a tough weekend. There hasn't been time to get really stuck into it, I've told myself, so I may as well take some time off, have a break, and return to it refreshed. But when? When will I return to it? I could be doing it right now, but I'm writing this. I could have done it yesterday but I spent much of the day distracting myself with You Tube. On Friday - a perfect bank holiday opportunity - I actually cleaned the oven, rather than write. Not just the oven, I actually took a toothbrush to the window frames. I mean, that's some quality procrastination. My house looks better, my novel does not.

And now, to add some extra pressure, I have signed up for Camp Nanowrimo. I've decided I am going to write 30 000 words in April, and that will form the beginning of the sequel to Chase. Have I finished Chase? No. No, I haven't. So why am I starting on the sequel? I honestly don't know. Probably because I want to feel good about writing again, whereas my feelings towards editing are mixed at best. I'm going to have to dig deep, find those pom poms, and work bloody hard in the next few months to start the sequel and finish the original and start approaching agents before my self-appointed deadline of my 30th birthday this July.

So I need to stop giving myself a break and sart working, right now.

Accidental almost plagiarism

So the other day I started reading a book - the third in a trilogy I started some time ago. I wasn't that far into the book when I came across a word I recognised - a word I realised with horror I have been using in my own story without realising I had stolen it. To clarify, it's more than a word, it's a concept. I suppose this post isn't going to make any sense without a little more info. Ok...but don't judge me, alright?

The book I'm reading is Requiem, the third in the Delirium series by Lauren Oliver. (So far it's pretty good. Not my favourite series, but worth a read if you're a fan of the genre.) The word is 'Pairing'. These books, in case you weren't aware, are set in a dystopian future where love is considered a disease and a cure is compulsory. Lots of other stuff is going on, I don't want to go into too much detail, but part of this society is that people are paired according to their interests and characteristics, so marriages still exist but they're purely functional. In my book, matches are made for similarly functional reasons - to promote unity and encourage (enforce) reproduction within the small rebel community that is holding my main character, Chase, hostage. The wider society is very different than the one in Lauren Oliver's series, but obviously they're both YA and they're both dystopian. I can't go on using 'pairing'. I have to find another word. 'Matched' is also out thanks to the Ally Condie series...I will be checking the online thesaurus and continuing to edit my book.

This accidental almost plagiarism is worrying. One of my major fears with this book is that people will read it and say they've read it all before. I think it's fairly original (I'm not going to go so far as to say groundbreaking, but it's a concept that I think is pretty interesting, and something that's been making the news a lot lately), but saying something is unoriginal is a well used critique. I have a strong female main character, two potential love interests, a dystopian future, a controlling government of sorts...I know those are well used plot points. I just have to hope that the way I've threaded it all together is different enough to be special!

I'm thinking about making my next blog post an excerpt from the book...Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Anyone want to pick a page number between 1 and 250 for me to start at?

Taylor Markham

The other day I promised you a post on Taylor Markham of 'On the Jellicoe Road', so here that is.

I have to begin by saying that, I suppose, my understanding of Taylor grew with my understanding of what was actually going on in the book. It's one of those that goes straight in without explaining a whole lot, leaving you kind of wondering for the first I don't know how many pages* whether I really cared what was going on. But I don't often give up on a book, so I persevered and it was worth it. By the time I had a grasp for the story, I was gripped by Taylor and her struggle to build relationships with people based on her feelings of loss and abandonment.

I don't want to talk too much about the actual plot, but I think it's worth trying to identify a few of the things that I loved about this character.

1) Her pain.
I don't know if you guys know David Farland, but he does this great newsletter called 'David Farland's Daily Kick in the Pants' where he doles out bitesize advice for novelists. They're free. You should sign up for them. Anyway, one of his constant pieces of advice is to put your characters through the ringer. Your reader will always be drawn to the character in the most pain. And it doesn't have to be physical. (He explains it way better than I do. You should sign up.) Taylor's pain is evident from the often detached style of writing, the way she shies away from any intimacy with any of her schoolmates or even the one person she looks to as a mother. You can tell she's pushing people away because she fears rejection, and it makes you - the reader - feel pain just to witness it. She's so lost.

2) Her weaknesses.
This ties in with the above, really. Her main weakness is her tendency to push away the people she needs the most. But there's also a physical weakness - asthma - which seems to affect her in times of emotional trauma rather than from actual physical activity, which just shows how deeply - how physically - the psychological stress is getting to her.

3) Her strength.
In spite of her difficult upringing and the fact that she hasn't formed a great connection with the kids in her school, Taylor is loyal to the core and does whatever is necessary to make sure these kids are protected. She also has the courage to face up to her past, even though it's a past most would rather forget.

So, in a completely different setting, she has the qualities that I have also admired in the likes of Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior and all our other YA heroines. They have pain; they have questions; they have uncertainties that make it difficult for them to proceed with courage, but they do it anyway. This, I hope, is what Chase will have.




*Because I was reading it on a Kindle, which annoyingly has no page numbers. It's one of the disappointing things about Kindles, together with the lack of covers, and the way you can't easily flick back and forth between pages to check things. Or how I read the entire Game of Thrones series without seeing the maps or being able to refer to the family tree whatsits at the back. On the other hand, not having GoT books does save an awful lot of room on my bookshelves.

#amediting

Editing can be soooo boring. When the kind of editing you're doing is limited to correcting punctuation, rewording a sentence here and there, and generally just making sure everything is clear, it can be laborious and uninspiring. *Big, yawny emoticon.*

On the other hand, one of the really great things I've found about working on the second draft of my novel is the possibilities it offers. When I was writing the first draft - and especially when I was rushing through 50 000 words in November - I had only the loosest idea of where the story was going. I knew my beginning, parts of my middle, and a rough cut of my ending, but navigating between all those moments was tricky. I think at one point I whined 'I hate journeys. I like A and I like B, I just don't like getting from one to the other'. But now, I can go back and make those journeys more interesting.

The action scene I added in the other day actually gave me an opportunity to weave together two other elements of the story that I was dissatisfied with. Yes, it's still a pain in the arse (or ass, if you'd prefer) to go through and thread it into the rest of the story, but it's going to make the whole thing better in the long run. I'm looking at it as a very complicated braid (or plait, if you'd prefer) - and if you've looked at my pinterest page, you'll know I love braids. Now I just need the patience to go through and bring in the rest of the narrative threads, twist them together and - ta da! - plait/braid/novel finished.

Meanwhile, I went to Jane Austen's house today. Here is a photo from the exhibition, which sums up exactly why I love Jane Austen, besides the obvious brilliance of her books. Hope you can read it, and that it reminds you why you need to go and re-read her entire collection.

 

The YA romantic lead

I just read 'On the Jellicoe Road' by Melina Marchetta (cool name, by the way). I saw EpicReads banging on about it on Twitter, so I thought I'd give it a go, see what all the fuss was about. It took a bit of getting into, but once I was in, I was so in that I'd devoured the whole thing in around 24 hours. (I am a greedy reader. I gobble up books. If I am into reading something, there is very little that's going to get in my way.)

The general consenus on Twitter seemed to be that Jonah Griggs was the hottest YA crush of all time. It's funny, he was crush-worthy, but I don't think I feel for him like I fell for some of the others. I love a bit of YA romance, and it's not unusual for me to crush hard on a totally made up character - probably with a hard exterior, a soft interior, and a lot going on in his head. Oh and soft lips that seem to be constantly brushing against parts of the female lead's head. Twilight obsessed over the jaw line. Others go straight for the lips.Personally, I love when the boy does that tucking hair behind the ear thing some of them do. *Sigh*

Where was I?

Oh right, Jonah Griggs. 'Built like a tank' is not my idea of hot, but how important is describing the way a character looks to how you relate to that character? It's not uncommon, for example, for a description to focus on one particular aspect of a character. Edward's crooked smile, or bloody golden eyes (ugh), Four's hook nose (uh - anyone else picturing Snape with this?), Peeta's blonde curls...And equally, when your female lead is telling the story, she can hardly go around talking about how hot she is. She can do the humblebrag about, I don't know, the colour of her eyes, or how she's always been lanky (read: leggy and gorgeous), but she can't really say anything complimentary about her appearance without coming off arrogant. So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, in the end, the reader will see what the reader wants to see. No matter how often Veronica Roth told me Four had a hook nose, I just kept choosing to ignore it. Likewise, one of the friends who's read my book told me that, even though I describe on a number of occasions how Chase has a shaved head, they still keep picturing her with gorgeous long curly hair.

I feel like I could write a whole other post about how complex a character Taylor Markham is (that's back to 'On the Jellicoe Road' again, for those who haven't read it). So maybe I'll save that for another day. Could someone please remind me I need to stop procrastinating and actually start editing this book? Thanks.

Balancing fact and fiction

This blog comes from a place of exhaustion. After a full day in Switzerland on Thursday, I had a late night on Friday making this:

It's a cupcake bouquet.

Then, I was up early yesterday for a weekend in London where I went on a massive walking tour - again - for more research. I wanted to go and see the Thames Barrier Information Centre. I'm no good at buses, so I got a train up to North Greenwich and then walked. It's far. I have blisters on blisters. The information centre was relatively informative. I was basically trying to work out whether or not London would be flooded in the future I've invented where much of the east of England is under water. Having read what I read, I decided that the government probably invested significantly in London's flood defences at the expense of the rest of the country.

This is the Thames Barrier.

I feel like I'm trying to find a balance right now between something that is believable and the story I want to tell. What's frustrating about some of the YA lit - or in fact, any books - is that sometimes they start the story at a convenient point where whatever the situation is, it's been that way for a long while and so the characters no longer dwell on the 'why'. Why, in The Hunger Games, is the rest of the world allowing Panem to get away with treating its people like that? Who, in the world of Divergent, originally thought 'You know what we should do? Let's split people up into Factions and assume that the majority of people slot nicely into one specific Faction'. I love both those books - have read them multiple times - so this isn't a criticism; it's just an observation. I'm sure the authors know the answers - and possibly, in the case of Divergent, all will be revealed in the end - but it was something I puzzled over after I'd read the books. In Chase, I would like to be able to reveal enough of the background to my dystopia that the 'why' can be understood. Probably overly ambitious, given I don't want it to be ridiculously long, but that's the reason for all the field trips. And now, all the blisters. Ouch.

Here's a gratuitous shot of London at night, just because it's pretty.

Picture this with no traffic, no tourists, no lights...That's the London Chase is looking at.

Method writing?

Yesterday I had to go to Switzerland for work. Whilst waiting for my (delayed) flight in the airport, I wrote you a lovely little blog post about making the most of your travels. I was almost all done when my wifi connection ran out, and sadly it didn't save. Don't you hate it when that happens? Makes you realise the importance of backing up your work!

Anyway, I talked about not only going out and seeking inspiration (like on my field trips), but also soaking up the inspiration from all around. I've got a little bit Dawson's Creek about the whole thing, tending to over analyse everything I'm thinking and feeling, physically and emotionally. So now when I go for a run, I imagine what it would be like to run for long periods of time for the sake of a journey - how the air feels in my lungs, the way the ground blurs past, how the day sounds compared to the evening, how long there is between sunset and dusk, that sort of thing. And then I push myself into a sprint and try to feel what it would be like to be running away. How long can I sustain the speed? What does it do to my body? How does it affect my other senses?

It makes running more interesting, anyway.

Yesterday after I'd done what I went to Zurich to do, I walked for hours in heels and a pencil skirt, while carrying my 'luggage' of sorts. It's a world away from the experiences of my main character, Chase (hence the name of the book), and yet by the end of the day I was exhausted and my feet were so, so painful. In fact, they still hurt now. It feels like the soles are bruised. Chase is on the run from her captors throughout much of this novel, so even while I'm moaning about the state of my feet, I'm thinking - I can use this.

Is there such a thing as method writing?

So anyway, here is a picture of what I walked miles to find: a post-work tourist snap of Zurich for your viewing pleasure. Quite the relief to come across this after getting lost in the seedier part of town. Let's hope Chase has a better sense of direction than I do!

 

Re-re-write

In the spirit of trying to make this the best book ever, I have been attempting to edit the beep out of it. I decided that I needed to add an action sequence in the earlyish stages of the book and, well, crap, if this action doesn't have an ongoing reaction. It's messing with my mind. It's necessary because it brings two characters together in a way that your average boat ride just wouldn't do, but if I'm being truthful - which I have to be - it's going to have ramifications for both characters beyond the boundaries of the additional chapter I was hoping to just slot in.

At this point, editing feels a lot like rewriting.

It's pretty disheartening to carve out great chunks of text and then spend ages trying to work out how to replace it with something better. And I need to make sure that every reference going forward to the scene I have decided to replace with this new more action-packed sequence is also edited in line with the changes.

I'm lazy. I knew this wasn't going to be easy, but it really doesn't stop you kind of hoping that it will be. (Just like I know at some point this book is going to be rejected by tens or possibly hundreds - depending how desperate I get - of agents, but at the same time I kind of hope it won't be, you know?)

And it makes me think about all the other changes I wanted to make, and how they're going to affect the rest of the book, and how much time they will take to rewrite...and then sigh huge despair-laden sighs that make my cat jump up off my lap (hooray!) because they're so enormous. 

What is it that Coldplay say? 'Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be this hard. I'm going back to the start.'

Except, hopefully, the start's ok, in which case I'm going back to around chapter 18. Or maybe I'll just just keep checking Twitter and Facebook to see what's happening, and then google image Ryan Gosling.

Write place, write time

When do you write?

Where do you write?

For me, since forever, my favourite time of day for writing is pretty much the time of day when I should be sleeping. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that I have to collect together all of the experiences of the day before I can manage to coagulate all that into something worth writing down. Or maybe it's just that writing can be hard, and so I put it off. In any case, it's rare for me to be all that productive before about 9pm. My best work is probably more of a midnight thing. Then I get up for work in the morning feeling like I've been hit by a train, and strangely, I'm way more productive in the first three hours there than in the remaining five.

Where...? Again, for me, that's always been bed. Now don't get all Rudey McCrudey about it. I'm fully dressed. I'm alone. Nothing dodgy is going on here. I just happen to be always cold, so bed, and usually under blankets and/or duvet is my preferred writing location. Desks are for work, and my work is not creative. Besides there's only one desk in my house and it's in the man cave - ergo, occupado.

So this weekend I straightened out the spare room (Spare Oom) and so here is the view from my new writing place, aka the girl cave:

You probably can't exactly make out what's going on here. So to the left is my new wardrobe (hence the straightening out of Spare Oom), in centre is Cisco - my husband's pet snake (don't ask) and around to the right, which you can't actually see at all, is a window, looking out over rooftops to a smallish nature reserve. It's a happy space. The light in the vivarium is actually pretty nice, and I put a few pics on top that make me smile. The rest of the clutter up there does not make me happy, but I figure once it's been there a while I'll probably stop noticing, as has happened with the rest of the junk in my house. (Oh and in case you're wondering, the little towl thing on my wardrobe is a hair turban - such a genius invention, but not at all relevant to the sanctuary of the writer's workshop aka Spare Oom aka girl cave.)

So when and where do you guys write? And share your blogs with me - I've been trying to search for them but either I'm stupid or Blogger is as complicated as Google+ (which is the most confusing thing ever).

Inspiration

I've always been a meganormous fan of YA lit. Specifically, YA lit with more pain than gain - something where all the responsibility falls to the teenagers, the world (or at least, life as they know it) must be saved, and there's a little romance along the way. Nothing wrong with taking a break from saving the world for a quick smooch, right? In this world, adults are generally either a) useless or b) evil or c) altogether gone. Imagine my surprise when I realised that I am an actual adult now and therefore fall into one of the categories above? I'd like to hope I'd make a brief cameo as 'well-intentioned adult most likely to die in the course of duty'.

Seriously, though, as a kid I think I had serious problems. I would virtually bookmark the passages where my favourite characters came close to death and read them over and over again. The pain - emotional or physical - was my favourite part. I don't know what this says about me, so let's move on.

This is a snapshot of my bookshelf:

Pretty random assortment. Ok, so the bottom shelf is mostly my husband's (except the cookery books and the thesaurus), but the other shelves are all mine. We have a little YA, a little chick lit, some classics and some more random stuff. If you can make out Nothing to Envy on the top shelf, well that's a book about life in North Korea that gave me a lot of inspiration when it came to the setting for Chase. There's a country that's pretty much cut itself off from the rest of the world, right? Delirium, Matched, The Host, all good YA. Love me some Phillip Pullman - that's more than good YA. That's more of the 'everybody should read this - as in right now' genre. Seriously, if you haven't read His Dark Materials, turn off your computer and go read it. So, so good.

I should also point out that I haven't read everything on my shelves - yet - and that they're double stacked. What you can't see there is John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began series, which is another must read. I read them when I was a teenager and loved them. They're about these kids in Australia who go off on a camping trip, and while they're away the country is invaded. So then they become, like, guerilla fighters, and blow heaps of stuff up. And they have seriously incestuous romances (not actually incestuous, you understand, just a little wife-swappy) and some of them die, and it's amazing. They made a film of the first one a few years ago, and it was so disappointing. I think a TV series would've been better. I digress.

Anyway, I am thoroughly in agreement with all those who say that to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. Know what's out there, what you like, what you don't like, which ideas have been overdone and what could be developed into something that's truly yours.

And while you're reading, why not indulge in a little of this

Maybe one of these:

And make it the best damned day of your life. Because what's better than reading, writing and eating?

Field trips

Chase is set in a dystopian version of the UK at a time about 40 years after the Disassociation, when the country decided to cease all contact with the outside world. I can't really research what that would be like, since we seem to have been connected with the outside world since the dawn of ships, but I have been on a couple of field trips to get a sense for some of the places mentioned in the book. First up, the drowned fens:



Beautiful in a desolate sort of way. I wish I knew how to attach the sound recording I made so you could hear the reeds. When I say they were 'rush'ing in the wind, I mean it in the most onomatopaeic way possible. Ruuuussssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

 

 

Next, a visit to the capital to take a look at Canary Wharf:

 

 

I mean, maybe it's the weather, but don't these places just look dystopian to you? Look at these guys -

Miserable bankers.

Anyway, so it turns out field trips can be fun. And useful. I'd already finished the first draft when I visited Canary Wharf, so seeing how huge it is has really made me think about the way I've written it. Definitely need to make some changes. Of course, in my vision of the future, the whole place has been destroyed by riots, but I think that part will have to be left to my imagination...

Next field trip: my brother has agreed to take me out on the water for a two-man canoe lesson. Should be interesting. Quality time out on the water with my bro could lead to some quality fratricide.



#amwriting

It has always been my ambition to be an author. I think at some point I must have nudged that dream into the category of 'fantasy', together with my other lifelong ambition to be besties with Kirsten Dunst circa. Bring It On. It's only relatively recently that I've thought, 'Hey, I could actually do this!' (Be an author, that is. I feel like Kirsten just isn't the same anymore. That ship has sailed.) So I wrote a book. It's called Half a World Away. It's a romance of the Katie Fforde variety, perhaps for a slightly younger generation (no offence Katie, I totally read your books, but I'm not sure many other people my age do). Of the several people I gave it to for general feedback, I think maybe three people actually finished it. No, four. And the feedback I received was not overwhelmingly positive. I was broken. I didn't actually do Dawson Leery crying, but I felt like I could. It was a punch in the gut.

Picture that bit in the second Twilight movie where Bella stares out of a window for four months.
That was me.

Anyway, despite all of that, the fact remained that I had written a novel. A 104 000 word novel, no less, proving - if nothing else - that I could sit and write 104 000 words, something I never knew about myself. And then an idea came for a new book, something completely different, and although I had a wedding to plan (did I mention I'm not the wedding planning type? That's not exclusive to weddings, actually. I am not good at planning), I couldn't help it. I started to write again.

The idea took root...I wrote the first few lines in an email to a colleague at work in June. I tried to put it off and focus on the wedding, but it was constantly niggling at me, like it wanted to be written. So when I got back from honeymoon, I started putting pen to paper. By 1 November, I had written 13 000 words. Then came Nanowrimo, and another 50 000. By January, the first draft was done at around 95 000 words. When I put the title at the top of the first page, I felt pretty good about myself. 'Hey girl,' I thought (my inner self sounds a little bit like feminist Ryan Gosling), 'You just wrote your second book. Congrats!'

Except this time around I knew I wasn't finished. I'd even saved the file on my computer with the file name '1st draft'. This time around, I was going to edit the beep out of this beep until it became the best beeping book you ever read in your whole beeped up life.

And so that's where you find me right now.

#amediting

Introducing...me

I'm not going to lie, this isn't the first time I've attempted a blog. I think I started one when we first got our dog a few years ago. That lasted for....one whole post. Then when we got engaged, I thought 'Yes! I will be one of those people who blogs about wedding planning!' But that only lasted for one post, too. (Turns out I'm not really the wedding planning type.) So now I am hoping that third time's the charm. Here I go.

My name is Kat. This is me.

Actually this is my cat, Indy. But that's me underneath - you might be able to just make out legs and super attractive slippers? Indy likes to sit on my lap pretty much any time I'm trying to write or use my laptop or whatever. Attention-seeker. On this occasion I was trying to edit - that big ol' manuscript you can see in the background is the first draft of my book. It's called Chase. Here's a snippet:

Anyway, so I thought I'd try again with the blogging thing. Any tips gratefully received - I'm hoping to get this book published at some point, so your thoughts and advice as to how to go about that would be appreciated!