Gone

I haven't ever taken drugs. I'm too much of a scaredy-Kat, too much of a goody-goody, and too much of a control freak to get involved in any of that. And I'm past the point of caring whether or not that makes me a nerd. I've actually always thought it was a good thing I was never tempted because I have a completely addictive personality and zero will power. I started reading the 'Gone' series by Michael Grant the week before I went to the US. In the space of about five days, I read the first three books. Then it was time to go to the US for work. A 9 hour flight, I thought. I could probably read book 4 in that time. But then, I know myself. I would be thinking about book 5 the whole time I was meant to be working. I would make excuses to get away from the conference and associated activities just so I could go up to my hotel room and read the next book. Just one more chapter. Just one more. One more. Until I was done with that book and on to the next. So I left my Kindle at home (and incidentally watched some good films on the plane and used my free time to work on my third draft). I'd already downloaded the rest of the books, so they were waiting for me when I got home. I picked my Kindle up on Monday and had finished the final book four days later.
I think I've said before that I'm a greedy reader. I gobble books up. But even for me, this was extreme. I was staying up until ridiculous o'clock, despite the fact that I was on deadline and having to get up early to put in extra time at the office. But I couldn't put the books down. They were just so good. So, so good.
In case you're not familiar with the stories, they are set in a small town in California that the inhabitants nickname the FAYZ. One day, a dome goes up for no apparent reason and everyone over the age of 14 disappears. Suddenly some 380 kids are trapped in an area 20 miles across with no access to the outside world. No one's coming in. No one's watching. And weird stuff is happening. Some of the kids have developed supernatural powers. Some of them are evil. Over the course of the six books, battles are fought, your favourite characters face death again and again, alliances are formed and broken and formed again, and of course there are some complicated romantic relationships.
If you've read Stephen King's Under the Dome (and if you haven't you absolutely should), you might be thinking this all sounds a little familiar. Truthfully, there are a lot of similarities, but being that the Gone series is all about kids, it is different. Some of the problems are the same, but the reactions are different. It's hard to explain - hey I never claimed to be good at reviewing books - but they're both worth reading. I was gripped. Utterly. I don't want to give anything away so just take my word on this one.
Another blog coming up on what happens to a society when there are no outsiders to judge or intervene...As for the writing exercise, I realise now I have never in my life written a short story and I'm not sure how to go about it. But it's definitely on the to-do list. Meanwhile, I am still working on the third draft. Wish me luck guys!

The epilogue blog (The Epiblog?)

You guys, I've almost finished the second draft of my novel! Hooray! It has taken for-actual-ever and it has definitely felt a lot more like pain than gain, but I am nearly there. That's not to say there won't be a third draft. I will be repeating the print, bind, read, scrawl, edit process, but I'm hoping - nay, begging - that it will be less arduous than it has been this time around. In the third draft I hope to add in the small details that make the world seem more complete, while the second draft has been more about making sure the plot adds up and there are no glaring inconsistencies. Also, I would take sentences like that and reverse them so that the second clause (or whatever that's called) goes first, because that just reads better.

A while back, not long after I began the second draft, I decided I needed to add an epilogue. The entire book is written from Chase's perspective, which is cool, but doesn't give me much of an opportunity to say what other people feel about her, for realz. (I don't know why I said that, but it's late and I've pretty much been typing the whole weekend, so deal with it, ok?) So I decided the epilogue would be from Steel's perspective (that's potential crush numero uno aka the first boy to save her life) and would give the reader a little insight into how he feels about her and a good strong nudge in the direction of Team Steel, so to speak, having spent most of the book sorting out their feelings for crush numero dos (is that Spanish?) aka the second boy to save her life, aka Will.

So I was all, "Hey girl," (remember that part about my inner self sounding like feminist Ryan Gosling?) "The epilogue is going to be super easy and fun to write. Why don't you do the hard stuff first and save writing the epilogue as a treat for the end?". Ryan Gosling is never wrong, so I sweated the hard slog and edited the darned book. (And you know I don't really mean darned.) Then, today, I got to the last word of the last chapter and It Was Time. I typed the word 'Epilogue' and then I changed it to the Heading 1 font, which makes it all seem more real. Then I typed about six versions of the first sentence. Maybe more. Then I made a good five attempts at the second sentence. Then I deleted those two sentences and wrote them again. "Hang on RyGo," I thought. "Isn't this supposed to be the easy part?" But then I remembered how hard it was, in draft one, to figure out how to end the book. I knew the ending, but I didn't know how I wanted to write it. Books with sequels have to leave you wanting more, but at the same time I knew it needed a degree of resolution. And by adding an epilogue I am adding another ending. And by making it from someone else's perspective - and someone we haven't heard from in a while - I'm effectively starting and ending a story in the space of a few paragraphs. "Holy crap, RyGo, you set me up!"

I've written some words. Maybe 750. I reckon I can go to 1500, tops. But I'm doubting myself - and Ryan Gosling, which is never good. Is this epilogue necessary or am I just writing it to make sure everyone understands how lovable my characters are? Am I doubting myself because it's hard, or because it's wrong? Am I struggling because I'm stupid and unsure or because it's 11pm on a Sunday night and I have been at this all weekend?

When my inner dialogue (oh how I wish it were a monologue!) starts getting all swing-ball-y I know it's time for bed. So goodnight, sweet dreams...and if anyone has any insights on epilogues I'd be grateful!

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.

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.

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?