Eek - nerves

Well I just finished going over the changes to my third draft, and rather than do the sensible thing - take a night to think about it, read it through again, let it settle - I just sent it out to four people who haven't read it up until now. That could work out to be a huge mistake. If they hate it...I don't know what happens. My confidence takes a knock? Honestly I have to be at the point now where I have faith in Chase and in my writing so that I can recognise the distinction between personal opinion and constructive criticism. Is there a little part of me that only sends my work out to people so that I can get some positive feedback...? Yes. It's probably bigger than a little part. I could do with having that part knocked out of me, but the idea of it is painful.

Note to self: must learn to embrace rejection.

(Embrace is maybe too strong a word.)

Sigh. I have given over my entire weekend to this novel, and now I feel completely burnt out. My brain is fried. My eyes are glazed. I've started laughing in a maniacal way that my husband seems to find frightening. I told the dog that Jesus was on the phone for her. Basically, the situation here is not good. Think of this blog as a cry for help. *Send chocolate*

*Alternatively, send Gosling*

On the up side, that's the third draft, done. The feedback I get from my new round of readers will determine whether or not there needs to be a fourth. I suspect there probably does. I hope there doesn't. I have limited time, remember? The countdown to 30 continues.

Meanwhile, what I really need to work on is my pitch. Anybody got any ideas? Helpful comments? Resources? Please, please help me. I can barely synopsise the story in basic conversation, let alone in, what, 250 words? I also need to get to work on making that list of potential agents.

Let's call that next weekend's job so I can give myself a week off to read books. By which, I mean, of course, research my genre.


 

Out on the water

Have you noticed how hard it is to take a screen break these days? Don't want to watch TV? Why not read - oh wait, my Kindle doesn't count as a screenbreak. Go on the computer, then? No...that's not going to work. Text my friends? No, that won't cut it either. So what am I meant to do? Stare into space? Well, on a beautiful spring day like today, I should probably head out for a run, but I have 30 000 words to write this month and a novel to edit and pitch before July. So back to work it is - except here I am, not working, but blogging.

I have written almost 2000 words today on my Camp Nanowrimo project, so I won't call it a complete failure. If I manage to get to 3000 I might even call it a success.

Meanwhile, in actual blog-worthy news, I went out on the water yesterday with my husband and my brother as one of my field trips. In Chase, my main character is escaping captivity in the drowned fens, and so she and her companion, Will, go part of the way by boat. I have been canoeing before, but not for a long time. As my brother works at an activity centre where they have such things, and because he is acting as my mentor/sponsor, he offered to take me out on the water so I could get a feel for what it's actually like. Well, it was beautiful.

You can't really tell from this picture, but it was actually a really nice day yesterday. Bright, but cold. At one point it started to snow (are you kidding me, 1st April??), which was fine because it's freezing cold in my book, so it was all good research. Actually, the effort of paddling kept me warm enough - well that and the thermal undies.

It really is a beautiful way to travel - the water was still and clear, the reeds were making a nice gentle shushing sound, and it's fairly companionable - as long as your companion can steer ok. (No comment.) At one point we just stopped for about 5 minutes and watched a barn owl swooping and hovering, obviously looking for something to eat. Just beautiful. And if it weren't for the few solitary people walking along the river we would have been completely alone. There's also that feeling - a little bit Thelma and Louisey without the suicide - that we could just keep going. What if we just followed the river all the way to its source, or all the way to the sea?

My brother gave me some useful pointers about the technical elements of canoeing, and I got a feeling for what it's like to paddle for any length of time, and the way the wind makes your eyes stream and how you have to work together to get the boat to move how you want it to move. None of this is especially eloquent, but I'm hoping it will make that part of the book more descriptive when I go back to redraft. *Sigh* I do not enjoy redrafting. Anyway, I will leave you with some pictures of us enjoying the canoe. Happy writing, people!

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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.