5 Ways My Writing Has Been Like Working On My Allotment

As of this month, I have now had my allotment patch for one whole year - at the same time, I have also been working on Draft Two of Redemption. And during this time I've learned a lot of useful stuff from both activities.

On the surface they don't seem related to each other. But a lot of the stuff I've learned can be applied to both writing and growing stuff, so maybe learning the lessons from one has helped me to look at the other in a different way as well. And because this is a Blog and I like to tell people about my stumbles and tryouts so they can be more sensible than I was... let's do this:

1 - Aim for Functional Before You Go For Beautiful

As I said previously on this very Blog, the plot of land I was given was in a right old state when I got it. Neglected for over two years, it was a wasteland of couch grass, ivy and thistles with roots that practically had an Australian accent by the time you got to the bottom of them. Added to that the wire netting, old pipes and half-rotting bags of fertiliser entwined underneath said urban foliage.... well, Kew Gardens it certainly wasn't.

But I had visions - oh, yes I did! One year from now this weedy eyesore would be transformed into a thing of beauty, with perfectly symmetrical plots lined with neat, green lawns, bearing more fruits and vegetables than I could eat in a lifetime...

Mmmmyeah, didn't quite happen like that. Oh I've done pretty well when it comes to the fruit and veg part; I've grown and harvested potatoes, onions, curly kale, sweetcorn, peas, gooseberries, tomatoes, peppers and a metric tonne of courgettes ( or 'zucchinis,' if you're American.) But only in the spaces I managed to dig in between the jungle infestation I didn't get round to clearing. So it's a functional allotment... but still not what you'd call 'pretty.'

And that's a pretty good description of the process of draft one through two of Redemption, to be honest. Draft One was a weed-infested wasteland - like most first drafts are - and maybe I was a little naive to think I was going to be able to sort it out and make it beautiful in a single, second-draft pass. Weeds have very deep roots, after all, and sometimes you think you've pulled one out only to find you didn't get all of it and the darn thing's grown back again. It takes as long as it takes, so sometimes you have to scale back your goals; first get it functional, then work on getting it beautiful.

2 - You Gotta Have a Plan, Stan

I'll stick my hand up and confess; when I took on that allotment I didn't have a chuffin' clue what I was doing. I'd grown stuff in pots and containers before, and that had worked out okay... surely it was the same, but just, like, in huge containers, right?

No. Soooo much no. The world invented gardening calendars and manuals you could demolish a shed with for a reason, and this reason is that plants are kinda picky about when they're going to start growing and for how long. In our modern world of global trading and intensive farming most of us take it for granted that we can stroll into our local supermarket and buy things like potatoes, onions and carrots any darn time we want to, from January to December. So it can come as a surprise to discover that, when you're trying to grow them yourself, they're working to a goddamn schedule - something to do with 'seasons' or some such malarkey. How inconsiderate of them...

As a result, I couldn't grow a lot of things I wanted to grow in my allotment because to do so successfully I would have to travel back in time and plant the seeds a couple of months before I decided I'd quite like to grow them. Sometimes you can cheat and buy them as young plants from a garden centre if you're quick (and I confess, I did do that for a couple of things) but the more sensible way is to assemble the aforementioned gardeners' calendars and manuals and work out your battle plan for the whole year in advance, so you know exactly what's happening, when it has to happen and for how long...

And if that sounds an awful lot like an outline for a novel... it's meant to. Yes, this was the year I finally figured out that outlining was something I needed to know how to do properly and then actually do it. No more going in blind and rewriting the bits I wasn't happy with 'organically,' to see what 'felt right' when the time came; I had to look at the whole story and decide in advance precisely what was going to happen and when, where, how and why. My outline for Draft Three is taking shape already - and it's good to know that, this time, I already know most of what's ahead of me. Heck, I might even make some spreadsheets - for my novel and my allotment.

3 - Sometimes You Don't Get What You Thought You Were Gonna Get

I planted a load of King Edward potatoes in one patch, and in the picture on the front of the packet they looked like... well, your standard King Edward potato. So I was a bit surprised when about half the potatoes I dug up a few months later were red-skinned -  still lovely, perfect for chunky, oven-baked wedges in fact - but not what I thought I was going to get.  I don't even know how that happened. And lets' not even mention the carrots... oh okay then, I'll mention the carrots. I sowed lines of purple carrot seeds (yes, they were going to grow into actual purple carrots!) between my rows of onions (that's supposed to stop the carrotfly getting to them, apparently.) When their little tufty green heads appeared above the soil I thinned them out as per instructions, watered them and cared for them as lovingly as if they were my own children. Until, months later, at least two other seasoned allotment-ers gently pointed out that they weren't carrots at all, but weeds. How on earth straight rows of weeds with tops that looked very similar to carrots manage to grow in exactly the place I'd planted carrots I'll never know, but that's what happened (and it is what happened; carrots don't produce little purple flowers in July, like mine did - nope, not even purple ones.) Point is, plants can be tricksy little hobbitses.

I also got a few surprises with Redemption draft two. For example, I'd been writing from two POVs up until this point, convinced that I needed both to tell the story properly. And then it gradually dawned on me that one of those POVs, far from providing tension and foreshadowing crucial plot points, was actually ruining them in the style of a human Spoiler Dispenser with his 'can't tell anyone this, but...' diary entries. Either that or repeating in technobabble what he'd previously said in laymanspeak to the other POV character. Not cool, Dr Harvey. You are hereby demoted to Standard Major Character.

On the one hand, I don't know why it took me so long to see such a basic error - but on the other, maybe I needed to see it in full bloom to know it had to be eradicated (like my carrots-that-weren't.) Other characters have turned out to have more depth than I'd previously realised, and will now be playing a bigger or more complex role in Draft Three (Junor, Jim, Randy and Fraser.) So, like my surprise crops, at least not all the unexpected results were unwelcome ones. And I've learned some useful stuff for next year.

4 - You Need To Tend To Your Plots Regularly...

Some days - mostly the baking-hot, beach-weather ones - I looked out over my allotment and thought "Y'know what? I can't be arsed to go over there and dig today." Other times I watched the rain sliming down my windows and thought "My god, I can't go out in that - I'll catch some form of Victorian consumptive disease!" And it's fine to play hookey and have a duvet day... every once in a while. But the thing about summer is that you get quite a lot of hot days - even the UK, believe it or not - and when it comes to the wet, windy and cold days of winter the UK's got them down to an art form. So when I started letting the climate dictate whether or not I would go to my allotment, those 'odd days' quickly turned into two or three weeks at a time. Which meant that when I eventually sloped back like the kid who knows she hasn't done any of her homework for ages, everything was overgrown and neglected again. I had to fight my way through 2-foot-high weeds and couch grass to get to my crops, and when it came to tidying it all up and preparing new plots I barely knew where to start. It felt like I'd gone a step backwards, and now I had twice as much work to do just to get back to where I was - all because I'd got lazy and kept telling myself "Tomorrow. I'll go over and do stuff tomorrow..."

I had bad-weather days with Redemption too. Days when  just the thought of sitting down to open up that Scrivener file and knuckle down into a writing session was enough to make me wish I cared more about housework than I do (so I could at least run away from the screen with a feeling of 'fifties housewife pride rather than lazy-arsed shirker's guilt.) Being a mum of a school-age child guarantees an excellent supply of excuses for slacking off; sports days, birthday parties, various PTA-sponsored events...

I told myself it was fine. I was just taking a break from the thing for a few days because I'd hit a gnarly bit I didn't know what to do with, and when I finally came back to it my brain will have magically unblocked itself - like sneezing out a really gluey bogey, presumably - and I'll just know what to do to fix the gnarly bit.

Except that nine times out of ten I didn't, any more than I did before I left it. And on top of that I'd forgotten a lot of what I'd done so far, so I had to go back and look through all my notes to remind myself again. Leaving the problematic bit alone wasn't what caused the problem; running away from the rest of it as well was my mistake. Even if I'd switched to adding new info to my character biographies, putting all the subplots into a spreadsheet - or even restructuring the outline - I'd still have been keeping myself in the loop with the story as a whole.

It's the same as it was with the allotment; if I'd made myself walk over on those sunny days just for five minutes, to water the plants or pull up the weeds in one patch, for example, I could have saved myself a lot of work later on and still indulged in a little bit of slacking off.

I guess that's why so many authors who've 'made it' say you need to write every day, like working a muscle or training for a marathon.

5 - ...But Sometimes It's Better To Leave One Part Alone For a Bit.

Weeds were - and are - a constant annoyance on my allotment - if there was some sort of award from growing the strongest and most impressive weeds, I'd walk away with it no problem. Accidentally bend the stem of a precious little seedling? I can practically hear it scream in agony before it crumples into a Camille-esque heap and dies. Gouge out the heart of a thistle and roar like Brian Blessed as I tear its roots from the ground? The bloody thing just pops up again a week later like I've done nothing more than give it a haircut and a massage. How does that even work? Damn you, Mother Nature!

At first I thought the answer was to swoop on every weed in every patch when it was just an ickle baby, smiting it while it was at its most vulnerable. Until I realised that meant being hyper-vigilant, scanning each patch on a daily basis and turning weed elimination into a never-ending job with standards of perfection that would make a professional forger beg for lenience. "I only weeded this bit two days ago, how in the holy heck have they all come back already?" became something of a catchphrase for me (and a lousy one for someone aspiring to the superhero title of 'Weeder Woman.')

Eventually I realised a far more effective tactic was to... just let the weeds grow. Because for most of the ones that grow on my allotment, trying to dig them out while they're tiny is a fiddly and messy job that involves getting right down on your knees and tooling around with mini-forks and dibber-things. You can easily spend an entire day faffing around like that, only to find that when you've finished things don't really look much different from when you started. However, letting each baby weed grow a foot high and then yanking the whole thing out, roots and all, is a breeze - five minutes work per patch, tops. And boy, does it look like you've accomplished something afterwards!

I've now adopted a similar approach when I'm working on Redemption too. For each rewrite and edit of a scene, I decide in advance what element of improvement/cleanup I'm going to be focusing on - and stick to that task and nothing more. If I spot things I can fix on the fly - spelling or punctuation errors I hadn't previously noticed, for example - I'll do that, but if I see anything that requires switching my focus from the Plan for Today - for example, further research to check if that thing this character says is still true, adding in new plot elements to explain that new bit I added into the previous scene - I leave it alone, to deal with another time. Yank it out, roots and all, when it's time to weed that particular part of the patch.

So... that's the lessons I've learned this year. I shall be taking them with me into the next one, and hoping the processes - in both writing and gardening - will help me be more effective at both.

Have any of your non-writing-related hobbies taught you more about your writing? Why not drop a comment below?

How to Detect the Clank of the Deus Ex Machina

There comes a point in almost every rewrite of a draft one manuscript when you suddenly become aware your internal Writing Satnav/GPS is yelling at you. Not the normal sort of yelling, where they're just giving you instructions like "continue with this POV until the next plot twist" in that slightly bored and disjointed voice they do so well, but the loud, insistent scream of "do a U-turn NOW or you're gonna dump this story over the edge of a cliff!"

Y'see the wonderful thing about a draft one is that anything goes in terms of making your characters Get Important Stuff Done. They can temporarily be Superman, McGyver and Gandalf the White all rolled into one if that's what it takes to move your story from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, because you're still in the figuring out stage and "the rest of the story can't happen unless they do this thing and shuddup okay I haven't got time to think about it I just wanna get this done dammit!" In essence, you roll out the Deus Ex Machina.

Translated as 'The God in the Machine,' a Deus Ex Machina was a plot device employed in Greek tragedies, when the audience loved nothing more than tales of piddly little humans getting repeatedly kicked in the 'nads by the awfulness of their piddly little lives until some random Greek God dropped down from the sky and fixed everything in the last three minutes of the show. (In these stage productions, the actors playing said gods were literally dropped on wires through a trapdoor in the ceiling to perform the obligatory last-minute miracle. In a world that had yet to acquire a 'Die Hard'-ing Bruce Willis, this was the best they could manage.)

Draft ones of manuscripts are the perfect place to slap Deus Ex Machinas; it's how many draft ones get completed at all. But when draft two and beyond rolls around you can't get away with that sort of nonsense anymore. Stuff has to make sense. You need to make sure that, when it comes to solving problems and moving the plot forward, your characters aren't using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or, even worse, an inexplicably-acquired magic nut to destroy a sledgehammer. And if such a thing occurs, it often occurs more than once. Like that thing they say about a butterfly beating its wings causing major disasters on the other side of the world, one such doof-up can have knock-on effect on several other areas of your story, amplifying the doofiness of each subsequent doof-up until your precious draft one begins to look like the work of a lunatic.

This week, at the two-thirds-through mark of my current w-i-p The Renegades, I reached that point.

As I began rewriting Chapter 22, I realised there was some major information that needed to be given earlier in the story if what occurred from this point on was going to make any sense. Which meant a pretty intensive re-write of Chapter 18 - the only place where including that information would be sensible and flow naturally from the events described. And as I started doing that, I began to see holes in other areas too, until the crucial Grand Plan of my protagonist and her two comrades-in-arms began to look distinctly colander-like in terms of its ability to hold water.

I sighed. I head-desked. I ate cake ('works when you're happy, works when you're sad - the all-purpose mind-medicine!') And then I decided that the only way to fix it - and at the same time catch any other giant doof-ups that may still be lurking elsewhere in my story - was to draw up a list of hard questions to ask myself. Put every one of my plot points on trial and see if they made the grade. And here is the list I came up with. The Renegades is a sci-fi story, which is why I need to focus heavily on technical details, but there's no reason why this list couldn't work for other genres too:

1 - Would this course of action actually achieve the desired result?
This is the first question because it's the most obvious. Are the characters - with all their strengths and weaknesses  - actually capable of doing what's required? Does this thing they're trying to do comply with what's physically/scientifically possible in their world? How could things go wrong, and how plausible is it that they could still achieve their goal a) without anything going wrong or b) by adjusting to a Plan B 'on the fly' if things did go wrong?

2 - Is this course of action the easiest/safest way to achieve the desired result?
Because characters don't care what makes the plot funkier; they just want to do what they want to do. In real life we don't generally pick the hardest and most dangerous way to do something, and if a story is to make sense to readers then the characters shouldn't either. So if your heroine is creeping up behind a burly security guard and doing a Vulcan Death-Grip on him, hacking into the security system to bypass the locks, and then taking out another couple of security guards before escaping through the front entrance of an underground complex - when instead she could just sneak out of an unguarded back door and run like heck... well, it might be more exciting, but it's ludicrous. Forget the action-thriller whizz-bangs and let characters behave like someone with common sense.

3 - And they're doing this thing... why, again?
There are only two reasons people in real life do something they don't need to do; if it's enjoyable, or if they believe they can't avoid doing it. The same should be true of characters in stories. This applies to the big, game-changing actions taken and the smaller efforts that help towards achieving the big goals (those times when a major action can't be completed until a series of minor ones are done.) Both can suddenly become redundant with even the smallest of plot changes elsewhere in the story, so it's worth going back and checking to see if they're still relevant when such changes occur. Do those characters really still need to do that slightly random midnight raid that contributes nothing to their current objective at all? Or is Cackling Overlord Author only making them do that, so they will 'accidentally' find the secret thing they didn't even know existed but just so happens to reveal some really vital plot information? Don't be that author. Readers will snigger at you and call you names behind your back.

4 - Why are they doing this thing NOW? What stopped them doing it BEFORE now?
If they're doing what they're doing now in response to a situation they were aware of ages ago, what changed to make that happen? The answer can't be 'nothing,' because that just makes your characters look like apathetic chumps. Action should always be followed in quick succession by reaction, and even if that reaction is to do nothing, the reasons for that should be logical within the context of your story - along with any reasons for them to change their mind at a later date. The same rules apply when it comes to characters with special skills or magical powers. The reader has to know about them as soon as the character is aware of them - and from that point on, they're a tool in their toolbox, to be used whenever any person with an ounce of intelligence would use them to make their life that little bit easier. No saving them up for an oh-so-convenient, one-night-only appearance in the Final Showdown Moment - "Oh I remember - I can shoot burning jets of fire from my hands! Well thank goodness I finally realised that  just now, as I'm fighting the Deadly Ice Troll we've been hunting through The Frozen Wastes for nearly three-quarters of this tale! Doh - now I think about it, I could've used that on all his icy minions on the way here as well... silly old me, eh?"

5 - And they still think this is a good idea, right?
Sometimes, in the name of building the tension and moving the plot forward, characters have to do completely the wrong thing. Make really bad decisions, horribly misjudge a person or situation or take a risk  on impulse and have it not pay off in the worst possible way. Your readers might see the disaster coming way in advance, fighting the urge to scream "nooo, you raving idiots, that's the worst thing you could possibly do..!" as your characters blunder towards the inevitable snake pit - but your characters definitely shouldn't. People don't generally choose to do stuff that's going to mess their lives up. If you're gonna make your characters do a dumb thing, they have to have damn good reasons for not thinking it's a dumb thing, and those reasons have to be crystal clear to the reader. If your character has clearly stated he has an acute phobia of snakes, that's not going to go away without intensive therapy - so you can't suddenly - and purely for the purpose of fulfilling your plot obligations - make him read an advert in the local paper for a job as a snake-charmer and say "Ooh, I'll go for that! I mean, I know I'm terrified of snakes... but I'll muddle through, I'm sure!"

I'm applying these questions to my w-i-p as of now - and it's already given me things to think about. Have I left anything out that could be added to this list? What are your experiences of extracting the Deus Ex Machina from your work? I'd love to know.

Can We All Be Precious Little Snowflakes?

How do you measure your talent as a writer? And by that, I mean in the sense of 'measuring and coming up with the right amount?' Two things happened in my life this week that made me think about this conundrum.

Thing Number One was a conversation I had with someone I met in my local library and, for various reasons involving backstory too dull to go into here, ended up having quite a discussion with about writers and writing.

When the lady in question found out I was a writer (I was brave for a change and actually called myself that - for real! But then again, she was a stranger so maybe not that brave really...) she proceeded to tell me about her cousin, who she said had also been "trying to be a writer for years." And yeah, she said it like that, complete with the statutory sighs and eye-rolling. "She's got no talent for it whatsoever" she added. "Everyone in the family's been forced to read her stuff at some point, and it really is dreadful. We've all tried to tell her - tactfully of course - that she should give up on the idea of ever getting anything published. But she just won't listen! She keeps on writing all this terrible dross and kidding herself she's got the talent - when anyone can see she just hasn't..."

I asked her if her cousin had actually tried to get anything published yet. "No, fortunately" she said. "Once any of us tell her what she's written is rubbish, she just hides it away somewhere and starts on something new instead. And then we all have to suffer that... for God's sake, how many books is the woman going to write before she gets the message that she just doesn't have any talent?"

I'll be perfectly honest here; that was enough information to make me pick a side - and I wasn't rooting for the lady I was talking to. In fact, I began to feel this elusive cousin was pretty damn awesome. To complete even one novel when you have the support and encouragement of loved ones to spur you on is an achievement in itself. To complete many novels with that same support and encouragement is inspiring. But when every novel you finish gets nothing but derision and negativity from your loved ones.. and your response, every single time, is to just pick yourself up and start on the next one? That's bordering on superhuman.

Obviously I don't know if she really is as talentless as the people around her are apparently telling her she is; without actually reading anything she's written there's no way of knowing. But as long as she keeps on doing it, in spite of the naysayers, she can only get better. Damn, if she ever finds a way to bottle that stick-at-it spirit I'd be first in line to get me some! In fact, I wish I could actually meet her - if only to suggest that maybe she gives her stuff to non-family members to read for a change. (Not saying there's any kind of unconscious agenda at work here or anything, but... well, sometimes the ones closest to you can want 'what's best for you' for the wrong reasons, if you catch my drift...)

And then, on what could be described as the flipside, is Thing Number Two.

Through a series of events - again too backstory-ish to be interesting here - I found myself clicking on a link to a self-published book for sale on Amazon. I'm not about to name and shame it here, but it was a 200-page fantasy novel and, like the majority of books on the Amazon site, there was a chance to "look inside!" So that's what I did...

And I have to confess, it was very badly written. By that I mean it was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, words used in the wrong context and/or the wrong tense, random switches between present and past tense - often within the same sentence - and all sorts of other, glaringly obvious, bloopers. Now, this does not necessarily equate to the writer lacking ability. These are the sort of mistakes even the best writers make - in a draft one of their manuscript. Some of them even linger into the rewrite stage for a while, until some eagle-eyed beta reader or editor points them out. But that's the point. The writers that get success and respect for their work do so because they take pains to root out every single mistake - and enlist the help of others for finding those that elude their own eyes - before they will even think of publishing their work. This author clearly did not do this. This author pretty much went 'write it, upload it, hit Publish, baby!'

This is not an uncommon occurrence in the age of one-click-self-publishing, of course. This author is one of a legion who birth their Draft Ones onto Amazon and the like with nary a care in the world - happens all the time these days... But this one stood out for another reason. Because this particular work - a 200-page fantasy novel from a pretty much unknown self-pubbed author - could be yours for the princely sum of... thirty-five dollars.

Yes, you read that right. Thirty-five dollars.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think even a Stephen King novel has ever had a price like that. And he's - oooh, fairly famous now. So I am utterly intrigued as to the thought process behind the author of this thirty-five-dollar-book deciding "Heck yeah, people will totally pay that for my work." Lordy, there's confidence for you! If only she could siphon just a little bit of that off and send it to that lady in the library's cousin... I can't help feeling it would go some small way to restoring the balance of the writing universe somehow.

So that's the conundrum for me this week; is there a magic formula for determining whether a writer's confidence in their ability is justified or misplaced? How do you apply it if there is? And what makes some give up without ever being bold enough to test those icy waters, while others are happy to jump in without even learning the Rules of the Pool first?

An Experiment in Improving Creativity: The Results!

**Dun-dun-DURRRR!!!**

Yes, it's that time. Just over three weeks ago, as detailed in this previous blog post, I embarked on a self-hypnosis program designed to give my creativity a kick in the mojo, and I promised I would report back on my experience. This was in no way a promotional gig, nor was I getting any kind of kickback, favours or other form of backscratch-love for doing this; it was an experiment, pure and simple. And for that reason what you're about to read is a completely honest account of how successful (or not) that experiment has been.

As I stated previously, I have done hypnosis therapy before; I used it as a pain-relief method during labour when I had my son. It worked extremely well for that. However, I wasn't about to let that sway me in my assessment of this program, because a) it was for a completely different purpose and b) seven years have passed between the two, and both I and my brain have changed a lot during that time. This is why I've been extra cautious about providing a fair and balanced assessment. I'm well aware that my previous success with hypnosis might easily lead me into looking for more positives into this experiment than were actually there.

*Deep breath.* Not doing that. This is going to be 100% objective, clean slate stuff.

And so...

First off, let's start with the practicalities. In order for each session to be effective, you need to have between 35-45 minutes of your daily life all to yourself, alone, with no interruptions of any kind at all. People without children are the ones not laughing hysterically at this point  - and hell yeah, this was definitely Major Difficulty Number One for me. Weekdays during term-time were fine, but weekends and a perfectly-placed half-term holiday in the middle of the program did cause some headaches (yeah... well, that's why none of the jobs I've ever done in the past have had the word 'Planner' in the title, isn't it?) Fortunately on the Kindle the sessions can be adjusted, so that you can choose between ending them with a 'Wake,' 'Delayed Wake' or 'Sleep' setting. By setting it to the 'Sleep' session on those days when I was going to be shadowed all day by a rampaging seven-year-old, I could do my session at night, just before I went to bed. There's also a choice between 'Long Induction' and 'Short Induction,' which varies the length of the talky bit that sends you 'down' into the hypnosis session proper. After the first week I changed it briefly to the Short Induction, believing (particularly with my previous experience of hypnosis) that I no longer 'needed' the long one - but changed it back to the long one after only three days, because... well,  the short one just didn't feel as effective. Which brings me on to my next observation...

The days when it really felt like a session had 'worked' (i.e. that I really had 'gone under' and hit that deep-trance state) were the days where I felt tired prior to that session. I am a very poor sleeper; I cannot seem to remain asleep for more than two hours at a time. This means that, for years, I haven't slept through a whole night without waking up  - and I mean fully waking up, for about half an hour - at least twice before I have to get up for the day.

At weekends and during the half-term, when I could get away with sleeping in a bit (some days as late as 7am - woohoo!) I was obviously less tired. Those were the days when I felt I wasn't really absorbing all the positive messages; I was just dutifully listening to everything that was being said - and actually getting a bit bored as the weeks went by, because by then I'd heard the same words so many times already... 

However, on school days, where I was having to get up at ridiculous o'clock to get everything sorted in time and then hitting that Wall of Knackered halfway through the day... well, let me tell you, those hypnosis sessions kicked ass. Hell, regardless of whether or not my creativity was being enhanced - and even though I wasn't actually falling asleep during those sessions - they were ten times better than a quick nap on the sofa. When they finished I felt as good as if I'd slept all the way through the previous night (I think I can still remember what that feels like...) So, as a quick daytime energy-topper-upper for the sleep-deprived I can definitely recommend this program.

(Ironically though, when I switched the ending of the session to the 'Sleep' setting so I could play it at night, it had the opposite of the desired effect. I was wide awake when the session finished, and my positively-hypnotised brain had no inclination whatsoever to go to sleep for a good hour or so afterwards. Maybe that's just me, but after a night-time session I just felt... I don't know, is there such a thing as 'benevolently wired?')

But now we get to the meat of the experiment... has it done what it said on the tin? Has it 'improved my creativity?'

Well, in terms of making me more committed to writing... I've got to be honest here, it scores a 'meh.' I track my writing hours each week with an Excel spreadsheet (my personal version of 'clocking in') and I haven't noticed myself doing much in the way of 'overtime' since I embarked on this program. Still hitting the targets... but no sign of striving to exceed it, judging from my timesheet.

But... within those hours at my keyboard, my word count appears to have gone up. for Draft One of The Renegades, I was hitting 400-450 words per two-hour session. In my Draft Two Phase (when my Demon-ass Internal Editor started showing up) that had dropped to about 200. In this last week or so, my word count has consistently hovered around the 500-600 mark. And... I'm liking what's coming out this time around - more so than I have since starting on Draft Two. To the point where I'm looking at what I've been rewriting over the past week and thinking "Hmmm... looks like I'm going to have to do another rewrite of all the previous chapters just to get it up to the standard of this one now." (Notwithstanding, naturally, the next stage of rewrites that will come after Draft Two is completed.)

(Of course even saying all of that has given me the heebee-jeebees, and I am touching everything wood-based and clutching rabbit's feet even as I lay the words down. But... if these are permanent changes, that's gotta be good.)

So, to conclude, it seems to have made a difference - for the moment, at least. And I can't deny it, when you get to the point where you've slipped into that cozy, shut-the-whole-world-out state of trance-y meditation it is the best feeling, ever. Better than being wrapped in a warm blanket, drinking hot chocolate, in front of a crackling log fire, with the rain beating down outside. That good.

I shall certainly be using it again, as a top-up measure for when Novel Constipation strikes in the future (as I'm sure it will.) And I shall definitely be using it in place of a quick daytime nap on the sofa to avert those times when my lack of sleep becomes so cumulative I start responding to everything and everyone like Kramer from 'Seinfeld.'

The Second Draft: It's Just The One After The First

I learned a valuable lesson this week - and it's all thanks to Chuck Wendig (whose latest novel, Under The Empryean Sky is out now. Of course I'm going to inform you of that - and not just because I'm grateful, but because I also happen to think it's a ruddy marvellous book, so there.)

As you may have noticed in my previous posts, I have whinged about this Draft Two of my novel-in-progress The Renegades taking much longer and seeming to be much harder than Draft One... ooh, maybe several gazillion times. Anyone still in possession of their World's Smallest Violin has probably long given up on the idea of just playing it at me and moved on to fantasies of smashing it over my whiny little head.

*Shrugs.* Sorr-ee. I'll stop now.

No seriously, I will. I'm sure it was annoying - and now that I've made this amazing little leap I shouldn't need to do it anymore. Much. No - at all, honest! Because now I see why my Draft Two was causing me so much angst - and how changing my attitude to it, even in these last couple of days, has helped me get my Renegades mojo back again.

It started when I wrote my previous post about NaNoWriMo. I believe there was this little statement I made along the lines of 600 words a day being a really productive writing sesh for me, yeah? Well, I'm doing my embarrassed face right now as I admit that was a massive lie.

I get two hours of 'writing time' a day in my life, so I doubt I'm ever gonna be one of those writers who can churn out two novels a year - but there was a time when 600 words a day would've been a piece of cake for me. (Mmmm.... cake...) But I haven't been writing anywhere near 600 words a day for... urrgh, at least a month now. I've been squeaking 300,  maybe 400 at very best  - and even then, only with the aid of PURELY MEDICINAL chocolate supplements. Fun and tasty as that is, I'm not sure chomping my way to Type II Diabetes is a great strategy for raising this novel into a functional, publishable grown-up, so I knew I needed to fix my shizzle. But how?

And then I read Chuck Wendig's blog, where he stated that it took him five years to write his first novel, 'Blackbirds.' Well, heck - if a real, properly famous and successful author is allowed to take five years to write his baby, then surely that means a little ol' 'who?' like me can take that long as well! I'm only on Month 20 since the entire Renegades Process began, so I'm kind of on schedule, if you look at it that way...

Then another thing occurred to me. If he really spent five years on it, then it can't have just been on Draft One, Draft Two and then a final spit and polish for grammar and typos. In other words, he probably had more than just a couple of gos at getting the story part right, before he even got as far as moving on to the technical bits.

And that's why I was struggling so much with my Draft Two!

All this time, I'd been thinking of Draft Two as my final chance to get the story right. After this, all subsequent edits would be purely for trimming and polishing the language and sorting out inconsistencies and the aforementioned grammar and typo bombs. Which meant I was putting my Editor Hat on - and an awful lot of pressure on myself - every time I sat down to work; "This aint no disco - this is Draft Two, Cupcake! (Mmmm... cupcake...) So every word you hammer out had better be freakin' good, if you don't want to prove to the whole world that you're not a good a writer as you like to think you are..!"

I'd lost that mindset of "just write - you can go back and fix it later" and gone headlong into "this has to be right now!" But the truth is, I'm still putting the story together in many areas; now I know all of it, I've realised there are bits in Draft One that don't need to be there, and important stuff missing that definitely does. I can't expect to fix all of that and have it all flow perfectly, first time, as well. So I'm going to need to do a Draft Three for that. And maybe a Draft Four... and Five...

And if I do...*fanfare*... IT DOESN'T MATTER!

It sounds so simple when it's written down, in actual words. But it's taken me a while to see it. So, if there needs to be a Draft Three, and Four, and Eleventy-One... so be it. No-one dies if I cock it up on Draft Two; I just get another go at putting it right. Which feels... kind of good, actually. Yeah.

So if you'll excuse me - I got some more Draft two to write. It'll probably be crappy, but I'm down with that now...

Saying Nah-Nah-No-No to NaNoWriMo.

So... NaNoWriMo is upon us again!

And yes, you are correct in concluding - simply from the fact this post dates from 4 days into the event itself - that I am not partaking. But I'm cheering all you guys on who are, rest assured. Go team! and all that.

It's a fabulous idea, of course. The bestest kick up the backside an aspiring writer could have, with the added benefit of instant membership to a club of like-minded masochists comrades-in-arms for support. For many it provides the motivation for writing that novel that would otherwise never be written - and I'll admit it, I have an admiration bordering on awe for those people that actually complete the challenge. Fifty thousand words in one month? You guys rock. Seriously.

But NaNoWriMo is not for everyone. I know this because, for this year at least, I myself am very much not one of those everyone, even if I wanted to be (and oh! I so want to be..!) I could offer up the usual excuse - I'm a mum who has to juggle looking after a lively kid and running a house with my writing, blah blah, etc. etc, and yeah, I get it so put away that teeny-tiny violin RIGHT NOW...

But that, of course, is complete baloney and an insult to those who hold down full-time jobs AND have kids AND still manage to churn out best-selling novels by the bucketload.

No, the real reason I would fail at NaNoWriMo this year is because I am in the wrong place, at the wrong stage, to have any hope of achieving the goal. As anyone who has read this blog more than once will know, I am currently in the Draft Two stage of writing my novel The Renegades. I love this book like a sibling, i.e. it frequently drives me nuts and makes me want to pull its hair when it annoys me, but I am fiercely loyal to it because I believe I need to write it even if it ends up never being published. So I am not about to abandon it for another story, even for a month.

I did the maths (well, okay - I got a calculator to do it for me) and it soon became clear that, in order to complete the challenge of fifty thousand words in thirty days, I would need to write at least 1,667 words a day (I rounded that up because I'm not sure how you'd write .6-recurring of a word, but anyway...) And that's if I wrote every single day; if I decided to do the standard 'working week' thing of five days a week and two days off, that word count goes up to 2,381 words a day. On a Draft Two manuscript.

That's never gonna happen for me. At the moment, 600 words a day is me on fire. It's not because I'm lazy, or a crappy writer (well I certainly hope it's not the last one...) it's simply because I'm spending more time unpicking and rebuilding what I've already written to make it better - and that's harder and more time-consuming. No free-wheeling, brain-candy-dumping in that process...

And that's the key to succeeding at NaNoWriMo; having the freedom to write whatever crazy-ass stuff comes pouring out of your noggin. When you don't have to care about what you're slamming down on the page because, hey, you can fix it all later, you can party on through the alcoholically-liberated moonings and dodgy one-night-stands that constitute the average Pantser Draft One novel. After all, you get the prize just for writing those fifty thousand words; no-one has to actually read them as well.

(But even if you do end up writing fifty thousand words of utter pants at the end of the thirty days, you still rock. I wouldn't dream of taking that away from you, never fear.)

Some people like the ceremony of NaNoWriMo. Perhaps there's a part of them, deep down inside, that feels like they need... I don't know, permission to knuckle down and all-out focus on Getting A Novel Written. Maybe they don't have partners, friends and family who are supportive of their writing ambitions, and so they feel guilty about indulging in it - as if it's little more than a slightly nerdy hobby to be confined to snatched moments of free time. To do it with any degree of conviction at any other time feels self-indulgent, maybe even (shudder) selfish - but hey, it's November, so for this month being crazy-OCD-dedicated to that hobby that everyone sniggers at is officially allowed... the calendar says so. Well then - hell yeah, let's do this!

For those people, NaNoWriMo is a wonderful thing, and I'm glad it exists if only for them - although I can't help wishing I could just wave a magic wand instead, and give them the power to claim their writing time for themselves, all year round, without feeling guilt or shame. (If this person is you, hear this: you deserve that time, it's yours and you've earned it. CLAIM IT!) Or maybe getting a proper, formal kick up the writing jacksie that comes bang on schedule every year is a much better motivator for others than trying to maintain it all year round at a lower intensity. I'm glad NaNoWriMo exists for those people too. 

I wish you all the very best of luck if you are partaking - go nuts, enjoy the ride. But I will be cheerleading from the sidelines, if that's alright with you. I can't bring myself to cheat on The Renegades with some flighty new November fling - or, alternatively, to give her a month's worth of lousy lovin' just to rack up the number of times we've Done It. (That may well be the weirdest analogy I've ever used to make a point... but hey...)

Whether you write slow or fast, a trickle all year or a massive burst every November... enjoy it and claim it. It's yours. Do it.

Write! Go!

Wherefore Art My Writing Mojo?

Writing is flippin' hard sometimes.

Admittedly it's not 'hard' in the same way as, say, going to war or working in an A&E department is hard...

(I see you amazing people there... what's that you're holding? Oh - the world's smallest violin. Okay, well, that's fair enough...)

No - writing-flavoured 'hard' is a different kind of challenge altogether. Not least because, when it is hard, it has this magical ability to make you feel like you have suddenly become the most stupid person in the universe.

I started learning to talk from about... ooh, fourteen months old, according to my mum. I've been doing it ever since - maybe not as much as more extrovert people, but even when I was shrinking against the wall trying to be invisible I was still practicing in my head. I started learning to write at about five, when I first started school - and I've been doing that ever since as well. With both of these abilities under my belt, that's a lot of years of using words and stuff to get my point across.

So you'd think, after all that time, I'd have got the hang of it by now. And, for most of the time I believe I function quite ably. But, in those dark periods when Writing Gets Hard, it seems as if something freaky happens to my brain.

I know what I want to say. The movie scene playing in my head is very clear; I can see every detail of the action and hear every word of the dialogue. All I have to do is take what's unfolding in my brain and put it down on the page in front of me, right? Simples.

Except, for some reason, it isn't.

It takes me ten solid minutes of word-wrangling to convert one teeny-tiny aspect of the scene in my head into one sentence - and when it's done that sentence reads like someone whose native tongue is Chinese and they only just started learning English half an hour ago. When I read it back, even I think "What the heck does that mean?" I started writing 'The Renegades' because I thought I actually had the ability to do it - what the gubbins happened to my brain between believing that and now?

I can state with conviction that I didn't have this problem with Draft One. Draft One poured out of my brain in a crazy, uninhibited gush and I just spilled it all over the pages like a kid let loose with the nursery paints. That's because Draft One was my happy-fun-go-nuts-and-CREATE! time, when there were no limits and no 'wrong' way to do anything.

But now I'm about a third of the way through Draft Two - and  Draft Two is the time to put on the Serious Pants and say "Right - let's sort this shit out then." This is the stage where I'm supposed to be rebuilding the story foundations so they'll actually take the weight of the unfolding events, making sure all the pieces fit together and that it doesn't look so bloody awful it'll bring down story property prices for the whole neighbourhood. In Draft Two, it seems, there's a wrong way to do everything - and I seem to be pretty damn good at finding them all.

Everything I write looks messy and repulsive at the moment. I almost wish I could just pull out all the story-stuff dancing around in my brain and squish it onto the pages and say "There you are - ta-dah! Screw words and sentences and all that crap -  that's how it's supposed to look." But I suspect that would just look messy and repulsive in an entirely different way.

I have been assured by many writers that this is normal - indeed, some have even gone so far as to say that it's a necessary part of the Draft Two process. (Oh. Hooray then.) But it's not a fun part, no it surely isn't. Writing like a drunk idiot without the actual fun of first getting drunk and then behaving like an idiot is not good for the self-esteem, it has to be said.

But I made myself a promise with this book; I was going to FINISH IT. Come what may. Even if, at the end of all the hard work and effort, it turns out to be monumentally crap. And I intend to honour that promise. Because, even though I don't like how hard it is to get this thing written at the moment, I still like writing it. Crazy-ass writer-type that I am.

So I'm going to keep turning up, keep on truckin' through it and keep on working through the pain. Apparently (according to my writing friends) by doing that I can eventually come out the other side of this Tunnel Of Crapness and into the light of Yay, I Might Be A Writer After All-ness.

Until then, I may have to get emergency supplies of chocolate shipped in. Dig for Victory, and all that...

Fifty Shades of Fifty Shades (Or The E.L. James Effect)

Has there been a book in modern times that's caused quite the furore of the Fifty Shades trilogy?

It caused controversy for obvious reasons - mostly for being full of the sort of sexual shenanigans that would make Samantha Whatserface from Sex & The City come over all Sandra Dee. On the one hand, it gave legions of frustrated suburban women all over the world a kick in the mojo so powerful that their husbands and boyfriends wore either permanent grins or expressions of cross-eyed terror. On the other, it was denounced by many women's' groups (and even BDSM groups) as being degrading and reinforcing dangerous sexist stereotypes.

But the phenomenon of particular interest to writerly types like me was that it divided the world into two distinct camps regarding the quality of the prose. I'm paraphrasing here of course, but the general gist was that it was either a) spectacularly horny in a way no other book could ever make the reader horny, or b) atrociously written, woefully unrealistic and read like the work of a Emo Teen With Issues.

Now let me make my position clear here. I have no beef whatsoever with Ms. E.L. James; regardless of how much of any of the above is true or not, the plain fact is she gave a gazillion trillion people exactly what they wanted from a novel. She got something very, very right, and that's one, solid-gold fact you can't argue with.

What DID wind me up, however, was the angle the media chose to take with the story behind the books - and in particular the way Ms. James and her meteoric success was portrayed. She was touted as the 'shy housewife and mum,' who'd written what was essentially a piece of fanfiction that 'borrowed' heavily from Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novels. It was the very first novel she'd ever written in her life, so - being such a 'shy and prudish housewife' who just happened to have a taste for writing porn - she thought "Hey, what the heck, I'll self-publish it." And then - boom! Instant fame and fortune.

Except of course it's not entirely true, is it? When you picture a 'shy housewife and mum' do you picture someone in an executive position in a television production company? Nope, me neither. But that's what E.L. James was before she stormed into a novelist career. Obviously she would still have been a housewife and mum at the same time - so technically the media weren't lying there. The 'shy' part is pretty much open to interpretation as well. Does someone who's worked their way up to an executive position in a television company and then gone about self-publishing their debut novel - which is, incidentally, all about a BDSM relationship - strike you as the 'shy and prudish' type? Perhaps she said she didn't like dancing in nightclubs in some interview somewhere; that's one kind of 'shy' - albeit not that relevant to the image the media shoved down our throats..

It's all about dressing up the fairytale though, isn't it? Changing the slant on the mundane facts just a teeny bit makes the whole story a little more heart-warming; after all, the public are suckers for a good old-fashioned rags-to-riches story.

All well and good; I like a bit of the old Horatio Alger-ism as much as the next person. But turning someone who is clearly a very astute and business-savvy woman into some sort of literary Cinderella bothers me. I mean, what message does that send out? That writing a novel is easy-peasy, something that anyone who's ever loved a sci-fi or fantasy series can knock out on a fanfiction website and become the biggest-selling author on the planet. All you have to do is take something that's already been done, tweak it here and there, change the names and - voila! Jump on that bandwagon and count the money, baby!

The proof that this message was heard can be seen in any bookstore in the western world. Entire bookshelves are now needed to stock what could quite justifiably be called 'the Fifty Shades Rip-Off' genre. Some pay only the 'subtlest' of homages to the novel that spawned them (Sylvia Day's 'Bared To You' - which proudly screams "If you liked Fifty Shades of Grey' you'll love this!" on the front cover) while others were far less... um, 'covert.' (Seriously - 'Fifty Shades of Green?' That's not even trying!)

All of which just reinforces the idea that becoming a successful novelist is a simple as picking a winning formula and then banging out your own, slightly-adulterated version of it - crank 'em out like strings of sausages from that money-making sausage template. Sure, the chances are pretty high that most of the imitations are cataclysmically rubbish. But they're still sitting on the shelves in bookshops; some publishing company somewhere believed in them enough to take on the people that penned them. Rather than, say, novelists who've been writing for years and honed their skills accordingly... but, unfortunately for them, in genres that aren't the current flavour-of-the-moment...

No, this isn't a sour-grapes rant. It can't be; for starters, Whilst I've had some minor successes in other writing fields, The Renegades is the first novel I've ever got to Completed Draft One stage, so I can't even legitimately call myself a novelist yet. It's just worry, that's all. This is a virus that originated from outside the world of writing, but is now threatening to cross-breed and infect us too.

You've only got to look at programmes like Britain's Got Talent, when some excruciatingly un-talented individual does something godawful in an attempt to 'entertain' and looks utterly shocked and outraged when they're told they're terrible. And then marches offstage, snorting that the judges are idiots and they'll prove them wrong in the end, when they finally get the recognition they deserve and become the superstar they're just born to be..! And they believe it - they believe every word of their own hype. Why? Because they saw Susan Boyle do it. And Paul Potts do it. They saw them step onto that stage, with their bad hairdos and wonky teeth, and blow the world away, in the space of a three-minute audition. Because that's all it took - three minutes...

Except it didn't, of course. Both Paul Potts and Susan Boyle sung for years before their auditions. But telly doesn't show that part - only the three minutes that launched them to superstardom. And now, with this insistence of the media of applying the same, rose-tinted wash to the likes of E.L. James, there's a danger of the same thing happening in the writing world. The quality of published works will suffer for it (while the vanity publishers will make a killing.) Writers with genuine talent but without the abundance of self-confidence required to 'self-publish and be damned' may become disheartened and simply give up on the idea of ever being published altogether.

Veterans of the Performing Arts may laugh bitterly and say 'that's life, kiddo - welcome to the real world.' And I suppose no-one knows that better than them. But that doesn't make it any less sad to me.

If I never get anywhere with my novel-writing, I'd rather it was because I'm simply not quite good enough to make it, or the things I need to write about aren't interesting to anyone but me. Not because I just can't bring myself to sell my soul and crank out touch-up-and-tweak copies of whatever's selling at the time.

Being The Literary Equivalent of Homer Simpson

I wonder what images the above title conjures up... Am I in fact bald with yellow skin? Drinking a Duff Beer and saying 'Doh!' a lot? Or attempting to type this blog with my face and going "Oww! Why does writing hurt so much?"

(Actually the third one is probably closest to the truth. Except for the typing with my face part.)

Still working on Draft Two of The Renegades. If you want a fanfare to go with that statement, you'd best play it on a kazoo, because that's about all it's worth. The good news is of course that I am still writing it, rather than reverting to the strategy I always used in the past (which mainly consisted of going "Sod this for a chocolate chip cookie" and abandoning it for some other project.) The bad news is... it's taking so blimmin' LONG!

Draft One was a blast. Draft One was like freewheeling down a hill on a bike, with just your feet for brakes. Draft Two, so far, has been like trying to walk back up the hill after you've been eating too many doughnuts and sitting at home watching daytime TV until your arse resembles a space hopper...

(Huh! I should be so lucky, to indulge in such luxury..!)

Like the aforementioned Homer Simpson, I am feeling distinctly unfit for this task. My writing pace has slowed to a crawl, and after each daily 'session' I come away from my keyboard feeling like I've been trying to rewrite the Magna flippin' Carta. In Ancient Greek. How can rewriting what I've already written once before make me feel so gosh-darned lazy and STOOPID?

If I were the Big Yellow Guy himself, I would probably be wailing "it's too hard, and it's making my brain unhappy" right about now. And my smart-alec daughter Lisa would probably make some pithy comment about getting in better shape in order to feel like doing more exercise. And then I would tell her to go to her room... but anyway, enough with the Homerisms, there's a point in all of this somewhere. And I think it's that, rather than get hung up on the negative aspect of how much slower the process has become, I should instead focus on the positive aspect - that in spite of the trials and tribulations, I'm still turning up to put in the effort each day.

When it comes to the Metaphorical Olympics of Writing, I am quite obviously going to have to spend some time (okay then - a long time) being Homer Simpson before I can progress to being Usain Bolt. The words are definitely coming slower - but, when I compare my new Draft Two chapters to the old Draft One versions, they are better second time around. And not just a little bit better; a lot better - enough to make me think "Yeah, I'm glad I've done it that way this time around..."

So I think it's worth sticking at it, however long it takes. And that's what I need to remember whenever I get impatient, or frustrated... or hear that doom-heavy voice in my head saying "Y'know what? Maybe the real reason you're finding this so tough is because you're just not any good at writing after all."

I'm hearing that voice a lot recently; I think he's been listening to all the hype surrounding E.L. James and Amanda Hocking and comparing me unfavourably. After all, they both woke up one morning and thought "What shall I do today? Ooh I know - I'll become a best-selling author!" - and then banged out their debut novels in a few months and became instant millionaires, didn't they? 'Cause that's exactly how it works if you're truly talented!

Hmm... I think I may well be exploring that notion for a future post...

Pantsers: Dancers Not Sprinters

Oh lordy lordy lordy. Completing Draft 2 of  'The Renegades' is going to take a LOT longer than my laughably optimistic Schedule is still telling me it will.

It's said there are two types of writers; the Plotters and the Pantsers. If writing this novel has taught me anything, it's that I am pure, crack-cocaine-strength Pantser.

Outline? Pffffttt! What's one of them? I've got a Beginning, a Middle and an End, what more do I need? My brain's filled up to the top with fuel, so I'll just pootle me little old way to each destination in me own sweet time. I might take a few wrong turnings - okay, a lot of wrong turnings - and it might take me a little longer to get to each checkpoint - okay, a flippin' eternity to get to each checkpoint - but hey! I'll be learning all the way! And I won't ever get downhearted, or doubt myself, or even get bored and frustrated that the whole thing's gonna take twice as long as I thought it would. Hell no - ha ha, how could anyone even think such a thing?

What a Grade One prat.

I'm on Chapter Four of Draft 2 now. Yep, Chapter Four. After nearly four months.  That means I've done precisely one chapter a month of what I'd always imagined would be mere editing of existing writing.

Except of course I imagined wrong. This is because, even though I'm still telling the same story, the way I'm telling it has changed dramatically. The bare bones, skeleton-frame of the novel has barely changed at all; the themes, story arcs, character goals and motivations are still as they were in Draft 1. But the perspective has altered radically. Reading Draft 1 back, it seemed as if I were hovering above the action like some sort of all-seeing, all-hearing fly on the wall. For Draft 2, I've realised I have to get down to ground level - get right inside the heads of my two POV characters and experience everything through them. Which means there's lots of new stuff that isn't in there yet and badly needs to be - and lots of stuff that can't stay because it no longer belongs in my new, on-the-frontline view of events. This is beyond even rewriting - this is coming up with brand new events and discarding existing ones... in order to tell the story I've been intending to tell all along. Now I've reached the outlining stage; when I've finally realised what the flippin' heck I'm actually doing with this story. That's the way your cookie crumbles when you're a Pantser, I suppose.

How many of you Plotters are reading this now with that strange, warm glow of smugness-disguised-as-sympathy, nodding and saying "Ah yes, well - that's why it's always best to outline first, you see... I know it might seem tedious, but it saves sooo much time in the long run..."? Well, enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling, guys. No seriously - pat yourselves on the back, have another cake, whatever. I could wish that I was as organised, as methodical and as forward-thinking as you are, and endeavour to adopt your mindset and outline to within an inch of my life before even typing the words 'Chapter One' - from now on and forever into the future...

Except that my little old brain simply doesn't work like that. Can't work like that. No, I'm not being stubborn, it's Mother Nature, goddammit. And so, rather than beat myself up for not having the kind of Writer's Brain that can predict imaginary futures with the precision of an Excel spreadsheet, I am instead going to accept my Pantser Brain for the undisciplined problem child that it is and try to love it like a proper parent.

I may probably never become one of those authors who can churn out two or three books a year, happily working on my outline for the next book whilst doing a final edit of the current one. Does that make my methods wrong? I don't know. All I do know is that they are the ones that work for me. I may take longer to reach the finish line - but hopefully the end product will be worth the wait.

And now - time to hoik up those pants and carry on with the writing...

When Writing Feels Like Constipation

With a title like that, you'd be forgiven for suspecting that there may be a lot of toilet references in this entry. I will try not to use them gratuitously, but use them I must, as it is the best analogy I can think of for those certain times when the writing is going... not so well.

I know people who are massively preoccupied with their bowel movements. They have decided, a long time ago, exactly how many times a day they 'should' do a Number Two, and even what time of day it 'should' make its presence felt. They hold this view regardless of what they may have eaten, drunk or done during that twenty-four hour period - to the point where, if they have a bowel movement at a time that does not comply with the schedule they immediately decide they must be ill. For such people, a poo arriving without a scheduled appointment is something to be feared - and being stood up by an expected poo comparable to the end of the world.

It's easy for writers to feel the same way about their craft sometimes. Most of us who try to keep to a regular writing schedule gradually develop natural ways of self-tracking our progress. For some it's to write for a certain number of hours each day. Others prefer a word count - "I cannot leave the page until I have written at least a thousand words" for example. Whatever the chosen method, when we hit or exceed the target all is well with our writing world and everything is working as it should. If we miss the target once or twice - well, that's unfortunate, but nothing worth worrying about, because we'll just catch up another day and it'll all work itself out. But if the failure to hit the target runs into days, weeks... well, just as people who dread the thought of constipation worry that the condition will cause their entire bodies to fill up with poo, until they are nothing but a big, fleshy balloon of poo waiting to explode, the writer can worry that they are becoming nothing more than a big bag of literary poo. And that, should they explode all over their work, it will become obvious to the world that, as writers, they're actually... well, 'poo.'

But in the same way that constipation can be caused by blips in a person's normal lifestyle - eating something different, not drinking enough fluids or having a few couch-potato days, for example - Writer's Constipation can be caused by blips in the writing lifestyle. Stress, for example. Unless you're already a successful writer (and in many cases even if you are) the chances are that you have other things to do in your life besides writing; running a house and/or holding down an unrelated day job, for example. Roles like that will occasionally throw curveballs in your direction that demand your attention, be it physical or mental. If those curveballs are big and emotional enough, that can disrupt your natural writing rhythm.

I have been getting to know this feeling very well over the last few weeks. What with family members in hospital, a sick child and various other incidents paying unexpected visits, focusing on getting on with Draft Two of The Renegades seems almost selfish. Today, according to the nifty piece of software I'm using to write it, I had written minus 173 words at the end of my scheduled two hours. Yep, minus.

It's enough to make a girl think she ought to just give up on the whole thing. But if you have genuine constipation in your body you can't just give up on the idea of ever performing a successful dump again; you'd end up in a pretty bad way if you took that approach. You just have to keep going off to the toilet and sitting, and trying, and hoping that eventually there'll be a breakthrough. After all, if you're still putting food in the top end, it all has to come out somewhere eventually, doesn't it? And this, I've decided, is the approach that's needed with my writing. Keep turning up at the page and sitting and trying, because eventually it'll work its way out.

Oh - and in the meantime, try and banish all those mental images of spontaneously exploding in a big shower of literary poo.

Even In A Pretend World, You Need A Map

I've been having a bit of trouble finding my way around lately.

My sense of direction is pretty rubbish at the best of times, but nothing brings out my navigational doofus tendencies like trying to get to various places in a building I've never actually, physically been inside. Partly because said building is located three thousand miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And partly because it only exists in my head.

You guessed it - I'm talking about a location in my Renegades novel. A large underground base hidden in the side of a quarry, to be precise.

In its real-life geographical location in New York state where the novel is set it doesn't actually exist, but some specific infrastructure is really there so that, at some point in the future, it plausibly could. (Yep, I did the research for it - God bless the internet!) So even though I've placed it in a real-world environment, the base itself is pure fantasy - mine to carve out of that hillside however I like.

So if it's just a pretend place, I don't need to know exactly where everything in it is in relation to everything else, do I? I mean, it's my secret base; I invented it, so I can tell the readers whatever I want about it, right?

Well... it turns out that no, I can't. Or, to put it more accurately, I can't tell them whatever I want about it whenever it suits me. If I say there's a gymnasium just down from the dining area in Chapter One, then that's where it always has to be - forever, for the entire life of the story. And I can't just blithely assume that, should I make a geographical slip-up at some point, 'no-one will notice a little detail like that.' Because that's like assuming everyone else possesses navigational skills as dire as mine (and that's a hell of a lot of people I'd be insulting.)

To put it bluntly, fans of science fiction novels are smart cookies who aren't easy to fool; some of these people have actually taught themselves to speak Klingon, for crying out loud. They're gonna pick up on every little detail - even those that seem trivial and insignificant to those of us with smaller brain capacity - and if it's wrong, it will jerk them out of the story and that's a bad thing.

I have a fairly flexible imagination, which enables me to create these places in the first place; unfortunately flexible imaginations tend to come with an equally flexible memory. This results in a brain that enjoys creating things on the fly so much, it rarely mentally files anything away so that it'll be the same every time. But, for the purpose of building a believable story, my world has to be the same every time; it can't change from scene to scene. The only way to ensure constancy then is to set it in stone from the start; design and plan it, the same way an architect designs and plans a real-life building.

So, after several hours of: searching through the text of the entire novel for all mentions of the various rooms in my base, cutting out, fiddling with and glueing bits of squared paper, and then faffing about trying to make Microsoft Excel work like a floor-plan-drawing tool (I'm pleased to report that it can, and the results look surprisingly good) I have now made myself a thoroughly detailed map of my fantasy underground location. I could even tell you where the toilets are - if you really wanted to know.

Boring? Yeah, sometimes. Headache-inducing? Oh, heck yeah! But unnecessarily nit-picky? Not on your life. Because now, not only will the map ensure my characters will always be able to take the right route to reach the places they want to get to - but I can make my descriptions of them more interesting. More real, because now I'm properly 'with' them, following them around like a little spy. I'll know, for example, that they can smell disinfectant as they're walking down a particular corridor, because my map tells me they're passing the medical room. And when you're mentally walking through the same environment as your characters, it makes it so much easier to get inside their heads and know what they're feeling and thinking.

Tolkien famously drew detailed maps of Middle-Earth and wrote vast, sprawling back-histories for all the races inhabiting his mythical lands. J.K Rowling did a lot of the same for her Harry Potter series. I can see now that their reasons for doing so went much deeper than mere nerdish pleasure in creating little extra nuggets of trivia for their fantasy worlds. I guess if I'm going to learn a valuable lesson from anyone, it might as well be from two of the greatest storytellers of them all.

Happy New Year, everybody! Let's make this the year that we Get Stuff Done!

Pesky Life... You're Getting In The Way Of My Fantasy World!

Soooo... how long is it since I last blogged?

No, don't go and actually look, please, I'll just be embarrassed... Yes, that question was hypothetical. I know it's been a while, and there are many reasons for this.

Reason number one is discovering that, for Draft Two of The Renegades, I have to actually write a whole new chapter that fills in a lot of stuff currently missing from Draft One. Which means even when I've finished Draft Two, that chapter will still be a Draft One and suck more than the rest of the book, so I'll have to go back and do the whole stew-and-review process again for just that chapter. Assuming I don't find other moments in the story where I have to add in extra chapters of course... and they in turn don't mess up some structure/facts in any of the other Draft Two chapters...

And there I was thinking pregnancy and childbirth was a long and complicated process (although it has to be said my novel-writing process also seems to involve sitting down a lot and eating weird stuff.)

All of which is a rather weedy way of saying that it aint been flowing easily. Writer's Block? Well, I'm not sure if I should succumb to that kind of thinking (see here for my thoughts on that) so in order to not do precisely that I've been doing other kinds of writing instead, to stop my brain getting flabby and bored. But not a lot of Renegades writing, it has to be said. And because this blog is mainly about the progress made with Renegades, not a lot of blogging here either. (I am doing my ashamed face right now actually.)

Reason number two is a bit more universal; it's that thing called 'life.' That blimmin' thing that gets in the way of so many creative endeavours, because most of the time it just isn't as interesting. (Unless of course you are a fabulously wealthy and maybe even a bit famous person, in which case you could probably buy yourself things that would take the edge off the humdrum. But I'm not, so in my case that doesn't apply.) Christmas, for one thing. I realise I'm massively generalising here, but when you are a man, Christmas generally doesn't appear on your mental radar until... oooh, I don't know - maybe December? It certainly doesn't warrant much practical attention until you realise you've heard Wizzard's 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day' at least five times in various public places in the last two hours or so. But for the average woman - most especially one with kids - Christmas starts way earlier than that. Planning for it is on a par with organising a war. Presents, food, who's going to who's house on which day, costumes for the school play.... it's okay, I won't go on, because I can hear you all yawning from here. But it eats chunks out of potential writing time, there's no getting away from it.

So there you have it; two potential excuses to choose from for my recent tardiness on Renegade writing. But that's in the past now, I'm glad to say. I'm turning the corner, crossing that bridge now I've come to it (and hopefully not burning it as well) and The Renegades is BACK ON. Hurrah!

So I suppose I'd better get back to it then. As Dory from 'Finding Nemo' says - "Just keep swim-ming, swim-ming, swim-ming..."

Draft Two - Time To Get Real...

Well, my Date With Draft One of my novel The Renegades hit last Saturday, and I've spent the last seven days reading over it in preparation for the Draft Two process. And I have discovered two things:

1 - I'm not as bad a writer as I thought I was!
2 - I'm also not as good a writer as I thought I was.

It's a strange thing, to reach both conclusions at the same time, but then this isn't maths we're dealing with here, where every question only has one right answer (which probably also explains why I'm hopeless at maths. I'm a rubbish conformist.)

I suppose the best way to explain it is to say that the bits of Draft One that were good were... well, actually good, like a real, proper writer wrote them. While the bits that were bad... well, apart from the fact that I found myself guilty of some of the very things I'd been picking at in the writing of other authors, I also found myself at one point thinking "Jeez, this is note 163 - and I haven't even got three-quarters through the book yet!" (And my numbered notes are just the ones detailing changes too big to write as a one-liner on the manuscript... )

So I've learned something new from this exercise - something that, had I been taught it in a writing class or told it by an experienced author, I probably wouldn't have believed it. It's something I've had to learn the hard way - by actually going through the process for real.

Before now, I always thought Draft One was where I'd be doing the bulk of the donkey work. That the long, hard slog of actually getting the story down, from beginning to end, for the very first time, would be the most time-consuming part of the whole project. Everything after that would just be tweaking and polishing all the stuff I've already got down - editing what already exists. That won't take nearly as long to do - it'll be much quicker and easier than Draft One was. Wouldn't it?

I can see now how wrong that idea is. The real, sleeves-up graft is only just beginning.

Draft Two is not just a matter of dusting off Draft One and making it better; it's about upping the game considerably. It's about putting in all the parts of the story that are still missing (and my god, there's a lot more of that than I thought there'd be.) It's about finding and correcting every single plot, character and world mistake (and it pains me to confess there are a lot more of those than I thought there'd be too.) But most of all, it's about making every single part of the whole book better - even the bits that are already pretty good. It's not just an editing exercise - almost every chapter will have to be pretty much completely rewritten.

And that's what I've learned; Draft One is not, as I'd previously thought, the block of marble from which you carve and polish your literary David - it is merely the wireframe on which the whole thing is built. That means it won't look like anything much until I start slapping the clay on top - and that, clearly, doesn't happen until Draft Two, the real donkey work of the novelwriting process.

So... if Draft One was the conception stage, it looks like Draft Two is the pregnancy. I wonder if it causes weird cravings, backache and swollen feet too?

But I'm not downhearted - far from it. It's actually quite exciting, and I'm up for the challenge. Well let's face it - if I'm going to fall at this hurdle I don't have much chance of making it as a bona fide novelist in the future, do I? So bring it on, Renegades Draft Two! Meet me at the computer in ten minutes time -  'cause you and me have an appointment, and I don't like tardiness...

Six Weeks Is Longer Than I Thought

OMG (as I believe people under thirty years old say these days) have I really got three-and-a-half more weeks to go before I can start on 'Renegades' Draft 2? I'm sure weeks weren't this long when I were a little girl...!

I've given up on the kid's comedy novel, by the way. Well no - not given up exactly, just pushed it aside for a future project. Mothballed it, I suppose you could say. Instead I am now working on - another sci-fi novel. Yep, it seems I just can't leave the genre alone, no matter how hard I try, so I decided not to fight it and just go with it. Although I suppose I'd better not get to like this one too much, since I'll have to put it aside again when I start 'Renegades' Draft 2 - and even when that book's fully complete, it's just Part I in a trilogy, so I'm going to have to write the other two before I can go back this new one... Tsk! Get me, with my 'Oooh, I'm writing a trilogy" line - without even knowing if Draft 1 of Book 1 will make the cut yet. Me and my ridiculously lofty future plans!

How on earth do the professonal novelists deal with this? How do they resist the burning temptation to take 'just a little peek' at their simmering Draft One for six whole weeks? Some of them wait even longer. I haven't taken any sneaky peeks yet - but most of my writing thoughts have been consumed with what I remember of it, already debating in my head what I'll probably need to change, cut, add in... Am I allowed to do that? Is that breaking the rules? Ah, Stephen King et al - you give us these rules about 'setting your manuscript aside for a time,' but when we have questions WHERE ARE YOU, eh? EH?

This Week I Have Mostly Been... Procrastinating

Well... it's Confession Time, I guess.

During the writing of  'The Renegades: Redemption' I was cracking out a steady pace of about 10-15 hours a week of work on it. Yeah, alright, I'm not asking you to faint with admiration, don't worry. I'm well aware that's not many hours compared to, like, a full-time job or anything. But when you're a mum and housewife you don't get many hours that you're 'allowed' to call your own for 'indulging' your 'little hobby.'

 ( I HATE that word - 'housewife,' by the way. Makes me feel like a mindless drone. 'Domestic Engineer?' Makes me sound like a plumber or something. Not that I've anything against plumbers... it's just not a very accurate description to apply to running a house and bringing up a kid, that's all. We need something more dynamic that doesn't sound like a patronising mickey-take. Future project, perhaps? Anyway, I'm digressing...)

The point I was making, just before my brain randomly took a wander away from it, is that I had myself a nice little writing schedule whilst writing Renegades and - more importantly - I stuck to it. Now I've had to put it aside to stew for a while, and work on something else that's about as different from that as it's possible to get, my schedule's gone... a little wonky, it's fair to say. To the point where this week, for the first time in about six months, I am unlikely to achieve my minimum 10 hours of writing.

Okay, as Crimes of the Century go, it's hardly up there with Grand Larceny. But it's made me feel twitchy. Does it mean I'm Failing As A Writer? Aren't writers supposed to bounce out of bed every morning going "I want to write today, I was born to write, let me write right now, damn it!" ...Or something like that.

I've got to be honest, I haven't felt like that any day of this past week. Now that I'm working on this other project, it's been more like "Oh god, I suppose I'd better do some work on this again... nothing's coming... aw jeez, I'm not sure I can even do this..." It's not because it's not a 'fun' thing to write; it's a comedy, after all, so it should be ten times the fun of the predominantly giggle-free Renegades. And, if I'm completely honest with myself, it's also not because my six-year-old son is still off school, and doesn't go back until Wednesday next week. Sure, he has the energy of a Tasmanian Devil, and I've long run out of ways to get him out of the house that don't cost tons of money, don't need a car to get to and don't - JUST DON'T, MUMMY - involve going anywhere near shops to buy ANY things that aren't new toys or games. But that in itself is not what's slowed my momentum down. So what is the cause then?

Perhaps I'm 'missing' Renegades. After all, I devoted six months and some 200-plus hours of writing to it - and once I start on Draft 2 it'll be at least another 200 more before it's completed, I'll wager. Perhaps I'm just having trouble adjusting to the shift in perspective, from dark, gritty sci-fi to children's comedy in the space of a week. Or perhaps I'm just subconsciously trying to 'take a week off work' and feeling too guilty about that to let it properly happen. I can't imagine that, if I did, my Writing Brain would really shrivel to the size of a pickled walnut and I'd just be sitting there drooling and grunting the next time I tried to write. But it's there, in the back of my head, nagging away like an exasperated parent. The Fear.

Is that the Writer's Ultimate Nightmare, I wonder? That you somehow 'lose the muse' forever if you stop, for even a couple of days? Or have I just become as nerdy about my 'schedule' as I am about many other aspects of my life? Maybe I should join a support group or something.

Or maybe I should kick myself up the bum and get back to my writing, like a good little writer. *Sigh*... okay, ta-ta for now then...

I Think I'm Finally A Novelist..!

This week I finished the First Draft of my science fiction novel, The Renegades: Redemption (working title that will probably become the actual one unless I can finally dream up something better.)

That's 'finished' as in 'actually got to the bit where I get to type 'THE END' when the final chapter's been written.' This is the first time in my life that this has happened to me!

Sure, in the past I've written the lyrics for two musicals (both of which were performed in the USA) and had a couple of short stories and parts of collaborative short stories published - but when it comes to novels... well I've got enough halfway-through and only-just-started ones to stock a library (admittedly a very rubbish library, seeing as none of the books would be finished.) Until now. Now I've actually FINISHED a novel!

Well okay - I've actually finished a first draft, which isn't quite the same thing, as I'm sure all the proper novelists out there will tell me. But for me, this is still A Big Thing. For one thing, it means I'm not the big old, lazy, procrastinatin' lightweight I thought I was (well, okay then - I'm a little less like it than I used to be.) And second - now it means I actually have to find out if I've got what it takes to reach the next stage - completing Draft Two.

In six weeks time I will need to unearth my Draft One copy and rip it to pieces with my distance-critical eye. I might discover it's so awful that actually taking it to Draft Two stage could be considered a crime against literature, and while that will probably hurt at least I will have discovered it early rather than late in the journey. I'm hoping that won't be the case, of course - I invested a lot of time and effort in it, after all. I even made an Excel spreadsheet to track my hours spent writing it, for crying out loud. (I know - dead nerdy, but it seemed to work for making me write each day. I suppose seeing those little numbers adding up in my Total Hours columns guilted me into keeping at it.)

And then, if said Draft One proves to actually NOT suck, I will be able to dive headlong into the process of creating Draft Two. And heck, I might even finish THAT too. Providing an asteroid doesn't hit the planet and vaporise us all of course, or some other natural disaster of a world-ending nature. (That would be just typical of my luck, that would; finally get my posterior in gear with my writing and then get wiped out in a global crisis of bad B-movie proportions.)

But no! I must think positive, happy thoughts. Today is the first day of the rest of my life as a novelist. Not necessarily a successful one - but a novelist all the same. This calls for a celebration!

I may well eat a colossal amount of chocolate tonight...