Work in Progress - It Has a Name PENDERROWN

Well, I have put the nose to the grind stone for the month of May. Why? Because come hell or high water I have to submit to the RNA New Writers' Scheme by the end of August and I haven't left myself much time. Not that I haven't been working but the rewrite of August Rock doesn't help. It has been through the scheme twice so I won't submit that again it would be a waste. A Cornish House went through last year. I need to put something new in and that would be Penderrown. Yes, the wip has a name. It is the name of the house that is quite important to the core of the story. I diligently worked out the name of the house before Christmas using mil's book on Cornish. I scribbled notes on a paper with all the variations and settled on the above (also several other I came up with matched names of existing houses in the vicinity). I would tell you exactly what it means but I can't find said paper. I should know enough to write these things in my various notebooks but I didn't. So when I find the paper or even mil's book I will enlighten you but trust me it does make sense!

I recklessly aim to complete the very dirty first draft by the end of the month. This is very foolish as I have two trips back to the UK in May! Next week I will sitting with little lappy in various coffee shops trying to connect and find inspiration as well as attending RNA's Summer Party.

The word count is 38k - almost half way. Victoria my villain is in dire straights and so is Demi so thus far no sagging middle. I do know that I am lacking on description and am rushing things as I am ruthlessly pushing forward - scene to scene with relentless momentum. I just want the story out. It will take some serious fine tuning to fix the pacing but I know that before I lift a pencil to edit. This ties into some of feedback I had from a lovely agent re ACH - which cracks on too. She said I needed to give the reader more time, build up more to the key scenes...Well I am not ready to look at ACH right now but even without doing it I now know what she was talking about. In the various first versions of AR I lavished attention on the landscape and Judith's reaction to it........it was a character in and of itself. Which I think was probably one of the strengths of the early versions. But I had been criticized that it moved to slowly, wasn't pacy or exciting enough. Hence I over corrected in ACH and I can see it happening in my quest to get the story down now. Let's hope when editing that I can see my mistakes and can fix them properly!

Here are two good links - first on Romantic novels from The Huffington Post which goes on to blast the stereotype view :

I may not have gotten my answer for why romance is selling so well in our troubled times, but the Princeton conference taught me that to rush to conclusions about romance fiction is to flatten out a rich, varied, and continually evolving genre. In the end, though, I did conclude one thing. People read and enjoy romance just as people deal with hard economic times: differently.

And here's one on what is needed to make a good author website from the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency newsletter by Alan White.

I will finish my Japan posts later this week with a good wind and meeting that daily word count on Penderrown.