Done - well for now!

In the midst of chaos I finished with A Cornish House as far as I can go - for now. Tomorrow I print and send. Fortunately it is not going to agent or editor but to eyes who will accept that it's not perfect - yet. However it has grown well.

In the next three weeks I have to pack two boys for school (which includes sewing in labels), build seven flat pack Ikea boxes, paint a room, clean the house, ready two boats and kyak for storage, and have a family to stay :-)

When I get back to Dubai I will await the word on ACH and prepare....I have two open doors - one agent and one editor who said no to August Rock but wanted to see ACH.

I'm so ready to start the next book too! Where are you at the moment?

Past the Half Way Mark

Well, I have past the half way point of A Cornish House on this read through and quite edit. Thus far I am pleased to say it all hangs together - miracles never cease:-)

Of to enjoy the sun on the beach if manages to stay out!!!

Signs of Summer

Even though we have seen very little of the sun it is clearly summer. The sign tells us all. Visitors have arrived and if they follow their sat nav they end up going down lanes that twist beyond 90 degrees and if your car is bigger than a Fiesta you will rip the end out of your bumper. So summer is here - now if mother nature would help!

Back to School

I'll will be the first to admit I am totally hopeless at grammar. As a dyslexic it made no sense to me and I didn't like Miss Brown who taught it. I have always relied on my reasonably good ear to make my way. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how I received a degree in English. Somewhere along the way I mastered what I called paper-ease English and lost the natural syntax in my head. This natural syntax came from my grandfather who lived with us while I was young. He was originally from Donegal. His speech was naturally poetic, well at least to my ears.

However as I graduated back in the dark ages, 1985, I have forgotten everything. This morning I have spend hours here trying to master my tenses and exactly what is passive voice. Yes, I know I should have done this years ago but well it just didn't interest me. Now as I am wading through A Cornish House I need to understand this and more. However I haven't much time before this bl**dy thing must be sent off to New Writers' Scheme and as much as I will slap a big sticker on it saying beware not polished I do have some pride - not much but some.

So I'm finding myself making my sentences too simple because at least that way I know they are correct. This, however, leads to boring reading if all the sentences are too simple. So here's a choice for you:

Scattered around her were easels and canvases, all the requirements of her life. Well they had been her life and must be again. Bending, she opened a box and the smell of turpentine hit her. Something must have leaked. She dug into the box and found a pile of cards. She dropped them quickly and groped for anything else as the tears welled up. Her hand came to rest on a cool bronze finish. This wasn't any good. Who had packed this box? Who put his cards and the bust she had made of him with the turpentine?

or

Scattered around her were easels and canvases, all the requirements of her life. Well they had been her life and must be again. She bent and opened a box the smell of turpentine hit her. Something must have leaked. She dug into the box and found a pile of cards. She dropped them quickly and groped for anything else as tears welled up. Her hand came to rest to rest on a cool bronze finish. This wasn't any good. Who had packed this box? Who had put his cards and the bust she had made of him with the turpentine?

Confession - even as I read through the paragraph above I struggle to identify all the tenses I have used. I need to go back to school .

So are you a natural with grammar, a keen study, or do you flounder like me?

To the LIghthouse

Yesterday we decamped to the north coast and spent a glorious windblown few hours huddled by some rocks. The kids did a bit of boarding and general messing about on the beach. It was a day to clear cobwebs and anything else lingering in my head.

This morning I woke early and finally sat down to do a critique of another writers work. When I first attempted to do this last year, I was too scared to be as hard on her as I was on myself and also didn't think I had any skill for it (she has assured me otherwise). I was also feeling guilty that I would be totally hopeless at helping with grammar and spelling.......However when I finally took the plunge I had no idea how much it would give me back. By being a tougher reader for her I learned how to be tougher on myself. So I am now hopefully setting myself up for a brutal read through of A Cornish House. I must be ruthless. I have found myself going through first pages of books in shops again trying to find what makes them work for me and what doesn't. I am also seeing things which I think could have been cut. Let's just hope I can hold onto this vision for Monday morning!

Have you done a critique for another writer? Was it helpful to you? Was it horrible? Did you gain anything from the experience?

p.s. the photos is of the Godrevy Lighthouse which V. Woolf used for her book To the Lighthouse which somewhere in the back of my mind i know I have read but can not for the life of me remember it.

Recovery Time Required

Finally after much blood letting this rewrite of A Cornish House is done and dusted. I was beginning to think I would never get there. I hope that for all the pain it caused (which included my mother desperate desire to read the end before she left which was 4 am this morning) it is a stronger story. I do know without a doubt that it is more Maddie's story than Serena's - so even if it's crap I have at least proved to myself that I could re balance and intensify the story. For this I owe a debt of gratitude to the lovely Julie Cohen for reminding all things have been written before but it's what you bring to the story that makes it different and the Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.



Now I will not touch it until Monday - I promise. I need the distance to get perspective. However as I woke early this morning (Have been rising about five every morning to have peace and computer time) I was twitching. I think if I begin rereading on Monday that gives me a clear two weeks to play with it and then I can send it of to the RNA New Writers' Scheme as an unpolished but complete work. It was the best I could hope to achieve with the end of August deadline.



I have to say there is a part of me also that is itching to begin writing the book in my head which began brewing last summer at the RNA conference. However that must wait until September even thoughI have found the house that will be the basis for the setting......

So Close I Can Taste It

I haven't been blogging - not for nothing to say but the time issue again. My parents are here which is bliss. My house is now sorted and the kids are sorted. Life is good but time keeps disappearing. DH arrives today :-)

Yesterday I woke at 4:30 and couldn't fall asleep again so I crept downstairs and began revision work. I had spent the six hours the previous day while the car was being serviced this week. I sat at the kids table in the local vauxhall garage with a printout of A Cornish House and Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. I began at page one and worked through his chapters and the connections in my head started flying. My poor heroine is having more and more dumped on her but best of all - it all fits.

This leads me to the marathon revision day yesterday. So I revised from five am to six pm yet I didn't reach that crucial stage where these new key scenes need to go. I know what I have to write and I now know where they need to fit in the story but truth be told I might just be a little bit afraid to write them. Why you ask? Well, they will hurt Maddie and me. I will have to pull on all those dark corners of pain that we shove away to make these scenes work and I'm just not sure if I can do them justice.

I have wrestled this story from Serena's (the bolshy teen) grip and placed it back with Maddie but it has come at a huge emotional cost for her. I keep saying what else can I throw at her? So now I sit on the edge of writing some pretty painful stuff.......DH keeps saying as I mention what else is going to happen to her - and this is going to have a happy ending, it sounds more like a slash your wrist job. But Maddie will have her happy ending, I promise, it's just that both she and I will have worked bl**dy hard for it.

Have you had any scenes that it took all your reserve to write because you knew how much it would cost your hero/heroine?

Finally some links - over on C. S. Harris's blog there is a great post on lessons learned.
And finally from d.o.t's blog I found this blog How Publishing Really Works which carries much worth while info......

Well, we did have summer ever so briefly over the weekend but it have left us again. I took some wonderful photos of our days on the Helford with water so clear (and cold) and the sky blue but my camera it appears is on strike. It won't focus properly any more. In these days of digital cameras can they be fixed and is it worth I wonder?

I am trying to achieve some routine which is working. I have managed to keep the early rising thing going which means I have a peaceful two hours before any child appears. I should be cleaning the house but I have been getting back into A Cornish House. This has meant beginning again so to speak. So Instead of being on page 285 of the structural rewrite I am on page 160. Having said that this time through I am catching only small things and I am pleased that new additions seem to fit in seamlessly. Now to push on to where the BIG stuff needs to added.

So with my routine back in place I have been trying to catch up on all the blogs I have missed. I am still not commenting much but I am reading them again but before I venture on to what today's blog is about there have been some new additions to RNA conference reports:

Kate Johnson has a great write up of two of the Saturday morning sessions up.
Anna Lucia

Now while catching up on blogs Iwas reading Nathan Blansford's blogblog I clicked through to Rebecca Ramsey who had a great post about encounters with famous people. This had me thinking about my more recent ones. In Rome we were in the same restaurant as Julia Roberts much to the Dh's delight. The sort of sad thing was that we thought it was just a woman who looked like her........(papers confirmed the following day it was her). I have contact encounters (walked into them) with two very tall men - first was Stephen Fry back when the DH and I were first married and lived near Windsor. Fry was so tall I didn't see his face after I walked smack into him and I was clearly so short he didn't see me! The second was at the Jumeriah Beach Club (in our first stint in Dubai when JBC still existed) was Jeremy Clarkson. I had turned to shout at the trailing kids and continued to walk which was straight into him. I realized who it was as I appologized. Probably my most famous encounter after sitting next to Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall in Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons was actually talking to Bob Hope on the golf course. I was about eighteen at the time. Somewhere I still have my golf card that he signed.

So fess up - who and how have you encountered famous types?

RNA Conference - Small World Moment

Now that I have blogged about the the serious business of the conference I thought I would just add one last little tale. As regular readers will know I have lived all over the world but home is now in Cornwall. We bought our beautiful house back in 1996 just after we returned from 18 months of living in Calgary. We were based up near Gatwick and the company didn't want us to buy a home but to lease. So we did but I didn't feel happy not having a place that was truly ours.

So i will jump back in time to the summer of 1995 when we thought we were coming back to England for a three week holiday and staying with my in-laws in their house on the Helford River ( lets just say at this point I had one 2 1/2 year old boy and another one who was eight months and the garden of the house was on a forty-five degree slope!). Friends who wanted to spend time with us while we were home had booked a cottage in a nearby village for a week. DH and I went there to meet them on arrival. I set foot in the house and the virtually the first words out of my mouth were - "If this house ever comes on the market, I want it." It spoke to me and it still does. Nine months later the word came through the local grapevine that the house was to be sold.......the rest is history.

The vendors were great people and I think truly wanted us to have the house. We shared a transit van to shift the furniture etc. So on the way down from Gatwick I drove our car full of kids and things to somewhere near Oxford and collected the vendor while DH and her husband drove the van down together.

This time allowed me to talk about the house its history and their love for it. Her parents had bought it in the early sixties and brought it into this century. She had so many memories and kindly left us with photos of the transformation of the house. Now you are wondering how this has anything to do with the conference but hang in there.......We bought the cottage with contents as it was an on going letting concern. The vendor only took away a few personal items. Of the many things left behind were copies of her brother-in-laws books. She told of one tenant who had loved the books and and how they kept getting requests for more information. Now my memory may be wrong but I think she mentioned that her bil had visited the house.

These books are still on the cottage's shelves. I have often picked them up but to date have not read them as yet but definitely will now.

Now let's jump to the conference. I arrive tired and a bit hassled on Friday afternoon ( I had driven from Cornwall to Heathrow to collect DH on Thursday so that we could be at DS2's school for a final parents' reception near Andover - spent the night at friends - collected DS2 from school early in the morning to take him to his soon to be senior school near Oxford for uniform fitting and to meet his housemaster - dropped DH off at train station so he could visit his sister in London, returned DS2 to school and then drove to the conference in Chichester). So I registered and crawled to my room dumped the bags and with tired everything left my room looking longingly at the bed. As I left my room I met a man on the stairwell. I thought he was lost as clearly RNA conferences don't attract a large number of good looking men. However we struck up conversation and I tried to figure out how to broach the subject -are you a romantic novelist? By the time we had reached the book stalls I had discovered that indeed he was and over from Dublin for the weekend. It was his first conference. He desperately wanted to know if there would be any other men at the conference. I said not many but a few brave souls were usually around - fortunately at that moment Steve, Kate Walker's other half appeared.

I thought no more about our male attendee until I caught up with him in the bar after dinner Saturday. I cornered him and said exactly what was he writing (that was after I did the polite thing and ask him if he was enjoying the conference) he then spoke of his uncle J.G. Farrell. Something then went bing in my wine muddle brain. He said he wanted to continue the story of one of his uncle's book. What would that be I asked? he said the Troubles. Another bing went in my head. I asked him what other books did your uncle write? He said The Siege of Krishnapur and ......... By this time alarm bells were ringing. I knew each and everyone of those titles. They belonged to my house. They were part of its long history. I tried to explain. I tried desperately to remember the vendor's name. You see I could remember her maiden name as that is a family that the village remembers fondly. Too much wine does not aid memory then Mark came up with her first name and it all clicked........some times it is a very small world.

Romantic Novelists' Association Conference Day Three Part Two

The last session of the conference for me was Kate Harrison's Botox for Writers - restoring that va-va-voom to your work. I must say I was thinking less at this point in the conference that I wanted to restore the zing to me and not my writing.

Kate began by showing us a pretty scary picture of a face having needles pushed in! I was awake. So here's what she said:

Botox for Writers : The Fiction Facelift

-tone up a tired imagination
-banish a saggy middle
-retouch & refresh a fading image

She began with a case study of the tired imagination which showed symptoms of an inability to focus and a wrinkled brow. The causes were constant deadlines and outside pressures.

Story:
-stories are universal-storytellers must be valued
-appeal to us from childhood
-passed down in all cultures
-it is a way of expressing the world, human emotions and struggles
-as story tellers we are performing an essential fundamental function
-it may be instinctive but its not easy

A story must answer a question
-Who will be the best?
-How will this person transform themselves?
-How will the family/friends respond to the transformation?
-Which team will win? Which woman will land the man?

Story = struggle OR change
-to satisfy, a story must involve a struggle or conflict
-without conflict there is nothing to keep the reader interested
-conflict doesn't always mean argument - but the reader must care
-no struggle - no drama

Jeopardy
--the struggle to achieve a goal be overcoming obstacles (think of working to get through a mine field)
-obstacles may be physical or mental
-think of twenty ways to make it harder for your character
-increasing the jeopardy can increase tension and interest: add new problems or obstacles, increase difficulty, how far can you push your character?

Story= Character
-nothing matters unless your reader cares about your character
-they don't have to be completely likable though it helps
-but a reader must identify with the struggle

Story Solution
-what is the central question?
-what is the struggle, challenge or change the character must go through?
-can you make the struggle, conflict or challenge greater? more dramatic?
-consider raising increasing the jeopardy or playing with time to raise the stakes (here think of the classic film rom com where the loved is leaving on a flight and the hero rushes off to the airport to declare undying love and gets caught in traffic)

Next Kate dealt with the Saggy Middle (the photo for this one looked all too familiar!)
-symptoms were bloating and blockages
-causes - inevitable stage of life, delivered too many manuscripts
-treatment the WIP/Tuck ( loved this!)

Saggy Middle: Vitamin Cs Boost

1. Change will do you good!
-change your writing location - try cafe or library
-change your perspective -try the pov of another character, or from first to third.......
-change your writing method - computer to pen, skip the description and write as a screenplay

2. Cheat: if in doubt leave it out
-this can be liberating if you are a rule follower
-if stuck at a scene skip forwards
-write entire pages that say what happens then just move forward
-move ahead to scene you can't wait to write

Saggy Middle: the SCAMPER Miracle Plot Lifting Booster
-swap/substitute -think Freaky Friday, Wife Swap or Shakespeare
-combine: genres, ideas, new elements (keep list or use collected articles)
-Adapt - take successful formula and change one element - for example the a quality from a much loved movie or previous book
-maximise -exaggerate to an extreme
-perspective - unexpectedly change pov/have characters see things from a new angle
-eliminate -get rid of a character, a possibility, or escape route. where does it leave the story?
-reverse- dramatic change- rages to riches, Back to the Floor, sudden unexpected reversal tests character

Saggy Middles: SMART Workout
Set your goal. They must be:
-SPECIFIC (what are you going to do - be precise for example read history book on medieval gardens for characters passion)
-MEASURABLE ( how will judge them - 100 words a day)
-ACHIEVABLE (they should challenging but not off putting)
-REALISTIC
-TIME-LIMITED (set a review date and revise goals if struggling at that point)

She added that is should also be FUN - what would renew your enthusiasm for current wip?

Case Study 3 was Faded Image which symptoms were greying out of date look and the cause changing fashions.

First thing to do was the Stimulating Prep Treatment.
-gather materials together:books magazines tear-sheets, objects, scents. Hunt round the house for things new and old be it a stone from the beach, a postcard and even a cupboard stable. to try the multi-sensory approach
-look through these and set aside the ones that work well
-have a notebook to hand to record to note down any immediate reactions/thoughts/passions/themes.....then think about the themes that jump out at you. Beware story ideas may occur at this point

Intensive Imagination Renewal Treatment
brainstorm media you enjoy
-pick one at a time and analyse why you enjoy it and why they work
-apply to your own work

Refining Revolution Solution
(we all give ourselves rules so break them)
-work out your own rules
-write what the opposite would be
-think how you could tweak them to make your work more interesting and fresh

Conclusions the Holistic Approach:
-get more rest
-get out more
-ask for help
-drink more water
-give self treats

Further resources:

http://www.kate-harrison.com/
http://www.themindgym.com/
Sticky Wisdom/How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas
Story by Robert McKee
The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

Kate had us laughing the whole way through but I know I could really see how these methods could perk up a weary creative mind and have already started a few things in mine.

Just to say again that my notes are very incomplete and I know I have missed many of the subtleties of the various sessions which doesn't do the speakers the credit they deserve.

The conference wound down with a smaller group for dinner and quiz. I am pleased to say that I was on the winning team again! Just goes to show that you must learn to be near Anne Ashurst when it's quiz time. The most interesting part of the quiz though was the writers who did not recognize their own work - my lips are sealed on who they were though :-)

It was a brilliant conference thanks to the hard work of the wonderful Jan Jones and the committee. I have come away feeling lifted and inspired so now back to revisions - a deadline to meet!