From the first page

I have yet to find the right kind of image for my cover. I tried making one but it looked very home-made. So instead I'm going to hire someone to do it, which means saving for a little bit first. I've also decided that I need my own website (which I hope will be a joint venture with at least two other writers) before going forward that will include short stories, 'deleted scenes', alternative endings and notes, letter, blog posts, etc. So it is happening...just not as soon as I had hoped it would.

There are a few things I am not to be trusted with. The first is directions. I have gotten lost on a straight road. Relying on me fot directions is a sure fire way to get lost. The second is timing and estimating hoe long things take. Which happened when I talked about self publishing at the end of this month. I'm not even going to guess how long it will be so lets just say it's delayed a little while. Also I'm going for a job I really, really want so wish me luck.

So I'm going to do something a little bit mad. You see, I'm very curious about self-publishing and ebooks. I read mostly ebooks. Don't get me wrong, I still love me the feel of glued dead-tree in my hands. Nothing smells as good as a room full of books. Ebooks are quick and easy and I devour them whole without having to worry about conserving them until I'll be able to get to the bookshop or library next. I also want to test my writing. I want to take the plunge and see how people react. So I'm going to either commission an artist or buy some stock photos for a cover, get someone else to take a look at it and release a short story at the end of the month. I have no idea how this is going to go. None. But I am going to track it and reveal how it's going here every month. I have a short story lined up. The one I have chosen has potential for a series if it goes well but it stands alone well enough. Hopefully it won't all blow up in my face.

Now that I'm editing SB, I've taken to writing more short stories. Today's is a story about a lazy law officer who is inspired to solve some weird cases. It's a little wacky, very strange and very me. As I type I'm making up a playlist for a new short story I'm writing.  I love listening to music as I write. I've done the experiments and tracking my writing to know that it makes me write faster as well. I'm going to share the music I pick for this one with you guys and I hope you let me know what you like listening to. Sometimes I like music without any words while I'm writing. This story just calls for lyrics! This won't be all of them in the playlist, just 5 songs to give you a taste.  1. Chasing Cars- Snow Patrol. (I also have the mix up of this with the Police and 'every step you take'. Check that out! Why here it is! ) 2. Five for fighting-100 years. This song is so sappy and sweet. Also the video. It's an old guy...

is a great way to set a mood in your story. It's also something most authors forget to mention. I was talking to someone I'm beta for the other day and it struck me. Picture this: Your character is alone on a street. They are starving. Seriously, their stomach is about to fall out and go look for food on it's own.  In front of you there's three restaurants. 1)One of them is small, has fairy lights around the doorway and candles on every table. The main light in the room comes from a dimmed hanging shade of clouded glass that's been shaded orange. 2) The second restaurant has much more light. The six evenly spaced spotlights bulbs are built into the ceiling. 3) The last restaurant is covered in neon signs that lead the eye to the bar, which had LED light along it that change colour with the music. Now which does your character choose? The light in the places your character go tells us about the setting you have made and it t...

It's a new start to a new year and I don't know about some of you-but I feel burnt out. The holidays were exhausting. My mind is fried and I am emotionally drained and physically weak thanks to the flu. I have made my resolutions but I'll save that for another post. This is a re-charge post. I did photography as part of collage and loved every bit of it. I have a powerful camera that I know how to use and sometimes I feel isn't being shown enough love. I like to take pictures. Me and my boyfriend are quite broke so sometimes we go for 'camera days' instead of having expensive dates. These are getting rarer with time restraints on both of us. It's something me and my best friend used to do as well before she emigrated. I take the camera to family things and I took it to Rome but mostly it's just looking at me sadly. I'm also for anything that  gets my creative juices flowing. The great thing about using my own photographs is not having to wor...

...and played around with photoshop for a bit. Pretending that it's all edited I made a cover. It's not and I won't have a say in the cover anyway but pretending is nice. The result is this:

For the last three weeks I has have a project outside NaNo. I have been studying me. It's easy. I have a excel sheet (but honestly all you need is a piece of paper) and on it is the date, what time I start and finish, where I am, whether I am listening to music and how many words I wrote in the time. This is what I learned: I get between 900 and 2000 words per hour. I do better when listening to music. I do better when I'm sitting at a desk. By keeping track I know I do best from twelve to three. Odd that. I figured I would be a night owl or a morning bird. Not a weird in-between person. But by keeping track I've been able to beat the system, my own messed up system. I know when and where to write to get the best results and with 28,000 words written on the 13th of November, I know that I can do NaNo. I can win! Not only that but must short stories are going well too. The change in what I'm writing helps me from burning out. Every day I write at least two thousan...

You know they aren't true. Sometimes someone is completely wrong about you and there isn't anything you can do about it. It feels horrible. Worse Than that is when you still know that they are good people. That they are nice and kind and genuine. You like them. It would be easier not to like them. It would be easier to dismiss their opinion of you because they are mean or cruel or just not nice people. Sometimes you can't even correct them. Someone can think of you as something terrible and still be awesome. That's about them, not about you. Being good people doesn't make them instantly right about you. But it just sucks. It feels horrible. A million other bad things can happen. Some might be serious. Sometimes you might wake up just feeling a little depressed. That's okay. I know studies say that one in four/five (depending on where you live) people suffer from mental illness but I honestly believe that everyone has depression at some point. Some people get...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Halloween is my favourite holiday. With sweets and costumes, what's not to love! I sadly won't be dressing up this year. At least not excessively. I might give myself peacock eyes or something. I'm on sweet duty this year. Can't wait to see all the cute costumes. The other thing is that tomorrow is the start of NaNoWriMo. Tomorrow. It got near scary fast. I've decided to not write anything today even though I'm itching to go. It's hard. Harder than I thought. I've spent the last few weeks writing every day I can and it's built up a habit. That's good. It's half ten in the morning and I want to write. I have my novel all planned and plotted. I know my characters. They are asking me to write them. I know my world. It wants me to go explore. So why take today off? Nano is 50,000 words and I'm worried about burn out if I do too much too soon. The goal is definitely do-able. To get it done I need to write 1,667 words w...

Things have been hectic. Beyond hectic. I went to Gran Canaria. It was sooooo hot. Forty degrees. My pale Irish skin was not made for that. I melted. I went to Rome. Rome was lovely. It even rained one day and I felt like I was home. Only a really pretty version of home. Here. Have a picture of Rome. Posing much? I have pictures of Gran Canaria...but it was a drunken, sun-stricken mess of a holiday with the girls so I'll think keep those to myself. Not because I'm a horrible mess in them. No no no. It's for the greater good.  So instead I give you a cat. It's the internet. So cat. Roman cat. I have been writing (Good girl) but not blogging (Bad girl). I got a smart phone finally. The reason it took so long is because I love buttons.  I'm doing NANOWRIMO. Super excited. I even get to meet other writers! I have my idea fully fleshed out and am now counting done the days until I get to start.  To bind the time I'm working on another p...

So, first off, writing's going wonderful. I'm taking part in word wars and the like on twitter and, as I'm a competitive person, it works for me. I joined a forum for writers and am learning so much. Short stories are coming fast and easy. The novel is stalled again but not because I don't know what's coming yet. In fact, I'm excited about it. I just a break from that world for a few days so I can get hyped about it. My excitement about it will grow and writing it will be a reward instead of a chore. I think short stories will sharpen my skill for the novel also. Some of them tie into the story and I may leave one at the end of it. It isn't needed for the story but it's a neat little story that is concluded in the main. All very good. Grade: B The not so good is all the drama that's going on. So many authors have decided that reviews need punishment or something for reviewing them badly or ignoring them. I won't give links to the sites in ques...

Samuel Beckett, you “try again. Fail again. Fail better.”   I'm not going to lie, I love outlining and then I love to go about writing and ignoring all my outlining ( I am trying to get better). However, recently I 'pants-ed' a story. For those of you unfamiliar with that it means to sit down and write until it's finished with no idea where the story is going to take you. I learned a few things by doing this. The first is that it is an extremely free way to write. You don't have to worry about research or time or word count or how to get from point A to point B. It's also quick. I had the first draft written before I knew it. It gives you a really good sense of where you would like you're story to go. It gave me a huge insight into my characters and how'd they would at and react to what I threw at them. Then, if you're like me, you have to change everything about it. That's the not-so-fun part. I learned that I am incapable of keeping ...

The good: I'm out of a job I hated. I wasn't afraid of the work. I'm lazy on my own time, thank you. No no no. It wasn't an atmosphere I wanted to stay in. It was temporary for just 10 weeks. I was counting down the days from week 2.  I have time to shop, cook and eat well even if I lack the money. (I think I'll make big batches and freeze) Banana toast is yummy!  It's only two months until I get to see one of my favourite people.  Exercise is actually happening. My muscles hate me but the dog is delighted. I've made out a schedule for the blog. So be prepared for well-planned fun and frolicking. The Bad: I haven't been writing so much. You may have guessed that from it being missing from the good list. I have been project switching like crazy but still find it slow going.   I haven't been editing either. I now have the time and no excuses. If I were someone else I'd hit me. Or yell at me. I'd at least give a dis...

My awful reading habits: I devour books. I'm a speed reader by nature. Even when I try to slow down I end up racing to the epilogue. I don't care much for detail or conversation. I just have to know how it ends. I need my story fix. My process: 1. Read it fast, read it now. 2. Anyone who distracts me is risking life and limb. As a teen I was serious skilled at two things. While I read I could hold conversations. (The second is that I could sleep with my eyes open. It was great for boring classes.) I can't do either any more. Sigh. 3.Skip the boring bits. Not this kind of skipping. (Source) I was an author's nightmare incarnate. I disregarded whole paragraphs (and sometimes chapters when I was very naughty) that they spent hours or days or months or years writing. And I didn't care. The worst part? I still do it. I try not to. But I have limited free time and I don't want to know about the colour of the sun in exact details as it climbs over the o...

I have a voice in my head that's sole purpose is remind me of all those doubts and how things could go wrong. I call it the anti-me. The anti-me is jealous when I want to be happy for other, mean when I want to be nice and rains over my parade even after I accomplish something to be proud of. This same voice ignores rationality so it's not my sub-conscious being cautious. It told me that a coat in the dark was a face, that the wind was something howling for my five-year-old blood. It seems to thrive on making me hate myself and everything I write. If I could shut it up by punching my face, I'd take the black eye. I know better now. Most of the time I don't even register the little nag whining away. The exception seems to be when writing first lines. That's why it'll be the last thing I do with this one. (Even though I am writing down 'maybe' first lines) Are the times when the anti-you gets too loud to ignore?

That word sends shivers down your spine, doesn't it? When you're looking at 20,000+ words, the task of editing can seem really daunting. Well, don't worry because it's supposed to feel that way. There will be things you want to change. There will be grammar and spelling errors. There will be rewrites. There will be plot holes. There will be scenes you love that need to go. There will be characters  you love that need to be cut. There will be paragraphs that make you wonder how sober you were when you wrote them. -_- This will all happen no matter how long you spent planning and plotting and detailing. Some seemingly glaring mistakes will only show up after you've spent months writing the whole damn thing. You will hate your book as much as you love it as this point. It won't take away your pride in finishing, but it will certainly diminish it. The first draft will suck. Well, it will suck when you compare it to the second draft. Which will suck when...

When writing news articles, we use something called the inverted pyramid. This means putting the most important fact first. It's hard for two reasons. The first is that it goes against your nature. Every story you see, hear or tell has a start, a middle and a end. Usually in that order. It's the best way to explain a series or events. However with news it's different. People don't care how or why an event happened. It's the event itself that is important. What happened? Why? Sometimes only a line or two of the whole thing will be read and that has to be enough. The other thing is the importance of a fact is subjective. The fact as I see as the most important might seem trivial or obvious to you. The one you choose to focus on is the angle of the story. You aren't changing the facts, you're just putting in your choice of importance. It might be an idea, after you've plotted out your story, to do this with your key scenes. What's the most im...

I write before I type. Then I go to the excellent  other side of the story  to help me with tricky editing and spiteful words that slow down everything. So saying that I have one chapter all the way written (I know, I'll need to re-write it) and another one written out in pen is a very good thing. If anyone sees this, which I doubt as I'm new and shiny; how do you write?

I know how I want my story to start and, even more importantly, I know exactly how I want my story to end. If I start at the beginning there's a danger that I'll trail off or even forget the ending I have in mind. That's why I've decided to work backwards. Progress: Good. Got a chapter written down yesterday. Today I'll type it, fix any annoying POV errors and edit it a bit so it less rough. Well, that's the plan anyway. Wish me luck!