Amanda Fleet's Blog, page 22

Guest post: book planning using PowerPoint

I'm delighted to share a guest post with you today by Angela Nurse. She said that she was planning her new book on PowerPoint and I was intrigued... Scrivener, index cards, pen and paper, Excel... all these I had heard of being used in planning, and most of them I'd tried, but PowerPoint?

Happily, Angela said she would share her thinking with me, and all of you. Over to you, Angela! (btw... I love the idea of a 'murder board' and can't see why it wouldn't be appropriate in a living room...)
[click on any picture to enlarge]
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Tightrope walking...

I both love it and hate it when A New Book starts prickling away in my brain. I love it because it feels fresh and exciting and I'm curious to know where it will go and how it will turn out. I hate it when it starts chiselling away at my brain at a time when I am already overloaded with other books that need finishing/editing/writing!

I'm always scared that if I don't make any notes or write at least a little bit about The New Book, that it will vanish, escaping my brain like a Will o' the Wisp. But, boy, it can be a fine balance between 'getting some of it captured so I don't lose it' and 'oh look, here I am at the end of a first draft'!

As I said in last week's post, The New Book is serious enough to have got its Own Notebook. I spent a while researching the location and the house in which it will be set, plus getting a few other ideas out of my head, and suddenly, the five or six pages that I scribbled on the train home a fortnight ago have morphed into almost 30 pages of a B5 notebook. I'm treading a very thin line between getting enough down that I don't forget it, and disappearing down the rabbit hole and only re-emerging when I've a first draft in my hand.

I've come to the conclusion that I might just have to write two books at once.

But... that way, madness lies, doesn't it?

I'm hoping not (though enough people suspect I'm a bit mad a lot of the time already). I've tried to make a bargain with myself that I have to have done x amount of work on the book I'm meant to be working on, before I get to play with The New Book. It's a carrot and stick approach! My aim is to parallel process, but not to get beyond chapter outlines in The New Book until I've cleared off The Trilogy! I suspect reality will be that I have both The Trilogy and The New Book on the go at the same time.

There was an author who always had at least two typewriters set up, so that if he reached a tricky bit with one book, he would switch desk and work on the other. I think I may end up doing something similar.

Now I just need to find a new desk...

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Too many ideas (again)

My brain at the moment...I'm disappearing into my own thoughts more and more at the moment. I find that I do this when the world seems worse than usual. I don't want to get into politics here (domestic or world), but at the moment, things feel stressful and entirely beyond my control. Consequently, I'm retreating into my made-up worlds in my head, where I do  have some control (allegedly!) and my head is full of new ideas! Not that I need them... I have two books of the trilogy to edit, the third to write, plus full chapter outlines of another (stand alone) book, a prequel to the trilogy and a crime novel to sort out. And should I tire of all that, I have a thriller, and a women's literature novel that are both at final draft stage and I could get them edited. So really, I need to be thinking about another book, like I need a hole in my head. Actually, if I had a hole in my head, it might let some of these ideas out and give me some peace!

I went to visit a friend the other day and knew that I would probably get some quiet time on the train to work on "book 6" (first book of the fantasy trilogy). Right enough, on the way there I did a load of work on it.

On the way back...

I started to jot "just a few notes" about something else that's been flittering around in my brain for a few weeks, "just to get it down on paper... not to really start writing it."

Ahem.

It's now got its Own Notebook.

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What is "success" in writing?

If you do a Google search for "success quotes" you will find a whole heap of motivational quotes and slogans about how to achieve success. But what if you don't actually know what success will look like if or when it happens?

Is it getting published by a publisher? I don't think so - I've read many a book published by a big publisher (or a small publisher) and wondered how and why it got chosen out of the submissions pile. I've also read a lot of self-published books that have been brilliant. Who knows why the author hasn't been published by a big publisher - maybe they never sent it off to them; maybe they did and got rejected, they re-worked it and self-published; maybe the were rejected because the person who read it didn't like it but another person may have loved it. Of course, I've also read some brilliant books published by big publishers and terrible books that were self-published. Trying to predict whether a book will be good or not from how it got into print/ebook, is pointless.

Is success selling a gazillion books and having multiple best-sellers? Maybe. Maybe not. I can think of some best-sellers I would be beyond proud to have written and have read and re-read because I love them. I can also think of a whole heap of best-sellers that were absolutely diabolical - badly written, badly plotted, badly edited... just terrible.

Is it getting loads of great reviews? Perhaps. But look at any book that you think is incredible and look at the reviews on Amazon. I would guess that every one of them has someone hating the book. This, for example, has been left for Pride and Prejudice:

One of the very few books I can't read. Every time I say "NOW I'VE GOT IT!" and by page 20 I'm asleep or try to kill myself with a wooden spoon. Eventually I ran out of spoons, but still the outcome was the same. People seem to love it, but I really can't understand why. Probably it gets better later. I may even try the zombie version, just in case.

Reviews are very subjective - some will love a book and others will hate it. Getting good reviews isn't always a good indicator that something is good, any more than getting bad reviews indicates that it's bad, though maybe the spread of good to bad can be useful information.

So if it's not how it's been published, and it's not necessarily sales and it's not necessarily reviews, what does indicate success in writing? What would you say indicates that a writer has become a successful writer?

Drop me your ideas in the comments.

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Why running helps me to write

I can't remember when I started running long-distance. At school I was a sprinter (and a long-jumper) and not terribly good at either, and seemed to have an aversion to the annual cross-country run the whole school had to do. But somewhere in the last twenty years I turned into a runner and now I couldn't imagine not running.

There are many reports of running being good for mental health (though the jury is a little out on how effective it is in comparison to medication for depression - running seems to be about equivalent to medication for mild depression). Speaking personally, I know that my mental health is always better if I'm able to run. But how does running help me specifically as a writer?

I feel that running improves my life as a writer in a number of ways, not just on the mental health side.

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Computer hell...

I got my royalties for Q1 a couple of weeks ago and decided to buy a new laptop. Now, before you think of me as a hugely extravagant person, can I point out that my old laptop was many years old and still on Windows 7!

The "instructions" on how to set up the laptop were (I kid you not):
1. Connect to power
2. Press the power key
3. Configure the operating system by following the on-screen instructions.

That was it.

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Perfect Dead by Jackie Baldwin - #LoveBooksGroupTours

#LoveBooksGroupTours #PerfectDead I'm absolutely delighted to be hosting Jackie Baldwin on the blog today, as part of the tour for her latest book, Perfect Dead which was released on June 15th

I first met Jackie through Bloody Scotland - we were both Crime in the Spotlight authors in 2016, and we've kept in touch and met up again for lunches over the years. Her first novel, Dead Man's Prayer was released to great acclaim and fans of her ex-priest detective, DI Frank Farrell will love the new novel.

Today, Jackie wants to share with you her thoughts about finding the perfect work-life balance.
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Writing scrapbooks

For each novel I've written, I have a scrapbook. In fact, for several books I have more than one! In these scrapbooks, I keep initial thoughts, plot outlines, notes developing the plot, notes on each character, notes on each scene before it gets written, notes for when I'm editing... it's great fun looking back through them and if I ever feel unsure about what I'm writing, or uninspired, all I need to do is flip through them to get enthused or for the ideas to start flowing again.

sample page from a notebook
(absolutely no copyright infringement intended!)They're mostly A4 in size, though recently I've had a bit of a shift towards B5 size (especially for using in my writing folder) and often lined, though a couple are plain. The best bit about them are the pictures and drawings. The notebooks genuinely are scrapbooks! As well as all the notes, there are pictures pasted in from magazines of interiors - how I imagine the characters' houses look. As you can see in the picture at the side, I have an image of what a bedroom looks like (and also an image of what a character might be wearing).

I've also added in property schedules sometimes - it can be very inspiring to do a search on the property websites, looking for the kind of house you imagine the characters to live in (or aspire to), even if the only thing that really makes it into a book is the layout of the place.

I also draw in the books. I (amazingly) have an 'O' level in art and used to enjoy sketching, so there are sketches of layouts/items/locations etc. in the notebooks. There are also drawings of costumes. I'm not great at drawing people (at least, not with faces - I'm quite good at drawing the rest!) and so there are also pictures of people pasted in - usually actors or people from clothing catalogues. Clothing catalogues can be a great resource not just for what the people look like but for outfits - what the characters might wear (even if they don't look like the models).

I'm trying to make a note of what music I've been listening to for each book too. Listening to the music again is one of the quickest ways to get me back into a book if I've been away from it for any time - but I'm not good at noting it down at the time.

These notebooks will make almost no sense to most people, but to me, they are an inherent part of the process of writing a book and something I cherish.

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Decluttering... home and mind

Actually, for me, decluttering the home makes my brain feel a lot less cluttered too. Not that you would always know it to look at my desk, but I can get overwhelmed with objects. If there's too much stuff around, my brain gets agitated.

My desk can be a veritable sea of stuff sometimes, but I seem fairly blind to that! But too much stuff in the rest of the house unsettles me. It's why when people ask me what I want for Christmas or birthday, I usually say "nothing - please give a donation to charity instead". I have more things than I need and there are too many people in the world who don't have enough. In fact, Christmas in general makes me feel ill - so many people buying so much stuff that the recipients rarely want or need. The waste appals me. Please, just give the money to charity.
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Back to work...

We had an amazing time away, but now it's time to get my backside back in the chair (metaphorically, as I tend to stand to write, rather than sit) and get back to doing some writing.

I'm trying to get some work done on the first book of the trilogy while "Liars" is away with Gillian for editing. I've been thinking about it quite a lot while I was on Lewis and Harris so hopefully, my head is in approximately the right place to get stuck in.

And the weather has finally broken! It was wall to wall sunshine here before we went away and then the same on Lewis and Harris, but it's cloudy now - much more conducive to writing than scorching sun and enticing shady corners in the garden. (Much as I adore being outside, I never get quite as much writing done while sitting outside as I think I will - I'm too distracted by all the wildlife!)

My batteries are recharged, I have a stack of new notebooks clamouring to be written in... time to get back to writing.

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