Jen Black's Blog, page 103

Women writers

Today I'm cheating - I started reading a long article in the Guardian and didn't have time to finish it, so I'm pasting the link  here and I can go back and finish it at my leisure. It begins by discussing the writing of E.L.James and goes on to Rowling, Mantel, Donaldson, Meyer....women whose writing has changed fiction in recent times.

So read and enjoy, and I'll catch up later. Right now I have to go and find something a writer would like for under £5, wrap it in Christmas paper (do I have any?) so it is presentable for the bran tub at my local writers' lunch today, and then think about whatever it is I'm going to take as my contribution to lunch. Even thinking about it is making me hungry, which is very bad as I am hoping to lose the few pounds I put on by drinking all that Australian wine a few weeks ago. Empty calories, I keep telling myself whenever a glass hovers into view, but Australian wine is so good I just could not, cannot resist. If I don't do something soon I amgoing to be heading to town for a new wardrobe as nothing will fit.

Writing

Now that the month of novel writing is over I hope there will be more activity on the internet. NaNoWriMo, as it is fondly known by those who participate, takes over the month of November.  The aim is to write a 50k story in that month, and of course it means dropping everything else in favour of writing.

I don't take part, and so I notice how Blog posts drop off, comments are few, people disappear from Twitter and Facebook, critique groups don't move very much during the month. It demonstrates how much writers inhabit these places, or, put another way, how many people out there want to write a story even in these days when book publishing is supposedly in recession.

One answer to avoid the slow down would be to cultivate people who are not likely to launch themselves into NaNoWriMo, but how do you know? The most unexpected people turn out to have ambitions to write a book...some day. I attended a Girls' Night In at Hexham Library last night as a panel member, and was pleased to see so many people turn out on a freezing cold night, some travelling lonely country roads from villages in the Pennines where snow covered the ground. We told them how we'd begun to write, how we wrote, what we wrote etc etc. and they asked if our stories were ever altered by publishers, did we have any input on covers, how did it feel if stories or titles were altered? I suspect we had some budding authors right there in the audience.

For me it began years ago, back in the days of typewriters and Sno-pak, and it was tediously slow. I fiddled about in between real life and never finished anything, but then three things happened in the early nineties: computers came in at work, and I had to learn how to use them. I saw the possibilities and got a computer at home, and writing moved up a gear. Then I retired, and a whole new chapter of life began. First book finally completed, offered and accepted. I was hooked.

Endings are such a problem

No matter how many times I go over a piece of writing, I can always find something to alter, to improve, make clearer than it was. It would save so much time if I could see those things right off, but no, it’s always at the second, third, fourth etc draft stage. They say the brain sees what it expects to see and hides the mistakes – or doesn’t even register them. I’m tempted to start going through Victorian Beauty again, but I haven’t finished it yet. I still have the final couple of chapters to write, and this is where I stalled the last time I worked on this story.Melodrama, they say, is the result of under motivation rather than over expression, so maybe I’d better start checking the motivation of my characters. Perhaps their lack of motivation is what's stalling me. Goldman says of endings: ‘Give the audience what it wants but not the way it expects.’ Ha! Easier said than done. McKee says ‘The climax of the last act is the great imaginative leap. Without it, you have no story. Until you have it, your characters simply wait.’

My poor characters have been waiting more than a year for this resolution, so I’d better get on with it. But then, as Hemingway once said, ‘The first draft of anything is shit.’I can study famous quotes and read about endings, climaxes, resolutions and the like, but when it comes right down to it, I’m going to have to finish the thing, or else admit I’ve wasted my time writing the first 80 thousand words. I don't want to give up; I like these characters. A piece of advice remembered from long ago - if you can't decide on the ending, write several endings and see which you prefer. I may very well try it. I'll let you know if it works.

Literary sex and Amazon

Something worth keeping an eye on for UK authors is the news released in the Bookseller yesterday that Amazon publishing plans to open a European publishing wing based in Luxembourg. Vicky Griffith will relocate from Seattle in the New Year and start building a team of editors and marketing personnel. There is a thought that Amazon may wish to acquire global English language rights with this move. Big name authors have not flocked to Amazon Publishing, and some US stores have boycotted Amazon published titles because of the required exclusivity on Kindle deals.
There’s an interesting piece I spotted in the in the Guardian by Lee Rourke hereon why sex isn’t suited to the pages of literary fiction. I think he is saying it may well be suited to the pages of commercial fiction but I’d have to go and read it again to be sure. Why don’t you read it and let me know? I’ll go and dry my recently washed hair and then trot off up the hill to renew my car tax before I become illegal. and when I come back, I shall put my nose to the grindstone (or in this case the computer keyboard) and try and complete the remaining pages of Victorian Beauty.

Victorian Beauty

I have set myself a goal. I want to have a new book self-published on Amazon in time to catch the Christmas buying extravaganza. So I've begun second-editing a story for which I wrote a swift first draft some time ago. I've called it Victorian Beauty, and I've reached page 92 of 192. The title may change as I'm not sure it gives exactly the flavour I want.
There's still some way to go, and the ending will require a little more work than the rest of it because I finished it off in a great hurry. It needs more story to complete it properly, maybe an extra two chapters. In between editing, I'll be playing around with a cover as well. That's more like fun. It's good to be back in the mood again after all this time away having fun.

The story is set in Northumberland. After all, why struggle with locations in the south when I know Northumberland so well? why give myself problems?

If you are curious about the orange van in the picture, I spotted it on the road in Australia. Click on the pic to enlarge it and read the words scrawled on it!

Floods

July floodsMy better half regards the dismal weather beyobd the window and wishes he was back in Australia. Really? When questioned, he answers: Well, perhaps what I want is Australian weather here.That’s because here in northern England it’s grey and raining and half the country seems to be flooded. He’s forgotten how bright it was on Thursday, when we had blue skies, sunshine with frost and the world looked bright and sparkly.

Looking at pictures of flooded fields and towns on tv, it makes me wonder how folk survived in the sixteenth century. They didn’t have tarmacked roads or cars to keep them safe and dry, nor a centrally heated home or hotel waiting for them at the end of the journey. If they travelled at all in the winter months, it would be on horseback or covered waggon, slogging through miserable, freezing weather and avoiding puddles, swollen rivers and marshlands – and there would be plenty of those before the fields were drained and rivers restrained between stone walls. Before we went to Australia, a culvert burst under pressure of the rain in Newburn, a suburb of Newcastle, and caused havoc. Now we are back home, and we hear that the Local Environment Department is worried because though there are several known culverts flowing beneath Newcastle into the Tyne – no one knows exactly where they run, and the old maps depicting their course are no longer available. Duh! Bad mark to someone in the records office!

Evidently the owner of land is responsible for the safe conduct of water fron one side of the property to the other, which is a worrying thought for landlords and businesses in the city centre, certainly, but also for the average homeowner who may suspect a water culvert runs beneath his house or garden.Insignificant water courses on hillsides such as the Tyne valley can become torrents under heavy rain, as many of us have discovered in recent times. Suddenly it seems that no one is safe.

Home again

My Australian adventure ended with a trip to IKEA – said to be the largest in the world, and a walk along Bondi Beach admiring the lithe, tanned bodies soaking up the sun. It is certainly a lovely beach. I’m told it is raked and rolled every day to keep it looking lovely. The famed lifeguards were there, but not performing any daring rescues while we were there. They did go out in an inflatable and herded swimmers and surfers closer inshore – whether that was because the helicopter pilot had warned them of sharks, I don’t know, but certainly all the people in the water moved much closer to the beach.
Not only was Ian Rankin in the country at the same time as me, but James Bond aka Daniel Craig, turned up too, advertising his new film Skyfall. He was on the same piece of pavement as me – twelve hours later, and they put out a red carpet for him. Such is fame.
So, what are my impressions of my third trip to Australia? The weather was more variable than it has been before, with quite a few cloudy, windy days, and one or two with rain. That was surprising, though most of the time it was warm – there was sometimes a need for a sweater, but not a coat. The number of beggars sleeping rough on Sydney streets surprised me. The cost of living did too; I know the exchange rate did not favour us this time as it has in the past, but even so, the cost of living seemed high, and it was across the board. Shoes and clothes in general were delightful, but priced high, and often not practical for life in rainy old England. Food was also expensive. You need a very well paid job to live the good life in Australia.
Businessmen in shirts (ie without jackets) sit and discuss business over coffee in cafes that inhabit the ground floors of office blocks. On trains and in the streets, we were surrounded by people e-mailing, blackberrying and i-pad-ing. It seems work never stops, and that may have something to do with the awkward fact that Australia is ten hours out of synch with most of Europe and seventeen hours ahead of America. When business is waking up in those countries, Australians have done their daily grind, but they feel they must respond, so people out for the evening in in restaurants interrupt conversations, grab their mobiles and gabble away. The people of Sydney are multi-cultural, predominantly from Asian communities, but four hours away in Forster, this is much less prevalent. There, the bowling clubs rule supreme, and if you don’t bowl, you’re nothing!

Literary Taste and Bondi

Bondi BeachI found a copy of Chocolat by Joanne Harris on someone's shelves this week and couldn't resist re-reading it. I enjoyed it more than I did the first time around because I’ve now read The Lollipop Shoes and Peaches for Monsieur le Cure. Beautiful writing in all three, each with an intricate story that takes its own time to unfold on the page and in the reader’s mind. Enhanced, for me, by the memory of the beautiful actress who played Vianne in the film version of Chocolat.
How Fifty Shades of Grey will stand up to the comparison, I’m not sure, for they are poles apart in genre, style and almost everything else. I gained a copy as a gift, a copy going spare, so I was told, because they were not allowed to use it as a raffle prize! Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am reading it even though I freely admit I would never have bought it. So, how do I find it?
Bondi, looking northI was led to believe the writing is poor, and in some places it is, but not everywhere. There’s a certain breathlessness about the style that seems to catche how 20-somethings think these days, and no doubt that is appealing to 20-and 30-somethings. It also taps into the fairy tale/myth/fantasy of the pretty but poor virgin meeting the handsome, sexy billionaire and discovering how much he fancies her. Sex is wonderful for them, and the graphic description is better than many I’ve read, plus which it has the big plus that it is not the usual run of the mill sex. The twist in the tale concerns the devilishly handsome hero being a control freak who requires her to be totally submissive to his wish to inflict pain. He is so nice with it that the heroine is tempted to consider and sign his pseudo-legal Agreement. When he describes the kind of action he envisages, which involves whips and canes, it taps into a very basic tantalising-fear cum desire to be dominated that lurks in the heroine's psyche and also deep down in many a female bosom. I found myself grinning at the couple's witty e-mail exchanges, (which reminded me of typewritten notes addressed to Dear Big-Eyes which came to me through the ICI internal mail system in some long ago universe) and her asides to her inner goddess were a treat. Yes, I can see why it has been a runaway success.

Go Catch and Rankin

Kangaroo joeyGo Catch is a way of calling a taxi that’s new to me. The average mobile has GPS so if you ring Go Catch, taxi drivers know where you are and if they can pick you up. When we tried it, within a minute, four drivers had acknowledged us. We turned one down because he was too far away. Within ten minutes, 28 had responded. We agreed that one should pick us up, and he did, within five minutes, and told us it was the first time he’d used the system!
There are downsides, however. The next night, we agreed a pickup with one driver and waited ten minutes. He failed to arrive. When we rang him back, he made excuses, and it was obvious he’d ditched us in favour of other business. So it was back to the drawing board, and the next contact went through successfully.
Since it’s raining again, we’re trapped indoors and really quite glad for the rest. It’s time to get to grips with the work I’ve managed to do in-between all our sightseeing, and try and get it all in order. I’ve written about four or five chapters of Matho and had them critiqued, so when I get back I’ll incorporate them into the main file. After watching the programme on Ian Rankin, who writes the maverick detective Rebus, I was reassured to find that he takes eleven months to write and finish a new book, and always, always feels around page 65 that it isn’t going to work, that it isn't good enough. By the time he’d written the last third of his latest book, he knew it wasn’t good, and would need copious re-writing, but at least he had the outline. ‘Now it just needs a lot of hard work to get it into shape,’ he said. Three or four drafts later, he had the finished item, and he confessed that if he didn’t have to meet a deadline with his publisher, he’d just go on tinkering with it, always thinking he could make it better.He also said that he'd published eight Rebus novels before the ninth took off in the public mind, so there's hope yet for all us still climbing the publication lists.

Jacarandah in the parkWe’ve walked our socks off in the l...

Jacarandah in the parkWe’ve walked our socks off in the last few days. Tuesday saw us bussing into Sydney and walking via Circular Quay to the Royal Botanic Gardens where we debated going into Australia House – free – and decided we’d save that for when it rained. We walked around Farm Cove to the Domain and out to the headland in order to find Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. Mrs Macquarie used to walk to the headland every day to watch the ships sailing in and the soldiers carved a chair out of the sandstone rock for her. Click and you’ll find more details of Lachlan Macquarie than you ever wanted to know.
Unfortunately, three coachloads of Chinese tourists were there to visit the chair, and every single one of them had to have their photograph taken sitting on it – we managed one picture as the last of the Chinese left and with one eye on the approaching hordes from the next tour bus. We left and walked through the gardens, stopping for coffee on the way, then went to find the Mitchell State Library of New South Wales. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/ A splendid new building, all space, glass and light. I must admit I was awestruck.
Wednesday night we ate at Ivan and Lissie’s Tea House on Union Street in North Sydney. We ate Nasi Goreng which in Indonesian means "fried rice" but is so much more than that. It was delicious and we ate every scrap.