P.D. Martin's Blog, page 3

February already?

It’s hard to believe it’s February already. I missed my 1 January post completely (oops) and now it’s February. How did that happen? I know, I got sidetracked by life…my daughter’s birthday, Christmas, New Year, summer school holidays, etc. etc.

And now school’s back (as of Thursday) and I find myself more in my usual writing routine (if you can call it that when my time is scheduled around a 2yro!).

So, some big news coming soon from me. I’m branching out into my own creative writing training business. I’m finalising the venue at the moment, but this year I’ll be running some intensive writing courses and maybe a couple of other courses. I’m very excited about this new venture, although also wondering how I’ll publicise them! But I’ve got to finalise the details first.

This is the format for the week-long intensive course. It is during the week so people will need to take time off work but after meeting Fiona McIntosh at Clare Writers’ Festival and hearing about her courses, I know there’s a market there!

Monday-Friday, 9.30am-3.30pm
Five days of intensive training for complete creative immersion
Exclusive sessions capped at 12 people so you get individual attention
Creatively inspiring environment
Full catering so you can focus on the writing
Extensive notes
In-depth exercises to help you put theory into practice
A range of tools to make your novel the best it can be
Intensive work on characterisation and plot development (with application to your novel)
Access to internationally published author (that’s me!)
First 15 pages of your manuscript (12pt, Times New Roman, 1.5 spaced) edited/critiqued by PD Martin (me again!)

Anyway, more on this and my other courses soon. Hope all my readers have had a lovely January!

NaNoWriMo round up

It’s official…NaNoWriMo is done for 2013. This was my second time attempting NaNoWriMo and I’m afraid that once again I fell short.

Instead of meeting the 50,000 word target (or my personal target of 30,000-40,000 words), this year I managed only 20,212  words.

I have excuses, of course. Who doesn’t? But the truth is there were two days I had put aside for intensive writing sessions (two full days, the only full days I get each week) and instead of putting my foot on the accelerator I went for the brake. I’m still not sure why. Yes, it’s a crazy busy time of year for me. My daughter’s birthday is on 6 December so there are always celebrations to organise. I also went to the Clare Writers’ Festival from 29 November – 1 December and was busy preparing for that in the last week of November. (The Festival was fantastic, by the way!)

Also, the writing didn’t seem to flow as easily for this book (book 2 in a YA series) as it did for the first and I even wondered if the fact that I actually did some plot planning BEFORE writing made things worse. Instead of writing free-form, I was writing the scene I had designated as the next scene in Scrivener. But surely plotting should help move my writing forward, not hinder it.

The bottom line is I hit the brakes for some reason. But the good news is I got 20,000 words done of my next novel and if I hadn’t been pushing myself with NaNoWriMo perhaps it would have been a much less productive month.

Not sure yet if I’ll sign up in 2014, but I’m determined that one of these days I will do NaNoWriMo and actually finish it. Perhaps not when I’ve got a 2yro at home though      

NaNoWriMo – take 2

This year I’m trying NaNoWriMo again. For those of you who don’t know, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it’s basically a whole community of writers (both published and aspiring) getting together with the goal of writing 50,000 words in the month of November.

I tried it for the first time in 2011 and unfortunately only made it half-way. This year, I hope to get a bit closer to the 50,000 word target, however I am trying to fit it in around fairly limited chunks of writing time.

This year, I’m working on book 2 in a new YA series. I recently finished the first book and am doing the agent/publisher rounds but I thought in the meantime I’d spend November to get a chunk of book 2 written. It’s especially important for this series, because book 1 does end on a cliff hanger. Yes, there’s some resolution, but I know if I was reading it I’d want to pick up book 2 pretty much straight away because while the lead character just avert disaster in book 1, the novel ends with her ‘going into the lion’s den’ shall we say.

In the lead up, I’ve been doing a bit of planning. I tend to be more of a plot-as-you-go writer, but I thought in honour of NaNoWriMo (and because I had no idea where the plot would go!) I might actually do a basic structure before putting pen to paper. And I’m using a new-to-me theory…I’m trying the Blake Snyder beat sheet, which includes 15 ‘beats’ in a story. It’s made for screenplays, and some beats only last one page (e.g. the Opening Image) while other beats might last 25 pages (e.g. Fun and Games).

I’m also using Scrivener (which I use for all my writing now) and so I’ve written up scenes on index cards in Scrivener and I’ve customised the ‘Status’ section so it says which type of beat the scene (index card) is. This is what part of my structure looks like.

First time using this method and obviously first time using it with Scrivener so we’ll see how I go!

So, that’s my November. I did miss last month’s blog (naughty me) but I’ll check back in with a blog on 1 December to tell you all about my NaNoWriMo progress. Or you can see it in real-time at www.facebook.com/pdmartinauthor

A celebratory month

September is already a month of celebrations for me…and we’re only five days in! And maybe that’s why this blog is a little late, going up on 5 September instead of 1 September.

Anyway….

The first celebration was literally on the first of the month, when a large group of people gathered in the Yarra Valley to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday. It was a fabulous day and Dad had people from all different aspects of his life there.  We had a lot of speakers – yet everyone was so unique with wonderful insights that the day didn’t feel ‘heavy’ with speakers. In fact, it was fascinating. We had 14 people all up!

And 1 September was also Father’s Day, so we started the day with breakfast for my husband and presents from the kids.

September is also another big celebration for me. As some of you know, in 2010 I started teaching at Writers Victoria. This month marks a huge milestone in my role as a writing teacher, with one of my students entering the ranks of  ‘published author’.   Congratulations to Ellie Marney on the release of her debut young adult (YA) novel, Every Breath – the novel she was working on in my 2010 class!

I have to say, it’s extremely rewarding to see one of my students’ manuscripts come to life not only on the page, but then on the bookshelf. The official launch is next week, but it is in bookstores now. Congratulations to Ellie, and I hope she’s the first of many of my students to break into this crazy world!

About Every Breath (from the back of the book)

What if Sherlock Holmes was the boy next door?

Rachel Watts is an unwilling new arrival to Melbourne from the country. James Mycroft is her neighbour, an intriguingly troubled seventeen-year-old genius with a passion for forensics. Despite her misgivings, Rachel finds herself unable to resist when Mycroft wants her help investigating a murder.

And when Watts and Mycroft follow a trail to the cold-blooded killer, they find themselves in the lion’s den – literally. A night at the zoo will never have quite the same meaning again…

It’s all about the characters

Even now, on my new once-a-month schedule, it seems that blogging comes around so quickly. But that’s more about last month’s blog on the fluidity of time and not today’s!

Today, I want to talk about characters. You see, I do think different types of books need different levels of characterisation. My Sophie books, as most people reading this know, are what I’d called forensic-based murder mysteries with a good dose of criminal psychology in the form of profiling. They are essentially whodunits and why-dunnit and these two questions are the driving force to keep the readers turning the page. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can ignore character and character development in thrillers or murder mysteries — in fact, readers will quickly put down a book if they don’t feel like they’re connecting to the main protagonist. Characters can never be cardboard cut-outs or two-dimensional. Every character, just like every person, has a story. However, I do think that the importance of characters and the relationships between characters is much more instrumental in novels that explore drama or family dynamics as their central theme and plot.

Last year I finished a book that I’d describe as a mainstream drama, not that dissimilar to Jodi Piccoult. And while I finished it last year, it has literally been sitting on my desktop gathering bytes (manuscripts don’t gather dust any more, do they?). Finally, late last year I paid for an assessment/developmental edit. Probably not such a common practice for a published author, but this book was so different to what I’d written before I felt the need to dig deeper and I felt like I needed professional and objective eyes.

But the process didn’t stop there…then I needed to let it stew for a bit. For a lot. I needed to get more objective myself and I needed to go back to the drawing board in terms of characterisation. It’s been an interesting process. Armed with David Corbett’s book, The Art of Character, I started again, as it were. I dug deeper into the characters, deeper into their psychological motivations.

With the new character work complete, I started edited. The editing process is taking me longer than I’d hoped (it always does!), but I’m up to chapter 5 and really happy with the changes in the first four chapters. I feel like I’m transforming this book, and making it so much better in the process.

Good writing is always about characters…but to me it’s about the balance of characters and plot. It’s about knowing when you need character development and when you need something to happen—and preferably you can bring both to the page simultaneously.

It will still be a couple of months before I have another draft to show for this latest spate of work, but already I’m looking forward to seeing the transformation on the remaining 25 chapters. I know I’ve still got a long way to go, but this story is worth the time and the effort.

Originally called Crossroads and Deadends, through my psychological delving I’ve come up with a new title — Adrift. I like it and I hope that one of these days it will make its way to readers.

The fluidity of time

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about time. Specifically, the passing of time. I remember when I was a little kid and all the grown-ups used to say things to me like “Wait until you’re older…time goes so fast then.” Of course, at that age I had no real concept of time. An hour’s drive seemed like an eternity.

Now, as the mother of two little ones (aged 6 and 2) I find myself completely blown away by how fast time is moving. It’s the little things…like I’ll catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while and in my head it’s been a couple of months, but then I realise it’s actually been six months, or even longer. Or suddenly it’s 30 June (end of financial year here in Australia) and I think ‘How did that happen?’ (On the plus side, it also means we’ve past the shortest day of the year and I definitely prefer the longer days of sunlight.) These are some of the little things that make me wonder where the time has gone.

Then there are the big things. Like the fact that Grace is six (and a half) years old and I just can’t believe how quickly those six years have gone by. Can she really be in Grade 1 already?

I also find with time, you can imagine things if you have a reference point. In some ways, Liam going to school seems so far away (2017)…but I know how quickly the years with Grace went, from toddler to starting school, so I’m sure the next couple of years will go that quickly, too. So I CAN imagine Liam starting school. I know it will fly by and I’m prepared for it.

But when Liam starts school, Grace will be in Grade 5. And that seems impossible to me…no point of reference, I guess. I’m yet to experience a child moving from 6 to 10.

For that matter, when did I ‘jump’ from being in my thirties to my forties? Yes, I know I can pinpoint the exact day it happened, yet at times it’s hard to believe I’m now in my forties. Know what I mean?

Again, I think back to being told as a child that as you get older time goes faster. But boy, this is intense! Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m stuck in my imagination, in one of the worlds I create, so much that my sense of time passing is as warped (in the opposite direction) as a child’s.

I know that each tick of the clock is a second, each time the sun rises and sets is a day. Time is constant, fixed. Yet it doesn’t feel that way. To me, time often feels more like a moving target, something that bends and twists. It almost feels fluid. And just when I think I have a concept of it, I find out that it wasn’t three weeks ago that xyz happened…it was three months ago. Fluid.

SEO for an author…really?

A short blog today….

I rarely use my blog to voice a gripe—in fact, I think today is a first! But I’ve just hit the tipping point in terms of emails (spam) from web developers offering their SEO (search engine optimisation) services.

The email usually starts with something like: We’ve noticed your great design, but unfortunately your website isn’t optimised for key search words in your field. They try to word the email like they’ve checked out my site, yet clearly they haven’t. I mean, what good are search words for a crime fiction author? Or am I missing something?

Although you may know this already, search engine optimisation is set up so that if you type in a related key word search to Google or another search engine, your site comes up as close to the top as possible. So if you sell chilli-flavoured bubblegum, when someone types “Chilli-flavoured bubblegum”  you want your website at the top of the list.

But does anyone who’s thinking of trying a new author search in Google for “crime fiction author” or “FBI thriller” or “mystery novel”? I think not! Yes, they may do this type of a search on an online bookstore (e.g. Amazon) but I certainly don’t expect to gain any new readers via a random search on a general internet search engine.

In my mind, an author’s website is more about giving existing readers information about you, your characters, other books you’ve written, etc. So really, the only search terms I need to worry about are “PD Martin” or perhaps “P.D. Martin”, and “Sophie Anderson”.

Feel free to chime in…do you ever search for a new author on Google? Or what is your current most annoying marketing/spam email?

Jet lag, toddlers and children

A new era has begun…

As my regular readers will know, for over a year now I’ve been part of a group blog called Murderati and blogging every fortnight. Sadly, on Monday Murderati closed its doors (at least in its current form) and I made the commitment to start blogging once a month, on the first of every month. So here I am…1 May = first blog. Some blogs will be about the writing life, others about something totally unrelated (like today’s).

First topic of the new regime…jet lag and toddlers/children.

A couple of weeks ago we made the long-haul trip from Australia to Ireland (and back). The jet lag in Ireland wasn’t too bad (more about that in a sec) but when we got back to Oz it was pretty horrendous those first few nights and I found myself Googling like crazy and asking friends who’d also done multiple long-haul trips for their advice.

Time difference when we left Australia was 11 hours, so pretty much the exact opposite. It’s difficult to adjust to such a massive time difference for anyone, let alone children (who only partially understand what’s going on) or worse yet toddlers who have no idea that they’ve just reversed their body clocks.

Our daughter (6yro) is a seasoned traveller. What do you expect with an Irish father and Aussie mum? Not to mention the fact that she’s adopted from Korea so has also done that trip a couple of times. Anyway, our little man (23 months old at time of travel) was a newbie. He’d only done the one trip — Korea to Melbourne back in September 2012.

Australia to Ireland

The first night in Ireland was pretty good. Grace (our 6yro) and I both woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night (1am, 2am and 4am) but managed to get back to sleep quite quickly. However, Liam (nearly 2) woke up at around 4.45am and was then ready to go. Pretty early, but not too bad in the scheme of things, especially given he’d fallen asleep around his normal time the night before of 8pm (Irish time).

We kept him close to his normal nap schedule and pushed him that first day until midday. We let him sleep for two hours, then woke him up. After that it was 12.30pm, letting him sleep for two hours. I know people have very different opinions on whether you should wake a sleeping baby/toddler but I think when travelling it’s essential to help them get into the new time zone. Even if they wake up very cranky!

Second night/morning he woke up at 5.30am. I was hopeful this was a pattern, and it was with the next morning being around 6.15 and then 7am the morning after that. So by the fourth night/morning he was waking up at his normal time. Fab.

However, like I said at the start, travelling back to Oz wasn’t quite so easy!

Ireland to Australia

We managed to get both kids down to bed only a couple of hours after their normal bed time but Liam woke up at 2am — wide awake. It literally took four hours to get him back to sleep and we tried various methods, from bringing him into bed with us to letting him cry a bit in his cot. There was a great deal of protest crying and mini-tantrums, and this situation was complicated by the fact that the kids share a room so we wanted to contain him and keep his as quiet as possible.

That morning we woke him at 8.30am and he went down for his normal daytime nap (12.30pm). After a day in pretty much the right time zone, I hoped the night would be getter, but it wasn’t. Again, he woke at exactly 2am and took nearly four hours to get to sleep.

The next day and night was much the same. At this point I read a few things online from other mums. Some said to let them get up and play, others said to keep the room dark and focus on getting them back to sleep. Some said to give them food (they might be waking because they’re hungry) others said NOT to give them food because this might reinforce the old time zone. I certainly did notice both kids were eating less during the day than they normally did. In the end, I opted for dark room and no food. I also looked up the effectiveness of melatonin for kids, and the results didn’t seem promising.

After the third night (and I was only getting about 2-4 hours sleep myself) I decided to look up the east/west travel thing. I remembered studying circadian rhythms and jet lag in university and knew you did something different in terms of sunlight depending on which direction you’re travelling. Around this time, I was also told by two frequent long-haul traveller friends that it was usually 3-5 nights or 3-7 nights before their toddlers got into the new time zone.

After I’d Googled my east/west thing, I knew that because we’d travelled west to east when coming from Ireland to Australia, Liam needed afternoon sun. It wasn’t particularly sunny that afternoon, but I took them to an indoor play area that has heaps of skylights directly above it. That night, I also put a drop of lavender oil on each of their pillows. Voila…8pm to 7.30am.

Quick tips

Get into the new time zone as soon as possible. ‘Push’ the kids to their normal nap time/sleep time, especially those first few days.
If you’re travelling west to east, make sure to get afternoon sun. If you’re travelling east to west, get morning sun.
It may take 3-7 nights for the kids to get into the new time zone.
No harm in trying lavender oil or something similar to help relax them before bedtime.

What about sleep on the plane?

In case you’re wondering about the plane trips, neither Grace nor Liam got their ‘normal’ amount of sleep on the plane. On the way over, Liam got about 6 hours (when he’d normally get 11) plus a 1.5 hour nap on the second leg. Grace got about eight hours (as opposed to her normal 11-12 hours). I think that’s just the nature of the beast, the nature of long-haul flights.

Happy travelling! If you’re mad enough to travel with young kids, it always helps to know how to ease the pain.

Beginnings and endings

Many of you know that I’m part of a group blog called Murderati. Unfortunately, that blog is closing its doors at the end of this month : (

Since I joined Murderati, pretty much all of my blogs here on my website have been re-posts from Murderati. Below is my second-last blog for Murderati…

I’ve been overseas the past three weeks and literally landed at Melbourne Airport four hours ago. I was planning on writing my blog for today while I was on holidays, but with everything that’s going on with Murderati, I found myself changing my mind constantly about subjects.  

Originally, the blog I had in my head for 11 April was going to be about my holiday. The family and I headed to Ireland for three weeks. My husband’s Irish and I lived there for a year and a half, so we spent our time catching up with friends and family. But there was also a very important purpose for this visit. You see, this was our first trip to Ireland since we picked our son up from Korea last year and this trip would celebrate his arrival into our family with his christening. In fact, we managed to get a wedding and two christenings in during our three-week holiday.

Anyway, then I thought I could blog about christenings and maybe even other non-religious birth celebrations. You know, even research the topic a bit plus talk about my personal experience. Even though I’m not a religious person, I found Liam’s christening incredibly moving.

But then I thought, no…I can’t blog about holidays or Ireland or christenings as part of my long goodbye. Can I? Maybe I can. I mean, the two subjects are tied together by the related themes of beginnings and endings. While I was in Ireland celebrating a wedding (the birth of a new marriage), two christenings (the birth of two beautiful boys), I was also in mourning. In mourning for Murderati. Births and deaths. Beginnings and endings. This is what’s been going around and around in my head the past few weeks. 

I have to confess, when I logged on briefly from a borrowed phone to read the Monday 1 April blog and the comments I DID start to wonder…are we doing the right thing?  Do we have any other options? I think I speak for all the current Murderati gang when I say it’s been a tough choice. But for me personally, since we picked up Liam my writing time has been drastically cut. I have enjoyed blogging at Murderati immensely, but with my time so limited I did have to question whether it was the best possible use of time. I need to write more books. That really is my bottom line at the moment. And I need to do it with less available time than ever before. But it’s still sad…really sad to say goodbye to Murderati.

My last blog at Murderati will be Thursday 25 April and that will be my official goodbye.  But for today I wanted to share everything that’s been going on in head re beginnings and endings — and why. And I guess I also wanted to explain why Murderati coming to an end breaks my heart but also seems like the most sensible thing to do. At some point in time, something’s gotta give and I think it just so happens that more and more of the Murderati gang seem to be in this position right now.

What’s in a prologue?

For some reason, I think every book I’ve written includes a prologue. It just seems like while I don’t want to cram clunky ‘back story’ into my books, there is some basic information that’s needed before readers start on chapter 1. Know what I mean?

Couple of examples…my first Sophie book, Body Count, includes a prologue of Sophie as a child, so it’s 30 years or so earlier. Yes, the main story is complete without this prologue, but it gives readers some important character information (namely that Sophie’s brother was abducted when she was a little girl).

Another example is from my current work in progress. This book, tentatively called The Pulsars, includes a prologue from 18 years earlier when a woman (who’s the mother of my main character) finds out she’s carrying a Pulsar fetus. Again, while the main, present-day story works without it, there is scene-setting in the prologue. Plus, the reader discovers that the scans are compulsory worldwide and that if the fetus is a Pulsar, the governments around the world have enacted the Pulsar Termination Act, which means all Pulsar fetus must be terminated. So I guess the story works without it, but the short, two-page prologue also does a lot. Yes, as the reader moves through the story they would discover that the main character is a Pulsar whose mother and father went on the run so they could keep their child. But I do like the way the prologue, as it is, launches the reader into this new world.   

As you can probably tell, I like prologues. Like writing them, like reading them. Funny thing is, after I’d written about three books I met someone who said they NEVER read prologues. That they figure it’s not necessary for the story. This shocked me. I consider a prologue to be part of the story, and as long as it’s pretty short and tight (and well-written, of course) I think they’re a great writing device. Many novice writers make the mistake of packing in back story in large chunks in the first chapter or two. A prologue (as long as it’s bare essentials!) can get rid of this more clunky ‘reveal’. It can set the scene, deliver character motivation or back story. Ideally, a prologue should also capture a reader’s attention. Make them want to read on–instantly.