Stuart Sharp's Blog, page 7

Things I used to do

I used to write poetry. I say this, not as an attempt to find an excuse to inflict any of it on you, or because I'm trying to look arty, but because of those words "used to". Just a few short years ago, I took it into my head that I was going to be largely a poet who also did other things. I studied formal and free poetry, I wrote computer files and notebooks full of the stuff and I set myself goals about trying to write a poem a day.


I know this because the other day, I found my files full of poems. Many of them are silly, while some of them really aren't. While all of them represent a strand of writing that I don't really do today. In the course of about five years, I've gone from writing lots of poetry to writing none.


This is, I suppose, a post about the ways in which we all change. As writers, but in general too. You know that awkward question they always ask in interviews: where do you see yourself in five years? Isn't it true to say that we don't know? That no one knows? Think for a moment about all the things that you used to do, as a writer or more generally. They probably felt like the most important things in the world at the time. Now, what you're doing feels more important. A few years from now?


I used to be a poet. I used to write urban fantasy. Maybe I'll look back one day and say I used to write comic fantasy. Looked at like that, it seems almost silly to say "This is what I am and what I do", doesn't it? Because who knows what we'll say we used to do tomorrow?

Reborn by Cherie Reich

To save a kingdom, a prophetess must challenge Fate.
 
On the day of Yssa’s death and rebirth, the god Apenth chose her as the Phoenix Prophetess.
 
Sea serpents and gods endanger the young prophetess’s journey and sour the omens. Yssa is cursed instead of blessed, and her duties at the Temple of Apenth prove it. She spends her days reading dusty scrolls, which does nothing to help her forget Tym, the boy back home. But the annoying yet gorgeous ferryman’s son Liam proves to be a distraction she can’t predict, even though he rarely leaves her alone for two sand grains.
 
Her boring temple life screeches to a halt when visions of her parents’ murders consume her. Yssa races across an ocean to stop the future. If she can’t change Fate, she’ll refuse to be the Phoenix Prophetess any longer. Fate, however, has other plans for her and the kingdom.
 
Yssa must either accept her destiny or fight to change Fate.
 
Reborn, book one of The Fate Challenges, by Cherie Reich will be released on May 23, 2014. For more information about Cherie Reich and her work, please visit her website or blog. The cover art is created by Laura Sava. To add on Goodreads, click here. If you’d like to be notified when Rebornreleases, please sign up for her newsletter here.

Ideas, and their importance (or otherwise)

Thanks to an incident I won't go into, I find myself thinking about ideas. As in "Where do you get your..." No, I'm not going to answer that, because we've all got better things to do, but I did want to ask the question people often don't bother with: how important are they, really?


Obviously, people generally seem to think they're important. The popular image of an author is of the idea getting being the hard part. Hence the thing you sometimes hear about writers being pestered with, where people offer authors their ideas for a share of the profits.


And on one level, ideas are important. It's ideas that create that initial buzz, that excitement. That moment where you go what if. That moment that gets you excited enough to write something in the first place. So what if I could relentlessly make fun of the standard "someone is secretly a faerie noble" plotline? What if I did a kind of vaguely humanist take on angels and demons, with a fake psychic as the lead character? What if I write some urban fantasy where the lead character happens to be a changeling, whose main power is her ability to lie? What if I did something vaguely Arthurian, set in the modern day?


Those are all ideas I've had. Three of the four are ideas I've written. The fourth, I'll probably get round to shortly. And here I am, putting them up on the Internet. Why? Because the world isn't as full of idea thieves as people think. Because in UK law, it's the execution of an idea that's protected rather than the idea itself when it comes to creative works. And because this is one area where the law actually has it right.


You see, I would be perfectly happy if someone who read this chose to go down one or more of those routes. Because I'm sure they wouldn't write it the same way I did. I'm not saying there that I will write it the best way, but I will write it my own way, just as you would write it yours. Because ideas aren't as important as people seem to feel they should be. It's not the idea itself, but what you choose to do with it that matters. Indeed, in a lot of literary fiction, where big plot is distinctly frowned upon, it's the way in which you choose to make the journey rather than the overall point of the book every time.


People don't read ideas, but books. They read those marvellous characters you've created (good job there, by the way), and that snappy dialogue. They're excited by the sudden plot twist, or at least gripped by the panache with which you did it if they saw it coming. They might get swept up in the sheer beauty of the language, or in my case by the fact that someone can try to cram quite so many jokes into the first chapter.


They might even, at some point, say "what a great idea", but don't let that fool you. There are probably another hundred authors who've had the same idea you've had, at least. But none of them, none of them, has ever written your book. It's what's so beautiful about writing. And what's so weird about people who get completely paranoid about their ideas.