Joey Paul's Blog, page 243

From Joey's Instagram

This is my ugh it's gonna be a high pain day today and I have things to do! I have a chapter to write so onwards! #beingawriter #writing #indieauthor #joeywrites #chronicillness #spoonie #fibromyalgia #chronicpain #flare #brittleasthma #oxygenuser #wheelchairuser #writerlife #spoonlevels #authorslife #authorsofinstagramA photo posted by Joey Paul (@joeybug) on Jun 1, 2016 at 4:04am PDT

 [IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photo of Joey Paul (me), a cis woman with a chubby face, wire rimmed glasses and an oxygen cannula under her nose. She looks tired and frustrated. She is wearing a purple hoodie. Caption reads: This is my ugh it's gonna be a high pain day today and I have things to do! I have a chapter to write so onwards! #beingawriter #writing #indieauthor #joeywrites #chronic illness #spoonie #fibromyalgia #chronicpain #flare #brittleasthma #oxygenuser #wheelchairuser #writerlife #spoonlevels #authorslife #authorsofinstagram.]

My awesome other writer hoodie! Been wearing it for months but hard to photograph while in my chair so here it is on my walker. #beingawriter #writing #writerlife #joeywrites #indieauthor #authorslife #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #wheelchairuserA photo posted by Joey Paul (@joeybug) on Jun 2, 2016 at 9:52am PDT

 [IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A purple hoodie is laid out on a black rollator/walker. The back has big white font which read: "Warning: Author with a pen and I know how to use it." The caption for the photo reads: My awesome other writer hoodie! Been wearing it for months but hard to photograph while in my chair, so here it is on my walker. #beingawriter #writing #writerlife #joeywriters #indieauthor #authorslife #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #wheelchairuser.]

My "I got three hours sleep and I hurt and am waiting for an amazon delivery so I can't sleep" face. Hoping it gets here soon but if not I shall sleep with one eye open! But at least I'm #writing! #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #writerlife #authorslife #painsomnia #chronicpain #flare #oxygenuser #wheelchairuserA photo posted by Joey Paul (@joeybug) on Jun 3, 2016 at 3:58am PDT

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A photo of Joey Paul (me) a cis woman with a chubby face. She is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and has an oxygen cannula under her nose. She is wearing a purple hoodie and a crooked smile that gives the impression she is not happy. She looks tired and frustrated. The caption reads: My "I got three hours sleep and I hurt and am waiting for an amazon delivery so I can't sleep" face. Hoping it gets here soon but if not I shall sleep with one eye open! But at least I'm #writing! #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #writerlife #authorslife #painsomnia #chronicpain #flare #oxygenuser #wheelchairuser]

Inside The Author: My Characters

MY CHARACTERS 

Everybody has their own methods for creating characters. Everybody who writes a series or a trilogy, or even a standalone piece of work have their own favourite characters and I am no different. However, when you first begin writing, it's hard to say goodbye to characters that you'll probably never see again. I remember when I’d just finished writing BLACKOUT, I was so desperate to write about Tally and Lisa again. I wanted to take them on adventures and go new places with them, but my best friend, B, told me that it just wasn't possible and she was right. Tally had told her story and I had to say goodbye to her, however hard that was.

Whilst the majority of my main characters are young adults, usually teenage girls, I do write about their parents and the other people in their lives. I don't know who coined the phrase "writers create from nothing and breathe life into words" but I feel that it’s a good description of what I do. I take a blank cut out of a person and I add life to it, by giving them hair and facial features, adding clothes and words. Once I've done that, I take them on an adventure and I bring the reader along for the ride. I enjoy choosing names, and personality traits, habits and accents and I know that’s reflected in my work. I take great care to make sure that every character I create is as unique as every person in the world.

However, that said, a lot of my characters do share something and that is that they all have a part of my life and self in them. Whether it’s their choice of clothing, or their accent, the way they speak or who they choose for their friends. I think it is inevitable that every character you create, whether they be a background player or the main part, has a part of the creator in them, no matter how hard you may try to hide it. In Angelina's case, her cynicism comes from me, though maybe not to the extreme that she takes it. Zack carries part of my belief that people in trouble are to be rescued and saved. I don't know if I would have ever done what he did, but in my own teen years, I know that I did some stuff that was equally stupid. I probably still do!

Other characters I have created also share parts of me; Lisa from BLACKOUT has the same medical condition that I have. Tara from the DYING THOUGHTS series has the same fondness for sarcasm as I did at that age. Hope from LYNNE & HOPE has the same wheelchair that I did when I writing that book. Some of them have taken GCSE classes that I chose or have aimed for A-levels that would have interested me had I taken them. I could go on, but I hope I’ve made my point. I would hazard a guess that other writers have similar stories to tell.

When writing a new book, my favourite part is meeting your characters for the first time. I believe, as I am sure many other writers do too, that while we breathe the life into them with our words, they take us on their own journeys. I can't tell you how many times I have been sure that the book would go one way, only to get to the middle of the chapters and realise that I am going to be using a different interpretation of the chapter heading than I initially thought. I know that when writing WAITING ON YOU, there were things that were not ever planned, but Zack took me that way and then in another part, Angelina led me down a different path. Once you give them life, they seem to take on their own forms. At least, that's my experience!

While I always knew the ending for WAITING ON YOU, there were many extra roads I went down at the insistence of Angelina and Zack. The same can be said for other books I have written. I know that in one of the books I’m working on right now, I have just connected two characters who initially were never connected. It was only when I started writing the chapter that I realised where it was going, and that’s one thing I love about both writing and the characters that I create. You never really know where you're going to go next. It's a case of coming along for the ride as if the words were appearing and you were the first ever reader of that particular story.

So yes, writers do create from nothing, and we do breathe life into our characters with our words, but believe me, they do some of their own living without any help from me!

Follow Joey here on her blog, on Facebook, or Tumblr to be sure to be kept up to date with the latest news regarding Joey and her books.

New Front Cover - The Friendship Triangle

#JoWriMoGo MAY Final Tally

The final tally for May's #JoWriMoGo is 55 pages and 27, 063 words! Here's hoping June is just as good!

Inside The Author: Where My Inspiration Comes From

WHERE MY INSPIRATION COMES FROM

A lot of writers get asked this, no matter whether they write screen plays, novels, short stories, or anything in between. It seems that when you write in the land of fiction, people want to know where you get your ideas from, what inspires you and how you turn that inspiration into the words on the page. I've seen writers sigh and groan when asked this question and I've seen them ponder on how to answer it. It's different for every writer, of course, and it all depends on how they view the term "inspiration" and how they use that to write.

For some people, inspiration comes from other writers, famous people or just people they know. For others, it's the work of other people, or true life crime, or many other events that happen in the world. For me, it's simple. Life inspires me. I am inspired by the world surrounding me. I look at people living their lives and I see plot lines, I see characters and I see a whole story to be written. I'm sure it's the same for other writers too. And it's not just other people's lives that inspire me, but my own life too. In BLACKOUT, one of the characters has the same condition as I do. In LYNNE & HOPE, Hope is disabled just as I am. In DESTINATION: UNKNOWN, a character has both M.E and Fibromyalgia, both conditions I know all too well.

The inspiration doesn't stop there, life throws things at you that you have no idea how to cope with. I choose to use some of them in my writing. I'm not saying that I have a psychic gift that allows me to see the last moments of someone's life, nor have I ever dreamed my life whilst in a coma. But, along with other lives that happen around me, lives that I read about or hear about or even think about get turned into plots and characters. There is also an element of imagination in there too. My parents would probably say that I have always had an over-active imagination, and I'd agree with them. A flair for the dramatic, as it were, but it’s having that flair that allows me to dream up plot lines and people that I have never met or experienced.

Life is full of little things that can make you sit back and think "Huh, wonder how that would look in a book", but the imagination is a powerful tool and essential when you're a fiction writer of any kind. You need to be able to take the impossible and make it real. Go further than you have before and fit the pieces of the puzzle together to allow the reader to see the big picture. That takes a lot of imagination, as well as life experiences inspiring you. I have never yet written fantasy, and although I've thought about it, I often think about how awesome it would be to create a whole new world, with different rules, religions, people, animals and all of that. I am in awe of those who have done so, people like J. K. Rowling, Susanne Collins and Phillip Pullman. All of them have kept some semblance of our world, but added to it and breathed life into their words.

So, when I say that life inspires me, it's not as simple as it seems. It can have both a wide reach and a small one. One event can inspire a whole new world, and one world can inspire one event. Being a writer is about knowing which events create which and using them to tell your story. I only hope that I have done those events justice.

Follow Joey here on her blog, on Facebook, or Tumblr to be sure to be kept up to date with the latest news regarding Joey and her books.

Inside The Author: How I Write

HOW I WRITE

Every writer has their process and I'm no different. In other aspects of my life, I'm very organised. I always have been. I like things to be planned out and although I can be spontaneous, I do prefer to know where I'm going, what's expected of me and what I'm going to do when I get there. I'm the same with my writing. I plan to the point where it seems ridiculous, but it works for me and like I said, it's part of my process.

So, where do I start? Well, with the idea. Once I have an idea, I think about it for a few days and then start to flesh it out in my mind. With a few of my works, the idea has hit so strongly, I immediately start to take notes. When I have the idea fleshed out a little, I start the research. For some of my works, I've needed to do very little research, while for others, I have been drowning in research media. I like to have hard copies of information to go through and highlight, so that while I'm writing, I can fact check quickly without interrupting the flow.

With one of the books I've written in the past, I also wanted to get first hand knowledge of what it was like for the people actually living the lives I was writing about. Although I had some knowledge from my own life, I am but just one person and everyone experiences things differently. I also had to delve into religion and how each one dealt with the subject matter. I had to look at what it was like to be a first generation British person and the different cultures and traditions that would have come from their parents. It all adds up to a lot of work, but it's worth it in the end.

Once I'm ready to start writing the book, I need to create the characters. In the beginning, when I was first writing BLACKOUT, all the information was put on A4 paper and that was all I thought I would need. The same applies to when I first started the DYING THOUGHTS series. However, as time moved on and I fleshed out my characters more and more, as I started to plan them more and more, I realised I needed more space and more order to the whole process.

As you can imagine, when writing a series, you need to be careful about continuity, so I transferred all the information onto note cards and from then on, I did the same with any new work I started. WAITING ON YOU was no different, as I started with a handful of characters, the cards would grow as I fleshed out Zack's family and Angelina's classmates. I made sure that I had a physical description of each character along with any other traits that I needed to remember. With the DYING THOUGHTS books, I also made a note of every case Tara worked on, partly to be sure that I wasn't repeating myself too much and partly so that I'd know what the case would be before I had to write about it. I'm not kidding when I say I think up ways to kill people for a living!

Once the characters are created on paper, I start to decide what I'm going to do with them and over what time frame it's going to happen. I make a chapter plan with a short synopsis of what's supposed to happen in each part; usually only three or five words. I then make a note of what day each of these chapters is supposed to happen on. I add an extra note when I've surpassed a week, then two, and so on. I don't usually spread the books out over too long a period, but at the same time, it can't all happen within two days. I try to ensure that there won't be more happening in one day than is physically possible. Sometimes, I don't recognise that I've done that until it comes to writing that chapter, in which case I'll change it as I'm writing.

After I've done all of that, I get to write the book. While I'm writing, I make a note of the page each chapter starts on, the page it finishes on and the final word count. These are only for my benefit as no one else really needs to know whether or not the chapter had 2000 or 3000 words, but it does help in the long run when I need to print a hard copy of a certain chapter, or when I'm editing and can't remember the page a chapter starts or finishes on. While I'm writing, I also print out each chapter as it's finished. I like to have a hard copy for my own records so that should something happen to my computer, or the external hard drive it's backed up on, I have a copy of it to work from.

Although a lot of thought goes into the chapter plan, it's not written in stone and while I'm writing, I usually find that the story, the characters or just my own sense of what's happening changes and I end up going in a different direction. Sometimes, I'll switch a chapter around so that it happens before or after it was planned to. I like the fact that it's very flexible because sometimes when you're beginning to plan you don't see something as clearly as when you're actually writing it.

I don't have a solid plan for the actual writing though. I'm not someone who needs total silence all the time, nor am I someone who only writes between certain hours. I am flexible with my writing because of my chronic illnesses, and also because I write when I am inspired (and sometimes when I'm not!) and although I'm a planner, I'm not too strict with myself, at least not all of the time. The only thing I really need to write is a fresh cup of tea, but once I get started and enter the zone, then I'm usually fine to keep going. I don't approach writing as something I have to do, it may be my career, but not allowing myself to get under too much pressure allows my creative juices to flow better. I write because I want to, and because it fills me with joy. I write because I have stories to tell and I will keep writing until I don't. Writing is good for me, and you've got to have something good in your life because otherwise how do you keep smiling?

Follow Joey here on her blog, on Facebook, or Tumblr to be sure to be kept up to date with the latest news regarding Joey and her books.

Random Booktube - Life Of Joey - May 2016

RANDOM BOOKTUBELIFE OF JOEYMAY 2016

From Joey's Instagram

So I can't sleep because of pain issues so might as well do some work! #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #wheelchairuser #oxygenuser #writerlife #insomnia #lifeofanauthorA photo posted by Joey Paul (@joeybug) on May 15, 2016 at 5:53pm PDT

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photo of Joey Paul (me), a white, cis female with short bob of brown hair. She is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and has an oxygen nasal cannula on. She is wearing a purple hoodie and smiling. The caption reads: "So I can't sleep because of pain issues so might as well do some work! #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstgrams #wheelchairuser #oxygenuser #writerslife #insomnia #lifeofanauthor".]
 

Getting a little silly at 2am! #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstagram #wheelchairuser #oxygenuser #writerlife #insomnia #lifeofanauthorA photo posted by Joey Paul (@joeybug) on May 15, 2016 at 5:54pm PDT

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Photo of Joey Paul (me) a white, cis, female with a short bob of brown hair. She is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an oxygen nasal cannula. She is smiling. There are cartoon ginger cat ears on her head and a white and pink cat nose on her nose. The caption reads: "Getting a little silly at 2am!" #beingawriter #joeywrites #indieauthor #amwriting #authorsofinstgrams #wheelchairuser #oxygenuser #writerslife #insomnia #lifeofanauthor"]

Random Booktube - My First Signing Event - May 2016

MY FIRST SIGNING EVENTOCTOBER 7TH 2017
#THEDARKERSIDEOFFICTION 2017

The Rules Of Writing - May 2016

The Rules of WritingMAY BOOKTUBE