Jo Jenner's Blog, page 9

The one that got away

Who would have thought it? It had been twenty years but I recognised him the minute he walked into the room. Roger Burnistan, my first love. I remembered when I was thirteen and he was sixteen. He was so grown up, so wonderful. Everything about him had screamed bad boy but even at that young age I knew he was the boy for me.
He went away. We never knew where. Some of the village gossips said borstal, other to some kind of army boot camp. His father claimed he had gone to university. But he wa...

Diary of an aspiring writer – 2013 in review

Having spent my Saturday reading the year in review in The Times I decided it might be interesting to do something similar and see how far, or not, my writing has come this year.

I started the year promising to write a story each week and post it on my blog. This was taken on whilst at the same time completing an Open University Creative Writing course and submitting a monthly story to my writing group. Now this might sound a hard task and ridiculous to try to do whilst holding down a full ti...

Under the gun

She studied her feet and could see his, almost touching her’s. He was that close.
‘You think that was good enough? You think that was good enough?’ He snarled.
She didn’t look up, didn’t dare. She knew it hadn’t been good enough and she knew how angry it made him when she didn’t try. He placed two fingers under her chin and lifted her face. She looked in his eyes and could see his disappointment.
‘Get back down there,’ he jerked his head behind her to indicate where she needed to move to. She t...

The Key

David sat in First Class his eyes darting around. He knew the twins were on the train but that they wouldn't do anything until it arrived in London. At High Wycombe he toyed with the idea of jumping off the train at the last minute but he knew one of them would just wait for him and the other would have a head start that would be impossible to assail. He looked at the text message 'I'll be waiting by the tube entrance in a light green top'. He hoped he could trust her, but using total strang...

NaNo – Tougher that last year?

So finally I have finished. The novel is complete and 50,650 words have been written in the last 24 days. I am very happy that I am a NaNo winner for the second year in succession but why was it so much harder this year?

Was it because last year’s story had been circling round in my brain for many years and this year’s story had only been there a few months?
Was it because I planned less?
Was it because the story is not as good?
Was it because I am a better writer now and writing without editing...

NaNoWriMo teaches showing not telling

I am sure we are all aware of NaNoWriMo by now but if not I wrote about it in a recent blog that you can check out here.
There are many ways which people use to try and hit the 50,000 words needed to be a winner. Some do not use any constrictions which can lead to some rather stilted dialogue. Others insist on putting every characters full name each time they speak which makes no odds if you character is called Cher or Madonna but can significantly increase your word count if you are including...

Beware second hand laptops

'Where is it?' His gruff voice and the gun pointing at my left temple weren't helping my cognitive processes.
'I told you I don't know. Please just let me go and I’ll forget all about this. This never happened. You were never here. I was never here.'
'I'm not stoopid. The boss said I wuz to bring it back or not bother comin’ back.' He started waving the gun around. His mood was definitely not softening.
'But what is it you want exactly?' The only way I was going to get out of this was to confuse...

In Praise of Scribophile

I recently discovered Scribophile and cannot recommend it highly enough.
For those of you who are unaware of Scribophile you can link to it here.
So what is Scribophile? It is a website for writers. The way it works is that when you first join you can connect with people and critique their work. You can select stories to read that are from many different genres, short stories or chapters of novels. Every time you critique someone else's work you receive Karma points. You then build up Karm...

Snail mail

The old memories were dragged up when the postman arrived with a twenty three year old letter. They had opened a decommissioned post box last week and found some letters that should have been delivered in 1990. Yesterday, one had finally ended up on my doorstep.

I picked up the post and went back into the house just as the kettle boiled. I threw the letters onto the table and waited for the tea to brew. My thoughts drifted back to happier times.
 
Ralph and I had always been close. Twins a...

It’s NaNo Time again

Only a few days into October and already the ionosphere is buzzing with talk of NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated this is where over 300,000 people sign up to try and write a novel in one month. Yes that’s right. The plan is to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days.
I am not sure whether I am more excited this year because I did it last year and know what to expect, or whether I have more connection this year that are taking part but it definitely feels like there is more excitement from everyo...