Mike Crowl's Blog, page 10

Don't rush, let it simmer

 So I continued to write chapter 8 last night. And keptfeeling…’this isn’t very good…’

 

What choice do I have at this point, as a kind ofpantser? I can scrap the words and start afresh, and hope things take offdifferently the second time. Or I can analyse why I’m feeling disgruntled withthis piece of writing.

 

If I choose the latter course, I can ask: why does what’shappening in the this particular chapter seem all too familiar? Haven’t I pursueda similar path in one of my others books? ...

Explaining my process

Work in progress on the New Sheffield Markets, 2012
courtesy Wikimedia Commons
 So what have I been doing over the last week or so inregards to the WIP. (I only discovered today that companies use this sameacronym for their Work in Progress meetings. Fair enough. I’m sure we writersare generous enough to allow them to pinch our writerly acronym.)

Let me say first that there isn’t a lot of forward progress,in the sense that no new chapters have been written, and chapter 8 remains atabout 600 ...

Being interrupted

One of the great skills I learnt when I worked for thelocal City Council – a fairly minor cog in a large organisation – was that itwas possible to be interrupted fairly regularly and still get my brain straightback onto the job I’d been doing. 

Interruptions of all kinds get in the way of writing. Andour concern is that we’ll lose that impetus and that thought we were in themiddle of. But the brain copes. 

I’m sure all would-be, fledgling, and perseveringwriters have all read stuff about...

More benefits of writing slowly

 Originally written back in 2017 for a site that no longer exists, which promoted authors and their works.

In 2014, I published threee-books. That sounds impressive until you realise that the first of thosebooks, Grimhilda!, had started out life as a musical produced in the theatre,back in 2012. In spite of having a script to work from, it took another twoyears for the book version to get off the ground. Procrastination took itstoll, along with many rewrites. Turning a playscript into a no...

Taking hold of whatever the brain offers you

Had agreat day yesterday rewriting and revising some of the chapters I've written sofar for the latest book in the Grimhilderness series. 

 

Atpresent I have around seven and a half chapters in draft form, and still noidea about some of the things the characters have mentioned, or how the wholestory will work out. I have an inkling of what the end will be, but nothingmore. 

Thisisn’t unusual. With The Disenchanted Wizard I only knew, from early on,that the wizard who’d escaped the map w...

Having a forward-moving rhythm

 

One of the things that helped me overcome the so-called problemof Writer’s Block was an idea I found in a book wittily entitled Around the Writer’sBlock . The author is Rosanne Bane.

 

As with so many books on writing, one particular thingsticks with you. Bane sees Writer’s Block as a procrastination problem. It’sdealing with procrastination that’s important.

She talks about Process Time and Product Time. Process Time isbasically about play, doing something creative you wouldn’t normally do...

Writing at your own particular pace

At the moment my 'work in progress' opens with the collapse of a house, something that came to me while I was out walking the dog one day. The house, which hasn't collapsed, by the way, is a specific house in a specific street in my hometown. Why the house in my story collapsed remains to be discovered. I certainly don’t know at this point. 

I think it takes time for any writer to find their ownapproach to putting a story on paper. That doesn’t mean they don’t get bookswritten, but gradually th...

Why it took me five years to write The Counterfeit Queen

 Why it took me five years to write my most recent book, The Counterfeit Queen. 

 

Reason 1: Procrastination.

 

Reason 2: Thinking it wasn’t going to be good enough.

 

Reason 3: Having to work at it completely on my owninstead of with the person who’d been my idea-helper and idea-processor, plot-hole-checker,proof-reader, dismisser of unworkable or silly ideas, as well as being someoneagainst whom I’d sometimes had to battle in order to bring storylines I wantedto include.  

 

In spite of th...

The Counterfeit Queen is now on sale

 I've had a busy few months since I posted that The Counterfeit Queen was finished. It's now available online at Amazon, in ebook and paperback versions. Here's the blurb:

Humdrum? That barely describes Polly’s life.  

She doesn’t come on stage till the lasttwenty minutes of the school play, she doesn’t feel at home with her adoptedparents, and she knows deep down that her life needs to be more interesting. 

Then a good-looking boy on a skateboard turns up. And explains who she reallyis. 

Or rath...

Wamps and crowls

Yesterday my wife, who's from Norfolk in the UK, was talking about words she still uses that are common to people in Norfolk, but not elsewhere. One of these was wamps, another word for feet. (It's pronounced in the same way as lamps.) One might say, Get your great wamps off the table, or You're dirtying my clean floor with your muddy wamps. We tried to find the word on Google, but there was  no sign of it. 

That led to me write to David Crystal, who's produced a number of books on the English la...