Jacqueline Ward's Blog, page 5

Perfect Ten Paperback Giveaway

I am very pleased to tell you that the mass market paperback of Perfect Ten is released in 4th April 2019.

This is a very exciting time for me as it is the first time I will have had a paperback in the shops and supermarkets. To celebrate this I am giving away five signed copies of the new Perfect Ten paperback.

To enter:

Twitter: @jacquiannc – Follow and Retweet
Instagram: @jacquiannc_ – Like and comment or repost
Facebook: JACauthor – like and share

Winners will be announced on 4th April 2019.

You can buy Perfect Ten here

Finishing a first draft – what now?

Finishing the first draft of a novel is a great feeling. You have worked on the story, lived with the characters and in their world for a significant amount of time – but what’s next?

People have different ideas about what a first draft is. I depends on how you write – if you edit as you go along or if you download words onto the page. Either way, at some point you write THE END for the first time in this particular story, and that, for the purpose of this post if the first draft.

My first draft is completed in 6 – 12 weeks, depending on how busy I am with other projects and if i am taking part in words races or a ‘get-the-story-down’ process such as NaNoWriMo. I could write faster but they would mean more work afterwords – not in terms of the writing, more with completeness of ideas. It is only by writing the story down and getting to know everything about it that I can develop a deeper insight.

When have written THE END look at the list of notes I have kept while I am writing. It is often necessary to back-engineer the story to include strands or important character depth that crop up int e gaps in between writing. I add anything that the ending has brought about – payoffs, loose ends. Despite having dozens of notebooks, I keep my list in a Memo app on my phone. I use Samsung Notes and I can either write notes or leave myself voice notes.

Then I run the document through ProWritingAid. There are a lot of different opinions about online document editors. Some people swear by them, while others prefer to use a human editor throughout. I use ProWritingAid and Ginger Proofreader to do the following things:

ProWritingAid’s Identify Overused words function – I use ‘that’ far too much. This feature finds all your overused words and allows you to examine them in contextProWritingAid’s Sentence Length graph – this function identifies long sentences and allows you to go through your document to split them. It also displays a graph sowing sentence length variationProWritingAid’s Spelling and sense check – the Grammar function goes through spellings in some contextGinger Proofreader’s reading facility. I love this because it displays each sentence in a bar on the screen, highlighting any sense errors, missing words, potential wring usage and wrong spelling

There are many, many other useful features in both these apps but these are the ones I use most at this stage.

I check the formatting and then I made sure all the chapter page breaks and chapter titles are correct. Then I send the document to my Kindle Fire. I read it through once and make more notes. Then I listen to to it. Sometimes, depending on how much time I have, I will read it to myself. More often I will listen to it on my Kindle Fire speech function. I make even more notes as I go.

It is only at this point that I will even think about a second draft. This can be days, weeks, or even months after finishing the first draft. The second draft will be a fuller version of the first draft, but by no means a final draft. I repeat this process again, and then I will put my manuscript away for a minimum of a week before working on it again, adding ideas that crop up – and they do! – and working out n my mind where (if) these ideas fit in.

Finishing a first draft is very exciting! All the ideas that have been swirling in your mind for months are finally drafted out in story form. But it really is just the start of your story’s journey.

So what IS feminist about Perfect Ten?

My novel Perfect Ten is number nine in the Feminist Critique category again. It was previously a bestseller in that category along with Naiomi Alderman’s The Power and Mary Beard’s Women and Power. So what makes my psychological thriller about revenge feminist?

I am always interested in what people who read Perfect Ten have to say about it. Some people have read it and loved it, other’s not so much. That is absolutely fine, because when I wrote about Caroline Atkinson’s knee-jerk revenge on her cheating husband Jack, I knew that it would enrage some people.

Caroline find’s Jack’s diary in some misdirected luggage and, already destroyed by their marriage and acrimonious break-up, she takes action. Is it the right action? It’s what a lot of women have thought about doing but haven’t – I asked a wide range of women if they had ever fantasised about revenge. She exacts revenge in a drastic manner on Jack and the women he has cheated with and uncovers some interesting dynamics.

Here’s the breaking news: feminists don’t always do the ‘right thing’. Feminism is a ideology and a lifelong journey, not an instruction manual. I liken my experience of being a feminist as a kind of fight – a lot of bad decisions have generated a realisation that perhaps I wasn’t making them alone and some kind of cultural influence – hello patriarchy – was pulling me in the opposite direction to where I really wanted to go.

It’s a tug of war. It’s a power battle. None of it is easy and not every woman (or man) is a feminist. In Perfect Ten Caroline makes some questionable decisions. She tries out lots of different scenarios but the one she lands on, the only one that gives her peace, is that collaboration with other women. That shared space where we can reach an understanding about what the fuck just happened. Where we can reconcile ourselves with the fact that other women, divided and ruled by patriarchy, are making the same bad decisions as we are. And eventually that there is a better way froward where we can be happier and sometimes angrier.

So Perfect Ten, on a deeper level than life level of cheating, social networking, drinking, dancing, work, kids, is about the fight to sometimes even just stay on the surface. It’s marketed as a psychological thriller, and it is, but hopefully those readers who have had even a glimpse of how unfair divorce and psychological abuse can be for women will understand Caroline’s battle.

But some people won’t understand it, and that’s just fine.

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 20

The Air Inbetween. Sometimes it’s what you don’t write that counts.

Part of knowing the balance is giving the reader credit for being able to work out what you are saying – and not saying. It’s that space between bridging understanding that I have been working with today. The pace and beat of the story.

I am a big fan of Prince and therefore SheilaE I saw her on a documentary talking about funk and how knowing when not to play is as important as knowing what to play. She called it ‘the air inbetween’ and that really resonated with me.

It’s that space where you really feel something.

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 19

Patience. It was all going so well. Too well.

My writing tackles difficult subjects while still trying to keep the shape of the embedded stories that resonate with readers. In my current WIP I’m looking at issues around grief and stress and what they can do. But the story is uplifting as well as a quest narrative. It’s complicated.

Because of this I know some people won’t get it. I expect and welcome any comments, positive and negative, because I know people hold different opinions to me and are maybe expecting something different from me. It always makes me examine my work to make sure the message is right and the piece is working. I see it as looking at my abstraction from their point of view, which is a valuable insight. 

Someone didn’t like my ‘difficult subject’ this week and attacked. It was the literary equivalent of ‘all abstract art is scribbles that my two year old could have done’. But that’s OK. It’s part if the job, par for the course.

I discussed it with my mentor and moved on. I will be patient with people who refuse to look at my side of things. But it did stop me writing for a short time to question my motivation. Which is a good thing. But today I’m cracking on, going for 2k words.
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How do you deal with critique?

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 18

Writing with friends. Today was the first Oldha Writing Group of the year Oldham Library.

We sat down with coffee and each other and talk about our work. This is such a valuable process, where we get to air the inevitable self-doubt that working in isolation brings.

We also share and receive tips and experiences. Last night we looked at opening pages for some of the group, including myself and these were read out loud by another member, allowing us to hear our characters voices and the pace of the story.

And then, more coffee!

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 16

Things aren’t always what they seem.

One question I get asked all the time is: is your main character based on you? Is it you?’

This picture is one of my favourite views. It’s of Hartshead Pike, a landmark that my mother always lived in sight of. I took this picture on Christmas Day 2017. The sky was blue and it was a crisp, sunny day.

When I posted it here I applied a filter and it is now barely recognisable as that bright Christmas Day. It is skewed and there is no trace of me in this picture, or what I did that day.

Yet it retains its shape. Like my main characters – human shaped with emotions, very different from me but filtered through my experiences. 

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 15

 Not writing but talking.

Every so often I talk to other authors.

Writing is isolating so I make sure that I ground myself by listening to other storytellers tell their stories. We talked progress, next steps, experiences. We shared discoveries like groups and marketing opportunities.

Best of all, we touched base and reaffirmed what we were doing – creating something. So not written words today but lots of words spoken 

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 14

Early mornings.

That’s when I love to write. Before the day really starts.

I am up and about before first light and outside with my dog before there is anyone around for him to bark at. Then I go home, make tea and sit with my characters for a while.

I am lucky to live on the edge of a green belt, full of wildlife and water. But it’s the sitting in front of the fire with my dog and a cup of tea that I love best, continuing the story, filling the pages and then getting ready and going to my day-job fulfilled. 

I am a home bird. 

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#100daysofwriting 2019 Day 13

Super-charged writing day where I wrote 2k+ first draft words and updated my plotting chart.

I love my plotting chart because it helps me to avoid the soggy middle that plods along. I also have a ‘clues’ column for the reader plot prompts. I’m well over half way through now with a good idea where I am going! 

This novel has a tricky story line with two interwoven plots so I need to know where I am with each character at all times. I didn’t want to plot it all out in advance this time as I need to be able to be spontaneous, so I am updating the chart every five chapters.

#amwriting #amediting #author #authorlife #writinglife #writer#love #mentalhealth #issues#novel #psychologistwritingstories #storypsychologist

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