Keep Calm...

I'm currently rewriting my NaNoWriMo novel from last year - Sea Fever.

At the time, I wrote it because the idea had been hanging around in my head for years, taking up valuable space, and I figured that if I just gave it a month is would be happy, satisfied, and leave me be. After all, it's a YA, paranormal murder mystery. I'm a contemporary women's fiction kind of a gal. It was just a fun side project for thirty days.

Fast forward eight months, and the situation's slightly different. With my agent turning down my latest women's fic offering, maybe it is time to look for something different. And heaven knows I needed something fun to work on for a while.

So I pulled out Sea Fever again. I did some more world building and research to beef it up. I started idly outlining sequels, making it the first in a series, although still a stand alone novel in its own right. I workshopped the characters, and their journeys.

I started the actual revision and...

... found it really needed to be in first person, not third.

It's a lot of work. The first draft had two POV characters; taking it down to one means I have to find a way to incorporate all the things that the second character saw and thought and felt into the Stella's narrative.

And, yes, I'm aware that Stella was supposed to get a roasting from Dylan yesterday. This is why that's delayed.

But it works better in Stella's first person POV. I'm only a couple of scenes in and I can see that already.

And I'm excited about the story. About all of it.

I'm writing on, but less calmly. And that's fine by me.

I mentioned last week that The Agent had decided not to take on my latest novel, and that I was waiting to hear what her reasons were, before deciding what I should do next. She said she’d write ‘in the next few days’ and we’re now approaching two weeks, so I’m sending a gentle reminder today, just in case she’s forgotten about me.

I hate to nag, really, but I’m not the world’s most patient person. And sitting at home imagining all the terrible things she might be thinking about my writing is not helping with the keeping calm, or with the writing on.

As my father would say, the problem with us Analytical Masterminds is that we like to have a plan. We’re happy to amend the plan as circumstances change, but we need some sort of map or chart to look at and say, “Right now, that’s where we’re going.” Without it, we’re lost in the wilds of Powys following misleading yellow diversion signs, wondering if we’ll get there before last orders.

And at the moment, I’m wondering if I’ll ever be a published author, because without The Agent’s feedback, I don’t have a proper plan.

I do, because I am an utter geek, have a flowchart of possible plans, though, based on possible responses...

It helps me keep calm. And write on.

A roast, according to Wikipedia, is ‘an event in which an individual is subjected to a public presentation of comedic insults, praise, outlandish true and untrue stories, and heartwarming tributes, the implication being that the roastee is able to take the jokes in good humor and not as serious criticism or insult, and therefore, show their good nature.’


Whereas I’m more used to the meat and veg with gravy version, a comedy roast, it occurs to me, might be a fantastic way to get to know your characters. After all, what shows a person more clearly than their friends and families recollections and stories of them? It’s all about what they’ve done, or in the case of the untrue stories, could conceivably be imagined to do. And the only real way to show character in fiction is through action and reaction.

Anyway, it’s a theory. And, to see if it holds up, I thought I’d give it a try. Starting next Sunday, with the protagonist of my current novel-in-revision, Stella Fortune, as seen by her sometime best friend, Dylan Albright.

And yes, I imagine some of the jokes might be about her name.

When I decided not to go back to work after my maternity leave, I knew that it would mean some changes in our lifestyle – although, not that many more than if I had gone back, given how much of my salary childcare would have swallowed up.

So I expected that we’d have to tighten our belts, watch the pennies a little closer, and that we wouldn’t be able to go out so much, which we were too tired to bother with anyway. And I knew, intellectually at least, that I’d have less contact with other people than when I worked in a busy office.

Still, I’m quite a solitary soul, so it didn’t bother me too much in principle. But my husband started to get a little concerned when in answer to the question, “What have you been up to today?” I started saying things like, “Well, I had a long chat with the man who came to read the gas meter about his holiday in France,” and, “I’ve changed our electricity supplier again. Claire who rang from Scottish Power is from Wales too, you know.” He’s still a little concerned that I welcome the Jehovah’s Witnesses in every week, even though I’ve made it clear that my religious priorities are already set. It’s just nice to have someone round for a cup of tea now and then.

Regardless, my mother in law staged an intervention, and insisted I do something to get out of the house. Something besides the occasional toddler group I force myself to attend, even though I don’t think my daughter even likes it all that much. Something away from screaming children. Something with actual adults who aren’t trying to sell me something.

So, after some consideration, I joined a choir.

This isn’t as abstract as it might seem. My whole family has always been very musical, and I sang in a very successful girls’ choir in school. I chose a ladies choir, because I already know how to sing in parts with other women, and men just make this sort of thing messy, anyway. And I’ve been loving it. For two hours once a week, while my husband babysits, I focus on notes and rhythms and tempo, and forget about nappies and nursery rhymes and tantrums.

And tonight is my first concert with the choir. I’ve got my long black skirt (hemmed by my husband) and my black top, and my pink corsage. I’m hopeful that I’ll manage to remember the words, and maybe even the tune, to all our songs.

But to be honest, the concert is the least of it. I’ve got two hours a week where I’m something other than a mother, to other people. And that is very valuable indeed.

We recently signed up to a fortnightly farm box from the nearby Church Farm in Ardeley, and as a result, every other Friday I spend the afternoon fielding phone calls from my husband asking, “Is it there yet?” and “What do we have? What are you going to make?”

We have, I must admit, been incredibly impressed by the content and quality of these boxes. The meat has been spectacular, as have the vegetables, eggs, milk and bread. My husband’s excitement is not unwarranted.

For example, this week we have:

• Plums
• Grapes
• Salad
• Onions
• Potatoes
• Green beans
• Milk
• Eggs
• Bread
• Cucumber
• Topside of beef
• Pork mince
• Sausages
• Chicken legs

I said yesterday that I’d post today about where I am in my writing career, and how I got there. The quick answers to those questions are: Nowhere and Slowly.


The longer answer is a little more complicated, but I’m going to summarize.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I started taking it seriously when I left university, nine years ago. I studied my craft, I got better, I started submitting to agents and received many rejections ranging from the usual form letter to, finally, a personal ‘I like this, but not enough. Send me what you do next,’ from the number one agent on my list.

What I did next was a novel called ‘The Fairytale Way,’ which became ‘Breaking the Spell,’ during the year I worked on it with The Agent, and finally, ‘Everyday Magic,’ at the point when we finally sent it out to editors.

A lot of them liked it. None of them liked it enough.

I was pregnant at this point, and sick every day, and more tired than I thought possible. But I took the news in good part, and headed off to work on something new, a novel called ‘Playing Make Believe,’ sending chapters over to The Agent for comment every couple of months.

Six months later, we both decided we hated it. I think the title might have been the best bit.

And now I had a small baby to deal with. One who didn’t like sleeping very much.

Still, I was determined to make the most of my maternity leave. I wrote the first draft of two more novels during the second half of 2009, one women’s fiction, like the previous books, called ‘An A to Z of Love’ and one YA paranormal called ‘Sea Fever’ that I wrote during NaNoWriMo.

I knew that ‘An A to Z of Love’ needed one hell of a revision before I could send it over to The Agent, so I signed up for Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course, which I found immensely helpful. Still, it took six months, and since my husband and I had decided that I wasn’t going back to work, I found myself with a little time on my hands.

So I wrote the first draft of another novel, ‘Dream a Little Dream,’ which I still think is possibly the best thing I’ve written to date.

I set myself a deadline – by the end of May 2010 I wanted to have both ‘An A to Z of Love’ and ‘Dream a Little Dream’ edited and over to The Agent. And I did it.

Then I sat back and waited.

And waited.

And then last Thursday I heard back from The Agent.

She hates them both.

Well, what she actually said was that she didn’t love them enough to offer to take either of them on. But in the end, that feels like the same thing.

So, now I’m waiting to hear why she doesn’t love them, if it’s fixable, and whether she thinks I should send them out to other agents, or if she wants to see whatever I write next.

But I’m not just sitting around and waiting. I’m revising ‘Sea Fever’ instead. And I’m entering competitions, like the Savvy Authors Drive 'Em Wilde contest, and I’m thinking about writing short stories, or even poetry, to stretch my writing muscles. I’m writing this blog.

I’m keeping calm, and writing on.

In a wonderful twist of metaphor, we’re having new doors put in today.

This is fantastic, because in the five years we’ve lived in this house, we’ve never been able to enter through the front door, and now the patio doors at the back are sticking so badly that you have to cross your fingers, turn around three times and spit before you attempt to lock or unlock them.

But it’s also very fitting for the first day of this new blog, and the stage of my writing life I currently find myself at.

I’ll post more tomorrow about how I reached this point, but for now, suffice to say that the last couple of years have felt like I’ve been wandering lost in a long, eerily lit corridor of doors and windows. And every time I cautiously approach an ajar door, it slams in my face, just as all the other doors and windows around me also bang shut.

So, I’ve decided to make my own doors, in my own corridor, all with perfectly oiled hinges and no locks. And I’m going off in search of other corridors, and other doors, to see if they could use a spot of oil too. Or even a key.

I’m making my own opportunities. I’m chasing every possibility. I’m writing what I love, making what makes me happy, and working damn hard at it too. I’m not giving up on my dream of being a writer, and of staying at home with my daughter while she’s very young.

I’m keeping calm and writing on.