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.

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.

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.