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Iâve lost my small Moleskine notebook and my insides are doing summersaults of queasiness inside of me. I remember picking it up and putting it in my fleece pocket to go to lunch, with my novel to read and the…
Continue readingI’ve been writing in present tense for so long now, I now find, as make the first tentative steps to Louis Tumnal’s story I’m finding that the natural choice for me is still present tense. This is awkward as I…
Continue reading(The Curious Tale of) Mr Tumnal is working its way into my mind. My problem with the story is that it is important to me that Louis Tumnal is a sympathetic and likeable character, but someone who cheats on his…
Continue readingHelen recently posted information about a new competition being run and I am tempted to enter Blood & Fire into it. Normally I am cautious about entering my WIP into a competition because of the fear that they will want…
Continue readingI’m going to try and get the revisions to part three of Blood & Fire finished by the end of this weekend, and thus reach the half-way point. The thing is, I think I’m going to have to change the…
Continue readingI’ve been reading Kate Mosse’s Sepulche – the follow-up to her debut Labyrinthe. I have to say, I’m not entirely gripped with it the story set in both current day and 1890s Southern France, but I’m sticking with it. After…
Continue readingAnother interesting thing that came out of the SYP talk, was that, in order to âget noticedâ these days, there are a whole new breed of people to send your work to. There are so many writers out there that…
Continue readingAs the ghosts and ghouls and trickânâtreaters were spilling out onto the Oxford streets for a ghostly-cold night, I returned (after a short trip into Oxford to find a birthday present for my mum) I returned to OUP and met…
Continue readingIâve been putting my handwritten changes to chapter 13 into the Word file. Because I was working offline with an old fashioned pen-type of arrangement I havenât seen the comments and corrections that Helen has already made to an earlier…
Continue readingThatâs it. Iâve finished revising chapter 13. It’s weird, but as I’ve been doing the revising, I have been crossing out the bits that I thought, god this is really crap, but-I-need-to-write-it-to-get-the-story-on as I was writing it, and sure enough,…
Continue readingWhen I came to make my lunch this morning I found that I had no bananas. There was a rather scrummy looking bread’n’butter pudding on offer in the canteen today. In some kind of rather flawed and backward logic I…
Continue readingMy lunchtimes (at work) recently have consisted of being evenly split between reading The Timetraveller’s Wife and revising my own nove. The former is written in first person, present tense; and the latter in third person, present tense… I’ve been…
Continue readingIâm currently reading Audrey Niffeneggerâs The Time Travellerâs Wife and Iâm loving it. Itâs uniquely original, and fantastic read. It is also incredibly wonky – in its constant switching between characters and times and its all told in the present…
Continue readingIn preparation for second draft revision work of Part Three of Blood & Fire I’ve been reading it through with fresh eyes. It seems to be very much a chapter of two halves. The first bit is akin to Part…
Continue reading1. Cold though it might have been to get up to this morning, the quality of light and crispness to the air, and the smell of the day was gorgeous. It was the kind of day that reminds me why…
Continue readingWhilst cycling back to the Park & Ride tonight, I found my head buzzing with the closing scenes to chapter 12 (end of part two), so much so, that I had to sit in my car for about 15 minutes…
Continue readingUsually I’ve been finding time between eating my sandwiches and reading whatever book it is I’m reading (currently the third part of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy, King of the Middle March), to get a bit of work done on revising…
Continue readingChapter 10 is done. The second draft is 30% complete. I am pleased. 🙂
Continue reading1. Another successful lunchtime of editing today. I rewrote one scene, and then skim read the rest of the (tenth) chapter and, concentrating less on the &Thorn;ursar people, itâs already a much tighter chapter, and I think, needing less work…
Continue readingI received my first Icelandic critique of the opening chapters of my novel today. It didn’t come, as you might think, from one of the my cousins, but from a fellow critter, Sif Traustadóttir, on CritiqueCircle. When I saw that…
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