Last Thursday, I had a fantastic get-together with fellow writer and blogger, Vikki Thompson. She left home at seven in the morning for our meet-up in my home town on the south coast, and my first sight of Vikki was of a most industrious writer sat at a table outside a café on the seafront, her head bent over a notepad, scribbling away, with a latte to sustain her.
I’ve known Vikki for about a year, on-line, and really love the chatty style of her writing blog. She’s such a focused and motivated person with regard to writing, although she’d probably argue with that! I always knew we’d gel if ever we met up, so it was a delight to discover that, on a global scale. we lived around the corner from each other.
Seated outside the café, we succeeded in talking to each other non-stop for about five hours. About three-quarters of our conversation was about writing — Vikki had some wonderful tales to share — and the rest of the time we chatted about other things we had in common.
I came away from our get-together feeling incredibly inspired and glad to have met someone travelling the same writing road with such dedication. We write different types of fiction, but our goals are the same.
For me, this is the start of a great friendship, including a shared passion for homemade cakes, especially coffee and walnut sponge.
On New Year’s Day, inspired by Novel Writing Winter, I leapt into the unknown and began writing my first work of speculative fiction. Yes, I’d written four other novels before this one, but none of them quite made it to full publication despite a number of calls for full manuscripts from editors.
Studying feedback from publishers and agents is rather like gathering intelligence prior to action. Last December, I gave up footling with my first four manuscripts and shoved them in a drawer, classing them as learning exercises. At the same time, I decided to stop second-guessing the market, thus liberating myself to write the novel that burned within me and be damned if being experimental meant breaking rules.
The novel is character-driven, written from the viewpoint of six different characters in the first and second-person present, first-person past, as well as third-person past and present. It also includes poetry.
The working title, Eulogy to the Last Man was the name of the original piece of flash fiction upon which I based the story. However, as the novel progressed, new characters sprouted up alongside the original two and led me down unexpected paths, calling for me to change the title to Wightland.
In the first 81,000-word draft, I’ve concentrated primarily on characterisation and plot, but during its revision I might expand upon the story’s setting, turning it into a longer work. Whether I do this or not, depends upon my beta readers’ reaction to the approach I’ve used, which moves between minimalism and zooming in for bold, detailed close-ups.
I have total belief in this project and can’t wait for Monday to arrive, when the second draft begins.
Unusual for me, but I’m going to have a moan. Just to balance up my complaints with a positive, I’ll give you a rose photo at the beginning and the end of my post 🙂
My first moan. At the weekend, WordPress decided to develop an error that prevented me from posting comments on other people’s blogs. This was just after I’d completed one of its surveys and sung its praises as a blogging platform. So if any of my followers are feeling neglected by me, blame it on WP.
When it decided to dump every comment I made on some of your blogs, I contacted Akismet.com asking them to check if they were dumping my stuff into people’s spam folders. They sent me a link to fill in form so they could run a test. Not heard from them since. Nothing has changed. Please could you lovely bloggers check your spam folders and let me know if you find anything of mine there.
Today, it’s possible to comment but only after going all around the houses to do so. This involves linking to your blogs via Reader on my site. Entering the comment in the box on your sites, highlighting the comment and doing Control+C, as I know it will be dumped on the first attempt. Then I’m asked to sign in to WP again to make my comment, so I sign in and send the comment and am rewarded by the words “Sorry, this comment could not be posted”, and “WordPress>Error” on my tab button above. So I close your site, go back to Reader, follow the link to the same blog and, Voila! I can post the comment. You are all worth the effort, but it is such a labour of love and means I only have time to visit half the blogs I usually do. If anyone else has encountered this problem and resolved it, please let me know.
It’s nigh on impossible if WP doesn’t have an email address to contact their technicians direct. Instead, you’re told to post something in a forum and wait for an answer there. That’s just fine, if someone responds, but no good at all if your question remains unanswered. But enough of WP for now.
My second moan. It’s July and I have flu. Yesterday my temperature was 102 degrees F and I felt absolutely terrible, aching all over, nauseous, a foul cough, and unable to get up from bed without almost passing out. Lay on my back all day, being nursed by my dog, while reading and having a short snooze between chapters. To read for so many hours was a good distraction from my ills, and prevented me from shooting malicious thought-arrows at the foreign language student who sneezed all over me in the bus last Tuesday, on my return journey from meeting up with a fellow-writer for the evening.
The novel was The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory, all about Henry VIIIth and wife number four, Anne of Cleves, and wife number five, Katherine Howard. Previously, I read The Other Boleyn Girl, which was about the story of wife number two, Anne Boleyn, told from the viewpoint of her sister, Mary, who was the King’s mistress before he married Anne. The novels are totally riveting and I’d thoroughly recommend them to anyone who’s interested in history.
When I woke up this morning, my first thought was, apart from still feeling ill/slightly better, that I have a big problem with Henry VIIIth being the founder of the Church of England, considering he was foul, lecherous, and prone to sending people to the Tower and the block or scaffold at a whim.
Anne Boleyn in the Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On an uplifting note, I did find a superb quote about haiku in my inbox this morning, emailed to me by fellow blogger, David Kanigan at Lead.Learn.Live.
“A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand becoming, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night, become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.”
– Reginald H. Blyth
Lost in her tale,
the writer became a fox
leaping boundaries.
See that bushy red tail
vanishing into the blue.
#
This tanka is a surreal explanation of why I’m being less attentive to my fellow bloggers than usual. Please bear with me, as I’ve reached the halfway mark with my work-in-progress started on January 1st. My speculative novel has removed me to a different time and place, but I should return to relative normality by mid-July.
At present, our town’s annual cultural festival is taking place. It opened on 30th March and runs until 21st April. Although this festival is eating into my writing time, it does stop me becoming surgically attached to my computer. Last week, our early music chamber choir, LuxAeterna, gave a recital, which included in the programme a fiendishly difficult, not often performed Mass by Giovanni Animuccia (c 1500-1571).
LuxAeterna Early Music Chamber Choir
For those who are interested, here’s our programme (all music composed before c 1630):
The Curtain drawn – Giles Farnaby
A little pretty bonnie lass – John Farmer
Il bianco e dolce cigno – Jacob Arcadelt
Le Sourvenir – Robert Morton
Though Philomela lost her love – Thomas Morley
Thus said fair Chloris bright – John Wilbye
Flow not so fast ye fountains – John Dowland (Organ – Canzona Ariosa by Andrea Gabrielli) Au joli bois – Claudin de Sermisy
Chambriere – Jean Planson
Il est bel est bon – Pierre Passereau
Ave verum corpus – Solesmes
Sacerdotes Domini – William Byrd
Adoramus te – Jacob Clemens non Papa (Organ -Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein Eng’ by Jan Pietersoon Sweelinck) Hymnus ‘Condiro Alme Siderum’
Miss ‘Conditor Alme Siderum’ (Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus, & Gloria) – Giovanni Animuccia
My husband, Victor, also gave a harpsichord recital on an instrument he has restored and re-strung. This was a nerve-wracking experience for him, as this was his first full length recital on the instrument and he didn’t know if the strings would hold up to prolonged use. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stop playing to re-tune the instrument and there were no embarrassing loud pings in the middle of a piece. My job was as page-turner, which rather daunted me, as harpsichord music has loads of ornamentation which is open to interpretation by the player. This means that there are all sorts of twiddly bits that are not fully written out, making it very hard for a page-turner to follow the music.
Novel Writing Winter (NWW) 2013 ended today with the advent of the Vernal Equinox (just couldn’t resist replacing the word Spring, with its posh relative Vernal). I’m not sure whether all the people who registered an interest in NWW are still on board, but I know of some who’ve stayed the course. From the feedback I’ve had, nobody has yet finished their project, which is why I’ve decided to start a new page titled “Novel Writing Spring, 2013 ( Forum)” — link below. On the NWS page, you’ll also find a new image to paste in your sidebar, to replace the NWW one.
For me, January 1st heralded a change in direction for my writing — different style, more literary than before, and speculative. At first, my head could only deal with writing 250-500 words per session, or I would end up with one of my “school algebra” headaches, which is my name for anything that taxes my head to exploding point. Once I’d written the first 10,000 words and sketched out a complicated family tree for my incestuous cast of characters, things started taking off for real, and it was time to throw away the paracetomol. This week, I’ve reached the point when I’m breathless with excitement, so it’s on to the tranquillizers (only joking!).
Yesterday, in anticipation of the Vernal happening, I wrote an explosive and passionate chapter that’s pivotal to my whole novel. Approximately 20,000 words in, here’s a small tease of a paragraph. Publication of anything else from the chapter would require me to slap an adult rating on to this post, so anyone interested to read on will have to hope, with me, that the novel ends up published.
But there she is, standing there in the middle of the room, tears rolling down her speckled cheeks, her tawny irises swimming in a sea of pink. Alone. Adrift. And it’s my duty to rescue her before she runs aground, splinters, and drowns in her own desolation.
Does anyone else want to celebrate the start of spring, by sharing a paragraph of their Work in Progress?
Sarah Potter Writes 