What's The Point?

                Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be as depressing as the title suggests, I promise.

                This week I’ve been doing a lot of writing.  Mostly in work, not because I’ve been skiving, far from it.  We’ve had three reports to go to different senior management groups and they all had to be done by Friday.

                The difficulty with the reports was not so much the content, as knowing what the point was.  That sounds a bit odd, the point was, they were going to senior management and so had to be done, but when I was uncertain of why they were going to managers, it was extremely difficult to know how to pitch the paper.  I had to do the drafts, so I did, but it wasn’t easy, then I passed them over to the man to present them and they all got totally re-written.

                I’ve had similar feeling with some of the fiction I’ve been writing too.  I’ve got story ideas, but I’m not sure where they are going, I’m not sure what the point to what I’m writing is.  It makes it very difficult.  I remember undertaking a writing course where it suggest that every story has a plot and a theme.  Plots I don’t have a problem with, themes are much more difficult.  Took me a couple of years to realised that the theme of “Foreshadows” was identity even though it had been in there from the start.  Now I’ve come up with a follow up idea for “Foreshadows”, I know what I want to do with the plot, I’m pretty sure I know what I want to do with the characters, but I have no idea what the theme is.  Still I am only at the conceptual stages with this follow up, not even figured out a working title yet, so there is plenty to time.

                Also on Saturday last, we were supposed to be going to a CITO event, that is Cache In, Trash Out event.  A CITO is where a group of geocachers get together at an agreed location to pick up ‘trash’, kind of self explanatory really.  On Friday, I got on the website to check the details, but found that the event had actually been cancelled due to unexpected and unavoidable work pressures on the organiser.  So what would have been the point in travelling all the way to Cardiff for an event that wasn’t going to happen?

                The theme to this blog has been keeping to the point, the point of this blog was that in writing, fiction or non-fiction, you need to know where you are going, because if you don’t have a destination in mind, you may never get there.

Clash Resolved

You may remember at the beginning of the year I put out a list of resolutions, one of which was to blog at least once a week, well I messed up.  I didn’t blog last week.  The reason was one of my other resolutions, to enter at least one competition per month. 

Week before last I got a notice of an anthology being put together for Science Fiction writing.  Okay so an anthology isn’t exactly a competition, but you are in competition with every other writer who puts in for it.    And the subject really interested me.  It was about how science will change the human body, and I instantly knew what I wanted to write about. 

The idea was so clear in my head that I just had to get it down on paper, well okay, various bits on the computer, because I did type this one straight in.   So last weekend instead of blogging I basically sat down a wrote a whole 5000 word story in a single day.  To be honest I think I wrote about 6500 words, because there was one big section that I wrote and then just cut the whole scene out, covering it with a few lines in flashback instead.  When I was done I was still at 5700 words, so Sunday was spent trying to rewrite to get down to the 5000 words.  But I did it.  Took a lot of head scratching, but eventually I got the count down. 

Jon read it for me, pointed out a couple of mistakes and hated one idea, but it is science fiction after all and I needed that particular idea to ensure the final section worked the way I wanted it to, so I left it in hoping that the editors of the anthology aren’t so against the idea as my husband was. 

I also sent off another competition entry to Writing Magazine last week, so I worked on that a bit too.  Both stories have now been put forward so fingers crossed I hear good news from at least one of them. 

Also put a piece for work through to the prose group for criticism, things with this particular story is that it has a sub title, which I didn’t supply to the group, and there are two words in the prose which appear to be spelt wrong, but if you know the subtitle, you know those words are spelt the way they are.  Wonder if any one picks up on it.  I’ll let you know.

Easter Rushes

This was the Easter bank holiday weekend and I went with the family up to Lincoln for four nights.  It was the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in ages, but almost totally unproductive. 

            I say almost, because while I didn’t get the blog done, or any writing done, I did get about a third of my book “Foreshadows” read for errors.  I’m re-doing this because one Amazon I had a review I had said there were typo’s on every other page.  At least with e-books you get to double check and sort these out, so that is my aim.  I still have another third to go.   Now I have been away from the book so long I find that the reviewer was right and I am horrified that I let the book fly so riddled with mistakes.  Mind, that said I have had four number four-star reviews and one five-star review, which is pretty good really.

            Knowing this I feel I need to get my next book professionally proofread. To this end I found an advert in “Writing Magazine” offering a sample edit of a chapter.  So on Sunday morning, 11:24, I emailed off chapter one of my next book, “Solutions”.

            To my utter amazement, I had a response at 16:09 asking me, of all things, if I am Welsh or live in Wales.  Since the answer is that I do live in Wales, I responded with that confirmation and expressed surprise that they’d asked and done so, not only so quickly, but on a Sunday.  I hadn’t been expecting a response until the middle of next week at the earliest.  Turns out that there is a reason the question was asked, the company, Jefferson-Franklin, is based in Merthyr Tydfil, and are currently offering a discount to Welsh writers.  By sheer and freaky coincidence, the book I’ve sent to them is also based in Merthyr.

            Well I have to say, I can’t believe the service I’ve had. 

            The sample I sent was 3124 words long, but I got the full edit and critique document in my email at 23:09 that evening.  Good turn around and really good result.  I have to say I am taking some of the comments with a touch of salt as these are businessmen touting for work, so I doubt the response was ever going to be overly negative.  Still I was impressed at some of the oddities they picked up, certainly things I would never have spotted, some edits I wouldn’t have known to make.  So I will be sending the full manuscript to them, just have to decide if I’ll go for just proofreading or full edit.  Of course, I also have to find the money and that’s always easier said than done.

            Anyway, I should be off now.  Thanks for reading.