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.

Badly Dressed Criticism

If people don’t like being criticised, why do they circulate their work for criticism?

When I’ve written something I always give it to my husband to read.  I do this partly because he’s closest to me, but mostly because I trust his opinion, because he’ll never shy away from telling me something is bad.  He does this with clothes too by the way.  There have been times when I’ve put on something I think look goods, but he’ll soon tell me if it doesn’t because he doesn’t want others to think badly of me, and he does the same with my writing.

            I appreciate a tough review,  I want my reviewers to be nitpicking, because I know if I put something out to a wider audience, there will be people out there ready to tear it to shreds.  Much better that it gets torn apart where I still have the opportunity to re-write than after it’s in print.

This doesn’t mean I don’t get upset about bad comments, sometimes I do, but as long as I know that it is aimed at improving my work, I’ll take it on the chin.  Of course I don’t always agree with criticisms either, sometimes the commenter has missed the point, sometimes they haven’t seen the fuller picture and sometimes they are just plain wrong.  But I always listen because a lot of the time, they are right and they do have a point.

            So I do the same with I critique other people’s work.  I will pick up on little details that don’t fit.  I will say if the dialog is out of place with the setting and what/when the people are.  I do this because it has helped me when it has been done to me.  For example, I have a story called Unclear Triangle, when I wrote it I thought I was just writing everyday English speech.  But my husband was quick to point out that actually there were a lot of Americanisms in there, so I built that into the storyline and it gave me an unexpected extra background story and more colour to my characters.

            Unclear Triangle was started about fifteen years ago and in the second chapter I talk about wanting high speed camera film, this week I put it up for criticism with the local writers circle and it was pointed out that with modern digital cameras, hardly anyone uses film any more.  So either I have to explain why high speed film is being used by that character, or I have to take that idea out to fit with the modern era.

            I also reviewed three other stories at the circle, and clearly my comments were taken as being me ripping into people.

            All in all, I was rather disappointed at this week’s weak criticism, it was less helpful than I was hoping for.  I didn’t go to be patted on the back.  I don’t need everyone to say they ‘liked it’, if everyone likes it, I won’t have done my job right.  I want to be better than that.  People shouldn’t like everything, not everything is likeable to everyone.  Universally liked means universally bland.  When it comes to writing, it should move you, you should feel something.  Love it or hate it, have a reaction. 

So, I wondered, I went to a writers circle to make me a better writer, why do other people go?

One In A Million

Someone said “you’re first million words don’t count”.  I say someone because I’ve Google-ed this and I’ve found several different people to whom this quote or mis-quote is attributed, though Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, but I like the idea that it was Stephen King.

            Anyway, I was interested enough to wonder how much I’ve written, so last night I fired up Excel and Word, and went through all my files, counting words and adding it all up.  It was a surprising and odd experience.  I listed the books and my short stories, took only the count of the final versions even if the original were longer, occasionally much longer.  

            As I was going through I had a few surprises, not least of all was that several pieces I ‘knew’ were not there.  Actually it turned out that on the whole, they were there, they’d just got lost in my random approach to file saving, next job up this weekend is sorting out my filing.  Also, my hubby pointed out that given the amount of work on my hard drive that if I lost this laptop or it got damaged, I’d have lost a hell of a lot of work that I’d never really get back, so after I’d finished the count, I did burn all my files to a CD.

            Back to the surprising.  Because I’d been thinking about this millions words thought, I’d been thinking about it in work Friday, so at lunchtime, I started making a list of the stories I could remember and a estimating how long they were.  I didn’t keep the list, but I know as I was making the new one, I was rather surprised to find just how wrong I was on some of the counts.  There are a couple of cases where I was way out.  One romance I thought was 90,000 words turned out to be 60,647.  Another I’d thought around the same size was 84,086.  But the two that surprised me were one of my early mysteries that got an agent, but no publisher, which I’d thought was about 100,000 words, turned out to be 121,985, and the last is, of all things, the only book I’ve actually self published, Foreshadows (available on Amazon for Kindle), I thought it was around 120,000, it was actually 147,181.

            Anyway, I’ve got the list, I’ve done the maths, and here it is: 1,126,533 over 38 distinct stories.  Since my day job is heavily set on mathematics, did a number of statistics while I was there, I’ve tabulated them below, in case anyone’s interested. 

            Of course this count is only what I’ve got on the laptop.  And only the fiction, it doesn’t include the raft of non-fiction I’ve written, nor my journals, nor my blogs.  Also, I’ve got a couple of boxes worth in the loft that were saved on three and a half inch floppy discs (yes unfortunately, I really am that old), which I’ve never transferred, and never will do now, I mean, who’s got a floppy drive any more?  Mind you, I’m not sure I’ve even got the discs any more.  Truth is anything that old probably isn’t worth having any more, but while they sit where I can’t see them, they are skeletons in the loft that I can’t quite bring myself to cremate. 

            So, hey ho, that’s a million words and more.  Hopefully that means that now I’m be able to ‘write’. There again, give me a pen and paper, or computer, or even my smart phone and I’ll write whether I’m ‘able’ to or not.

Total (as at 15/03/2013)	1,126,553
Average	29,646
Max	147,181
Min	94
Mode	1,700
Median	2,842

Time Races

Well time has certainly been racing for me this week. My new job is a bit of information overload but what's really getting to me is the fact that 2 days a week I'm still doing my old job.  Now I have to be honest - I love my old job that’s why I had to think very hard about even taking the new one.

It was agreed that I would do this split so I have to but what's worrying me is that the language being used suggests that the old bosses are expecting this position to go on indefinitely and there is no evidence of finding a replacement despite the fact that I gave them a CV of an ex-colleague I knew was available. Thing is I ended up spending hours on Sunday working when I wanted to be relaxing. As it was Mothers Day it would have been nice to have spent time with my kids only my son is away at Uni and didn't even bother texting me and my daughter was in Paris with her school on a French language holiday.  So just me, the hangover and a hang over hubby oh and the workload.

Have managed to keep up with the resolution to enter at least one competition a month and actually entered two last night. I also managed to find a piece for a flash fiction competition which I'm considering putting in for.  My hubby read it last night, said it was very dark.  Well the judge said he wanted to avoid formula and read something that moved him, well if this story doesn't move him I don't know what will.

Time to get on with other stuff.

The Ring in a Circle

The last two weeks I’ve struggled to find something to write about, which is why my blogs haven’t been as regular as they could have been. Tonight blogging wasn’t on my to do list, however, I thought I just had to get this done.

About a year ago I went to CrimeFest in Bristol and among others, I met Sally Spedding, and in conversation she suggested that I try my local Writers Circle, she even gave me some contact details, only a problem was, I didn’t get around to using them before my email account threw a fit and deleted everything in my inbox for no good reason and the details were lost.  So on Monday, I was on the internet and for no good reason I looked up Swansea Writers Circle, the link that came up to the council’s website, which linked to Swansea and District Writers Circle and gave me all the details I needed.  The site told me that they met on the first Wednesday of the month, so today I went.

The only other writers circle I’ve ever been to was in Cardiff and probably more than twenty years ago, so I was expecting the same sort of thing, people reading their work and other critiquing it.  But no.

Got there and there was an agenda and a speaker.  I was quite surprised.  The speaker was Melanie Lloyd, a woman who writes about boxing, she had two books out entitled Sweet Fighting Man and Sweet Fighting Man Vol 2.  When I realised she was going to be talking about boxing, I can’t say I was overly enthralled, but she was a really good speaker.  Absolutely enthusiastic about the subject, Melanie was a joy to listen to.  And though she spoke of loads of boxers I’d never heard of, she had interesting stories to tell that I enjoyed listening. Thing was, I’ve been trying to work on a noire flavour book and recently read Choke Hold by Christa Faust, and two of the three lead characters are boxers, so some of the stories Melanie told, seemed very resonant with that book, so obviously Ms Faust and Ms Lloyd have both got a talent for evoking the same imagery, emotions and reactions.

Strangely enough, I entered and won a prize in the raffle, but since I won a bottle of bottle of wine and I’m trying to give up drinking (not exactly working, but I’m trying), I suggested that it be pulled again, and it went to the other first timer there.  Nice that huh?

Anyway, feels good to feel enthusiastic about writing again, so thanks to the Swansea and District Writers Circle for that.