Authors Electric

  For as long as I can recall, I've been someone who likes to rush at things, trying to fit too much into the time and only getting it all done by a ruthless system of prioritisation, so that eating biscuits (for instance) always gets done and sweeping up the crumbs never does!   My mother was the same, only worse, and often quoted her own mother's motto, 'Better to wear out than rust out.' I suspect I am wearing out physically at a somewhat faster rate than she did, but that's beside the point. Inside view of a props cupboard where some things do rust out over the years, while others seem to be destined to appear in almost every show. The point is that I've recently had to modify my approach to writing in order to get anything finished, and I'm currently reflecting on whether this might actually be a good thing. Ever since I first took part in NaNoWriMo in 2006, I seem to have been operating according to its rules every time I sit down to write. This is a g...

What did you do while you were in lockdown?  I listened to a lot of audiobooks, I went for a walk every day, and I played board games with my boyfriend. We ate and drank too much. I tried and failed to master French. My boyfriend made model aeroplanes. And I wrote my first novel.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who wrote a novel during the pandemic. In fact, I know I’m not. It was an explosive time for creativity, as we all stared into the void and wondered what was coming next. For me, my self-employed, pre-child life, and the requirement to stay home all the time, plus the fact that I had just moved to a new country and didn’t have any friends yet, made the writing process nice and easy.  Proudly wearing my Winner t-shirt. Everyone who completes it wins! I did NaNoWriMo and I took it seriously. I knew that if I missed one day I would be toast, so I got up at 7am throughout November and wrote my words, then quite often got back into bed. I planned the first 25,000 words ...

As you read this, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it is fondly called, will be just over half way through. Writers all over the world will collectively have written millions of words and will be storming towards their final goal of 50,000. Some writers will already have completed this number of words and may have stopped at that point or may be carrying on to write an entire novel. Some writers may be struggling to move their word count forward and that magical 50,000 seems to be far in the distance. I speak to everyone today but mainly to those who are struggling.  To those of you who are storming ahead, congratulations, I applaud you. This is a fabulous achievement and you should give yourself a pat on the back and some extra chocolate (other treats are available). At the end of November you can download that winners certificate and claim your winner goodies. You might even buy yourself a NaNoWriMo Winner T-Shirt. Why not, you deserve it after all your hard work. To...

I have written about planning here before, probably more than once. However it's a topic that isn't exactly dear to my heart, in fact in some ways it's the opposite. Oddly, there are some areas of my life where I enjoy the process of making plans just as much as the act of carrying them out. For instance, I love planning journeys, the more complicated the better. One of my best efforts was the plan for my trip from Edinburgh to Finland by train and ferry. The fact that in real life it fell apart halfway wasn't entirely my fault, although possibly I would have done better to use one of the routes suggested by the Man in Seat 61 instead of making one up myself. One of the minor irritations of the pandemic has been the fact that there's no point in planning long, complex journeys, because there is no prospect of being able to travel very far afield at present. As far as writing is concerned, although I don't make exhaustive plans for individual novels* I do have a ...

 I've probably posted here before about trains, a topic close to my heart as well as yet another reason to be annoyed with 2020, as this must be the first year I can remember when I haven't travelled by train at least once. To make up for the train shortfall in real life, I've watched more or less every railway documentary I can find on television during the year. My absolute favourite is actually not about real trains at all. It's the Great Model Railway Challenge, which sadly doesn't seem to have taken place recently, probably because it's a team event and more or less impossible to do while you're applying social distancing rules. But who could resist railway layouts that included the Glenfinnan Viaduct, or a multi-level structure in which trains had to drive into various futuristic elevators in order to access the next level? However, as I realised while watching grown men panicking because their model freight train had derailed again, not entirely unexp...

I was making a list of presents to give people for the occasion which I suppose we can now mention (Christmas) when I had the idea for the title of this post. It was only after I had thought of it that I remembered two alternative meanings which seem curiously relevant. I've checked online and found there are far more than two meanings, and they all appear to have originated differently. Just thought I would throw in something related to writing here! To begin with the Christmas present list, I am very uninspired this year, a feeling that is not entirely unprecedented as I have had spells over the years of either hating the whole season or just barely tolerating it. I don't think it really gets much better than that, although I've worked out as I got older that actually it's the darkness of this time of year I hate, and that my mood will always improve marginally once we get past the winter solstice. Which of course is why Christmas and New Year happen at this time in...

Finding a good critique group is hard work. Get into the wrong one and it’s easy to have your ego bruised or to lose your writing mojo. Some writers hate critique groups while others swear by them. How does a writer choose? NaNoWriMo 2016. Image credit: Terry Chay First off: let’s get our definitions straight. There are writing groups and critique groups. The former is a convivial place where writers can gather to write in each other’s company. Sometimes there’s chatter but mostly it’s about getting words on the (virtual) page. There are international events like NaNoWriMo and there’s the local coffee shop on Thursday mornings. A writing group, in my book, is about moral support. A critique group, on the other hand, is where members are expected to point out the flaws in a manuscript. That manuscript might be a couple of pages to read on the spot or ten thousand words circulated a week in advance. It may not be the same people around the table from one time to the ...

I tend to frequent various writing forums, and one topic that crops up fairly often is whether it's essential to outline your novel before starting to write. Discussions on this tend to stray into the different methods of outlining, and at some point people will usually express amazement that anyone can write a novel without outlining. This is rumoured to be particularly impossible in the mystery genre. Although I'm very firmly on the 'not outlining' side of this debate, I do plan my novels as much as I can short of outlining. For my recent NaNoWriMo effort I started out having only a vague idea for (yet) another story in my mystery series, but during October I did write very short summaries in rather a pretty notebook of what I thought would probably happen in the first three chapters, mostly to make sure I got off to an easy start. Last week, after I reached 50,000 words, I hadn't finished the story but I knew where it was going (thank goodness - that do...

I am interrupting my ongoing countdown   of great self - published fiction to give you my annual Thanksgiving post. As you all know, I generally use my November post to give a brief list of all the writing-related things I am thankful for each year ( except for that one time that I didn't ). I mean, I kind of already am... This year's post is about just one thing. I mean, I'm already doing a countdown on the other months of this year, so it would unduly strain your indulgence for me to add a countdown within a countdown. Also, I can only think of one writing tool this year that really deserves a thanks. NaNoWriMo Every year, many writers and aspiring writers all over the world log into the internet and devote the month of November to writing a first draft of a novel with a minimum of 50,000 words. This internet-based creative writing project is referred to as the National Novel Writing Month or, more familiarly, NaNoWriMo . This is the second year I ha...

Women are sometimes thought to be better than men at multi-tasking, although I am not entirely convinced. Even if they are, it probably isn't an in-built skill, if it is even a skill, but a tendency which develops over the course of an average woman's life as they juggle a career, childcare, housework and anything else they might attempt outside these traditional spheres. Obviously in those enlightened times men do this too, but in my (fairly limited) experience it doesn't seem to come as easily to them. However as I get older I too am less able or willing to do more than one thing at a time, or even one after the other in some cases. I was first introduced to the concept of multi-tasking in a book entitled (as far as I can recall) the I Hate to Housekeep Book, which was a sequel to the I Hate to Cook Book . I bought these to assist with my first attempts at cooking and housekeeping, probably while I was at university and living away from home for the first time, but th...

I have to go for a speed awareness course today. Mea culpa.      I wouldn’t like you to get the impression that I’m unaware of speed: I am all too aware of it. I hate running or cycling down hill, skiing is impossible because I’m frightened of being out of control. I’m not some wild boy, or even girl, racer, I am just confused about the speed limits in my new locale. I moved to Cheltenham recently and Gloucestershire   has a surfeit of cameras and a deficit of speed signs: much like life, in fact.     In general, driving apart,   I am prone to doing things too fast and too carelessly   - cooking, child rearing, shopping, form filling even on occasions novel writing. I don’t think I ever learned the right speed for any of them because if anyone gave me any advice I wasn’t paying attention: I missed the signs and had to make it up with a bit of guess work, and a hazy memory of something I read in the highway code thirty years ago.   ...

I don't think I would ever have written nearly as many novels if it hadn't been for NaNoWriMo. It's only this past year that I've started to wonder if I've become a victim of it instead of a beneficiary. It was so exciting, that first year when I didn't know if I would reach the 50,000 word target by the end of November. I had never written as much as 50,000 words in a month before, despite having managed to complete, over quite a number of years, a couple of mysteries, an epic novel of the English Civil War and an odd book called 'The Tree Museum' that I was very fond of but which fell awkwardly between genres. Not to mention several children's plays and a handful of short stories. I probably wouldn't even have attempted NaNoWriMo if it hadn't been for Radio Scotland, who happened to run their own writing event in February 2006. Their target was only 1,000 words a day, and because it was February and not even a leap year, the total was...

In 2015 I did NaNoWriMo, the writing challenge that encourages you to complete a 50,000 word first draft within the month of November. I needed a bit of motivation for my new science fiction novel, and I believed that the 1700 words (approximately) required per day would not be beyond me, since I often write (or used to write – see below) around 1500-2000 words a day anyway. NaNo seemed like a good way of making sure I kept to that, while enabling me to finish my first draft just in time to start my Christmas shopping. It proved to be a lot harder than I’d expected. What I’d forgotten was that, although I often wrote as much as 2000 words a day, I generally allowed myself at least one day off a week – sometimes two. I’d even give myself an extra day or so if I was travelling, babysitting, or feeling under the weather. NaNo permits no such luxuries. Or rather, it does, but you have to catch up on any time lost and the whole thing soon gets away from you. It was a tough month a...