Hearts of Amberley: An Update

Hello, my dear readers!

I do hope you are all well in these strange times.

It's been a while since I've provided an update on where I'm at with book 3 in the Hearts of Amberley series. I assure you, this is far more frustrating for me than it is for you!

Progress on the third book has been hampered by a few things: the birth of my second child and the subsequent madness which ensued, various Covid lockdowns requiring full-time childcare and exhaustion, and of course just various life tasks and events which pop up along the way. It is still my hope that one day, I will have some "day-job" time to devote to writing, but at the moment that's not possible.

And so, book 3 has been limping along - always at the back of my mind, and more often lately, at the forefront and on my fingertips. It look a huge effort to get the headspace to finish plotting it out, but now that is done I am doggedly working through the draft, about two thirds of the way through. I hoped to have it done last year (or the one before lol) but come hell or high water it will be done this year.

I do have considerable uneasiness about writing a book about an established villain who has sinned so absolutely. But his story begged to be told, the WHY behind his actions nagging at my conscience. And the lady who would challenge him became a potent force in my imagination. As I have written, the tone of the book has changed somewhat, and I have changed the title from "Mr Barrington Meets His Match" to "Heart of a Gentleman". When you read the book, you'll see how fitting this is :) I hope with all my heart that you will find it a sensitive and satisfying read.

I am also looking at release the first two books in other formats - Hardcover and Large Print. I'd love your feedback if you like to read either of these formats.

I hope to be able to reveal the cover of "Heart of a Gentleman" before too long! Make sure you're signed up to my email newsletter or following me on Facebook for any updates.

Sign up here:

Mummy Brain – The Struggle is Real!

Sleepless. Overjoyed. Frustrated. Elated. Isolated, but no time for me.

The life of a new mother is relentless. So rewarding. So punishing. So brain-numbingly tedious but emotionally stressful. At the end of the day creativity is at an all-time low, and the struggle to get the rear end off the couch or do anything other on the laptop than peruse emails or social media is all but hopeless.

But I know I need to fuel the creative fire to feel alive again. To feel like me. I am a writer. And that means that occasionally, once in a while… I should actually create some words. Fictional words in extraordinary worlds which only live in my imagination, where stories dwell that only I can tell. It’s just even harder than ever to find the headspace, let alone the energy, to let the juices flow and feel the wonderful reward (as well as the agony) of creation. All my mental power is consumed by nap times and durations, creating ever changing menus, getting to activities on time and whether I'm doing white or colours washing. I can't even remember what I did this morning. Creating fake people from scratch is a little challenging.

My most productive period in the past was after 8:30pm, when I gave myself a deadline each night to turn off the TV/internet/whatever and just write something, even for half an hour. That would frequently turn into two hours or more once I was in flow. Now at 8:30 my husband and I tend to look at each other and drowsily debate what else we will do before going to bed.

You would think that being home all day would lead to more productivity, not less. But naptime is dominated by trying to catch up housework, life admin, attempting to connect with other humans and… maybe, personal hygiene. And given I may have been up for much of the night before, mustering the drive to be creative is challenging to say the least.

Now I am back at work, and needing to cram in mothering/wifing/lifing into even smaller slots. On the weekend my husband is so busy trying to be helpful, it’s very difficult to have him be solo-daddy for an hour or so, so I can get into my writing.

But I know I need to give myself the time and space to write. I need to make a routine, the same way I do for other essential parts of my life, now that we have more structure in our lives. I don’t have the answer yet. But I have the will. And I hope that is a good start.

How have other mothers got their mojo back? Please share your strategies for regaining this important part of becoming yourself again!

The Inane Ramblings of a Writer Who's Waiting

or, The Many Cool Things Starting with "Ch".

I'm doing quite a lot of waiting at the moment. Well, just mainly waiting to hear back on queries, partials and fulls, and waiting for the Christmas holidays. And my brain's gone a bill do-lally, unable to attend to any kind of sensible tasks. With that in mind...

So I was cooking dinner, and I had a little sneaky cheese snack ("cook's treat"). And I said to myself, "OMG I love cheese!". And then I thought, "and I really love chocolate." And it occurred to me: how many things, OK foods, I like that begin with the letters "ch".

So apart from the aforementioned...

Cheese

Image courtesy of Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

and chocolate....

Image courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There's chips - both this kind:

Image courtesy of Keerati / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

and this kind:

Image courtesy of artemisphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And cheesecake:

Image courtesy of Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And chicken!

Image courtesy of Apolonia / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Then after I'd finished eating my chicken, I was actually compelled to leaf through the dictionary to see what other "ch" treasures there are. Champagne, cherries, choux pastry.

And then non-food stuff: champion, chamber music, chandelier,chapter, character, chain reaction, charade, charisma, charity, chaise longue, chalet, chalice, chameleon, charming, chateau... need I go on?! (please stop, I hear you say). Those are just the "cha"s. I haven't even got to chivalry or chimpanzee. Oh yeah, and Christmas.

 

Image courtesy of digidreamgrafix / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of Photokanok / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of m_bartosch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It's a pretty cool way to start a word... not that I'm biased or anything ;-) But on that note, the dessert called a "charlotte" is pretty amazing.

So many wonderful things! And I was like, "I can't believe I've never thought of this before!" Like it was some kind of genius insight worth sharing. Sorry about that.

While we're procrastinating and thinking about yummy wonderful things, here's some candy for your ears AND eyes.

Cheers!

Procrastination Station

Image courtesy of Matt Banks / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I finished the first draft of my WIP back at the end of June. I anticipated a week or two off to let it rest. During those weeks my personal life fell apart and things got off track. Over the past month or so I have wanted to get back to the story. But for some reason, I just couldn't make myself do it. I have been busy with other things in real life, but even once I had a little time, reading blogs or even critiquing others' work seemed more attractive... safer.

It's strange that the activity that gives me the most pleasure is also the one I can be the most reluctant to undertake. How could that be?

Perhaps it was just too daunting to consider all the work I will need to do. I know several structural decisions need to be made and carried out, and there is still a lot of historical research to be done. Then there's all the little details at a sentence and even a word level, with so much to remember as I move through each page. Maybe I worry that I will ruin the novel if I make bad decisions about plot or character. And maybe I'm just lazy and don't want to give my leisure time over to more work.

I eased myself into the process by reading through the spreadsheet I made detailing each scene, chapter and act (with word count, POV and plot for each). I was much relieved to find my excitement rising as I fell in love with the story all over again, even before reading the actual words of the novel itself.

Confidence bolstered, I began to edit chapter one. And that's when I remembered: I love to do this. Once I started, I lost all sense of time and my surroundings. I started to make bold decisions and to cut alternative phrases and re-write paragraphs based on developments I wrote later in the story and recent research. I also spent quite a while trying to decide between two similar words, and in researching some little details - but we must allow ourselves to obsess every now and then, right? At least I am back on the horse.

Have you ever found it hard to get back into a WIP? Why, and how did you get your groove back?

Deadlines: It’s a Love/Hate Relationship

Ah, deadlines.... a necessary evil. Stuff must get done, and some stuff must be done by a certain time.

On the one hand, deadlines bring pressure, stress and the risk of sloppy work. On the other hand, some things just wouldn't get done without them. Without any deadlines, procrastination would rule.

I find I generally procrastinate the most about two types of things:

• Really easy stuff
  It’s the “I can do that later” kind of stuff that won’t take long but seems like it’s never important enough to do right now.
• Really hard stuff
  The tasks I just don’t want to think about. They stick around and haunt me, and it would really be easier if I just got them out the way. I just don’t want to.

So I spend a lot of time doing the middle-of-the-road stuff. It's only when I get closer to a deadline that I'll make myself tackle those things.

At work I generally have two sets of deadlines - by lunchtime and by the end of the day. But recently I've had IT working on my computer, and I had to give it up by at certain times on short notice. Usually I keep all my works in progress open so that I know what I have to work on (I hardly ever shut the thing down). But having to get rid of everything made me do a couple of things:

• I had to document my to-do list very clearly, without relying on just having stuff open (and stressing me out)
• It made me finish all the current little things, as well as a couple of big ones - and that felt really good.

So I was thinking, how can I apply a similar deadline to other parts of my life, in order to get that buzz of productivity? I'm not sure how yet - I'm not going to banish my personal computer... my willpower isn't that good. But there might be ways to encourage more focus, instead of trying to do three things at once or putting off the hard stuff.

With my writing, I don't think I've met a single deadline I've set for myself. I do beat myself up about it from time to time. But the deadlines are really just a means to an end - a way to push myself forward. The ironic thing is, success in writing means actual deadlines, and that's scary!

Well this was a somewhat disjointed post, but tell me: do you love or loathe deadlines? How do you make yourself get things done?

While I was drafting this post, this one popped up in my Twitter feed and it’s well worth a read.

Fancy Becoming a Professional Hermit?

I'm reading a delightful book at the moment, "In the Garden with Jane Austen" by Kim Wilson. Not only is it beautiful and fascinating in its own right, the book is giving me little tidbits I can use in my writing.

I came across something today which I had to share. In a chapter about mansions and manor house gardens, there is a section entitled "Temples, Gothic Seats, Grottoes and Hermitages". The author discusses how certain garden features were supposed to conjure particular emotions according to the romantic tendencies of the eighteenth century.

Hermitages are discussed last, and I have to admit I have never heard of this as a garden feature before. To quote from the book:

The Bennets in Pride and Prejudice have a hermitage in their wilderness walk. Mrs Bennet wants to show if off to the visit Lady Catherine de Bourgh: 'Go, my dear', she cries, 'and show her ladyship about the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.' A hermitage, meant to resemble the hut of a religious recluse and to inspire melancholy associations, ought properly to be located in a secluded wooded area, so the Bennets hermitage is sited correctly, though perhaps too close to the house for the best taste.

Estate owners occasionally advertised for hermits to fill their hermitages. Employers asked such men to let their hair and fingernails grow, wear simple clothing, live in the hermitage and interact with any passing visitors in the character of the religious ascetic. Some contracts promised large payments at the end of specified terms, because it was so hard to keep a good hermit. Eventually, the notion of hiring a hermit was considered so ridiculous that a play called The London Hermit lampooned it, and indeed it's hard to imagine even Mrs Bennet going so far. 

That's right everyone, it's hard to keep a good hermit. Can you believe that was actually a profession? You could pretend to be like a monk, living a solitary religious life in the garden - but you were just faking it! I'm trying to imagine what kind of performance a hermit would give for the privileged few strolling in these gardens. Perhaps this novel might shed some light.

Shiny-New-Idea-Itis

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I was in the bathroom at work, when suddenly a rather ordinary thought began to cascade into a string of increasingly interesting ideas, and suddenly I had a premise for a cosy mystery. Just out of the blue. I am focused on historical romance right now, have written contemporary in the past, and have never given mysteries a second thought - except that I read the blogs of some authors like Elizabeth Spann Craig, and as a tween I loved Nancy Drew. But I LOVE this idea and my excited writer's brain can't wait to think more about it, to start fleshing out characters and detailing plots.

Of course it does. It's no coincidence that this happens when I've told my brain it must sort out my WIP at all costs. Instead of grappling with the hard work, my brain just wants to play, to get back to the juicy stuff of planning and early drafting. Telling it that there's more fun to come with my WIP once we get over this hump in the draft is, apparently, not enough bait. It must distract me and tease me with the possibility of something new and exciting that might be THE BEST THING I'VE EVER DONE AND SURE TO GET PUBLISHED.

This disease, SNII, always strikes right at the moment when you can little afford to be distracted - right? (or is it just me) The temptation is so great to stop persevering through the hard yards of getting a draft done, and to enjoy playing. So I do what I always do - take notes, save them in my writing file, and wait for the excitement of the moment to wear off so I can concentrate again. My current WIP was one of those SNIs a couple of years ago, and I did dip into it every now and again (usually late at night when my brain was tired of the WIP-du-jour) before pursuing it earnestly for NaNoWriMo.

It's at times like this when I think: "I must be a writer". Surely only a writer's mind behaves this way. This time around I'm finding it really amusing that this genre flowed so organically from my mind. I find myself wanting to Google the title I came up with, to see if someone else has had the exact same brain wave before me - but that would just ruin the joy of these few minutes, and I can do that later. It reminds me of the time I thought of a book with magical elements which is also yet to be written - tremendous fun, but will take a lot of serious work when it actually comes to be written.

It does make me worry about defining a genre for myself if I do actually cross the hurdle of publication, but only a little. The right book will get me there - and I wonder what it will be?

NaNoWriMo Follow Up: Taking Stock

Well, I should have written nearly 10,000 words this month if I'm to get to 20k... but I have written *cough* 1,100 *cough*. It's been a mix of recovering from sickness, catching up on housework and gardening, and booking some more things for a big trip we're taking next year. I have been thinking about the novel, just taking a break from writing like a mad woman.

What I have done, which I've never done before, is note down every scene on note cards. Well actually they're a mix of memo cube paper and little rectangles I tore up when I ran out. I've read on several writer blogs that this helps with plotting and structure.

I ended up with 52, which I found pleasing in a geeky sort of way, because that's the same as a deck of cards. It also means that if I write an average of about 1,000 words per scene, and I want to finish with about 80,000 words, that I am well over half-way. I still only have 41,000 words, but there are still quite a few scenes in note form.

What I can do now is lay them out and try to see how they fit into the three act (four part) structure, and see where the main gaps are. I've noted whose POV each scene is in, so I can see if one of the characters is getting too much air time. And when I'm trying to figure out the order of things, I can physically move them around as I ponder without having to cut and paste the actual words.

It also meant finally reading through everything I've done, which I didn't have time to do during NaNo. And I like most of it, which is good :-) My hope is that one day someone else likes it too.

I still have a few key plot elements to uncover (Stephen Kings "fossils") which should help to make up at least half the remaining scenes. I had three new scenes burst into mind (which made up the 1,100) after I'd turned the light out the other night, so I know the spark is still there. It would be so easy to keep resting from it, now that I'm probably past the most 'fun' parts of crafting the book. But I'll persevere and drive myself forward, because I know I can. The fear is that I won't do justice to my idea, that the scenes I've written that I love, and I'm pretty sure are good, will be balanced with mediocrity or worse. Time will tell I suppose... onward!

Do you use any techniques to help plan or chart your novels? What works for you? Will you finish your NaNo novel?

A Little Diversion: See which Ancient Hero you are

I love quizzes, particularly when they give me an answer which is fun yet accurate. This is a quick little quiz based on Greek mythology. Here's my result:

See which Ancient Greek Hero you are, and share your result :-)

Making Art With Words

In my last post I mentioned that I use Wordle to see which words I'm over-using. In response to Lindsay's question, here's more information on this great tool.

Wordle is a website where you can create a word cloud from any number of words you choose. There's a range of font styles and colour schemes to choose from. Words appear larger based on the number of times they are repeated throughout the text. If you don't want certain words to appear in the finished product, you can remove them later. Wordle randomises the layout of the words, so no two wordles are the same. I could play with it for hours. I'm a bit of a typography geek, but I think the results are beautiful. I love seeing my novel turned into art.

There are many practical uses for the writer. Apart from seeing which words you're over-used, you can also see which characters appear the most (which may surprise you) or themes within your work that you might not have realised were there.

Of course you can make art with any sort of words under the sun.

You could use a poem....

Ngram: Words Through Time

Status update: I'm deep in editing right now. I decided to come up for air to share this random graphical deviation....
If you haven't already come across it, check out Google's Ngram Viewer. It's a tool which searches through the text of all millions of books over hundreds of years. It's a pretty powerful illustration of how art mirrors life.

Some of my favourite insights are:

Fooling Around With Fonts

One of my favourite ways to procrastinate is to type my name into a Word document and try to decide the best font to use for my byline on the cover of my book. Am I the only one who does this? I hope not. I always stack my first name on top of my last, because there’s no way my whole name is going to fit on one line.

I really like the way the more recent versions of Word show you the way the font looks in the font drop-down. But does anyone else think that the alphabetical listing of the fonts makes no sense whatsoever? Shouldn’t there be groupings of serif, sans serif, cartoony, symbols, caps, handwriting, cursive, ornamental, old-fashioned… you know what I mean? I’ll be gazing dreamily at Edwardian Script ITC as I run my mouse down the font list, only to be slapped around the chops by Elephant. Don’t get me started on Wide Latin and Wingdings.