Fia of the Blog

Mafia Mother

2010-11-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

I don't often blog these days, but I had to put something up because I'm sick to death of seeing my knackered hand rising up in a lady of the lake pose. Instead of Excalibur all I have is a frayed and grubby bandage.

You might be forgiven for thinking this was Kraytwins@blogspot or the lesser known film, The Godmother, but it is only the sons and me getting into the festive mood before a party.

I must clarify a few points. I am not fat, the boys are way too thin. I am not short either, they're both nearly 7ft.

On the writing front, I've plotted a new book after spending ages building characters who might just be believable. Might. I struggle with this. Perhaps a book with just one character would be the thing?

Writers Hand

2010-04-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

I've discovered a cure for writers block.

I haven't been able to type properly for months but had my carpal tunnel op last week so perhaps in another couple.

Of course I now have lots of writerly thoughts but they get lost with the slow tap, tap, taping of my left hand.

Wonder how many of you out there have had self inflicted injury from extreme writing? I am available to make comforting remarks in sympathy.

Gone Fishing

2010-01-03T09:27:00.000-08:00

Just for a few weeks while I try to find motivation for a third rewrite of my novel - aka the demon on my shoulder.

I'll still be flitting around the blogs so stay in touch.

Out with the Son

2009-11-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

I thought he knew what to ask for in the barbers.
'Two on the side and four on top,' his brother, twenty one and King of Cool, had said. And where were his manners? Fifteen years of my going on about please, thank you and making small talk to put people at their ease, seems to have been erased by puberty. Fifteen and he can only grunt at the sad eyed Polish girl, her bone coloured hair startling against her black T (scooped low enough to make the son blink rapidly.). She wears stilettos with those metal bits on the bottom, clip clopping on the tiles like she's been shod.

'How you like?' she lisps, and the son's red slapped cheeks in the mirror tells me we're thinking the same thing. Is she offering him a sexual favour? But my lad manages a grunt and makes circles in the air with his hand. She gets it, whatever style he's describing, and sets to.

Behind him, on a plastic chair, tacky to the touch, I'm invisable. Men come in from the Reading damp and hang their jackets to the left,right and nearly on top of me. 'Oh, sorry,' I say. Sorry for sitting in the chair provided.

On the chair next to me lie two newspapers, yesterday's Mirror and today's Sunday Sport. I've never read the Sunday Sport but I've always wanted to. Can anyone really walk upright with such big boobs? Did a man from Norwich really have sex with a gorilla and be living in California with her and their three children? I have to know and being invisable, no-one will notice if I pull out my glasses and have good look, will they?

Of course I don't. I stare at a stain on the wall by a well thumbed calender. Miss Winter looks chilly in the snow with only scarlet fluffy mittens and a reindeer pom pom hat to keep her warm. Technically it's not winter, it's still Autumn but I mustn't be pendantic. It's my one vice.

Twenty minutes later and with precisely three words being uttered by the son, the Polish girl is brushing at his neck and blowing - blowing! - rogue hairs away. He scowls at me but what can I do?

Time to pay. Hurrah because I have ceased being invisable. A couple of other mothers have come in with their grunting sons. The women know each other and have been whispering and glancing in my direction. It must the cardi/jacket. I bought it a few weeks ago at a car boot for two pounds. I tried to haggle but the seller wouldn't budge. 'It's Hobbs - Hobbs!' She said, almost crying at my ignorance. It must have been made by Hobbs! a long time ago, it's bobbly, the hem droops and brown is so not my colour.

Clutching the son to stop myself going A over T on the rain slicked cobbles, I shout into the wind, 'I need a new jacket.'

The son squeals to a halt.'What a brand new jacket?' As in not Ebay or boot fayre new.

'What about next week's food?' He worries. You can't hide much from kids.

'Only joking,' I say.

He laughs.

Me too.

Welcome Cally Taylor!

2009-10-17T01:48:00.000-07:00

Meet Cally Taylor, author of Heaven Can Wait which is hitting the book shelves as we speak.

Cally is doing a blog tour where she explains how she wrote Heaven Can Wait, edited it and found a top class agent too.

As my guest today,she’ll be showing in detail, how she wrote her query letters. Do ask any questions for Cally in the comments box and I'll try and catch her for answers. She has more dates in her tour of the blogs so look out for her.

Cally Taylor:

When Fia asked me to write a guest post on finding an agent I thought, I can do that. I’ll write about how I opened the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook, put a star next to the agents who represented chick lit and/or women’s fiction and chose six that represented chick lit authors I admired.

I can finish up the post by talking how I ended up getting signed to the Darley Anderson agency.

And then I realised I’d already included all of that information in an interview I’d answered for Caroline Smailes!

Uh oh, I thought. Now what?

That’s when I realised there’s something I’ve never revealed to the internet before – the cover letter I sent to Darley to accompany my synopsis and first three chapters!

Before I started subbing to agents I scoured the internet for examples of cover letters. There was so much advice out there – much of it differing – that I came away feeling more confused than before I’d started searching.

I’m not claiming that my cover letter is the perfect, or best, way to write a cover letter but it worked for me. From the six submissions I sent out to agents I received:

· two requests for the full

· two personalised rejections

· one form rejection

· one agent I never heard back from!

The breakdown of my cover letters always followed this structure

Greeting
How/why I decided to choose the agent (if they represented an author I was a fan of I’d say so. It shows the agent you’ve done your research and not just fired off the same letter you send everyone!)
A short paragraph about my novel, giving the word count and a few details (I chose to use a blurb style to try and gain the agent’s interest. My synopsis contained the full details of the plot)
A couple of lines describing the readership the book was aimed at
A paragraph about the potential market for my book (I have no idea if this is a good idea or not but as my book was very different from anything on the market I felt I needed to try and convince the agent that it might sell! If you’ve written normal chicklit – i.e. not paranormal – you won’t need a paragraph like this because an agent already knows it sells!)
A paragraph about my writing background
Very brief paragraph about my second novel (I inserted this to show the agents I’d already started work on a second book in the same genre and that I wasn’t a one-trick pony!)
What I was enclosing (this depends on what the agent asks for in the W&AYB or their website)
Goodbye

Okay, so that’s the theory. Here’s the letter:

ADDRESS

DATE

Dear Darley

I am looking for an agent for my chick lit novel Heaven Can Wait, complete at 80,000 words. I decided to approach you after seeing your entry in the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook and discovering you represent chick-lit. I’m also a big fan of Carole Matthews and particularly enjoyed her last book, “The Chocolate Lovers’ Club”.

Heaven Can Wait is an 80,000 word supernatural novel about Lucy Brown, a twenty-eight year old woman who dies the night before her wedding and ends up in Limbo. Lucy is desperate to become a ghost so she can be reunited with her fiancé Dan but before she can attain ghost status she must return to earth as one of the ‘living dead’ and find love for a total stranger in just twenty-one days. Can Lucy complete her task on time or will her best friend Anna get her clutches into Dan first?

The novel would appeal to women in their late teens to early forties who enjoy chick-lit and films like Ghost and Just Like Heaven.

The supernatural seems to be extraordinarily popular at the moment with television programmes like The Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, Most Haunted and Dead Like Me achieving huge viewing figures. I’ve also noticed a big market in the States for paranormal women’s fiction and a gap in the UK market for this type of fiction. I’m hoping my novel could fill that gap.

I have been writing fiction for three years and have won five short story competitions and placed in many others including the runner up prize in Woman’s Own magazine’s in 2006. Take a Break Fiction Feast and My Weekly have also published my short stories. Full details can be found on my website www.callytaylor.co.uk

I am currently planning my second novel [BRIEF DETAILS OF NOVEL 2]

I enclose my synopsis, the first three chapters of my novel and a stamped addressed envelope.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my work.

Yours sincerely

Cally Taylor

encs

Okay! So that’s it. I hope at least one person reading this guest post found it useful! Thanks for reading.

Cally

Blog: http://writing-about-writing.blogspot.com

Website: www.callytaylor.co.uk

Author of “Heaven Can Wait” (published by Orion paperback, out now!).

Whe

You F'Coffee?

2009-09-22T03:17:00.000-07:00

I wish they would.

Sophie and Emma ( not their real names), are petsitters who don't have the Budda Belly of one who's inexplicably stopped petsitting to write a book. They're coming for coffee this afternoon, 2pm.

That leaves four hours to decontaminate the hovel. And bake a Battenberg. Or maybe not. Last time they came Sophie's Bodened baby found a long, black hair in her fairy cake. It wasn't the fairy's. Dear old Archie Bubbles Bum-Bum, my aged Jack Russell x Black Lab - someone lent his dad an orange crate - sheds enough hair to knit a sweater from. I might do that and sell it on Esty.

Then there's the loo. We won't go there - teenage sons you know. I'm hoping Sophie and Emma won't go there either. Maybe if I give them weeny, weeny cups of coffee, they won't need a wee wee and risk life long trauma?

'We've been worrying about you?' Sophie said on the phone last week, 'stuck in your funny little shed, scribbling away.'

I tried to explain that I am happy in my funny little shed and that at the moment I am wrestling with my protagonist's lurve interest whom the reader has to empathise with at first, then hate, then feel sorry for.
It needs my full attention see.

In return I got the tilted head and sympathtic smile.

'You have to get out and about and meet people.'

No I don't. I've spent the last fifty years getting out and meeting people and now I want to stay in and not meet people. I want to stay in my shed and make people up. People who don't want to come round and eat my cake which would last at least six hours with me at the bottom of the garden, in the funny little shed.

I said all this to my sister last night and she said I wasn't to flatter myself they were coming to see me, it was because of the baby. Apparently people with babies are always desperate to 'get out' even if it means going to visit hormonal old bags and eat hairy cakes.

I found the martial chart here. Tried to find an email address for the blogger (Even slatterns should have manners), but I couldn't so if it's you, forgive me and thank you.

Right pass me the body armour, I'm off to tackle the loo.

Try, try, try again.

2009-08-23T01:50:00.000-07:00

Our garden backs on to a large wood and from late summer to early spring, wolf spiders exchange the oaks and elms for my little house. I wish they wouldn't. Last night one, as big as those War of the World beasties, thundered over the duvet towards me. As I screamed it went under the duvet and over my legs.

If you have no fear of spiders, then I apologize. This is vaguely connected in a Robert the Bruce kind of way, and is much more interesting and constructive from one who really knows his stuff:

http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/2009/08/dear-writer-no.html

Fish Publishing

2009-08-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy that my flash fiction made it into this anthology, but sad that the patron, Frank McCourt, has died. Anglea's Ashes was such an unsentimental tale of the worse of times.

I've just finished When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson. It was so brilliant I can't read anything else for a while and Reggie, one of her main characters, is constantly on my mind when I should be thinking about my characters. However, one of them has been behaving badly. I spent six weeks getting to know him and he's let me down. I never believed other writers when they wrote about their creations going off on a limb, but this is exactly what he' s done. I thought teenage sons were bad enough.

Fia of the Shed

2009-08-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

My father, a burnt out advertising man, promised himself that when he retired he would build a shed and write his novel. It would have been good. I may not have liked it - his Gorbells humour could cut deep - but the writing of it would have satisfied him.

It never happened and now I am nearly the age he was when he died, I have his shed.
Of course it's not his or mine really.
The last tenents left it behind and no
wonder, it's so heavily insulated, I'm surprised it hasn't sunk into the earth.

Apparently, alledgedly, the last people grew funny plants in it. I did wonder at all the electrics and big lamps. And the spiders with their funky, unfinished webs.

I've wanted to show off my shed for a while but didn't want Debs to think I was suffering shed envy - although I do indeed envy her the lovely shed of sheds. And Grumpy.

Creating Characters

2009-07-04T01:16:00.000-07:00

When I wrote my first novel which begat the next novel, which begat...yes this is how I seem to write. Am I alone in finishing a book, knowing it's rubbish but picking at the bones of it and creating another and another until, maybe, I'll have something that works?

My first novel, Sitting Pretty, had three POVs all in first person present and each protagonist was me, me, me.

My current WIP has just one and I'm using third person which took a while to feel as intimate with. But unlike Sitting Pretty when I rushed to just finish a M/S, I know that I have to build believeable people and let a good deal of the plot come from them.

There are lists all over the internet of questions to ask your characters which is all well and good but you have to know your actors before you can answer these and how to you do this?
Once you do know them inside out, then you can reveal them by the actions, thoughts and words of other characters but until then, you - or rather me because you may know how to do this all ready - have to put them together.

I don't have this problem with all of the people in my book, but two or three of them are proving a nightmare. I have started to build one of the men by using bits and pieces of past boyfriends - ouch! And then I've added a bit of 'what ifs' so I'll just have to see how they go.

Until they are all comfy in their skins, I can't write any more or do any more plotting apart from a loose story arc. I need them to get their bottoms into gear so they can add the tension, my flabby plot so desperately needs.

I am an Aries. I have zero patience so perhaps I can be forgiven for being a bit snarly while they discover themselves? Oh, and any books you can recommend would be much appreciated. I have thought about one or two I've seen on Amazon.

Sorry about the stick people with their elephant ears. Poor things, no wonder my characters don't trust me.

Death of a Cat

2009-05-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the car in front of me knocked down a cat. It lay, kicking, on its back while the car drove off. I stopped, remembered my hazards and ran over thinking, please die now, die now.
The cat was bleeding from everywhere. I knew it was hopeless because of a pet first aid course I’d laughed my way through. We’d practised on a dog manikin called Casper – CPR, get it? Made jokes about his lack of gender and other childish stuff.
But I felt for a pulse in the cat’s femoral artery – nothing. Now I knew that the writhing and the kicking were nerves and adrenalin. But my eyes didn’t believe this.
I carried him to the pavement, cradled his warm ginger body and told him that, had he lived, he would have been a king among cats, a mouser like no other, Top Cat.
Running from house to house to find an owner, I wondered if I found one, would they think it was me, the cat killer? I might have to assure them that were it me, I would have been a blithering mess and incapable of coherent speech.
At the fifth house, a man with greying, almost shoulder length hair, answered the door. Yes, he had a ginger cat, a rescue cat about two years old.
Clamped under his arm was The Guardian and in the other hand, a half eaten baguette. A hoop of onion had escaped onto the man’s white t-shirt. I felt relieved. Why? How shallow I am. If a messenger turned up on my tiny doorstep, my husband with his shaved head and hard chin would be liberal and well mannered too.
So I ran with Guardian man and when he cried on the cat’s body, I cradled him too. Then I gave him a towel from my car, a dirty dog towel. We had a short, polite tussle over my giving up a precious towel – the blood might not wash out. I no longer needed the towel, I said. I have a hundred, no, a thousand towels.
I didn’t take the number of the car that killed the cat and I never asked what the cat’s name was. A name would have made a hard thing harder. Perhaps it’s good that I don’t know who hit and then ran. It’s just a cat. No law says you have to stop. Unless you count decency and kindness of course. Maybe the driver was young and frightened. Or old and agitated? I don’t want to believe differently.

First Edition

2009-05-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

I’m a big fan of First Edition magazine, although I do wish they’d stop playing around with arty backgrounds so we can actually read all of the poems and short stories.

Last month Spiral Skies - never know if it’s okay to print real names or not – had a wonderful short story in First Edition and this month Lane had a great poem published by them.

Congratulations to both writers.

I’ve submitted my second to last assignment to my tutor on the Open University’s Creative Writing Course. In June I’ve opted to send the first three chapters of a novel rather than poetry or nonfiction. This week I’ll be writing an eighteenth draft of my first chapter.

Or wiping off those felty lines of dust you get between the skirting boards and the carpets.

Shall I go to Cork?

2009-05-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

I am still incredulous that I am a runner up in Fish's One Page Story. And honoured too.
Should I go to Cork for the prize giving? It's a long way and the pirate and I are both students - very, very mature ones. But it looks so much fun and to be with other writers would be like coming home.

I am Born

2009-03-30T01:28:00.000-07:00

Looking over a draft of a short piece I did for my Open University course, I thought I'd post it because it's my birthday. I might even have some cake.

I am Born

I was born just after McCarthy died - perhaps worn out from brutalising America - when business men wore bowler hats, when free love was waiting in the wings and when my mother still believed she loved my father.
In the 'burbs of Surrey, Bearstead hosptial was the birthing Mecca for the middle classes - as long as they were Jewish. This was no obstacle for my father, a boy from the Gorbals, who wore a chip on his shoulder as heavy as the Burma Star won when he was no more than a child.
'My money's as good as anyone else's,' he would have hissed, running his fingers through blue black hair and staring out from a face still little
more than a scull, for I think that most of him died in that war.
My mother would have lain in her confinement in a four women ward, its womb pink walls patterned with shadows from the large fire.
With gossamer negligees wrapped around their swollen bodies, executives' wives hung tiny white gowns to warm for expected off spring.
And once born - bonding not yet been invented -
Jamaican midwives, delivered with Windrush, would laugh and catch slippery babes in their magnificent arms and then glide like galleons under sail, to the nursery,far away.
'I didn't even miss breakfast,' my mother would have smiled at my father, still dressed in his suit, a Lucky Strike in his pocket.
I think my unobtrusive entry made my mother immediately fond of me.
As for my father, he just loved me.
***

Death by Shopping

2009-03-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't be here. I should be unpacking nine bags of shopping.

'How many bags you got?'
I'd considered this for long enough to make the woman behind me tut.
'Fifteen.'
The boy scout behind the till stopped chewing gum to give me a look. A 'you're lying,' look. I mean how much do you get off your shopping for using your own bag? A penny? I had nine big bags. I could have had thirty tiny bags. Very mean of me but even meaner of Costalot.

I felt mean because not only do supermarkets filter out every sunbeam that threatens to disrupt the carefully engineered enviroment of grey conformity, they filter out your soul too. I think they do it at the sliding doors. They leach it out of you along with your personality. They don't want oddly shaped customers any more than they want pimpled pears. And it's all our own fault. We've deserted our village shops to save time and money. And have we saved time and money? Not me but then I lose shopping lists and impulse buy.

Tomorrow I'm going to see my butcher,Jim, who may or may not have his teeth in. At nearly eighty he's about twenty years too old to work in Costalot and he'll insist on telling you the kill number of the bit of beef you've just bought - with cash cos he don't like the visa machine. Yay.

Read something Very Funny for money

2009-03-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

TwitterTitters is a collection of funny short stories written in aid of Comic Relief.
Two of our Novel Racers, Cally and Lane had their submissions judged worthy of inclusion along with ten other writers. Out of nearly a hundred entries, this was no mean feat.

Bookersatz features my review of TwitterTitters and payment details on their site.
http://bookersatz.blogspot.com

By buying the book you will be helping those who have been dealt a much worse hand than most of us can imagine. Then you can join me in a Value Price beer and a few good belly laughes.

Asta Luego Lisa

2009-02-12T06:48:00.000-08:00

We are not our bodies
We're not even our breath
We are the sum of our words
And yours were mighty fine.

Asta Luego Lisa

A215 Draft of Poem

2009-01-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

I'm realising something sad - for me but perhaps a relief for agents on my hit list - is that my novel is not good enough. It has to be a practise novel. I am going to use one of the protagonists, the soldier's wife, and write a book about her. I'll take bits and pieces from the discarded novel and a lot of the story line too.

The thing is this; when you start writing a story and nearly four years later, you're still with it, you've changed, your writing's changed - I'd like to say matured but who knows. So I've been trying to edit words that at best, leave me cold and, at worst, make me cringe.

Here's a draft of the first poem I've written since I was fifteen. A few summers ago. It's part of the OU Creative Writing course. Not good enough for a TMA so I'm putting it here so I can find it again.

Oh, please tell me if you've chucked an entire novel and started again? And do also tell if you know any good books on character creation because that should have been where I started - with very detailed characters. Story and plot come next, in my humble opinion.

A Cornish Village

On Cawsand Bay in spring

We’d run to meet a topaz sea

Skate barnacled rocks that bled our feet

And saffron sand as hot as larva

With diamonds glinting in the waves

We’d taste the brine on childish lips

And thought that life – just like the sky

Stretched on and on forever

In Cawsand village in summer

We’d sing a siren song

To trawl the sailors in from Plymouth

And hold them in our girlish arms

How they loved our wild brown eyes

And flapped like fish in nets of hair

They spoke of loves in English towns

But spilled their seed in Celtic coves.

In Cawsand quay in Autumn

My baby son and I

Threw bread to angry gulls

And watched grey water writhe and rise

Then with small fat hands my child

Skimmed spitting surf with pebbles

Worn down to shallow flint

And I kiss the softness of his neck

And pray that times stands time.

In Cawsand square in winter

I pass the tourists spying

On my home, my life, my loves.

I am a ghost. They pass right through me

A faded women by a silent sea.

I will shed this skin of ages

And dive among the jewelled fishes

To find the mermaid in my soul

***********************************

My Girl Jessie

2009-01-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, the RSPCA appear to have declared war on owners who dress their pets up or anthropomorphise them in any way. I do agree that the sight of Paris Hilton wearing her dog as an accessory is tasteless and worrying. All animals should be allowed to exhibit their natural behaviour which is difficult if you're kept in a shoulder bag. Dogs are dogs. They need a hunt every a day and an owner who understands them. But there are far worse things than dressing your dog up as Peter Pan or Beyoncé. In China dogs are killed in the most painful and protracted way for their fur and meat. Tesco would have us eat petit foie gras and the treatment of battery chickens is heart breaking. So I think the RSPCA could be shooting themselves in the foot by seemingly targeting a large section of pet owners who love and treat their dogs well - but put them in pink coats with clips in their hair.

So, this is my girl Jessie in her pink woolly leggings. Despite being only four she has arthritis in her joints - the result of neglect by her previous owners. My vet suggested leggings and rather than boring black I found these which suit her dippy tart nature.

The Factory Cat

Just submitted a short story to Your Cat. Not getting excited at all because they seem to publish most excellent work by known writers. Very enjoyable to write though. I'll post a few lines when I get my rejection letter. By the way, does anybody know - if your story is 1784 words do you state this or do you round it off to 1700? And - don't go just yet - have you read Nicci French's Losing You? The best thing I've read for ages. So exciting and chilling. And,and...how do I lose the green eyes? They were red, corrected them with red eye remover but now they're green and Jessie has the most lovely amber eyes.

On loss and Gain

2009-01-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

I lost a dear friend a few days ago in the most tragic way. We are just a blink of an eye in time. I thought I couldn't write but now I find it's all I can do. I've written a poem, a short story about a cat and a new beginning to my novel. I've stayed away from writing how I feel - too self indulgent - maybe later.

I've written a new first page to my novel, Sitting Pretty and will carry on editing for content for probably the next six to nine months and then line edit. That sounds very organised and organised is what I'd like to be. Washing out before I go to work, lunch boxes made, ironing every night, both socks matching,no driving kids to school in my pjs. No more trying to write like I think I should, I'll just write from the heart.

New first page:

Chapter One. Sian.

If I told you that my husband travelled the world and, occasionally killed people, you probably wouldn’t invite me in for coffee. But if I said that he served his queen and country in the British army then maybe you would.

The truth, I guess, is somewhere in between which means it’s easier for me to stay here, behind the wire, safely in the camp with the other soldiers’ wives.

Ten years ago at seventeen, I was just a bolshie girl from the valleys, newly married to my Private Evans and carrying my father’s chip on my shoulder. A miner’s daughter who wanted to change the world. Now I know my place and my place is here; Aborfield Garrison where I clean the NAAFI and support my husband.

I’m Sergeant Evans, ‘Wife of’. That’s right, I got a promotion but you can call me Sian. And now we want another stripe and that’s why we’re dressed up like Ken and Barbie, with a freezing January wind whipping round our legs. We’re waiting with another Ken and Barbie - our mates, Mo and Alan, for the army transport to take us to the Warrant Officers Mess Ball. We get a tick in the box for socialising you see.

‘Fucking transport’s always late.’ Steve flicks a cigarette butt which lights up the black sky like a scud missile before landing, burning red, a few feet from the defunct tank, the symbolic watchdog of the base.

Not drowning but waving

2008-12-12T05:34:00.000-08:00

Every morning the radio alarm shouts at me in Polish or Punjabi - I'm too uncultured to know the difference. Every morning I think I'll remember to set the bloody thing to Classic FM or anywhere the DJs aren't angry with me.

It's not that I hate mornings, I love mornings, I just can't wake up in them. I think I drown every night and lie like a wreck stuck in the grey sludge of the ocean floor. And that's where I want to stay, thank you. A worn out vessel with silver fish stretch marks across my broad side. Leave me be to grow barnacles on my bottom. But no, the morning tug boats dredge me up to ferry the grunting teenagers and growling husband to work. Bugger.

I didn't reply to any of my fellow bloggees comments last week. Because, I'm ashamed to admit, I put the edited bit back and not only that, I added more. So I have a 133k m/s to edit down to 100k and I've edited up to 137k. Ha.

Snip, snip...

2008-11-27T05:26:00.000-08:00

I've just cut one of the bestest bits from my novel. Three thousand words from chapter one. Three thousand words I've poured over, changed round, added to, taken out, put back in and now - boof - they're gone forever. Their crime? They didn't move the plot forward. But they are saved in my brilliantly named 'Stuff cut out' folder, just in case.

So only thiry six more chapters to edit.

Feel a bit shaken up. I better have a cocoa.

Tell me how you edit. Can I copy you?

My room with a view

2008-10-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

I sleep downstairs. My french windows open on to a neglected court yard with stone slabs embroidered with lichen and moss.
The courtyard walls would have collapsed if it wasn't for the vine. She's sewn them up and enslaved them. She makes me uneasy when her thin limbs flutter and grasp blindly at the air.
We are isolated here.
No houses nearby. We are alone and the sky is big. Just for me and the vine.
Above us geese groan, 'Fly, fly, fly.' Because they must. An African sun hauls them in.
I wonder, if I sat on the oak seat under the wall, would I be Odysseus to this silent siren?
Would she curl bracelets round my wrists and sweetly bind me to her?
I could just sit. My skin turn to pale marble and my heart to rock.
Green fingers stroke my neck and tighten, tighten, tighten until the vine and I are one.

I think I've got a thing about vines.

Feeling Tense

2008-06-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've got my report back from Real Writers. If you haven't tried them I can't recommend them highly enough: www.real-writers.com
Following their editorial advice, I am strongly considering giving my three protagonists, who were originally all written in the first person present, different tenses. This would really help to give each women a different voice. The one I feel most empathy with, Lucy, a scatty mother of three - I have two children but often the pirate counts as another - so I will probably go for her being in first person present. Mel, the airforce wife, might be in first person past and Cassie, an ex-traveller, in the third person. So, I could write the whole book in three different ways which will keep me very quiet for a while.
Actually I have a fourth option which would be to give up and write a novel with one protagonist in the third person. This would be the most sensible one.

Oh, pass me a gin.

Goodbye Housie!

2008-06-20T00:38:00.000-07:00

Well, nearly. We got our marching orders a couple of weeks ago. I suspected we might when the landlady starting her three month checks to make sure we weren't growing weed. Lots in the garden, of course, and if there was any of the other kind, I'd have had it with my Asda wine instead of crisps. Might of lost some weight then.

So, we have been offered a key worker house by the local earl or lord - landowner who owns thousands of acres of land with farms and farm cottages. Quite fancy being Lady Chatterley (sp?) but the pirate wouldn't make a good gamekeeper on account of his occasionally poaching.

Meanwhile, we have to have prospective tenants being shown around this house by She Who Must be Obeyed. I have decided that I am a nudist and will exercise my civil rights and be naked when prospects call. I'm trying to persuade the pirate and the thug - the Prince of Darkness being on holiday in Turkey. They are none too keen but I think it could be fun.
I need to know the form. Do I shave? Wear a pinny? I could be cooking and hot olive oil splashes worry me. Maybe there's a blog I could visit? Do let me know please.