“She’s got a body like a bag of hammers and a face like a can of angry worms!”
…is my favourite recent first line.
First line of fugue is: On Midsummers Day of 1830, he awoke to his fortieth birthday with a headache and an erection.
Quarter Square: I curled up in a foetal position and listened to rats scratching in the dark.
I love them. Love working on them to really bait the hook.
Let’s have a First Line Fest! What are your favourites?
What are you working on?
How many projects are you juggling?
I have five on the go, at various stages of completion and possessing different degrees of urgency.
- fugue – my first completed novel is out on query with my third batch of five agents. Until their replies start coming back in this one is enjoying a lull.
- Quarter Square – the first book in my Wild Times urban fantasy series about an immortal, her reincarnated lover, and the werewolf who hunts them through time. I’m ploughing ahead with the first draft on this one, working from a detailed outline and writing fast to inject pace. Almost finished chapter 7 (of 10).
- Sudbucket – a collection of linked short stories set in a town filled with strange events and strange people discovering strange connections. I’m working on the first story and letting this one grow gently in my mind. I have an idea to publish this one freely over a wide variety of social media platforms, in sections related to individual characters and events, when the time comes to promote fugue or Quarter Square.
- social networking – I’m loving this adventure in making and getting to know new friends. And, yes, I do consider online friends to be real friends. When I make a friend, I mean it. Warms my heart to see blog posts about online friendships by two of my new Plurk friends, Teeg and Allan Cockerill.
- critiquing - there’s a small queue of work waiting for my crit over summer. I can’t overstate the benefits of critting other writers’ work, and I consider myself to be very fortunate to be in three critting groups that are friendly and active.
How about you? What are you working on now and what’s in the queue? Like to tell us about your works-in-progress?
How to mine your life for writing material (1)
In this occasional series I will explore and describe the way I mine emotional material from the depths of my sadnesses, the heights of my joys, and the plains of my everydays.
Meet my friend Jacob!
It’s 8am here. The builders will be here in an hour or so, and Jake won’t like them. They will probably think he’s the most beautiful dog they’ve ever seen, but they’ll be very wary of him because he’ll be in full-on Protector Of The Family Home mode.
He really is beautiful in every way: intelligence and stature and coat and personality. His is the loveliest nature of any creature I’ve ever known. Under normal circumstances he is interested in strangers and cautiously friendly towards them. But he’s also very territorial, and when strangers come to the house they feel the power of his presence.
When the gang of builders start ripping our old kitchen out this morning, he won’t be friendly.
Jake is very wolflike. He’s the fourth German Shepherd to be part of our family over the years, and he is definitely the most wolflike of them all. British police dog-handlers call their German Shepherds “land sharks”, and I suppose that’s a suitably macho nickname for a macho environment, but there’s never been any need for anyone to dream up some superhero nickname for Jake. He’s our wolf and we’re his pack.
This strong pack instinct is what makes GSDs such superb candidates for policing and military roles. Specifically, it’s their intelligence and strength of character, married with their eager determination to please senior pack members. Not to mention their teeth!
Living with Jake is the nearest thing I’ve ever experienced to living with a wolf. And he gives me a wealth of excellent material for my werewolf novel, Quarter Square.
Hmm, let’s see if we can write some nervous builders into QS. 
Okay, your turn. Do you mine your life for writing material? How does that work out? How deep do you go?
How do you carry on writing when the sky falls around you?
Italian coffee and a Spanish orange
My routine (routine… ha!) has changed dramatically in the past year.
I used to sit at the computer in our living room and rattle away on the keyboard while my busy family hurtled around doing their thing. Sometimes I felt like I was in one of those cartoons, where I did everything in slow motion and everyone else wooshed by leaving vapour trails behind. And noisy? Noisy never bothered me. After raising three daughters to appreciate great music, who was I to complain when Led Zeppelin rocked the house?
But my arms and hands stopped functioning as typing tools over last winter, and in the spring I installed voice recognition software. Now I need peace and quiet around me when I’m dictating, and the family is finding it quite difficult to adjust. It’s difficult for me, too. I’ve turned into a middle-of-the-night writer and that really isn’t my brain’s most creative time of day.
So I’ve bought another piece of kit, a dictation machine that will work with the VR software. Once I get it set up I’ll be able to write in bed, in the garden, in the bath, or anywhere else I feel like talking to my sleek little gadget.
However, none of that will be happening in my near future. There’s a new kitchen a-comin’ to our house and we’re taking advantage of the wreckage/renewal to have some serious construction work done at the same time, including ripping the old electrics out and installing a new ring main. So the next two or three weeks are likely to be almost impossible as far as writing is concerned.
That’s why I’m breaking my blog-here-on-Mondays-and-Thursdays routine to share my quiet Sunday breakfast with you today. Italian coffee and a Spanish orange. Mmm.
There’s going to be precious little peace around here from tomorrow, on the outside of me anyhow. I’ll keep a peaceful place inside. I think I’ll hold on to this one from George Harrison. Thank you, George. Love you.
So, tell me, how does routine work for you? Does it work at all? Or do you grab whatever you can, whenever you can?
Can you carry on writing when the sky falls around you? How do you do that?
7 Thought-Provoking Literary Agent Quotes
10 Ways to Not Get an Agent #4: Writing anything that involves a serial killer that specializes in the killing of literary agents. You’d be surprised how many of these I get. Elizabeth Jote
Write something I haven’t seen before, and write it really really well. Janet Reid
A great plot just drips off of a query letter, and an author with a great plot can’t help but write a great query letter. Nathan Bransford
I realized that I kept repeating to writers that they should make their pitch paragraphs read like the back cover copy of books you’d see in the bookstore or library. And that got me thinking about how I write my pitches to editors. That got me to my realization that I almost ALWAYS use the catalyst that starts the story, which can be found within the first 30 pages of the novel. Kristin Nelson
To attend a book fair at Frankfurt or London is to see how removed the industry is from the daily concerns and challenges facing writers — and vice versa. Orna Ross
Writing is your job, just like your postman has a job. He delivers the mail every day, rain or shine. Successful authors sit down and face that blank screen every day. You don’t actually have to do it every day, but you do have to do it on a firm schedule. …If you write only when the muse strikes or when you feel like it, you will have a very hard time finishing a book. Irene Goodman
(Talking about what makes a book special) …the thing is, it is both subjective and emotional, as well as involving the part of my brain that weighed books up as a commercial publisher for fifteen years. I’ve turned down books I loved personally, when I didn’t feel they were commercially viable. So basically, both sides of me have to feel something is special. John Jarrold
Stacia Kane on Small House and ePublishers
If you’ve ever thought about submitting work to a small house publisher or epublisher, have you read Stacia Kane’s superb series on choosing the right one?
She talks about how to examine and evaluate publisher websites, how to research a publisher, whether or not it’s a good idea in general to submit to a brand-new publisher, red flag warnings to look out for, and so much more. This series is a rich vein of solid information!
Part One – Find the right print publisher
Part Four – The Honeymoon Period
Stacia Kane’s first urban fantasy Personal Demons was released Juno Books in April 2008, and she is multi-published in erotic romance as December Quinn.
You Gotta Have Goals!
My family manoeuvred me into taking a break from writing for the past two weeks. I had no idea it was going to happen, but they all arranged to take time off work to watch Wimbledon with me.
It was a lovely thought, because we’re all tennis fans and we rarely get to spend quality time together. But it was also something of a mixed blessing, because they tore me away from my work!
Still, I’ve loved the tennis. The two singles finals and the women’s doubles final were all wonderful matches; my favourite players won; and I accepted the impossibility of working while everyone was here and being rowdy. I even managed to show some grace about it.
Anyhow, the break is over and it’s time to get back to writing Quarter Square.
Except… it isn’t as easy as that. My muse is acting skittish. And it was all going so well, too!
I injured myself in a bad fall last week (the very evening I launched this blog, actually) and have been hobbling around ever since with a bruised coccyx, twisted hips, a swollen knee and elbow, a head like Birkenhead, and the scintillating zing of sciatica.
None of that stuff is helping me feel like getting back into the groove. But, no matter how soulfully my damaged body groans, or how stubbornly my mind shies away from the renewal of discipline, I know I have to plunge right back into that first draft.
Experience tells me there is only one way to do it: I need to get back in touch with my goals. Specifically, I need the motivating power of metrics.
I have three types of goals: long-term goals; enabling goals; and short-term goals. They’re part of the same picture and I need them all.
First, write your novel
In Neil Gaiman’s essay All Books Have Genders, he remembers Gene Wolfe telling him: “You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.”
How true is that? I couldn’t have offered an opinion on it while writing my first novel, although I would never have doubted Gene Wolfe’s wisdom. But now, halfway through the first draft of my second novel, I believe it’s 100% true.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever stop learning. It’s a lifelong process; or, at least, a career-long one.
I’m trying to remember when and how the learning process started for me. I sat down to write a novel when I was sixteen. I’d already decided to be a novelist but didn’t have a clue what that story would be, or why, and I only managed a page or two.
My next attempt came about twelve years later, during a succession of long sea passages. My writing and I had matured a bit by then, and we played with structure and stuff, but the whole horrible thing was unconsciously autobiographical and I’m glad I filed it under B for Bin.
Ten years on and I found myself paralysed and civilianised. It took me two years to recover movement and start to recover mobility, two years in which I decided to stop being a hobbyist and start learning how to become a professional writer.
My family brought home all the Learn to Write books our city library held, while I devoured them and demanded more. One that stands out in my memory is Michael Legat’s Writing for Pleasure and Profit.
More years passed before the internet arrived in our house, around about the time I climbed out of the wheelchair, and my learning achieved interactive lift-off. I was a confirmed outliner by then, and fugue was one-third written, but I was bogged down by perfectionism. Nanoers will know who I’m scowling at when I mention my internal editor. Yep, she’s the one.
I tried out several writer communities online before someone’s signature in a NaNoWriMo forum led me home to Forward Motion for Writers, and my learning started to take serious strides at the same time as it filled with fun and friendship.
What’s your story? How did you get from where you started to where you are today, and who helped you along the way?
