Word Dumps and Picture Books

NaNoWriMo has well and truly finished and I was so pleased that I was able to get out 50,000 words by the end of the month.

It was an interesting exercise. First of all I had to switch off my editor mode. Now, I’m not much of an editor in terms of grammar, punctuation and even spelling but I do have a knack for going over and over my writing, adding a little here and deleting a little there. But I wasn’t allowed to do that.

It was a big word dump. I found the first 10,000 words relatively easy to get out but by the time I got to 35,000 words, man was it a slog. I prayed a whole lot during those last couple of weeks.

The whole NaNoWriMo process was quite liberating, in a way. I started writing with little knowledge of what I was actually going to end up with. I sort of had a vague idea of what maybe I should be heading towards but I was constantly surprised with the new characters and issues that cropped up along the way.

I’ve been advised to leave the writing or typing on that particular project for at least a few weeks before going back for a more serious edit. So I’m having fun with other projects at the moment.

I have started doing a course on writing picture books. 

Oh boy, I’m in my second week and I feel like I have jumped into the deep end. A couple of years ago, before I attempted to write a picture book, I thought picture books would be a fun and easy way of writing. Then I tried to write a couple of picture books and discovered that it’s not that simple. Then I started this course and I’m fast coming to the conclusion that picture books may well be the hardest type of book to write.

Try writing a well structured, well paced, age appropriate, emotional, themed story that has good characters, humour, a great topic, has passion, conflict and a great resolution, amongst other things, in 500 words. 

And don’t let me get started on all the ins and outs on working with an illustrator.

I take my hat off to all the wonderfully creative people who write gorgeous picture books for us to enjoy. Because lets face it picture books are fun for adults too. J

I am learning so much, I only hope my brain as the capacity to retain a little of it.

Surprised by Characters

I have done it. I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo. A beautiful friend of mine said, "Why are you not signing up?" And that question just basically stumped me, so I did it. I’m not a coward anymore (well, in this one tiny area, baby steps) 

Freedom.

Yay for beautiful friends :)

So, I’m writing this story and I’ve got a vague notion of where it is heading but the details that are emerging are surprising me. I’ve had two characters pop into the story quite suddenly that I didn’t anticipate. That was quite a remarkable experience. My husband thinks I’m slowly going around the bend and if I start talking about my characters as if they are real people then he’ll truly think I’ve lost it.

However, to make believable characters a writer must imagine them as real. It’s quite an interesting process trying to create a character that is believable as a real person and not just a two dimensional character. It’s like in the movie ‘Inception’ Leonardo di Caprio’s character knows that the woman who appears to him is not real because she’s not as complex as his wife was in real life, she’s not as inconsistent or deep. She morphed into a two-dimensional character and was not believable anymore, even though he wanted her to be.

Real people act in ways that sometimes aren’t easily explainable. We hurt people because we were hurt or we fall madly in love with someone who our best friend just can’t stand. And for the life of us we have the hardest time communicating the simplest concept because the person who we are speaking to continually misunderstands us. We all see things through these amazing lenses that are built since our earliest impressions and memories and grow with each experience, which is so different from everyone else’s. (Woot woot, for taking Sociology and Anthro at Uni)

Of course, all of this background stuff is what the writer needs to know and not necessarily what ends up in the book. Readers can tell if a writer knows what the main character will eat for breakfast, even though it’s never mentioned in the book.

NaNoWriMo

Well, it is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month and I’ve taken up the challenge. Not officially, because I’m too much of a coward to sign up, but I’m doing it on my own. 

It’s great to have a goal to work towards. I’m finding it very motivating.

50,000 words sounds so incredibly daunting and I’m a bit scared of it. It’s already November 8 and I am behind. I’ve only typed 11,626 words on my adult fiction story. By my calculations I should already be up to 13,336. Of course, I've always been horrific at maths, which is why I'm a writer not a maths teacher.

So, I'd better start cracking and because writing on my blog doesn’t count for my overall word count, I’m going to stop right here and go back to my story. :) 

See ya later

The Journey Continues

Queensland was awesome; warm, sunny, lovely company. Being able to spend time with family who we hadn’t seen in a couple of years was fantastic. My oldest son had his birthday at his aunt and uncles place and we even got to go four-wheel driving on a long stretch of beach!

The writer’s conference was amazing. I felt so privileged to be there and to hear the speakers talk about their own journey’s as well as getting advice and tips on writing, and learning more about the publishing world. 

The title of the first session I attended was 'To Write is To Bless'. Wow, is all I can think of to write in response to that. The most challenging and encouraging sessions that I attended were those taken by writer Rosanne Hawke. She is an amazing woman and I would encourage you to look up her website and read her books.

One of the best things about it was the one on one times spent with different people I met. It’s so incredible the different people who I had no idea existed before that weekend but were in some ways connected to me.

I just finished reading this blog post by author Matt Haig, after twelve years of being a published writer this was one of the things he’s learnt.

17. People who work in publishing are generally very nice. I think this is because they read a lot of books. (Books make you better.)

That comment made me smile because since focusing on my writing I have met so many wonderful people connected to the writing ‘business’. It’s been a real blessing.

I had an opportunity to speak to a publisher about a book that I am currently working on. It was a great learning experience particularly as the in house children’s book editor was also there.

I came away with lots of things to think about and work on. Which reminds me, I really need to go over my notes from the conference. My younger brother had to come to my rescue the night before the conference. I discovered that I had travelled all the way up to Queensland, to attend a writer’s conference and forgot to bring my notebook (slap forehead).

To sum it all up. We had a great time. 

Writer’s Conference

 Well, I’m off to a writer’s conference this week, and I have to say, that I’m very excited. It’s the Omega Writer’s conference that is being held in Brisbane. Omega Writer’s is a group of Australian and New Zealand Christian writers. I know I’ll learn so much and meet amazing people.

Another plus to this trip, is spending time with family that we haven’t seen in years. It will be lots of fun. And to top it all off, we’ll be in a warm place again. It’s has been so cold here and we’ve all be sick with the flu for the past ten days and we’re all feeling just horrible still. I really hope we get better before Thursday, because flying with blocked sinuses is not fun.

The first day of the conference, I’ll be taking a master class in Y/A (young adult) fiction and fantasy. I’m more interested in the Y/A part then the fantasy part, but who knows, I might get hooked on writing fantasy.

My husband and I are going to be attending the ‘gala’ awards ceremony. I’ve never been to an awards ceremony before, so it should be pretty fantastic. And, I hope it will be another chance to mingle with more writing people.

I’m going to pitch my story to a publisher, something that I’m quite nervous about, but also, really thrilled about. It will be good to see if I can get this particular publisher excited about my writing. Hold breath.

There are going to be some great speakers at the conference and also editors and publishers, so hopefully, it will be a good opportunity to make some more contacts.

Yay. So, it’s going to be great. 

Just A Bit Of Silliness Really

Don’t you just hate it when your in the shower and your all soaped up, you’ve got that pore scrub all over your face, and if your someone else and not me, you’ve got your hair all shampooed.

Then, this brilliant start to the story you’ve been struggling with comes into your brain, and you just need something to write on. How you wish you had something, like a waterproof computer or paper that you can write on under water. But you don’t have those, so you try and hold on to this brilliant storyline.

And then you remember that your son has a new aeroplane called El Chupapabra or something and you start singing that name over and over in your head, because lets face it, it’s so cool and very musical. Every intelligent thought goes out of your mind. And by the time you’ve reached 50 El Chupapabra’s, and you’re ready to get out of the shower, you can’t remember anything about the brilliant start to the story you were struggling with.

You go to bed. And I’m not sure about you, but my brain seems to have this auto save system. When the computer crashes and you restart it, sometimes the document that you thought you’d lost forever comes back again. In the middle of the night, while your brain is rehashing all the events of the day, suddenly there is your story. Of course, now it’s got a green-eyed monster in it and it’s taking place on Jupiter, but that is ok, the basic plot is still recognisable.

So, you wake up at 3 am and need to get out of your warm bed. You stumble to the computer and turn it on and you quickly type out your brilliant beginning before El Chupapabra comes along, and you lose it again. 

My First Day of Writing

 I had my first full day of writing the other week. I have to say I was very excited but also nervous. I’ve never had a whole day dedicated to writing before. It seemed very indulgent and so incredibly amazing. 

Writing energises me. I love it and to be doing something that I love for a whole day. Wow, what an awesome thought. But what does one do with a whole day of writing? Would I really be able to sustain my concentration for a whole day on my writing project? Does a writer really sit at the computer all day and just reel off thousands of words for a eight hours? I didn’t want to be wasting my time. After all, I do have a family and I can’t just be whittling a day away when maybe I should be doing something that might actually be earning money right at this moment.

So I wanted my writing day to count because it’s important and also because I have two writing days a week.

So I prayed about it and I thought about it and planned it. I also tried to remember anything that I’d read or heard from other writers about how they organised their days.

So here is what I did and you know, it took up the whole day and it was fantastic.

I re-read what I had written last. The last time I had written anything actually was quite a while ago. We’d been moving interstate and staying with other people, house hunting than setting up our house and trying to get settled. So my writing had taken a back seat for a while. At first I was quite discouraged. What I had last written seemed so boring and trivial. But as I read and thought and started to write again I got more and more excited. I also decided that I would journal on my writing days. I try and listen to some interviews with writers or some sort of writing thing like going back over old modules from my online courses. I also blog and try and keep up with facebook, goodreads, kidsbookreview and other writers blogs and websites.

So that was what I did and it used up a whole day. And I’m so glad that I get two days!

The Slog

The slog

I love writing, I really do. I love thinking about it, I love reading it, I love creating characters and situations. I even love figuring out how to reword sentences to make them sound better or condensing and changing tenses. But at some point in the writing process it becomes a bit of a slog, an endurance test.

We were reading this morning about the story of Noah and how God told Noah to build a huge boat. So Noah built the boat and when it was finished God filled it with animals and Noah’s family. Then the rains came down and the floods came up (as the song goes). For some reason today I was reminded that in between God telling Noah to build the boat and it being finished was the time it took Noah to build the actual boat. Talk about a long haul project. Building the ark must have taken years. It doesn’t actually say in the Bible how long it took to build the ark. But I’m thinking it must have been a while and it must have been a bit tedious at times.

Well writing I guess is sort of the same thing. You get an idea or someone gives you one, you’re all excited and you start off and you write your heart out. You build on your story and shape and refine the characters and plot and structure and dialogue. Then you write it again. Then you send it out to people who read it and hopefully give you good constructive criticism. So you write it again. Then comes the grammar and the punctuation and if you’re me lots of spelling typos.

One thing I’m learning about writing a book is you can’t be in a hurry to finish it. Because writing a book isn’t a one-person thing, it takes a lot of people to for a book to be written.

I feel like I’m in the murky marsh, all the exciting parts of writing have finished and I’m in the tedious, sloggish part.

I’m hoping that writing a book is like being in labour. When you think you can’t take another minute of the contractions then you know you’re almost at the end. We’ll see.

Eliminating My Wases

One of the self-editing tips I got from the writer's conference was in eliminating words that are superfluous. I can't believe just how many words I use in my writing that are superfluous. It's quite amazing.
The thing with eliminating words is that sometimes taking out a word means changing the whole sentence and other times taking out a word just means hitting the delete button and the sentence still functions perfectly fine.
I can't tell you how much my word count has gone down simply by going through the story and finding all those little meaningless words that crop up at least five time on every page. Maybe now I'll have to boost my word count again by adding another chapter?
Of course one can edit too much and come up with a very tight story but totally inhuman. So while I'm zapping my thats, zinging my ings, eliminating my wases and cutting down on my ly words (thanks so much for the tip Amanda). I'm going to have to make sure the flavour of my story still remains the same and doesn't become to sterile.

Writers Conference

I had the opportunity to attend a The Word Writers conference for Australian Christian Writers in Melbourne last Saturday. It was an awesome time. I was able to meet some real life authors and even a publisher. The topics they spoke on were really helpful both from a writing perspective and also information about what is happening in the publishing and marketing world.

Talk about feeling like I had a full brain afterwards. I was exhausted but it was amazing. One of the things that was so encouraging was hearing again about how supportive and encouraging Australian Christian Writers and also Publishers are of each other.

Going to conferences like that one is a great way to start networking and becoming known by people in the industry. I'm excited to be attending the Omega Writers conference in Brisbane in October as well.

I'm starting to feel very patriotic about Aussie authors and building up the writing scene here in Australia. We've got some great authors and fantastic books out there.

A great place to discover books written by Australian authors is www.lightthedark.com.au

Enjoying The Scenery

I’m beginning to realise that the Christian writing community here in Australia is very close knit. It’s such an encouragement. People want to help each other and support each other. They’re so passionate about good writing, about promoting books that are amazing,

I never knew this. It’s a lovely, warm thing to discover.

I have been and still am very naïve about Australian Christian writers. I had no idea how extensive the numbers are. I am really excited to be discovering so many things that I never knew before. It’s like I’ve opened a book that I’ve never read and I’m being introduced to a new world.

This photo was taken at Cradle Mountain in Tasmania and an amazing friend of wrote this beautiful comment about the photo. I sums up this journey that I'm on, that everyone is on in different ways.

The picture with you and the boys on this long wooden trail just fit perfectly to what you wrote. You don’t know exactly where the trail leads you to, but someone has prepared it, you trust that person that he’s not leading you into difficulties and you can even enjoy the scenery. Isn’t it what God has prepared for us. And it’s not only the goal that is exciting, but the whole journey he’s leading us!

Killing Off My Darlings

I didn’t know that I would get so incredibly attached to my writing. 

In Jane Austen Regrets, Jane comments how she is worried about sending her books out into public scrutiny because she sees them has her kids. She doesn't want people to dislike them and criticise them. I never really understood what she meant but now I reckon that I’m getting closer to.

I’ve been working on my story for about six months now. I’ve thought a lot about it. Prayed about it. Agonised over wording, scenes, characters and dialogue. I’ve gotten really protective of my story and the characters within it. It feels like they are coming into focus, that they are more than just characters in a story.

I don’t mind people giving me constructive criticism and maybe if someone had said, ‘You need to cut that,’ it would be easier than having to make the decision myself of what needs to be cut. It’s heart rending to delete paragraph after paragraph of words. It’s like they were never there.

But I’ve got to be brave. I’ve got to be willing to sacrifice the mediocre to get to the rich core of what I’m trying to communicate. Hopefully my writing will be all the better for it.

Hopefully it will end up being a beautiful picture, something that people will want to look at again and again. 

The 3am Epiphany

I am beginning to realise that writing takes over my life. I think about my story ALL the time. The other night I was snuggled in bed, it was warm and cosy. Outside it was freezing cold and incredibly dark. My mind was literally buzzing with ideas about how to make my story better. I had the perfect intro epiphany, then my mind started going through all the niggly little bits of the story that I wasn't sure about and tidying them all up.
It was soooo annoying because I couldn't sleep. My mind was alive and my body was saying no, no just stay in bed.
I tried to fight it, I tried to go back to sleep. But everyone knows that perfect ideas that come to you at 3am vanish by morning. So, finally I dragged myself out of bed, put on my slippers, my fuzzy warm bathrobe and trudged down the cold, dark hallway to the living area. I turned on the light getting to my manuscript, I sat down and wrote out all my ideas.
After my brain was drained, I went back to bed and fell asleep. It has happened before that I have felt the need to get out of bed more then once in one night. I should probably have a notebook by my bed but that would mean I would have to turn on a light and thus wake up my husband. So, middle of the night trips down the hall will continue for the foreseeable future.

The Learning Curve

Wow, writing a book is a whole lot more complicated and involved than I ever thought it would be. And there are so many people involved in the process as well!
When I first set out to write my children's book. I thought right, I'll write it, get Matt to read it, someone else will edit it and then bam! It will be finished. (HA)
I have written it, then rewritten it, built on the characters, sent it out to people, got feedback, rewritten, more feedback, more rewriting, printed it out, scribbled all over the print out, reworked it, got more feedback, rewritten again. And I'm still working on it! (Phew!)
But you know what? I am learning so much. This isn't just about writing a book. It's about becoming involved in the whole book world. You can't just be an author on your own anymore. A writer needs a support network. People who are willing to read my work and give me advice. I need to build up a network of people who might want to read my finished work as well. Then there are writers groups and workshops, people who edit my work and proof it for me. It's like a whole community that I've become involved in.
I need to know the book trends. What are people reading right now? Who publishes what? Do I want to self-publish? And are people actually going to want to read what I am writing? Who knows?
But it's good and it's fun and it's exciting.
It's also been a huge learning curve, one that I'm not finished climbing but I'll get there. One day.

Soaking up the Beauty

We went to Cradle Mountain last week, we're in Tasmania at he moment, and it was so gorgeous.  I felt my thirst for beauty being quenched as I soaked up the amazing scenery. 
The drive there was incredible to. First we saw a triple rainbow, I didn't even know they existed.  But there it was, short and very wide. The colours became more intense before it faded away.
We drove through frosted forest sparkling in the sun. The day was picture perfect, sunny and blue skies. Seeing the reflection of Cradle Mountain in Dove lad was so clear and spectcular. The vegetation up there is so different from what I am used to seeing in Australia. 
We went wombat spotting in broad daylight and saw 14. A couple were so close we could have touched them. They were incredibly placid and din't care that we were so near to them. 
After the wombats we went to check out 'Waldheim', the very first guest house to be built in 1921 near Cradle Mountain by an Austrian man and his wife, Gustav and Kate Weindorfer. The couple helped to preserve Cradle Mountain National Park. 'Waldheim' meaning forest home was a lovely wood house that looked like it belonged in Austria. Moss covered trees and an old wooden bride and steps made the place look like it was out of a storybook. 
God must have taken a lot of pleasure in creating Cradle Mountain and it's surrounds. I'm sure He took great pleasure in us enjoying it today as well.

The Brave Thing

One of my favourite movies is 'You've Got Mail.' There is this scene in it that I love. Kathleen has just decided to close her shop and her good friend Birdie says, "Closing the shop is the brave thing to do."
I guess I take this as saying, "Stepping out of your comfort zone is the brave thing to do."
I have always wanted to write. Ever since I was little, telling made up stories to my parents. We'll I'm finally doing the brave thing. This is it.
I'm also realising that if one wants to write, one needs to blog. Social networking is apparently a very important part of being a writer.
And so it begins.
Epiphany: 'You've Got Mail' is a movie about books!