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