3 am, San Francisco Hotel bathroom
I’ve not been around for a while because, among other things, I have had my head down on draft 2 of novel #2. I had some fantastic notes from EditorLeah, AgentSimon and AsstAgentAriella, and have been working on them, weaving new plotlines back and forth, making sure the little boy doesn’t age rather too rapidly to serve the story (!) and cutting out one of the two prologues and one of the secret rooms.… read more
I have been a bit quiet of late because I am deep in editing mode, with a lot of Christmas and new year stuff on the side. But I have got my story mapped out now, so I thought I’d stick my head above the parapet and share what I’m up to.
I have filled in all my real-world index cards, colour-coded them and shuffled them around, and I have transcribed all that information onto virtual index cards in Scrivener, which I have already banged on enough about.… read more
After two heads-down weeks, the final manuscript is scrawled on in purple pen, tippexed until it is stiff, photocopied at vast expense and put in the post to my publisher.
I am in awe at the copy-editor’s art. Such skill and knowledge. There are very few suggestions that I disagree with.
It is an eye-opener. For one thing, I don’t hyphenate. Not hardly at all. So a large part of the job is to insert hyphens.… read more
Leah, my editor and I had a long phone conversation today, where she outlined her comments on the initial draft, which she is sending on to me tomorrow. I am very happy with the changes she has asked for – many of them I have thought of myself, and others are structural solutions to problems I know are there. I am itching to get going on it – I want to make the novel perfect, and Leah’s insights are going to help me do that.
My three 1980 notebooks
I am a great fan of notebooks. I have always kept what I call an Everything Book: just one journal that I carry everywhere with me in which I put everything: notes taken at meetings; ideas for stories; word or line sketches of things that take my fancy; eavesdroppings; doodles (rather too many doodles, if truth be told).
Why an Everything Book? Well, I am an alphabetiser, an organiser, a categoriser. By recording everything in just one place, I save a lot of energy that would otherwise be wasted by deciding where to put it.… read more
Photo by Darren Cool for Connors Brighton
Last week I ran a three-hour MA class on plotting at City University. Apart from being one of the scariest things I have ever said yes to (and I admit this as a constant yes-person), planning the session coincided with a small sea-change in my working process.
If you have even glanced at some of my previous posts, you will have gleaned that, in NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a pantser, not a plotter.… read more
When I finished the very first draft of my first novel Cuckoo at the end of NaNoWriMo 2008, even I knew that I needed to do a lot of work to get it into a shape where I could show it to anyone else. After all, it had only taken me thirty days to produce. The pants to pearls ratio was pretty high.
So I worked on it for another ten months, until it was the best it could possibly be.… read more
And this is a bit how I feel after emerging from two months of heavy-duty editing/major surgery on novel #3, which I can now happily announce is to be called TARNISHED.
I’ve been working on Editor Leah’s brilliant and comprehensive notes on my first draft, as well as a bundle of rather more haphazard and gut-based queries of my own.
I had fully intended to post weekly with lessons learned while editing, but I found it quite difficult to lift my head from what I was doing.… read more
This article first appeared on Behind the Headlines on May 16, 2012.
As a full time writer working from the home I share with three men, I can find plenty to distract me from my daily 2000 words. Before you get excited about this in a 50 Shades sort of way, the three men I live with are one husband and two sons (the daughter is largely away at Uni), and the distractions are of the domestic kind – exciting things like washing crispy sheets, scraping crud off floors and searching for all the forks which have mysteriously disappeared.… read more
I’m just lifting my head from the final stages of editing the first draft of novel #3 to tell you this:
My author’s copies of Verbroken Belofte, the Dutch translation of Every Vow You Break arrived today. Aren’t they chillingly lovely? They’re published by the very classy Bezige Bij. I love all my covers, but these are just so haunting.
I’ll now get back to it. Normal service should be resumed in about one week, when I will have handed novel #3 in.… read more
