Brainfreeze

It’s Friday, which means Flash! Friday is going on. I heartily urge you to go on over and take a look, and throw your name in the ring if you can. This week’s writing prompts are ‘Janitor’, and this fine photo:

Coliseum in Rome. CC2,0 photo by Vlad.
Image sourced: flashfriday.wordpress.com

For some reason, I find myself unable to create a story from these prompts just at the moment. My thoughts are scattered in a million directions, and no matter what I try to do, all the stories I come up with based on these prompts seem old, and dull, and done to death. If my mind was a telephone exchange, all you’d get when you dialled the number for ‘Flash Fiction Inspiration’ would be an engaged tone.

So, I’m going to step away from it, for now. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I’ll come back to it in an hour, or three, or five, and a story will suggest itself which will seem beautiful, and perfect, and true, and if it does then I’ll write it.

And perhaps (shock to the horror) it won’t.

And as I’ve finally learned? That’s all right. It’s all right not to have inspiration strike you between the eyes every time you see an image prompt. It’s all right not to feel happy with the story you write. It’s all right to choose not to post up work which you’re not sure is representative of you at your best. It’s all right to do your work justice and not share it until it’s ready.

I am a busy person at the moment. It’s all good; I like to be busy, and it can be a lot of fun to just buckle yourself in and hope for the best. There’s some stuff going on which I can’t share yet (though don’t worry, I’ll get to it soon-ish), and it’s all very exciting. Stay tuned…

But, until then, I’m off to try to find ways to focus, and with any luck we’ll have a piece of flash fiction by close of business. In the meantime, what are you going to write today?

 

It’s the Most Busy Time of the Year…

Ding, dong, ding, dong!

So, yes. November. How are you? It only feels like a week or so since you were last here but apparently it’s been an entire year. (Did anyone see who made off with the last twelve months?)

November, my favourite month in many ways, and my least favourite in so many others. Loads of family events on (no fewer than seven birthdays among my friends and family, and that’s just the beginning of it), plenty of travelling all over the country going from the in-laws to the outlaws and back again, an important work event for my beloved, and an important work event for me (luckily on different weekends!) – and before we know it, December will have rolled around.

Time really does go quicker the older you get, I think. As I approach a painful age (one I’d really rather not face up to) I realise that the days are galloping past with gleeful disdain, hurrying my steps. When I was a teenager my mother used to say to me – pained expression turned up to max, of course – that she felt like a sixteen-year-old inside and that it was only like ‘yesterday’ since she was young and sprightly and that I was wasting my one and only youth and would I ever get out of that chair and put that book down and go out and meet people?! I used to think she’d lost her reason. Nobody I knew was more interesting than the people I met in books, and anyway I thought (as we all do when we’re teenagers) that I would feel young and capable forever.

Well, huh. It just goes to show your mama always knows best.

I have aches and pains in places I didn’t know I owned until they started to hurt. I’ve started making ‘old lady noises’ getting into and out of chairs. I have a dodgy knee. I don’t have any grey hair yet, but that’s possibly because my eyesight is failing. I am feeling every second of my age, and November reminds me that I’m getting older, for one of the birthdays I’ll be ‘celebrating’ during this month is my own.

*Sigh* Yeah. I feel your pain, young lady.
Photo Credit: jDevaun.Photography via Compfight cc

Luckily (I guess?), I’ve relieved myself of one mental burden this month, and that is ‘Emmeline’. I have returned the edits to my agent and I now have everything crossed that she doesn’t hand the book back to me pinched between thumb and forefinger, nose wrinkled, going ‘what on earth is this, then?’ The aim is to get the book good enough – good enough to catch the eye of a publisher, good enough to get a team of acquisitions people excited and enthusiastic, good enough to fall beneath the scalpel of yet another editor – and I can get on board with that. If we were trying to make it perfect, I think my brain would have clocked out a long time ago. I can’t deal with perfect; I can deal with good enough.

And so that means today is the start of a new-old project. I’m going back to basics and revisiting the first book I ever queried Polly with, one which she enjoyed and which she told me was good enough to engage child readers and make them look for other stories by the same author (which is catnip to anyone who writes, let me tell you); it wasn’t good enough for her to sign me, not at that point, but my aim is to bring it up to the same standard as ‘Emmeline.’ I like a challenge.

Essentially, I’m trying to make my agent fall in love with my work all over again. It’s a bit like a marriage, this agent-author relationship. It takes work and enthusiasm and openness and trust on both sides, and it can be dang scary – and one thing you should never do is take it for granted. So, I’m going to take everything I’ve learned from the editing process I’ve already been through, and bring it to bear on Eldritch, and hope to find a story I can polish.

No time like the present. Let’s begin!

 

Getting (Re)Started

Life has conspired to keep me away from Le Grand WiP for the past few days. My edits have been allowed to sit, festering; my mind has been occupied with other things, like family and new responsibilities and even – rather interestingly – the faint stirrings of enthusiasm for a new idea. Or, rather, a new way of doing an old idea, really.

Today, however – well. Today’s the day I need to crack on.

Photo Credit: the Italian voice via Compfight cc

It’s hard not to feel guilty when my other duties take me away from what I see as my primary role – in other words, getting my edits inputted as smoothly, quickly and professionally as possible, and getting them back to my agent so that she can move my book to the next level, whether that means another round of edits or starting the publishing submission process. Bringing a book to publication is a hugely long, complicated and involved thing and it’s hard to balance the need for speed with the need for quality work, particularly when life insists on getting in the way.

I’ll manage, of course. As the old saying goes: ‘if you want something done, ask a busy person.’ I am rather busy, these days! Not complaining, of course. Would I ever complain? Sheesh.

But I have had a few days off, and the best way to assuage the guilt is to get right back on the job. Restarting, though – is there a harder thing? Kicking off your enthusiasm cold, trying to grind it up to working speed, building up a head of steam behind your motivation… it would be easier to climb the Eiffel Tower backwards, blindfolded, in a pair of stilettos.

It’s got to be done, though.

Opening up your computer file is the hardest part of the day, when you’re editing. It’s like a roller-coaster that has only one long drop – you climb and climb and climb up to the great precipice, where you teeter for a while before taking the (literal) plunge, and then it’s all whoosh to the finish. Well, not quite – there are a few small ups and downs along the way, perhaps – but the toughest part for me is definitely those few moments either side of clicking my file open and watching the MS, complete with my agent’s increasingly exasperated Track Changes, appear. It feels good, in a blisteringly painful way, to deal with each of the edits in turn and watch as the Track Changes bubble vanishes from the margin, and even though some of them haven’t been dealt with yet – they’re waiting for the second pass of edits, which I’m aiming to start before too long – I realised last week that I’m over the two-thirds completed point. That’s pretty good going. Better than that, though, is this: I’ve had a quick flick through to the end of the document, and the edits get thinner and less hair-pully from this point onwards. I think, without even realising it, I’ve slogged through the hardest part already.

And guess what?

I made it. I survived.

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs via Compfight cc

Okay, so maybe the fireworks are a bit premature. But you’ve got to love an optimist, right? They’re pre-emptive fireworks, which are (of course) the best kind.

Now. I’m off to make some coffee, friends, and then throw myself headlong into the day. Godspeed on your own endeavours – may they be mighty – and remember: we’ll get through it. All will be well. One step at a time.

See you all back here tomorrow for some Friday flash fiction!

 

Proof Of My Silliness

As if you needed proof, right?

So, it’s NaNoWriMo, as we know. I have a project to complete, as we also know. Other stuff that I knew, but which perhaps I should’ve taken into account when deciding to bash my details into the NaNoWriMo sign-up page included:

The fact that it’s my dad’s birthday this month;
The fact that it’s my birthday this month;
The fact that my husband is taking several days’ leave this month;
The fact that I have at least two medical appointments this month; and, last but by no means least:
The fact that I have no fewer than three really important family things to attend – yes, you’ve guessed it – this month.

Image: likeablequotes.com

Over the weekend, I attended a (very fun, and wonderful in every way) birthday party for one of my dearest and oldest friends. I got to see so many people – some of whom I hadn’t seen for ages – and much laughter and catching up was had. We also visited my husband’s aunt and uncle, and that was great too. The silliness in all this, of course, kicks in when one considers that I also knew about all this before I signed up to NaNoWriMo.

So.

I am, at the moment, trying to do several things simultaneously, all of which are vitally important. I am attempting to do them all in the one month so far this year when I have the least time. It’s definitely silly. It’s even perhaps a little on the ditzy side. But you know what else it is?

It’s great.

Image: kwasistudios.com

It’s a privilege to have friends and family to spend time with, and it’s great to have so much to celebrate. (The medical appointments aren’t so much fun, but we’re not thinking about those, right? Right.) It’s also fantastic to be busy, and to have so many opportunities to submit and create work. Having said all that, I still really wish I’d engaged my brain a bit more before making the decision to begin NaNoWriMo. It’ll be NaNoGoSlo at this rate. I was doing really well last Friday – I was way ahead of schedule for the day, and the site was predicting I’d be done with my 50,000 words a week early if I kept up the same pace – but, of course, over the weekend it all went to hell. I’m afraid to check the website now, in case it yells at me – or, worse, tells me how disappointed it is in me, and how it expected better.

I hate that.

The current picture of my situation is like this: I am just over two-thirds of the way through my line edits for ‘Tider’, but the manuscript has been sitting on my desk now since Friday, so I hope I can get back into the right mindset to get through it. I want to finish that job and get the manuscript sent away to the kind agent who gently rejected ‘Eldritch’, but who wanted to see my other work. So, my heart is (not literally, because urgh) in my mouth as I work. Once that’s done, then it’s NaNo time, and to stay on track I have to write something like fifty million words today (approximately.) Then, it’ll be time to turn my attention to my story for Walking on Thin Ice, which has been neglected so long I’ve forgotten what it’s even about. (The closing date for this contest is coming up, by the way, so if you’re preparing a story, get ‘er done.) On top of all that, then, we have the usual stuff – living, eating, breathing, sleeping, attempting to keep the house from turning into a hovel, and all that other incidental stuff.

If someone finds me gibbering gently in a corner, don’t worry. Just leave me be. If you really need me for something, however, just waft a book in my direction and I’m sure native curiosity will drive me out of my stupor.

Happy Monday and happy new week. I’m armed with a brand new jar of decaf, my biggest mug, and my game face. Let’s do this.

Nicolas Cage speaks the truth.
Image: brightestyoungthings.com