Recuperation report

I must get back to taking pics again, though it is hardly the weather for it. Gales and rain do not tempt me out for walks at the moment. Yesterday we drove to IKEA and walked around the ground floor half of the store, and that was my exercise for the day.

Tired me out, too! What a weak and feeble creature I am right now. But I have to report that my scar is fading very well, and won't be at all obtrusive in a vee necked blouse. I lost a stone, but have already regained half of it back again, so it seems unlikely that I will retain that sylphlike 9 stone weight.

I give thanks every day for my writing. Without it I don't know what I'd do all day. Go mad, I expect. There are only so many re-runs of Monarch of the Glen I can watch in one day!

I expected to be able to report a new book out by now, but Till the Day Go Down is still up on Amazon only as a pre-order entry. Tomorrow I'll dig out the cover pic and announce it properly, regardless of its status. Call me impatient!

Clever novelist

I have to give Gregory credit for the ending of The White Queen. All the way through the book the hint of witchcraft is maintained and comes to fruition when Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth curse whoever killed the Princes in the Tower. They know it is not Richard, and suspect Buckingham and the Stanleys but cannot prove it. The curse decrees that the firstborn son of the culprit shall die through the coming generations until there are only girls left....well, we know who that pinpoints as the culprit, don't we?
So Gregory has avoided angering the Ricardians, found a novel way of stating the guilty party (no pun intended) and given the reader a flavour of the unease, uncertainty and distrust of the times into the bargain.
Good for her. But I still don't care for her heroine.

Floods

While Cumbria drowns we on the east of the Pennines suffer no more than a few rainy days. I suppose the east had it last year, when several places like Morpeth and Rothbury were almost washed away. It beggars belief how complacent we have become, building so close to waterways and rivers. Fine maybe in drought years, but what about the wet years? And the UK is predominantly a wet country, strung with rivers and canals, with a climate that is temperate and given to generous rainfall.
People talk of unprecedented levels of rain in 24 hours, but had there not been rain for days beforehand, the land would have soaked it up and drained it away. May as well blame the land, already full of water and unable to soak up more. Seems to me it's our old friend multiple causality again. The lesson to be learned?
Do not buy a house built on a flood plain. We seem to have forgotten what flood plains are, or why they were there. Better by far, if faced with a choice, to buy a house on higher land, out of reach of the river. The thought of sour-smelling river mud and worse creeping up through drains and catflaps while I sleep, coating every surface of my home, sends shudders through me. I don't know how the people caught this time will recover and begin again. I hope they will, with help from agencies and donations, and hope it will be somewhere safer.

The White Queen

I'm still not enamoured of The White Queen, which is most odd, as I expected to like it. I buy very few books in hardback these days, but it was one of them. Nor can I say exactly why I'm not ripping through it at a rate of knots. There's something almost reported speechish, something quite passive about the voice in which the story is delivered, almost as if the main character is fatally pre-determined. Elizabeth and Edward share one of the most amazing love stories in history and yet there is no hot, fiery centre in the central figure of Elizabeth. She is cold, thinks herself related to the watery spirit Melusine and seems fuelled by hatred more than love.

I'm doing a lot of work on my latest wip as I recuperate. There's not a lot of other things to cloud my attention, and my "straight historical" still flows easily enough to make me believe this is what I should be doing. Either that or I'm way, way off course!


I'm still in two minds about letting my hero and heroine come together in an "encounter of the bedroom kind" or whether to keep them apart, but that will sort itself out further down the line. What's nice is that I'm not trying too hard to make any of my characters likeable. They either are or they aren't. If I keep them apart, them I can't be accused of writing a sloshy romance again. But as a friend of my husband says, "Shagging sells!" So it has to be a consideration.


I've had The White Queen on my to be read pile for quite a while now, and dipped into the first few pages when I first came home from hospital.


It may be that it is too similar to Campion's book, which I finishd just before I went in, but TWQ did not grab me. It is written in the first person viewpoint of Elizabeth Woodville, consort of Edward of York, parents of the Princes in the Tower. The pervading tone is dismal and sadly lacklustre.
Now I'm willing to concede that this may be more to do with me than the book; but in my defence I have to say I put it down in favour of a little gem called the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (see my Books I'm reading list for the authors) recommended and sent as part of my birthday present from my daughter-in-law. An odd little book by any standards, compiled of letters between an author bereft of a story and a collection of Guersey individuals picking up the pieces of their lives after the German occupation in the 1940s - but a delight.

Die Hard 4

A wine cooler and a bucket have been pressed into service to hold the flowers that keep arriving. People are so kind!
More than usually at the mercy of the tv schedules these days, I recorded Die Hard 4 and sat down with high expectations to watch it.
It is hard to convey the growing sense of unease it gave me. The spirit of heroic adventure pervading the first John Maclean movie degenerated into a comic strip cartoon within the first few feet of film and I half expected the BIFF, BANG, KRUNCH explosions to litter the screen. I grow weary of 30-year old teenagers who rush into supposedly complex situations, size them up in a split second and start pushing buttons - the correct ones, mind you - to avert the catastrophic explosion that will blow them to kingdom come if they get it wrong. I worry for the state of society when it is OK for a determined cop to career down a motorway in a juggernaut hurling innocent road users to certain destruction but who demands that the entire united states airforce must be deployed to save the daughter of that same cop. Promise me! he cries, ramming another innocent victim against a motorway pillar. I despair of films that show villains bouncing off concrete buildings and falling out of helicopters without so much as a bruise, or leaping gymnastically (and impossibly without a springboard) around lift shafts and turbine rooms.
And surely jet pilots are trained not to blow up civilian infrastructure including motorways in case they kill hundreds in pursuit of one man? Let's hope so.
One has to wonder what films such as these teach young people today.
Certainly not kindness, nor selfless bravery to save others. I could possibly have argued the John MacLean of the the first film wanted to save his wife and the people with her. But this hard-bitten version of the hero went on a rampage and it wouldn't be going too far to say he caused more damage and loss of life than the villains.

Flower shop

I live in a flower shop at the moment. Because I've had an operation recently, friends have swamped me with flowers, which is wonderful and so very generous and thoughtful of them.

However, typing on one's lap without resting a heavy laptop on one's legs turns out to be well nigh impossible. And I can tell you that while taking painkillers is easy, the effect of certain painkillers on the body's natural system is less than good. Now I have to take laxatives, too! But enough of these woes.

Instead let me sing a hymn of praise to the UK's NHS, which has been absolutely wonderful. Let no one tell you anything different. There may be hold ups, but usually it is because someone, somewhere, is more ill than Iam and went in before me. Would you expect anything different? Surely not. I waited a month longer than expectation, but I have no complaints. Some of the people who went in before me were still there when I came out. The District Nurse has been in contact with my home, the Cardiac Rehabilitation team has already made an appointment for me in December.

Now I have to get on and make myself fit again. Already I'm up and about, doing bits here and there. I breathed the wonderful air in the back garden at lunchtime. Tomorrow, I'll maybe take a little walk. My school motto used to be Pas de pas...step by step one may go a long way. Seems appropriate, don't you think?

The nose of the beholder

Sometime this month my new book should appear on the shelves.

Till the Day Go Down by Jen Black. Since I don't have my publisher's permission to put the cover up yet, I've amused myself by playing with a painting of the heroine I did when I began the story, and a photograph of a castle that features in it.

I like to visualise my characters and painting is often a good way of getting a likeness - if a bit styalised and impossibly wasp-waisted - my husband's comment! But who cares? Heroines are never stodgy, are they? They don't have pimples or a sudden outbreak of zits at a crucial moment in life. Even in the most desperate of situations, their clear skin and beautiful eyes never let them down. Me, I get bags under the eyes from sleepness nights, and I get a lot of those when I'm worried.

Come to think of it, heroes never have bad breath or stink of horse manure. They always smell of male musk or some such enticing odour. I don't know about you, ladies, but a man who has been doing something active and energetic often smells sweaty and many times it is not a turn-on. Especially if it is more than a day old. But then perception is all. When I worked for a living my staff came to me with a complaint about a client in the library. His smell, they complained, made them feel sick, and the other students were leaving in droves. Upon investigation, their complaint was justified, so I had the unpleasant task of warning him that he must leave and not return until....all was well for a few days and then gradually the smell got worse again...I asked a senior member of staff to intervene. (ie get rid of him!) She came in, spoke to him, and told me she did not find his odour reprehensible at all. What can you say to something like that?

Smoke and sheep

Our moorland roads are pretty, but there are hazards.
Definitely not the place to drive in ice or snow. Even in mid-summer and autumn there are heather fires and sheep on the road. There were several plumes of smoke on the hillsides when we drove this way a week or two back, and driving through the down drift we got a lovely whiff of heather smoke.

Made me think of garden bonfires we had as a child. Now of course we live in smokeless zones. We've definitely lost something in our modern life with central heating and plain walls instead of open hearths. I still remember crouching by the fire, cheeks glowing in the heat, with a piece of bread on a toasting fork. "Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Ahhhh! it's burnt!" Nothing happened and then in a second, the toast went from white to black! a great learning experience about the way fire burned and might burn you should you be stupid enough to play with matches and fireworks.

I admire Sheep. They manage to thrive in the most inhospitable places, through howling winters, snowstorms,and rain sodden summers, all without out help or shelter; but they have no road sense. People say they come down to the road to lick the salt off, but whatever it is, it makes your heart lurch to come around a corner and find them in your way.

They don't always move aside

for cars, either. They have a particularly disdainful way of looking right through you, as if you're in their world and don't belong. Which I suppose is right. If you're a sheep.

I suppose tomorrow night I'll go into grumpy mode and snarl when the trick or treaters come knocking at the door. It is one American custom I really have no time for, and wish it had stayed in the states. Ask the kids standing at your door what it's all about, and they can't tell you. Whatever the rational behind may be, it is still across the pond.

Bad Guys

How bad do bad guys have to be before they are unbelievable? These days such horrid crimes are committed in real life that almost anything might be considered believable in a fictional character. Not that I want to move into Stephen King territory with my current wip, not at all; but I find that most of my characters qualify for the label villain in some way. I've come to the conclusion that the times about which we write dictate the villainy level of the characters.

Possibly genre matters, too. I would expect a Thriller villain to be a worse villain than a Romance villain. Your average villain in a Regency Romance may need to have some redeeming qualities, but not so with a villain facing Rebus in the grey streets of Edinburgh. Which leads me to wonder about villains filling the pages of historical novels.

Documents list hideous facts, and I turn away from them, shuddering. But if my characters live in those times, then their senses are bound to be less sqeamish than mine, are they not?
I suppose it depends on the mental toughness of the character. Not everyone could be bold and brave. In A Place Beyond Courage, Chadwick has a female character who is an absolute wimp - and very believable.

My latest set of Tudor characters have to be tough to survive in their world, so maybe I'm wrong to label them all villains. But they're turning out to have some villainous qualities. All of them. I will have to sit very firmly my 21st century sensibilities.

Top pic is heather fire on the moors, bottom pic Middleton-in-Teesdale.

When it goes smoothly

Matho's Story is going well at the
moment. I hope I'm not risking the
terrible finger of fate turning in my direction when I say this, but it all seems to be falling into place in the most pleasing way.
I could be totally off the plot with it, but I hope not. Perhaps I feel at home in the time period; perhaps it is because I'm not conciously trying to write romance any more.
But whatever it is, I'm happy with it, and happy with the writing, too. If I get to the end of a chapter and get up and walk away, I tell myself I'll go for a walk, or do the ironing and I'll think about what is to happy next . I start to think about it, sure, but before long my brain wanders off, distracted by some other stray thought, and sometime later I realise I haven't thought about my plot at all.

Not conciously, that is. But because I

sit down the next day and start to write without any trouble, I realise the little old subconcious must have been busy plotting away all the time.

It is an amazing feeling when writing goes as well as this. I love it. If only I could think of a title...

Pics are of the road "over the tops" - between Brough and Corbridge, crossing the Tees and Wear valleys and then on to the Tyne. The pole at the side of the road is a snow marker.

Style

So many things go to make a writing Style. Each one of us must find our own and not allow anyone change it.

It is probably the hardest part of writing, for anybody can string words together. But do they tell the story in a good way? Here are a few snippets to help get it right:

-do not misuse long words;

-don't use cliches;

-use the best word to express the idea;

-do not abuse commas, em-dashes and exclamation marks - use them correctly. For example use an exclamation mark in dialogue only when your character is shouting.

-description should be unobstrusive and lend substance to a novel;

-description is not and never should be an inventory;

-don't focus on the generic but give us the specific;

-do not reiterate something you've already mentioned;

-treat time carefully;

-use appropriate metaphors - a comparison must be accurate;

-The larger ideas in a paragraph should lead from one to the next so the text is not jerky.

-don't flaunt your vocabulary unnecessarily.

Characters must have

More words of wisdom, this time on CHARACTERS. First of all, Don't Introduce a Character to No Purpose.

Always remember your character has to have one; he must be more than a gender stereotype. Err on the side of the specific, concentrate on features and qualities.

Above all, Ignore that Mirror!

Remember that a POV character knows what she looks like, and that a POV character "sees" whoever she thinks about.

Don't overdescribe clothes, and don't use politics as an accessory.

Lastly, but important - perfect people are boring.

As for SETTINGS - don't stop in the middle of an action sequence to describe the scenery. If you're running from a murderer you don't think "What a beautiful tree" as you tear by. Well, you wouldn't, would you?
Mention food only to advance the plot or illustrate a mood.

Reading the comments in a list like this, it is so easy to chuckle and think well, of course not. Which idiot would fall into such traps? But beginners do, and occasionally so do we all. I know I have. Food isn't one of my things, I'm happy to say, but I've read many potential books where each meal is described in loving detail and I suspect the author is salivating as she writes. All it does for me is make me groan and skip to the next bit.

My fault line, as it were, is describing outside locations. Less is more, I keep telling myself, hoping I'll learn the lesson eventually.

(Top pic is one of the orchards at Acorn Bank; bottom pic looking north west across Northumberland from the Roman Wall.)

How Not to write a Novel

How Not to Write a Novel is entertaining. (Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark are the authors) By advising that we write in a style that will certainly fail to achieve publication, they pass on sound advice and amuse at the same time.

Cut out the backstory in chapter one, for example. Don't bog down on only two characters (unless you write category romance, I suppose). Don't write a scene twice.

They say these three are the biggest mistakes. As soon as I read the subtitle In which the character's childhood is introduced to no purpose, I realised I needed to do some work on the opening paragraphs of my current wip.

Where the author substitutes location for story, Where the author stops short of communication and In which the reader is unintentionally misled give you a flavour of the style.

Sigh. It is easy to get so immersed in a character's life that other characters get shoved onto the back burner and when they reappear the reader thinks Who is this? Ah, wasn't he in the story about twenty chapters back?

And then there's the last rule. Well, I suppose it must happen subconciously, for no one would set out to write a scene twice, surely? But they say it happens so often. A different angle, setting, characters - but there is no new information, and the original conclusion is unchanged. That's basically a re-write. And even if it does add new information, don't do it if the scene is essentially the same as the original.

What not to do

Writers must write something that makes readers want to turn the page.

Therefore, plot must be number one in the list of priorities. So if we start with a thorny problem and a sympathetic character, we should be on the right track. The plot must thicken (like a good sauce?), the hero must be hindered in every possible way but triumphs in a surprising way that once you know it, seems inevitable.


Almost every How To Write Book I've ever read says such things. They say it in different ways, but say it they do. So you'd think that by now I wouldn't be writing about a hero, and then bring in his mother, father and three sisters and her cat and have them discuss their lives to date.


I wouldn't drivel on endlessly and get to page 120 without so much as a hint of what the storyline will be once I get around to it.


I won't be writing a prologue where my hero stares at a flower, gazes through of a rain-drop covered window, walks through the long grass and contemplates why his life is not running as it should.


Indeed no. I should know what the chase is, as they say, and cut to it at once. No pages explaining what I want to tell, why the hero is as he is on page one or what terrible history happened to make him the way he is.

So, consider the opening lines of my wip:
Matho Spirston stood at the door of the tiny cottage athwart the hill at Halton and surveyed the countryside with pleasure. Small and poor though the cottage might be, it was a start. He folded his arms, leaned idly against the door jamb in the late sunshine and gazed south. The roof of Aydon Castle, where he had spent so much of his life, was visible above the tree tops beyond the meadows. Further south, the hills of Durham rose like a humped blue quilt across the horizon and somewhere in between, the river Tyne ran unseen west to east through the valley.
This was his territory, where he had reigned as undisputed leader of the gang of children who fought and played together among the scattered farms, cotts and cabins that composed the Aydon Township, and where his father had put him into service with Sir Reynold Carnaby, Lord of Aydon, five years before.
But things had changed since then, and would change further. Both his father and Sir Reynold were dead, one in the Rising of ’37 and his patron last month after a long illness. Then three weeks ago Alina and Lionel Carnaby had stood with Matho at his mother’s graveside.
A warm feeling filled him at the thought of the two elder Carnabys. They were still his friends. On their uncle’s death, most of his holdings went to their father, Cuthbert Carnaby and Lionel now had lordly duties of his own. If Lionel said the cottage belonged to Matho, then no man would question it. It was the least the family could do after he’d helped Harry rescue Alina from the clutches of the reiver Johnny Hogg.
She was married to Harry now. Matho shifted, settled his shoulder comfortably against the wood. One way and another it had been a grand summer, full of life and adventure and all because Harry Wharton turned up in the locality.
Now the dust had settled, the humdrum days threatened to return and Matho sensed boredom creeping into his life. Already he found himself glancing at the horizon several times a day, vaguely hoping for something more exciting than drilling the local farm lads into guard duty around Aydon Castle.
As if he had conjured something out of the air, a small figure rode across the field towards him. Matho squinted against the sun, but no insignia betrayed the identity of the rider. Still, as the distance lessened between them, Matho recognized the familiar set of the wide shoulders and long limbs. A grin stole across his face at the sight of a daft cap with its jaunty ostrich feather curling back in the breeze. He shook his head. Harry was always the lad who liked his fancy clothes.
Matho straightened and strolled forward.


Oh, Lord. I can see the red pen glowing, leaping up and down on my desk. There is work to be done. What would you change, if you were me?