NaNoWriMo2011 - more pencil and paper

Just musing about the implications of yesterday's exercise, with another blank sheet of A4 at my side, I drew another 'mind map' stemming from this almost brand new character (actually imported from 'Shenanigans') and a linking device for (some) chapters using a series of emails.   There's no doubt they are useful but for me, at least, I had to already have something to build on - not sure it would have been so successful if I had not already got the characters in mind.

One minor mental hiccup is that in other people's books I too frequently don't read these inter-linking, chapter-separating snippets ... they seem to interrupt the story, but then I often have to go back to pick up bits I've missed.

Have to say I am more excited than apprehensive at the moment, but I bet that heavy 'oh what have I got myself into?' feeling wil come sooner or later.

NaNoWriMo2011 - plot progress

Yesterday,  as a result of reading Caroline Green's excellent post 'Let it Snow' on Strictly Writing, I used a pencil and a blank sheet of A4 and made some progress with plotting 'Not wanted on voyage', i.e. I actually formulated one, instead of  thinking up a load of characters, without knowing what to do with them. 

In the middle of the page I wrote "Madigan has discovered ..." and then I asked the questions "How?" and "What does she propose to do" and "What type of deaths?", "What reasons?", "How come people know death is to be dealt on this particular cruise?"

And I came up with 1) a villain, 2) a motive,  3) a red herring and 4) a way of linking them all.

Next thing is to find ways of killing a few off - my youngest son has made some useful suggestions re poisons ... and it starts in a day and a half ...

Willing to conceal

A tale of mine is currently on Pygmy Giant

(orginally written as a prompt for MudSpots - one of those I woke up, thought about and scribled in a notebook at the firt opportunity, in 'The Old Bank' B&B in Wick, last September.)

With the best intentions [Book Blurb Friday #35]

It took Ben less than a month to realise that there were more than two of them in this marriage.   And he did not mean Sarah’s six-year-old daughter Emily.

Calm, caring and loving for most of the time, Sarah had another person buried within her – one connected to something lurking in her past which threatened her sanity and their marriage.

He knew Emily was the result of a mistaken one-night insistently-forgotten entanglement, father un-named on her birth certificate, but from things Sarah said, when in the grip of nightmares, he believed this unknown man was the cause of her distress. 

With the best intentions, and despite her refusal to co-operate, Ben starts digging into Sarah’s past:  his search culminates in a monastery rendezvous intended to allow Sarah to confront – and lay - her ghosts.   Ben’s interference has shocking and tragic results – but for who? [144 words]

This is partly a plot development for someone in my NaNo novel but also Week #35’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge (I've missed a few!) and Ashley Ortiz' photograph,    Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”  

http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

Another cover

Displacement activity doesn't take place only when I'm not allowed to write but also when the words stop flowing.

'Making good' - as with 'Damage limitation', the title came into being while creating the cover - is about thirty-four thousand words done - maybe a quarter of it, and currently I don't know where it is going. 

I've been this way before:  had not even expected to be writing a sequel until halfway through the penultimate chapter of 'Damage limitation' and have enough in the way of other projects for it not to be a problem.   

Yet.  

Fingers crossed it won't be long-term, because I get very ratty if I don't have something in progress.

NaNoWriMo2011

Hmm ...

I'm at the stage where I simply want to get started, have all these ideas which might fizzle into nothing unless I put them down and develop them, marry them to the right character, interject it into a conversation.
In the meantime, I am designing a cover for my novel.   The original BookBlurb Friday cover featured a bar of chocolate (which I simply ignored at the time), and stencil font writing, which I thought reflected what might be seen in the hold of a ship.   However, I got side-tracked by a photo of sand ripples on Warebeth beach near Stromness in Orkney, and played around with that.

It might not be the final one - how commercial 'grab-off-the-shelf' is it for a start? ('not very' I fear) - but beats chewing my fingernails.
And what a fascinating subject is bookjackets anyway - how do they KNOW what will appeal to me?

'Surveillance' at MudSpots

Another week of rich, rewarding reading at MudSpots - 'Surveillance' over as wide a range of subjects, told in 250 words, as you could wish to see.

Road to Spurn

On that occasion we should have done.   Spurned it, that is.

With hindsight we certainly would have done.

Spurn Head – a ceaselessly shifting spit of sand at the mouth of the river Humber, with a fascinating history of defence, defence against the elements. My notebook describes groynes 'like ancient and spear-hit soldiers, armoured squares and wounded stabs' and I'd anticipated using the invasive imagery to inform the World War One work I was at that time intending to produce.

In 2007, with blithe optimism, and blinkered as to the need to make a better check, I had booked the only  cottage there for myself and a fellow artist to spend a week drawing and painting.   A week in June - light, light nights, summer weather, warmth and sunshine ... surely not too optimistic?   

But the cottage was a dump – damp and peeling wallpaper, spiders and a temperamental scalding shower.   The weather dumped damp  too - two days of almost endless rain - just one dry afternoon and one golden evening the second day.   The rest of the time it was too wet, too cold - in June! - to stand outside and hold a pencil.   I drew, as much as the rain and cold allowed, the festoons of nets and wrappings of rags, vainly attempting to staunch wounds, doomed to ultimately fail.   After a day indoors, drawing diligently, we ventured two miles to the pub for a meal - "Sorry kitchen flooded - no food" - and the next morning woke to hear that Hull had suffered floods, as had the road down which we'd travelled - now apparently impassable.

Tempers were fraying too – my fellow artist did not possess the pioneering spirit, and fearful of being stuck there with her for the rest of the week I decided to extricate myself from this particular hole and insisted on driving home.

This is my submission for the anniversary edition of Language>place Carnival #11

NaNoWriMo2011

I've signed up for this for the second time.   Last year's 'Holding steady' was a follow-on to two smaller books, finished at about sixty-three thousand words and needed a lot of editing, minor but necessary, and I shall do a little more work before I re-publish in Blurb.   I've since written 'Damage limitation' (113,000+ words) which for ease of editing I published in Blurb and am currently reading and re-reading.   The follow up to that is at thirty-three  thousand words, titled 'Making good' and currently semi-stalled.

But this year's novel will be different.  'Not wanted on voyage' began life as a response to one of Lisa Richard Claro's Book Blurb Friday photos, will be part-populated with half-drawn characters from Thinking Ten prompts and has barely a vestige of a plot, which is a bit of a draw-back when it hinges on murder and who-dunnit and why and how, a genre I knew little of until recently.

So, twelve honeymooning couples (some true some false) four or five crew members (some good, some bad) and a need to convincingly bump a few off under suspicious circumstances, by person-unguessed-at, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.

In preparation I am re-reading P D James and Ian Rankin and, following a lucrative trip to the Tynemouth bookfair on Sunday, Mark Billingham and Stuart Macbride, with Michael Robotham and Stephen Booth to follow.   Not to pinch ideas but for some help in  how to construct a plot.

Four past use - creel stones collagraph

[NB this image has the wrong title over-written]

Obsession with creel stones

For several years I was obsessed with drawing these abandond creel stones.   They were stacked behind a derelict house just a stone's throw from the sea in Stomness, in Orkney - I drew them, once in the rain with soluble graphite, loving the blurred and shadowy marks.   Another giant piece measured about seven feet square - cominng across it much-folded and dusty a couple of months ago, in an impatient mood, I threw it away.   A drypoint etching failed to capture the essence of them, but evetually I produced a collagraph which was inked several times, in several colours and proved to be the most successful work done from them.
I think it was the hand-made, bespoke quality, wooden frame to fit found rock, and the enclosing nature which was the source of their appeal.   This photograph shows them  the dry - they were richer when wet.
Three years after finding them, they disappeared.