Book Blurb Friday - truly inspirational!

I made no secret of the fact that my NaNo novel was kick-started by a response to Lisa Ricard Claro's Book Blurb Friday over on Writing in the Buff but I have just checked and as well as #16 ('Not wanted on voyage') I have included characters from #4 ('Thickness of thieves' where Luke Darbyshere and Francesca Lloyd made their first appearance), #5 ('Smile now darling, just for me' which has photographer Davey and the shivering model Fay) and #9 ('Seeing double', Rose Madigan's first appearance).   BBF #13 ('Angels fall') has more Luke and Francesca and there is also a nod back to #15 ('Parts others cannot reach').
I can thoroughly recommend the challenge as an inspiration for plots - and I shall be making an effort with this week's because Lisa is using one of my photos.
And congratulations to Lisa who has reached her NaNo total, despite having been 20,000 words behind schedule at one point.

Day 29 NaNo - 77713 - and verified

In panic mode I have put in all the notes I have made re the endings and the whole thing into one document, and hastily written a final paragraph which tells the ending completely without elegance or subtlety.  And this is the total for NaNo purposes.   But it is a LONG way from finished.   And NaNo have marked my total up by a bit too.

Day 28 NaNo - 72067

Not so much new stuff created today as already-written snippets slotted into place thus enabling them to be counted.

Day 27 NaNo - 70797

Working towards the finale ... and tidying up the anomalies!

Day 26 NaNo - 69698

850 words from today's total were the sort that makes writing so satisfactory:  having had a note in my text, saying "sort confrontation with Peter Walpole" for over a week, which I had found impossible to make progress on, suddenly this morning it all came good and ideas tumbled out.   That and a less-than-enthralling arrest mean that nearly all the loose ends should be tied by next Wednesday ... fingers crossed.

Day 25 NaNo - 67179

Another solid day's typing and a couple of satisfactory long passages which make more sense of the rest.   Thus I believe I will have the bare bones of the story in place by the end of the month while knowing that they are inadequately fleshed.   A mixed sort of satisfaction, partly because I have done better than I expected at putting some of the plot elements in place - at concealing and then revealing, and at explaining - but as so often happens, having reached one rung up the next beckons.   My hope is that I can maintain momentum to get the thing finished properly.

Day 24 NaNo - 64157

Pessimism and the art of patchwork novel writing
I began with lots of brand new, brightly patterned and totally separate oddments of characters, and gaily stitched them all together.   Quite soon I found that they were mis-matched for size, some paired into a nice tidy square and were complete, while others needed a whole new piece or two before they were a section.
And then I found that although while separate they were OK, all the pieces could not be simply stitched together, just as they were, to make a pleasingly-patterned whole, they needed to be cut and cut again and reassembled so that equal weight was more or less assigned to all.   And in between each one I needed to insert a piece of plain to sometimes add contrast but also to unite.
And now it's sort of almost done, except that I have omitted almost one whole column and two halves of other rows, and the contrast/uniting pieces are inadequate, in places.    And today I wondered whether or not I really wanted such a mish-mash of a piece at all?

Day 23 NaNo - 62209

It's been a head down slogging sort of day, progress made, reasonably happily but rarely singing.   Time for that on the next draft I think.
Last year I finished on the 22nd with 61917 words, this year there is lot more to do yet.

Day 22 NaNo - 59050

A MUCH better day - all done with long conversations in which plot details and reasons are being revealed, and yesterday's half-baked snippets were made to fit, and tweaked so as to read better too.   Thursday is three quarters done, Friday about a third.   Saturday is the day for all the loose ends to be tied up, fingers crossed, and Sunday they arrive back in Leith - a couple more surprises and The End.
[Except there are at least two more couples whose tale has to be woven in later, post NaNo.]

Day 21 NaNo - 55288

Considering I've been sat at the computer for hours today I have very little to show for it.   It's mostly been playing put and take, trying to shoehorn conversations and snippets of action into the right day so that they all progress nicely.   But they don't and I have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is go and read a book.

Day 20 NaNo - 54541

A useful day, albeit unsatisfying.   Useful insofar as I drew up a spreadsheet of what happens when so as to get some idea of when to leak clues in; unsatisfactory because I then did little more than write scrappy outlines notes for each day.   I also completely re-wrote a description of top baddie - having last night made him little better than a stereotype I realised this morning that he just would not do as a 'real' effective person.

And from another site I learnt of the existence of the Writer's diet, which checks the 'leaness' or otherwise of a piece of writing.    Interesting and useful.

Day 19 NaNo - 52446

Slowly making progress ... I think.

Day 19 NaNo - 51018

Done the words - brief hurrah - and thankfully made some progress.   But a lot more to do ...

LOTS of words is not enough

Woke this morning not thinking 'nearly there!' but 'how am I going to tie up all the loose ends?' and currently the answers are: 
1) You won't and
2) the thing's too heavy/boring/ponderous/full of wasted characters to float so don't bother ...
One attempt to solve this will be another mind map.
And I have now cut the cruise to seven days.

Day 18 NaNo - 49386

Regrettably I've reached a point when some clever reasoning and deducing from known facts is required.    So I don't know how much to reveal in answer to the following:

‘I’ve just remembered something else about him too,’  Baz said.  ‘I should have said this before but I completely forgot … but on the first night, after we’d changed tables, I happened to catch him smiling at Fay, while he was pouring wine.   She looked really quite frightened of him.   Do we have any information on him at all?’ 

 I suspect I'll have to work backwards, starting  with the final 'Eureka' moment and then ... and then something else.   This may take some time.   I am progressing with other bits: one more murder, two denouements, at least, to go, and I am considering yet another cut in length of the cruise, to eight or even seven nights.   And tomorrow I expect to break the 50K.

Day 17 NaNo - 46080

Different again to yesterday.   Flailing a bit to find a direction, while I edit yesterday's work - the only way I can prepare to continue, despite knowing it is not recommended, and then when the idea for the next murder came to me, head down and working for the rest of the afternoon.   I had been trying to shoehorn another murder in, but it was not working and knowing something had to happen I had to concentrate hard.

Out of the blue - an unexpected death

If, having passed the several notices which warn of danger, someone sets out to climb, by means of steep, rock-cut steps on the side of a vertical cliff, steps which are uneven, which slope haphazardly and are frequently slippery as a result of guano or seaweed, and they then slip and fall to their death on the rocks below, it is, by its nature, an accident, and accidents are unpreventable.  

At least by the presence of otherwise benign group members.

And no matter how tragic, due to the youth of the victim – only twenty-four, the brevity of their marriage – just eleven days, an accident is an accident.

Except when it is not.

Except when it was not so much preventable but deliberately executed.

And not just heat-of-the-moment deliberate but planned in advance, the time and place selected, and the killer hired.   Because although, in this case, a killer might not have been thought necessary, that the obvious suspect was elsewhere at the time, although not very far elsewhere, it was useful to have witnesses who would testify, with complete honesty that what they had seen was an unpreventable accident.

[This direction for the plot occured to me in the less than a minute it took me to walk upstairs, having finished my lunch - the victim hitherto unsuspected - funny indeed this writing lark!]

Day 16 NaNo - 42660

Awake early thinking that if Penny pretends to be Italian a lot of problems could be overcome, and thus it proved.   Not easily, but eventually I got down 2500 words which adequately covered Tuesday's happenings.   Then a reward as two other characters chose to have an amusing 500 word conversation to which it seemed I contributed very little.   A good day's work.

Day 15 NaNo - 39413

An idea at how to proceed with the uncovering of a high-ranking purchaser of stolen art - corny but effective - and a decision to cut the cruise from fourteen days to ten, so I have to telescope the action somewhat.    Still haven't written the action as such ...

Tuning in

What a difference an author makes!   Having finished re-reading, with huge enjoyment and in quick succession the wonderfully poetic Andrew Greig's 'The return of John McNab and 'Romanno Bridge' which deals with some lovely-but-alien-to-me fit, mountain-climbing and adventure-minded folk (plus some nasties) I have picked up P.D.James 'The murder room'   I think I was not especially enthralled by this when I first read it, but after just half an hour of her slow-paced descriptions I find that I have begun using a similar approach with my characters.   Not, most definitely not, plagiarism, just a tuning into a more naturally sympathetic way of writing.
It embarrasses me at times to realise that even at my age there are times when I 'need permission' or (as someone said a couple of days ago in a comment on MudSpots) 'validation' to do something similar (and the commentor is the same age as me, so that's all right then!)

Day 14 NaNo - 37266

Started the day with a determined effort to fill in one of the less interesting days, a day when I need to establish minor relationships without resorting to 'and then' too many times.    After 1500 words I'd got to nine o'clock in the morning, with nothing happening.   Probably OK in the finished novel but no good for a finish in ~16 days .... 

Day 13 NaNo - 34680

Woke with much of one conversation pretty much in my head so got 1200 words typed up before breakfast.  Plus half baked pieces are coming to fruition and the plot is changing, narrowing, as I go.

Jogged memory

Found this photograph loose in the back of an album.
Written on the back ‘Scapa Haven October 1997, Sunday lunch.’
Taken fourteen years ago in a house we no longer own.

Table, chair, easel, jug and jar (with brushes) we still have.
No idea where the painting is, my first ever oil painting,
in a style now totally alien.


But the lunch is very familiar indeed.



[This is my submission for Language>Place Carnival #12]

MudSpots # 16 - Burning the candle at both ends

Rightfully named this week since Michael D Brown has added NaNoWriMo to his already over-loaded daily schedule - lots of conversations on MudSpots this week, all of which are worth reading at least once. 

Day 12 NaNo - 30940

Lots of words today, but not ones I'm very pleased about.   A couple of sections are cliche-ridden and boring and I knew this as I typed them, but the idea was to get the episode down, to work through the plot of it - the confrontation, the explanation, the threat, the frightening bits ... and I was surprised that even out of this quite uncomfortable way of writing, a new development made itself known, so that I have this poor girl who may or may not have been murdered, who disappears but it isn't clear who, if anyone, might have caused it to happen.   Was it murder or misfortune?   I don't know yet ...
But what I do know is that I can go back and tighten, improve the words later, provide I don't sicken myself of the characters first.

Day 11 NaNo - 27886

A scratchy, bad-tempered sort of day - sleep patterns all awry, not necessarily because of NaNo - plus I did some research into art smuggling, which, I am glad to say, given me plenty of possibilities from which to concoct one baddie's nefarious activities.   Also I made a decision, for the sake of 'completing' a tale by the end of the month, to completely ignore the additional story to be gleaned from the development of one couple, and just concentrate on the main ones.   So not many reported words, but more written which have yet to be tidied up.
This time last year I was much further ahead.

Day 10 NaNo - 26390

A good, solid day's work, after a late and shaky start.   Mostly come at by concentrating on writing the plot bits, but in a manner which is comfortable, i.e. by developing the characters of murderer/victim and worrying about the chronology later.   I'll keep this up for a few days and see where it gets me, but am accepting that the eventual tale will probably be three time 50K, and will need more research than I've time for here and now.

Day 9 NaNo - 22600

Some timely advice from Bill Floyd via fellow NaNo writer Travis Smith which is to simply write and regard this as a sub-first draft, rather than even a first draft. 
I finished up with cold feet yesterday because I am getting on for halfway through the word count and have barely started on the story.  I consider part of the NaNo challenge to be that I have to have a whole book, i.e. beginning, middle and end.   Today I sweated blood and finally got my first murder sorted, on day 1 of a 10-14 day cruise. 
The rest of the book is obviously going to have to be written as a skeleton, but I do have to have that skeleton otherwise I shall have considered it to be a failure.
So 2/3 more murders, several more red herrings, methods, and motives. in ~30K words.
In twenty-one days.

Day 8 NaNo - probably now less than19436

'That'll learn you' I am saying to myself.   All that printing out of pages and pages.
I woke at 5 a.m. this morning, lay in bed for a bit wondering about the whys and wherefores of the murders I have to put into my tale, now that I have more or less decided on the who.
But I not could not work it out, so I got up and tried some mind-mapping, a brand new pen, a couple of walks, a visit to the gym .   Still nothing.   Eventually, eleven hours later, a sort of mini-glimmer - fragile and barely believable but ...
The net result being, of course, that I have written not one word extra, and quite probably have several to discard.

Day 7 NaNo - 19436

I've realised that the only thing that will prevent me constantly editing and re-editing will be to print sections as I 'complete' them - that should also help with plotting.
Having made that decision I sat for three hours tweaking three thousand words without pressing the 'print' button  ...  I did it eventually, but too late today to see whether or not it was going to be hepful.

Day 6 NaNo - 17802 words

Lots of itty-bitty paragraphs today, one hundred and fifty words attaching themselves to random characters with varying degrees of relevancy.   Written up and 'parked' for future fitting in somewhere.   Maybe.
I find I am being ambushed with these interesting bits, which have much in common with the Bridie series, and are not the voice I thought I was using for this - relationships for example.   At the same time I am perceiving glimmers of possible plot development.   All I can do is follow my nose and see where it takes me.

'Joan alone' at the Camel Saloon

A second poem of mine this month at the Camel Saloon - place of much tasty reading and well worth a visit, with or without drink in hand.   And if you scroll down through twenty or more other good pieces you'll come to my 'Blow the wind southerly' - a development of one of my October small stones.   Much thanks to Russell Streur for compiling the whole shebang.
Joan was my Suffolk born 8 x grandmother and the poem uses information gleaned from her will, written in 1658

Day 5 NaNo - 14515 words

A pretty solid day of writing today - not all of it worthy of being kept, and 800 words which were almost certanly a waste of time - unless I can shoehorn them into .the mouth of another character.   And the tiniest smidgeon of a plot link, which is definitely a Good Thing.

Day 4 NaNo 10,856 words

A couple more snippets of conversation, one very much a propos of nothing but too enjoyable to lose, so it will have to go in somewhere.   Much writing of bits that are subsequently seen to fit nowhere, so progress has been muddled and difficult to count since everything is 'parked' in a multitude of dcuments alongside bits that might well have to be scrapped.   Today's count very much an estimate.

Day 3 NaNo - 8458 words

A couple of conversations got into my head early today, which always makes the writing easier, and both enabled me, once I had the bare bones down, to fit around them some extra information which will, I hope, serve to either muddy the waters or add mystery.

Not wanted on voyage - Chapter 1 of NaNo novel

       Her proposal came, as he later told her, with the felicitous timing of an amateurishly-plotted novel, one which relied over-much on coincidence to propel it to a credible conclusion.
       Following Isobel’s unrealistically optimistic departure, he had spent a couple of hours re-claiming his flat before sitting down in front of the television with a couple of rounds of mature Cheddar sandwiches, half a dozen pickled onions and a couple of bottles of Raven Ale to watch the Belgian Grand Prix.   A moderately eventful start had been followed, three laps in, by a coming-together of a rookie driver with one of the championship contenders, starting from the rear due to an enforced engine change.   No injuries but plenty of debris and, as the safety car was deployed for what looked likely to be at least half a dozen processional laps, his phone tapped out eight seconds of drum beat followed by the lead singer of Editors urging him to  ‘Pull the blindfold down, so your eyes can’t see’.
      There were not many of his work colleagues he would choose to speak to on a Sunday but she was one of them.   ‘Mad again,’ he said in greeting, mispronouncing her name, as always.
      ‘Rose’, she replied, using his surname as though it were his first but refraining, on this occasion, from the more teasing diminutive since she had a favour to ask.   ‘I don’t suppose you fancy being my husband for a couple of weeks do you?’
       He put down the bottle he had been about to take a mouthful from, grinning with delight.  
‘Madigan, my love, what a fascinating proposition!   I am between women at the moment, as it happens ... but I have to admit that while I like you well enough, I’ve never exactly fancied you ...’
       ‘Same here,   It’ll be in name only I assure you.   It’s just that if we’re going on a honeymoon cruise, the assumption will be that we’re married.’
       ‘Yes, I see that  ...  but why a honeymoon cruise?’
       ‘Because there’s been a higher than average number of grooms returning as widowers.   And I want to find out why.’
        ‘Ah!  Now I am getting interested.   When, where and how long for?   A fortnight did you say?’
        ‘Two weeks, yes,   The MS ‘Dunvegan’, departing Leith tomorrow week.   Scottish Highlands and Islands etcetera.   It looks like an insurance scam but there’s also some sort of link with an on-board lecturer on Archaeology, the chef and the croupier.  And when the ship calls at Lerwick ...’
         ‘OK you’ve convinced me, I’m on, so long as you promise that we don’t have to go through all that posh suit, white dress stuff.’

[I posted the first six sentences of this on 6S, and thereby confused several people, so I have done a couple of edits and am putting the whole of the opening chapter here.   Obviously my intention is to intrigue rather than irritate - if you have a comment on this I'd be extremely glad to hear it!]

Day 2 NaNo - 5262 words

Hmm ... plenty of words but I'm not sure how much more I can do before I start to get horribly mired in a plotless - and hence directionless and pointless - tale.
I need a motive or two, I need to write a convincing baddy, I need to decide whether I'm writing a psychological thriller or a simpler (ha!) murder mystery.
Spent much of the day trying to sort what I already had into some logical order, with only limited success.
And actually what I think I need is some time away from the computer, where I am impelled to put words down, so I can doodle and think ...
I have finished re-reading Ian Rankin's 'Resurrection men' novel, and hope not to be tempted into starting another ... he is so dauntingly superb.

Day 1 NaNo - 2616 words

This year is very different to last.   Much more of a patchwork operation.   Last year I had two or three major conversations which had to be connected - and hugely expanded - to form some sort of novel-length story.   This year, beginning with an outline, I have a rag bag of characters - thirty of them, gathered in from myriad places - about whom random, and sometimes contradictory short pieces have been written.   I've spent quite a lot of time trying to plan how these characters might relate to each other but it is clear that I can't start with chapter one and work forwards in a straight line, but will have to keep zig-zagging about to add clues and red herrings to make sure that I create a worthwhile whodunnit.   I have  the first 4/5 days mapped out and have sort of identified one baddy, have one linking goody and so far, one body ...