'Step so grave' - at last!

and now available via Blurb

Eight years ago I signed up for NaNoWriMo 2011 with plans to write a murder mystery (a genre I then knew little of).

I had a title. An idea: a cruise ship on which brides were bumped off to order. I had back stories for a dozen honeymooning couples; for ship’s crew and owners (some good, some bad). Best of all I had DI Luke Darbyshere and crime reporter Baz Rose, whose from-the-cradle friendship had turned toxic. All I needed to do was convincingly bump off a few brides under suspicious circumstances, by person-as-yet-unguessed-at, for reasons I could not begin to imagine.

Nearly eight years later, the final, final version of ‘Step so Grave’ is available to order.

Not only did the original undergo a change of title and me commence a steep learning curve – simultaneously reading some 700 crime novels and learning how to structure a readable novel – but, thanks to fellow writers and a succession of beta readers, asking pertinent questions and pointing out self-indulgences I reached a point where Step so grave was far removed from a shitty first draft and, having undergone eleven rewrites, became something I’m confident enough about to release upon a paying public. [Click on the link via the image in the sidebar]

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50219754-step-so-grave" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Step so grave (Love triangles with murder #1)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1563968396l/50219754._SX98_SY160_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50219754-step-so-grave">Step so grave</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1226042.Sandra_Davies">Sandra   Davies</a><br/>

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Available from: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9633748-step-so-grave">https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9633748-ste...</a>

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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8882805-sandra">View all my reviews</a>

Words paint pictures

Said so often but it really came home to me today when, having finished reading an admirably detailed police procedural, the main characters and their activities described with warmth; the progression of the plot with clarity, I returned to continue with the writing of one of mine.

I was immediately struck with the comparative stark sketchiness of my version of a police briefing. Perhaps because the book just finished* dealt with painting, I realised that my paintings and prints similarly outline; drawn with the minimum of detail for the viewer to get the gist.

In part, with writing, my knowledge of police briefings is scant enough to provide a reason for lack of detail, yet I am reluctant to go seek it, believing readers deserve to exercise their imagination.

 The degree to which they wish to has, of course, an impact on how much they are likely to enjoy my books. When I finally get them published (and this one I'm only 80% through writing.)

*Jackie Baldwin's 'Perfect Dead', set in Dumfries & Galloway, much of the action in 'art town' Kirkcudbright.

53,415 - a bit more than a shitty first draft

Tis done. And, I have to confess, at times the process was definitely a shitty one. I am more conscious this time of the work still to be done, not least the removal of one or two scenes of duplicated information.

Against this, the several times additional layers suggested themselves to me as I typed. Sometimes mistakenly, such as the one where I completely forgot making a bloke impotent in Chapter 3 and had him possibly impregnating someone at the end. But it is possible that the concentrated effort definitely added value to the exercise. But that he was doing anything was a bonus since I've been trying since July to flesh out his bones and only yesterday succeeded.

Adding NaNo count to what remains untouched from before, amounts to 62K. Plenty more to develop and flesh out. Twists and who was where, when to sort out. I don't expect to have the book ready to be called finished until this time next year. Especially as I still have NaNoWriMo 2011's to finalise.

Frequent cul-de-sacs, and a shape-dictating Blurb

Two weeks or more trying out and researching plotlines, identities and motives for Drink with a Dead Man. A little help gained from from Dylan, Denzil Meyrick, divers and dirty lay-bys, and I've found it necessary to write a blurb in an attempt to keep me on the straight and narrow: 

Christopher Tillerman has been dead for eight years, but when the man he’s now become receives notification of a wedding which cannot be allowed to proceed – and he the only person who can stop it – he has no choice but to return to England to take responsibility for mistakes made in his previous life.

But who has summoned him?

And why?

Edinburgh crime reporter Baz Rose receives a cryptic email from an ex-uni friend, asking to meet.

But is it A, C or D?

Across town, DI Luke Darbyshere, in the first flush of a promising relationship, has a rendezvous with a man who is supposed to be anonymous.

So what is he doing, deep in conversation with a high-class prostitute with connections?

  

And then someone dies.

That final line added to remind me that it IS billed as a 'murder mystery' so someone had better die. At this moment I've not a clue who it will be, at whose hands, or why.

Progress

17K words into third of trilogy - working title evolved from 'Luke's story' to 'Commission and Omission' - and far better-organised thanks to SE course.

Bloody Scotland had a hand in it too - the short story written for that will be expanded and incorporated, plus I am getting huge amounts of inspiration from reading and re-reading Chris Brookmyre's Jasmine Sharp trilogy! 

Obviously I'm very much looking forward to the workshop I'm doing with him in Stirling on the nineteenth of this month.

Growing a character

Ivo was born at a writing retreat – the fifth such – in a cabin in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. (Thanks to MH for the photo)

Seeded by a photo prompt; rooted more sturdily via a challenge to channel Hemingway, he pushed forth his first healthy shoots via an eleven-sentence exercise loosely based on Bob Thurber’s http://home.comcast.net/~bob-thurber/anatomy.html.

Next came an effortless and unexpected bloom:

'Ivo makes love like an alley cat. Skinny and slippy and quick. Ends with a grunt; an unsmiling appraisal of the woman beneath him who’s already forgiven him since she came at the moment he entered her; having feared that he’d leave her without.’

And rumour had it he teaches art ...

I've a place for Ivo. A barely-begun novel, the last of a trilogy, where I hope he'll bear much fruit, and
I’m waking earlier and earlier these days, needing to set down conversations.

Self-editing - last post

Six weeks has flown by, usefully and enjoyably.  And worth every penny, for the friends made, the insights and skills learnt and for the fact that I now know where to take my book next, and why.
Debi Alper asks questions.  Difficult questions that I can, for a while, ignore, hands over ears, muttering "yes but ..."
In the end it's not so much that I can't ignore as it becomes so bloody obvious.  A 'light bulb moment' as she is fond of saying.

Phew.

At just over ninety thousand words I feel able to declare what began life as 'Susannah Elphinstone' and what is currently 'Longest shadows reach' finished.  By which I mean after many many re-readings and writings I think it is, apart from minor tweaks, finished.

It is the follow up to what was .'Not wanted on voyage' and became 'A step so grave' which I temporarily abandoned after submitting it to an agent and a book doctor at York's Festival of Writing in September. This had undergone three major re-writes and I did not then have the stamina for an immediate fourth one.

I also have 'Making good' awaiting a final edit - the fourth and final on in the Bridie and Sean saga.

My intention is to sign up for the six week  'Self editing your novel', course run by the Writers Workshop which begins January 7th, using 'Longer shadows reach'  but before that I intend to play a bit more with the cover design.

Scrivener - learning curve and procrastination

As I've said before, I'm using 'Scrivener' for this current novel, having realised that with three strands of story and the need to interleave events taking place on different time lines, some more flexible way of working was needed.  The quickly re-aligned index cards, colour-coded, with date in the title, have been invaluable, especially once I'd learnt that it made sense initially to separate scenes.

I don't like - or haven't yet learnt - how to match the appearance of the main Scrivener page with what I get in my Word document.  Appearance, of the document on the page, is important insofar as I get distracted if it looks wrong.  So, I am writing in Word and then, at certain stages - when a mental pause is needed - re-uploading section by section.

Each card has the option of allocating a status to it.  Naming the status is up to me.  I have 'first draft', 'revised draft' and there is a default 'final draft'.  Something has so far prevented me from allocating 'final draft' to a single one of the sixty-eight cards already written.
 

Everything come to she who waits ...

Not that I think, or am claiming, that it is a good way to progress a novel.

But, yes.  I've not been just waiting on this.  Thought I'd got the answer, more or less.  One of two answers anyway.  As I've said before, 'Susannah Elphinstone' began with a blurb challenge, utilising the name of the heroine from an in-progress novel. (Not Susannah:  Madigan.)  It sat for  while, then the premise suggested a story, characters began talking to each other, as they are wont to do, and the book began to take shape, my only input the decision to make it a thriller with a far smaller cast than I'd used before.

Progress was made by conversations:  Madigan with Baz, Baz with Luke, Luke with Madigan.  Ed became involved.  Then the action moved to where Susannah lived.   I remembered that it was a thriller I was supposed to be writing.  Someone had to die.  Actually, someone had died at the beginning, that was left over from the earlier book.  But I needed someone else.

Fifteen to twenty thousand words in I decided who that someone would be.  Next thing, of course, who did it?

Yes indeed.  Who did do it?  For focus' sake it had to be one of two, from up to seven possibilities.  I had to work out how, had to factor in red herrings and misinformation.  Input reasons, methods, timetable, confusion.  I eventually found myself continually see-sawing between two individuals, unable to satisfactorily plump for one over the other.  Unable to justify or even convince myself how.  Quite important that:  if I wasn't convinced I sure as hell would not be able to convince any reader.  Oh, and I also needed to inject pace, and manage a final, surprising, last-minute, totally unforeseeable twist to the tale.

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, the answer came to me.  Of course.  It wasn't either of them, that was why I'd been struggling;  it was someone I'd barely noticed, someone who'd been sending out his own misinformation.  And when I started looking I could see exactly how he'd done it, what lies he'd told, how he'd fooled all of them.  And me too.

So now all I have to do is write it down.   In the correct order.  Remembering that there are things which need not be said until the end.  Gosh.

Blind to the screamingly obvious

Woke this morning, before 4 a.m. (not unusual) and used the time before getting up to think about my current wip, always a useful exercise as I spend far too long sitting at the keyboard typing not thinking.

I use a dialogue a lot to progress the plot, and realised that thus far no-one has even mentioned that there is a four week gap between man disappearing and man dying, never mind wondered why.
I know what happened (mostly) but they don't.  You'd think they would ask, wouldn't you?
At least I have the word-room to write it - a tightening of style, a reduction of characters, a more focused approach means thus far this is still well under 80K.
Onwards.

Festival of Writing at York

Later today I'm heading for York.  My first Festival of Writing.  Pushed into it by a conscience which kept reminding me that my New Year's resolution was, deliberately vaguely, 'do something about finding an agent.'  So, at 2.40 this afternoon I have ten minutes with an agent.  Later, another ten minutes with a 'Book Doctor'  Both have had, since the middle of last month, the first 3000 words of what used to be 'Not Wanted on Voyage', is now 'A Step So Grave' - taken from Robert Louis Stephenson's ‘Virginibus Puerisque’:   'Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness’

The programme for the weekend is stuffed with workshops, discussions and opportunities to meet other agents, writers and I, who am so used to solitude, will have to adapt to being surrounded by people, a great many of whom are much more adept than I at social communication.   Yet there will be at least as many of the same mind as me, since writing is a solitary occupation. 

I'll maybe be a bit frustrated too, since the follow up novel - working title 'Susannah Elphinstone' since that is the name that came first, but likely 'Longer Shadows Reach' - is going well,  But a break will likely not harm it.

Hopefully I'll be reporting Good Things.

Prospective TV series for wanna-be writers ...

A short clip (twelve minutes) presumably from a pilot, can be seen here 

Delphine, with her very first manuscript, gets an opportunity to show it to Carol Blake, who has taken on just two writers in six years (from at least a dozen submissions a day)

All my trials: Scrivener

A recommendation for Scrivener last week - and a list of reasons why - from Emma Darwin's excellent blog.
I tried it once before when I set myself up for Script Frenzy, but both died within days (my fault - too little preparation of either Script or software) but now being aware of the amount of work it took to sort Not wanted on voyage into sensible order, and that the follow-up will be trickier, I thought it worth a second go.

The video is useful, as is the tutorial, but the best thing is that the 30 day trial is for thirty days, i.e. if you have a day when you don't use it, it doesn't count, you don't have to use it within that time.

One day spent wrestling, back and forth between tutorial and a section of my wip left me scratchy and exhausted, but I think it will, in the long run, be useful, although it needs to be remembered it is an organizational tool rather than a writing tool.

Excarnation

Excarnation - the removal of flesh from the bones, a word known to me from reading John Hedges 'Tomb of the Eagles' wherein he describes burial practices in Neolithic Orkney.  It is my intention to do the same for 'Not wanted on voyage' since without exception the comments of four most excellent readers on WriteWords said, in a variety of ways, 'too, too wordy!' 

In one way it pains me to deprive the reader of the detail of how Ian and Lydia met, how Davy rescued Fay and Zoë's deceived her mother, especially when I have already wiped out how Natasha got pregnant, what happened at the blood donor session and just what a nasty piece of work Gareth's daughter is.   In another way, especially with the months of 'Prediction' practice I've had at fitting a tale into one hundred words - and making it interesting! - I actively welcome the challenge (and précis was something I always was good at.)
  
I envisage the finished product as being not entirely skeletal - but have no idea how long it will take.   Nor whether I'll have got sick of the whole thing by then.

Reiprocal writing help

On  20th March I posted about beta readers, wondering how they were to be found.  On 22nd March I joined the WriteWords site and a few days later, the 'Whole MS read/swapping' group.  There I posted one, then fourteen, chapters of my problematical 'Not wanted on voyage'.

In just three weeks I have had four folk read and comment on it, with honesty, insight and courtesy, which was way beyond my expectations (the reading, not the courtesy etc).
So I thank Gaius, Arboreal Sal, AlanH and Astrea whose comments have been exactly what I needed to know what is still required to knock this into a shape which others might want to read.  ('Prune' in a word - the length of my sentences, yet again causing problems; Astrea's "I don't think style should overwhelm meaning" being especially pertinent)   Can't say it'll be easy but am sure it'll be worthwhile.

It is, of course, absolutely necessary to reciprocate, to also read and comment on others' work, otherise the group fails to function, but that is no hardship when I consider the pleasure I get from that.  Also, there are myriad other groups, you don'r have to have an MS, but this I CAN and do recommend.

IIIA, IIIAlpha, III Aleph, and beta readers

The first year classes at the grammar school I went to were streamed into III A, III Alpha, III Aleph, second year was IV B, IV Beta, IV Beth and so on.   I was always middle stream so was either Alpha or Beta.

But I'd never heard of the term 'beta reader' until the year before last, when someone commenting, I think, on one of my Friday Book Blurbs (alas no more) that she would volunteer if ever I wrote the book I'd so enticingly blurbed.   It was a reasonably self-explanatory term, however, and I thought no more of it.   Until last week when I thought I could do with a few folk to read my current novel and tell me whether or not it works - for them - and if not why not. 
So I Googled the term and discovered, at a quick sprint through random posts (couldn't justify the term 'research') that such creatures are rare, temperamental, likely to be either upsetting in their tactless candour or lying in their fulsome praise, mightinsist on payment and will likely want you to reciprocate.
The latter - reciprocation - I would willingly do in theory, but it would ten be necessary to choose readers who write in a similar genre.   Which educes choice even further.   Always assuming there is choice in the first place.

Anyone any experience they can offer so's I know more before making an attempt to find me some beta readers?

Only seven plots - only seven endings?

I'm not going to identify the ending - but I want to put it on record that the denouement in Tony Black's 'Murder mile', which I finished reading yesterday, is near identical to the childhood secret shared by Luke Darbyshere and Baz Rose, which was hinted at in 'Not wanted on voyage' (and in place since October 2011) and forms one of the main strands for the as-yet-untitled follow-up, of which 50K words has already been written.
Just so's you know I'm not copying!

Back story and Stuart MacBride

 In real life I'm one of those over-earnest people who fears being misunderstood, especially by people whose opinion I value or expect to value.   So it's not surprising that I made sure that in my fourth Bridie and Sean novel I felt the need to ensure that the reader knows all he needs to to 'get' who they are and (briefly) what has happened so far.   The first chapter of 'Making good' wrote itself, full of impact and ending on a brilliant page turner.   Chapter two was inserted partly to add variety and delay the 'reveal' signalled in chapter one, partly to provide what I felt to be required back story.   Reading it was, despite my best efforts, despite changing as much as was feasible into dialogue, liking to digest an uncooked suet pudding and when I found myself skipping it when re-reading I knew I had to find a different way of doing this.

Stuart MacBride doesn't do back story.
In Len Wanner's first volume of 'The Crime Interviews'* in which best-selling authors talk about writing crime fiction, MacBride says of his first Logan McRae novel:  "I didn't want it to read like the first novel of a series. I wanted it to read as if it had appeared in the middle of a series. I loathe back story in all its myriad forms."

I've just finished reading his 'Birthdays for the dead' ;  a stand-alone novel which has Ash Henderson as the first person main character.   Aged forty-five, he has led a helluva full and complex life, knows lots of people, at all levels.   None of this, or the relationships referred to in the first chapter, are spelt out, and I have to make and remake assumptions as the story goes on, exactly as you do in real life.

Within a short time I found myself deeply envious of not only Ash but other characters - where does MacBride find them?   How does he portray them so vividly?  And that is what I need to do next - re-read, try not to get caught up too much in the headlong rush of the story, and try and spot how and then to transfer the skills to my writing.


*Wanner, Len (2012-02-28). The Crime Interviews Volume One: Best-selling Authors Talk About Writing Crime Fiction (Kindle Locations 879-880). Blasted Heath. Kindle Edition.

Why I write

Earlier today I read Kerry's account 'Why do I write?'  much of which resonated with me (I never failed to enjoy her descriptions of life on a crab boat).

An hour or so later two to-be-proofed copies of 'Making good' arrived - extremely fast and efficient service - thank you Lulu!.   Thus far I have merely hugged them, skimmed the pages and tweaked the slightly mis-aligned cover.

I shall re-read, with pencil and paper to hand, in a few weeks when it's had time to fade from my memory so it comes fresh again.

So I've put them on the shelf where I can sit and glow gently about them ...


In the meantime, I am struggling - and I do mean struggling - to find ways and means of editing, re-writing, shuffling and making a good deal sharper, last year's NaNoWriMo novel.