good wishes

All good wishes for a peaceful, contented Christmas

 and a brilliant 2014

Dish of the day?

The shape of his head, more visible as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, was reminiscent of an Elisabeth Frink – stone Tribute rather than bronze Aggressor.

Solid column of throat the same for either.  His sweat-varnished, black against soft white cotton.

I stepped inside. 

Behind me, a collective intake of breath, part-suppressed;  a single eruption of protest, immediately silenced.  From Julian, who I hadn’t yet learned to trust. 

His hands lifted slightly, a thin rattle of a chain. 

He whispered again, lips rimed with light, eyes lignite glittering.

My blood ran cold.

From behind me silence.  Avidly awaiting entertainment.

One of this week's entries for Prediction Fiction, prompt words varnish, erupt, cold. 

Threshold

From the doorway all that could be seen was the gleam of his cotton shirt and the whites of his eyes.  The rest of him was in shadow.   Unsurprising: boarded-up windows allowed only a thin-drawn rectangle of light.  He’d backed himself into the corner, somehow levered himself to standing, the bulk of him merging into the shadows.  I had to trust the shackles held.

Had to trust them too.   I didn’t know why they’d sent me to fetch him.  Didn’t know why they laughed behind me nor, when he saw me, why his teeth gleamed too, whispering, ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

One of my 100 word pieces for this week's Predction Fiction - using  flatter, cotton, shackle

A story of mine accepted for an anthology of horror stories, 'At the Stroke of Thirteen', which is to be illustrated by Comic book legend Nick Cuti.  Immensely flattering as I never thought of myself as a writer of horror.

I submitted a tale called 'Dischordant', a follow-up to 'Edge:  curve, arc, circle' and am curious to see what he makes of my Neolithic Orcadian tale.

Four o’clock

She wasn’t easy to pigeonhole.  Which made it all so difficult.   If they’d been able to be certain, the solution would be easy – bullet in the head, burial in the closest cement-poured project.  All the evidence indicated... timing, sightings, her bank accounts’ steady acquisitions of cash.

But face to face felt like a setback:  genteel parlour, doves cooing, latticed windows curtained with William Morris ‘Golden Lily’, velvet settee protected with pampas-grass embroidered antimacassar and arm-covers, India tea served in fragile Royal Pembroke bone china...

...it was the tea, of course.  And, after strenuous chopping, she found them very easily pigeonholed. 

One of two entries for this week's Prediction Fiction,  prompt words:  pigeon, cover, setback.

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.

Return to Porthfeddon at MuDJoB

A short story of mine - Return to Porthfeddon - is now up at the excellent MuDJoB site.

Another sign of the times?

Less than a quarter awake with two stories in my head which I am certain I have written:   skinny impoverished  black girl reaches the front of a queue to be given ... clothes?  Food? Entry?  Three, four places behind (written a half a day or something later) a black boy, darker skinned whose tale is only part-defined.

I spend time trying to bring the two together.  

Trying to recall the words I used.

But the more awake I am the more the words dissolve, until I’m left with two well-washed and frayed squares of cotton, on which the words have changed themselves - hers become milk chocolate coloured stripes, his faded into dots of semaphore, which I am unable to translate.

Woke with an opening in my head ...

"Merk arrived as they were leaving, the distinctive nose of his car blocking the end of the drive.   Had David been driving he’d’ve backed down but Viv was made of sterner stuff. "

I've extended it to a drabble for a Prediction Fiction challenge, subsequently incorporating  'alto', histrionic' and 'ticking', as a first part of a holiday-themed horror serial, each episode to be dictated by the week's prompts, and yet to be sent to Colleen, but what a gift of  early-morning words.

Ensuring customer satisfaction

He must’ve Photo-shopped his picture – one half then the other to counteract the ever-shifting cast in his eye.  The foetid crosswind of his minted smokey-bacon breath was another thing you couldn’t check online.

Likewise voice.  His, attempting to cajole, was whining, ‘Sorry, Doll, body on the line at Bakerloo...’

I could check that later.  Maybe.  Nodded to Dave the barman;  he’d’ve known this one would need swift intervention. 

‘Gotta take a slash...’

Dave returned, unsmiling.  ‘I still say it’s a bit drastic...’

‘But if your Dating Agency guarantees client vetting, it’s essential to deliver...’

‘Even if it’s client into sewer?’

[This week's entry for Prediction Fiction, using 'crosswind', intervene', and 'cajole'.]

Impressed with myself!!

Having rested it for a couple of months I'm now re-reading my current work in progress.
Approaching the end I've just read a conversation between the two main protagonists and found myself thinking 'What?  What's going on?  I thought they'd already arrested the man responsible - what's the date of this conversation?'

Then I realised that they were discussing the final twist, the denouement, the surprise at the end ...

Of course I did know he had done it, and that All Was To Be Revealed at some point, but hadn't remembered how, or exactly when.   As I say, I've impressed myself, even if only for this evening.

Travelling

Back on Tuesday from a week in New Orleans - my second visit but my husband's first.  Ate and drank very well, discovered hitherto unknown bookshops, went to a free BluesFest in Lafayette Square and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.
Then northwards, finding out how little we knew of how small town America functioned - only one restaurant open in the centre of Jackson on a Monday night - but also saw cotton fields, cotton picking and cotton bales.
Arrived at the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale - the highlight of the fortnight - and met with the best sort of friends from Alabama who taught and showed us so much of the area, including a memorable lunch which Mike Handley wrote about here.

Now I'm off to Cardiff ... still working on latest novel, still with two end of year deadline short stories, so I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo this year either.

End of the game

‘The cellar is now empty.’

So.  A now-dry cellar, a once dry wit, now maudlin; a once beautiful, flat-bellied man now bloated and bald as the bassist from Queens of the Stone Age. 

Sans goatee, of course.

He’d got the hint that hirsute was unwelcome the night I super-glued it with extensions, using what the poodle clearly didn’t want, since she’d left it in her basket. 

Had lost nothing of his powers of observation though.

Unwithered by my scorn, he crossed the room.  Took me by the shoulders.  Turned me to face the glass that hung between two windows.  Forced me to contemplate the scraggy bag of loose-bound bones, barely fit for soup.  Set his hands beneath and lifted high the once-was-black, now white and wuthering swirly mass of elf-locks.

Briefly he touched his lips to my rarely-exposed neck, then, holding my reflected eyes in his, he said, unsmiling, ‘Checkmate after all.’

Ran out of time to write something new - this, part three of the 'Chess Pieces' posted a couple of days ago - was my response to House of Writers prompt 10, which was to write a tale which featured a hairless man, a big-haired woman and a  shedding dog.

Signs and portents to a new direction?

... or simply coincidences?

Yesterday I arrived early at the dentist.  Top of the magazine pile was a Travel magazine, quickly browsed and only articles on places I'd recently been were perused.  Next, one of those glossy aspirational ones, gorgeously scruffy, scumbled paint, sun-bleached wood, Suffolk farmhouse conversions.  Just about the only thing that has me panting for riches. And dishonestly - where would I find the time?

So, I turned to a short story, read it, mildly enjoyed it, then was reminded - was forcibly dragged back to a childhood when such stories had formed part of my staple diet.  My mother's magazines, and those of my aunt.  And the neighbour's. The stories, the serials, the accompanying, usually water-colour, paintings that illustrated them (and those I do remember, wanting to emulate, believing that was what painting was for.)

I've known since I started writing, I almost never do stories.  Briefly, as I followed the dental assistant into the surgery, I wondered why.   Then the news of Alice Munro, who I had heard of but it hadn't registered that she wrote only short stories.

This morning the first line of a possible short story popped into my head. But possibly, if it grows enough, I could turn it into a novel.

Chess pieces

He played chess like a politician in the midst of a crisis.  Drunk out of his skull and imitating two out of three of those bloody brass monkeys.  (Were they brass, originally?  The ones in my childhood had been, but God alone knows who they came from.  Or where they went.)

It was me that spoke evil.

But then it was me that gave him the problem.  He blew it up into a crisis.

I’d suggested the chess to create a breathing space.  Was a time I’d have used words like ‘strategy’. Was a time he’d’ve played me for all I’m worth (and, yes, I do know my worth).

Tonight all I needed was ‘checkmate.’

***

‘Zugzwang’

A guttural growl, which I first took for the Basset hound beneath his chair.  Realising it was him I checked again the pieces on the board.

He was correct.

I waited, poised for him to make the final move: not one in the book of course, but customarily an overturning of the table, an upsetting of the board, sweeping of the table, so that kings and queens; knights, bishops and rooks were scattered, black and white, across the red-tiled floor.

He surprised me.

Picked up the bottle he’d most recently emptied, (three more lay on the floor, rolling and dribbling as he was wont to do, after the fifth) and, squinting, read its label.

‘Two thousand and nine.  The last year Hooglangley Wines made anything decent.  And this the last bottle.  Three years drought has been the death of them.  But might have been the saving of mine.’

Focusing on my no doubt disbelieving face, he explained, ‘The cellar is now empty.  I’ve done what I promised myself I’d do.

I've drunk it dry.’

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.
 

All in a name? - a ten minute piece of flash fiction

The keys were there, on the doormat.  Attached to the plastic tab with the ludicrous photo of herself, age four, covered in chocolate and laughing at the camera;  her brothers out of focus in the background. 

They’d rushed up straight after the photo had been taken, of course, each with a bucket of water, and had taken it in turns to throw some over her.  Not a lot; Mum – she’d been ‘Mummy’ then, of course – had kept a watchful eye.  Always said, if she ever did come complaining (and by four she’d learnt not to!) ‘You’re a Rose, not a shrinking Violet!’.  Similarly she’d brought the boys up not to be savages. 

But. 

The keys on the doormat. 

Evidence for sure that she should have been more shrinking.

If she had been she’d not now be standing here, in the hallway, scratchy from the stupid form-filling, the endless bladder-heavy waiting around, the patronising questions about ‘the father’.  And the smug looks of pity from all those feeble, unable to stand alone, brainless, do-anything-for-a-council house morons with their spotty sperm donors, none of whom ought to be being allowed to breed in the first place!

And she’d not be snivelling, snot down her face, bawling her eyes out.  Knowing that he’d been here.  Let himself in with the keys she’d given him.  Collected his stuff, locked the door behind him and dropped the keys through the letter box so as to tell her he’d never be coming back again. 

Take it away Tuesday:  'The keys were there' - todays prompt for Thinking Ten.  This, like so many other pieces, is a part-rehearseal, part character sketch for my current wip.

Triple benefit - prompt, novel and blog post

Last night, re-reading an earlier part of 'Susannah Elphinstone' (that's the working title;  it might end up as 'Longer Shadows Reach' if I can get permission from the poet to quote him) led me to realise I needed a description of the adult version of my MC.

I wrote a note to remind me and left it on my laptop.

This morning, an email from Kerry Logan of Thinking Ten telling me today's 'on location' prompt was 'a bedroom facing east'.

Perfect.

Mind mulling over possibilities as I walked up to buy a paper, scribbled phrases before I ate my breakfast, brain given its work out over the crossword, then upstairs to spend just a little more than ten minutes getting the bare bones down.

'Tis done.

Fits snugly into novel;  now posted on T10  - and I've also got a subject for today's blog challenge.

And it isn't even nine o'clock yet.

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.

Downs and Ups

Yesterday finished disillusioned, crotchety and, although not fully despairing, bad enough to need a sneaky, well-heaped teaspoonful of chocolate spread to attempt to restore my belief that, sometimes, when the moon and stars were right, and in alignment, I could write.

The reason for this was I'd finished reading through my most recent work in progress.  Had, for much of it, been quite impressed, especially at the bits I'd no recollection of writing.   But the end.  Oh the end.  Was wrong and self-indulgent, irrelevant and totally off-topic.  Brought in new characters who really did not deserve their place, took attention away from the main character (who in any case was struggling to assert himself at times).
And I still have not quite decided how the second body came to be dead.  Still do not know which of the two most likely was finally responsible for the dastardly deed.  The evidence mounts up quite nicely, tension builds between MC and rival, there is character development (though not quite enough) - but only seventy-four thousand words.

This morning, with a couple of yesterday's tried-but-failed, prompt-led diversions rattling round my head, an idea for each took root, grew shoots, produced a lovely phrase or two, a voice, a phone conversation and a couple of neat endings.
Having polished them successfully, posted them, and put the washing out, I'm now ready to tackle Susannah Elphinstone again.

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.

Bad Book Learning

This reading for writing idea is not always as straightforward - or as easy - as it sounds, is it?
Parallel to me writing a crime novel I began, for the first time, apart from a few Ian Rankin's, reading them - both crime and thriller.  I discovered there was a huge variation in type as well as style, but that I really enjoyed a lot of them, especially those with characters who developed as book followed book.
I learnt that short sharp sentences add pace, that descriptions of fights are hard to do convincingly (and boring when they go on too long), that good sex can be told - or at least implied - in just three words.
And I've no doubt I learnt a lot unconsciously - or do I mean subconsciously?.
Since York, where I bought books by WW-connected writers, I've fully realised that when a book is really good I can only read with 100% enjoyment.  Even though I always mean to take note, go back, analyse how it's done, I rarely do because I am on to the next book.  Harry Bingham's wonderful 'Talking to the Dead' came into this category.
Two others were much more informative.  One, totally unreadable, but at least I now know that it would have benefited immeasurably from a bit of psychic distance. (Though I doubt that alone would have rescued it).  The other, fast paced and brilliantly-plotted, brought home to me that a superfluity of adverbs and too imaginative a deviation from plain old 'said'  are definitely to be avoided.  I'm grateful to 'How Not to Write a Novel' for that.

Prediction Fiction

Herewith the two latest episodes for Prediction Fiction, using the prompts alabaster, pore and waxwork.  The whole of the tales involving DS John Pettinger and the disgraced and disgraceful Tao can be accessed from the tabs above.  
 

A change of focus [57]

 Pettinger pored over the images Cherriman had smugly produced.  Spread across the faux-alabaster kitchen worktop their several lurid messages were shocking.

Not so much for what they depicted but that Cherriman knew such things had taken place

‘They’re fakes.’

‘You have to prove that.  In a court of law if necessary...’

‘I’ll risk that.’

Pettinger remembered a waxwork-buttocked judge, last seen handing wads of cash to greedy, now-dead, Gunita. 

He sighed.

‘Cherriman, now Raptor’s gone, surely we can re-negotiate?  I’ve no interest in Khakbethia...’

‘Me neither. I need a tame policeman here.’

‘It won’t be me.’

‘I think it will.’

Dirty tricks

Mutterings warned Drusilla not to approach too closely to the man whose gun threatened her daughter’s life, e’en as the mob parted to permit her passage.  Rarely seen in daylight she shocked the elders who’d known her, biblically, who’d pressed themselves against her alabaster skin, soot-pitted pores of which now close resembled leaf-mould.

She  halted twenty feet before them. 

Described some swift finger-writ message in the air, whereupon her daughter’s face became yellow waxwork.

‘She curses you?’  Tao, mildly incredulous.

‘I stole her magic...’

‘Then she cannot harm...’

Premature:  his pale passenger slumped against him, causing his gun to fall.

'The Blacksmith's Wife' (illustrated on the left) precedes Tao's tale.

The numbers game

This is my 547th post on this blog and my 47th wedding anniversary.  Significant?  No, of course not.  Just one of those things.
Yet when I woke, about a hour ago, one of my first thoughts was to remember the day, the date, and recall some of the supposedly significant things one ought not to do at the start of a marriage, not if its success is to be anything like guaranteed.  (But who really believes that everlasting happiness can be guaranteed, that the perfect marriage exists?  No-one who has been married for any length of time, I bet.)
That wedding day - a compromise (of course) between what we wanted, which was only to be married so we could live together; what my mother wanted, i.e. the sort of wedding she could endlessly discuss with her workmates (unkind, and only one aspect but one that I strongly disliked) and what his parents wanted, which was a) not yet (we were young) and b) in church, which we flatly refused, being non-believers and not wanting to begin married life with a hypocrisy.
And we broke another cardinal 'rule' - travelled in the same car to the Registry Office - two cars cost twice as much.
I won't even tell you about the proposal, which has to count as one of the most unromantic in the whole world.  I certainly never said 'yes'.

I'd better believe it!

No, not the report of a survey which reported that '36% of women prefer to have a tidy house to having sex' - done by a cleaning company, that's clearly biased! - but that I can do hooks, revelations, turning points - whatever is the preferred term for those things to insert in a novel to maintain the reader's interest.

In York, at the Festival of Writing, I heard the term 'reward reader's for their investment' for the first time. Their investment of both money and time, which has to be paid for with my providing them with interesting, entertaining, unputdownable characters.  The best way to do this is to have the above-mentioned hooks etc. scattered judiciously throughout, adding a page-turning element.

Now, I know that my Prediction Fiction serials (Pages tabs above), which are only a hundred words long, more often than not end with a hook;  which more than one commenter has referred to as a 'killer line'.

So why am I struggling so to scatter them throughout a novel?  And have the plot hang together?

Psychic Distance

Probably the best, i.e. most useful/exciting, workshop of the lot at York, for me, was Debi Alper talking about Psychic Distance.

Debi and Emma Darwin spend an entire week on the topic in their six week on-line course 'Self-editing your novel', which runs three or four times a year via the Writer's Workshop, but even the single example she made us attempt was an eye-opener.  And not only for writing, but reading too - I could recognise Psychic  Distance in action in Lesley Glaister's writing, and now know that it is one of the main reasons books totally fail to sparkle.

More information here:
http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

More useful, by far, than just listening was being told to do an exercise using Psychic  Distance.  We were given ten minutes in which to describe the reaction of a soldier just returned from war as he meets his father for the first time, handing him a photograph:

Steps.  Five of them.  Will I be able to manage them, with half a leg and the other barely functioning?  I’ll look bloody silly if I fall, land on my arse.  

Though it wouldn't be the first time he’d’ve seen my fucking arse either, from what Ma said.  Then I had all my fucking bits too ... but O Christ ... he doesn’t have a fucking clue who I am.

I grope for the photograph, leaning on the concrete wall, half my mind taken up in the looking at him.

Although I do already use it instinctively, it was hard to do, and the follow-up - the ignorant father's response, even harder:

Another wounded soldier.

You can only do so much, and this one so young, no more than twenty, twenty-two perhaps.  The age that ...

No.  Impossible ... even though his eyes are so like Mary’s.  So very much like hers, blue of cornflower.  Too long since they smiled at me.  I was a bloody, bloody fool ...

What?

What’s this? ... A photograph?... Mary ... oh Mary.

York day 3

At home I prefer to eat alone, but mealtimes here have been stimulating and the perfect example of how, if you sit yourself alone at a table, within five minutes you've been joined by three more folk and quickly find yourself discussing, for example, daft names for detectives, going blind and (inevitably) What Agents Say.

'Tension' followed yesterday's 'Pacing' - a bandying about of words such as conflict, claustrophobia, deadline and morality and a warning not to skim the surface of interleaving events.  Then, 'How to write a sentence' with some yet-to-be-properly-perused handouts.  Followed by the art of plotting.

Also some mild encouragement to continue with my second wip, utilising lessons learnt from the first, which, since it is a far less weildy plot might be simpler.   I say 'might' now rather than the 'should' I used yesterday, since I have been thinking for an hour on the balance/interweaving of plots and sub-plots and trying to decide which of the three main characters should become the mainest of them

Inevitably, if you choose all workshops on similar themes there is overlap.  Some are more properly called lectures, the giver of them reading from prompt cards, some (the best) get us working so the lessons they impart are better understood, but the hard work, enthusiasm of these and the behind-the-scenes work of the organisers - as well as the staff at York University itself - could not be faulted.

S.J Bolton, whose work I so much admire, said when her book is finished, before final submission, she takes four or five days to read the whole thing aloud.  I've just tried that with a couple of paragraphs of mine and seen where they stumble (although at times I think a case can be made for internal reading to be different from aloud)  She also talked of the desperation to see her books upon bookshelves, to the extend where it hurts to go into a bookshop.   I don't have that, not that burning passion about anything really, but I DO want to write the best book possible so I will write and re-write and by the time I'm done the desperation might be there.

After all Sheila Hancock is writing her first novel at the age of eighty!

Now to absorb all I have learnt.

York day 2

Didn't get back to sleep after 3 a.m. wakening so some of the day was a little blurred at the edges.
But Adele Parks address was so stimulating that I did not suffer for long - as she said herself, a ballsy, go-getting lady who has certainly put the effort in and deserves everything she's achieved.
Then I got waylaid by buying books ... whoops.
But one was by Adam Close, who I belatedly realised was Eve Seymour, who so kindly commented yesterday on my wip and who did an excellent workshop on 'Crime and Pacing' - in an over-WARM room (a rarity).
Second highlight of the day - and sufficient to revive me when I was flagging - was Debi Alper's 'Psychic Distance' - basically the best way to add life to writing and lack of it the reason so many books fall flat.  I'd bought one of her books too ...
And the evening Gala Dinner and much wine and conversation ...
                                                                          ... and so to bed.

York, day 1

Wet, wet and cold - it wasn't meant to be like this - and weird to have folk with unknown faces coming up, addressing me (by an almost unrecognised name, chosen in a hurry) and introducing themselves by unknown names.  As one of the ~50% who have a photo of myself on the WordCloud blog, I've made it too easy.  But friendly, yes indeed.

Both my one-to-ones this afternoon.  Both giving me the same message:  must be either/or.  Romance+crime is not marketable.   Also many, many useful points about too diffuse a start, over-long sentences, unidentified MC.  One was given with a lot more warmth than the other, with sweeteners such as I can write, and I do dialogue well - with humour!  Sweeteners enough to have me awake at 3 a.m. planning how to kill off at least 30% of my darlings so as to improve/rewrite.  For the fourth time.

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.