rip it up and start again...

Current work: new book
Listening to: Bach
Reading: next on TBR (but I’m reading Locatelli’s ‘Made in Sicily’ at lunchtimes – fabulous and a bit inspirational as well)

So there I was, stuck on the book. Choice of tortoising away or playing with iPhoto… well, you know what I’ve been doing all week. (I am a bad puppy. I know.)

And then at 5am this morning I was wide awake and realised what the problem was. I'd started the book in the wrong place, because I was so keen to get the backstory in. (This is my 52nd M&B. How can I still make such basic errors?) Oh, and I'd started with the wrong characters.

As I lay there in the dark, it hit me what needed to be done.

Cue padding quietly downstairs to make a few notes on the iPad… and today will be better.

Book so far is officially scrapped. (Though of course I haven’t thrown it away. There are bits I intend to pinch from that. The basic stuff is fine – just not for this book.)

Liz's Little Book

I have a very special guest on my blog today - one of my all-time favourite writers (and I'm speaking about reading as well as in person - I have a shelf of her books and they're what I reach for whenever life is tough, because she takes me to another world and puts a smile on my face for the right reason).

I'm delighted to introduce Liz Fielding.

A hero has to be strong, tender, a man who would never let down the woman he loves. But he has to be flawed. If he were perfect there would be no story.
— Mollie Blake’s Writing Workshop Notes from Secret Wedding by Liz Fielding

Mollie Blake is a woman who knows what’s she’s talking about. I created her for my novella, The Secret Wedding and I’ve been listening to her advice ever since.

I really, really wish I’d had someone like her to hold my hand when I set my sights on writing romance in… Well, it was a very long time ago. It would have been wonderful to have her easing me through the agony of getting the story in my head onto paper. Alas, back then there were few “how-to” books to turn to in the UK, there was no internet and I’d never heard the words “critique partner”. I didn’t actually know anyone else who was writing anything. I was on my own.

I learned by doing, by writing, being rejected, reading the writers I wanted to emulate. It was a long, slow and very steep learning curve but the one thing you need if you want to be a writer is single-minded determination. My fourth submission, An Image of You, was — with a lot of help from an editor who saw something in my writing — published in 1992. Since then, I’ve had a wonderful career with more than sixty books in print.

My Little Book of Writing Romance is a straightforward writing romance primer. It’s the book I wish I’d had when I was fumbling through my first attempts at writing fiction, a hand in the dark to new writers struggling with the stuff it took me years to learn. And when you make it into print, please do email me to share the joy. Mollie and I will do the Snoopy dance for you.

Liz Fielding’s Little Book of Writing Romance is available as an eBook download from Amazon and for all other devices except the Nook (we’re waiting for Waterstones to stop messing about with their apostrophe and get on with it). Molly Blake’s story, The Secret Wedding, is available as a free online read.

technical hitch

Current work: new book
Listening to: Joe Bonamassa
Reading: next on TBR (but I’m reading Locatelli’s ‘Made in Sicily’ at lunchtimes – fabulous and a bit inspirational as well)

I was planning a special guest today, but had a technical hitch in that some of my mail got eaten (which included her piece for the blog - arrgh! Luckily she's a good friend and forgave my ineptitude).

(Question for next Apple training session, I think – if I delete something from the iPad, I don’t necessarily want it deleted from my desktop!)

Anyway. My special guest will be here tomorrow and she is definitely worth the wait :o)

awesome sauce

Current work: new book
Listening to: Joe Bonamassa
Reading: next on TBR

Am now officially in love with my iMac. And playing with photos is definitely on the ‘not allowed until daily word quota done’ list. iPhoto is just AWESOME, and I don’t use that word a lot – it really has stunned me that I can put in keywords, so for example I can press a button and pull up all the photographs I’ve tagged as son’s or daughter’s birthday, or all the sunsets, or all the rainbows. For a nerd like me who’s built databases from scratch (so I get how it works)… I just love this, and I am so giving myself a pleasure project over the next few months of scanning in favourite photographs from the years before I had a digital camera. (Obviously that’s after I’ve done my daily tortoising. I would say I’m being good but that’s a fib as I’ve been messing about with my photos all weekend!)

Car went in for a service this morning (all fine – as expected, as it was the first service), and that gave me time to have a cup of coffee in M&S to wake up ready for my training in the Apple shop. Although I’d booked an intro session, I had a few questions on things that were holding me back, and James was brilliant – instead of sticking strictly to the session parameters, he answered my questions and showed me how to do what I wanted to do (I’m a kinaesthetic learner so this was perfect for me). I have another session booked in a fortnight, and no doubt by then I’ll have more questions, but for now I’m having a lot of fun with this and am much more relaxed.

Still on the awesome sauce front, I have a special guest here tomorrow – one of my favourite writers (and I mean in all senses – she’s a lovely woman, a good friend and I’ve loved her books for years). Come back and see what she has to say…

busybusy

Current work: new book
Listening to: Beethoven
Reading: Jessica Hart, The Secret Princess (enjoyed this one, too)

Thursday already? Where has the week gone?

Tuesday was guitar lesson (droppeddown to fortnightly at the moment so I can manage my workflow better) and we messed about with Pachelbel and building up variations (i.e. play the root of each chord in the bass with the first four notes of Frère Jacques – that was fun). Yesterday was various school stuff in the morning, and dance class in the evening; we started learning the waltz (excellent for research purposes as well as being enjoyable). DH and I have worked out that it’s better if we don’t look at our feet…

Am going through my photographs in iPhoto (at the rate of 100 a day, as there are 10 years’ worth! – though I was doing it while thinking so I did more than that on Weds) and adding in names and places. Bit of a lump in my throat as I’ve just reached the pics of my 40th birthday and there’s a lovely one of Dad with me. (Have decided am not doing a birthday party this year – I found last year hard as I always used to make Dad the centre of attention, and I don’t really enjoy the focus being on me.)

Today, am focused on the new book. Because today is a grey, wet morning and we’ve had two beautiful sunrises in the early part of this week, I’m posting a pic of Tuesday morning’s sunrise (Tuesday’s pic was of Monday’s). Glorious. (You can't see it here, but the ploughed field at the front is covered in frost.)

beautiful sunrise

Current work: revisions (typing up, almost there, and then back to new books)
Listening to: Bach
Reading: Jessica Hart, Ordinary Girl in a Tiara (great fun – lovely heroine)

Lots of typing yesterday. Word 2011 takes a bit of getting used to, and Mail is driving me faintly potty, but I am persevering :o)

Glorious sunrise on the way to school yesterday. We’re so lucky with the skies in Norfolk.

Whoo-hoo!

Current work: revisions (typing up)

Listening to: Blur (hence the title of this post – you know the song!)
Reading: next on TBR

Have spent the past few days being diligent. (All right. I spent Thursday in the Apple shop and having lunch with DH, Friday seeing my stepmum and putting flowers on my parents’ graves – the bulbs on Dad’s grave are coming up, which is quite exciting – and Sunday afternoon in the Apple shop, having my initial training. Oh, and in between I did the paper edits on the book. And tidied my desk. That might count as haring rather than tortoising. But it was fun.)

Even though this was a planned changeover, it was still a bit stressful, and by Sunday afternoon my words were coming out wrong and I was coughing. (This is how you can tell that either I’m stressed or it’s past 10pm – no sense out of me then as I’m a lark, not an owl.)

Barnie at the Apple shop was utterly lovely – there were two of us for the ‘Mac and Me’ session and he was great at talking us through everything. And the moment I switched my iMac on for the first time and saw my doggie on the screen… just wow. One teensy problem: my emails didn’t migrate. (My fault for using Outlook as a filing cabinet, so now I have to set up my PC downstairs again and email everything to myself, or just print the stuff out.)

Oh, yeah. You want to see it, don’t you?


This is it – and the new printer – just after I set everything up. There are bets on how long the clear desk will last. (Two days, according to DH. And people who know me in real life and have seen inside my office will be looking at this and going, ‘What, that long? That is so NOT the usual state of her desk.’) I admit, my iPad and my glasses case and my hand cream migrated within 20 minutes of taking that pic (well hey, I’m middle aged, and Neutrogena Norwegian formula is the only stuff that gets rid of scaly lizard skin on my hands). But I am going to have a general tidy of my office in half term, including the cabinet on which my printer stands and which hasn't been opened for about three years, and am on a promise of help from lovely daughter, who was also very good at helping me tidy my desk on Friday.

Plan for today: get used to Word 2011, and put the paper edits onto soft copy. And then I might start going through my photos and putting in the details. I have LOTS of photos. This is all so exciting. (Thinks: how to persuade DH to buy me an external hard drive that’s the same size as my iPod… Ah, yes, upcoming birthday.)