Thursday 15 December 2011

Coming soon (maybe)

This blog is about the romantic comedy novel Looking For Buttons.

The book is complete.  The blog is on hold for a while: life keeps getting in the way.



Thursday 1 December 2011

Tumbleweed

Not much happening round here, is there?

Thank you for noticing.  That's because a lot has been happening elsewhere, not much of it related to writing, unless you subscribe to the "all experience is material" school of thought.  However, there are a few molecules of relevant information, so here they are:

1.  Looking for Buttons is doing the rounds with agents again.  I'm unconvinced I could cut it as an indie writer, especially since the 70s bonkbusteresque attempt at a cover image (not the idea I wanted to convey at all).

2.  I have a pen name at last, which I shall reveal when I am certain I'm not pinching anyone's identity in a heinous way.

3.  The thriller-with-no-name has a name but a blog about Looking for Buttons is not the place to reveal it.  I may have to start a new blog. Again.

4.  The follow-up to Looking for Buttons is underway.  I have characters, a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end and the actual writing has begun.

None of this is terribly exciting, I'll admit, but it is progress.

Do say hello if you're reading this.  It feels a bit like talking to myself, only with no-one answering.

Monday 12 September 2011

Busy doing, well, a little more than nothing

There isn't a great deal of progress to report.  I've scrapped the initial attempt at an e-book cover image, mainly because it made Looking For Buttons look like a seventies bonkbuster.  I can only think that most of what passes for my creative brain was tied up in 1978 working on the thriller when I did it.

Otherwise it's been business as usual:  tweaking the text after Norfolk Bookworm's feedback and submitting to another agent.  The thriller staggers on and the new romantic comedy is percolating nicely in the depths of my subconscious and should start to take shape on the page soon.

Right, can't hang around here all day.  I have to eavesdrop on some imaginary people and see if I can make a book out of it.

Wednesday 17 August 2011

Beginning at the beginning (or perhaps not)

I think I'm going to have to start a blog notebook in which to jot down all those wise and witty observations on the writing process that come to me when I'm clearing out the attic or wiping down worktops.  It would save a lot of time spent gazing at a blank screen with a mind that is even more so when I come to post something.

Having said that, occasionally what passes for my mind does throw the right thing up at the right time.  And time is what this post is all about.

Where does a book start?  Page one?  The first page after all the copyright declarations and the dedication to the author's mum?  Or does it start somewhere in the middle?

This isn't going to turn into a musing on the nature of space and time, even though I did finally get round to watching the BBC's docudrama on Stephen Hawking last night (to my consternation, I caught myself thinking there wasn't enough physics in it for my liking; obviously I'm more of a scientist at heart than I realised).  No, big bang theory and superstrings aside, I'm wondering how much the first paragraphs you write influence the rest of the book.

I don't necessarily mean the beginning of the story.  Looking For Buttons started with a young woman trapped at a party she didn't want to attend.  I wanted to know how she'd got there.  Several years later, the book was finished and, yes, the scene did make the final cut.  It's the set piece of Chapter Nine.  By the time I'd written the preceding eight chapters, I knew how the book would end and it was more or less a case of joining the dots until I reached the final line.

The book I'm supposed to be working on now sprang from watching a 60s spy show and disagreeing with how the hero dealt with a sticky situation.  My somewhat less than heroic protagonist deals with a similar situation in quite another way and does so in Chapter One.

As I flounder partway through Chapter Ten, I wonder whether this is the problem.  With Looking For Buttons, I knew where I was going and just had to find where to begin the journey.  With the new book, I got where I was going almost before I'd begun.  Maybe this is why it's taking me so long to get anywhere else.

Luckily, I have another scene in my head from much later in the story, as vivid as the reruns of The Professionals they're showing in the afternoons at the moment.  So all I've got to do now is strike out in that direction and hope it points me towards the end...

Thursday 4 August 2011

And now, the Gallery

Yes, I know this blog is supposed to be about writing.  However, this sort of thing is supposed to be worth a thousand words, so hum the music from Take Hart as you view it.

 [IMAGE LATER REMOVED DUE TO SHEER AWFULNESS]

First attempt at the e-book cover image.

Tuesday 12 July 2011

Money has not changed hands

... although I did send homemade chocolate chip cookies in the post, which may or may not have influenced the outcome.

The first review of Looking For Buttons, by the charming and erudite Norfolk Bookworm can be read here.

I think I should probably go and bake some more biscuits.

Monday 11 July 2011

A teensy teaser

Great excitement after a rather too long period of silence.  Looking For Buttons is about to get its first review (even though it's yet to be published).  I shall, of course, post a link here as soon as it appears.

Wednesday 1 June 2011

Picture imperfect

If you want to be a writer that anyone's heard of these days, you need a blog.  It helps if you post things on it occasionally.  But.

But.  But.  But.  But.  But.

But what do you do about the design?

Right, I thought.  Time to make the blog look a little more inviting, a little more like a shop window for the book (it's called Looking For Buttons, by the way - if you hadn't realised that, this blog is not doing its job).  So I fiddled about with templates and settings and tweaked and generally made a complete hash of the whole thing.  Obviously I'm going to have another go at some point, although not today as typing time is limited by the after-effects of falling down stairs last night (sober, uncoordinated feet, mildly embarrassing, very painful).  I'm just wondering whether looking at other people's blogs counts as inspiration or plagiarism?

It was so much easier when I used to make books by hand.  Perhaps that's it.  Excuse me, I'm off to copy out all 120 000 words of Looking For Buttons and illustrate it in felt-tip pen.

Wednesday 25 May 2011

C'est nest pas un blog post

Had the decorators in.  Does it look any better round here?

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Ms Frankenstein regrets

I've tried to move on.  I really have.  I've bought shoes.  I've bought myself jewellery.  I would have my hair cut if the salon were open on my day off, but since it isn't I shall progress through mildly unkempt to becoming prey for yeti hunters until I can get there at the end of the month.  I've even tried a little flirtation with others but all to no avail.

I am still in love with Fergus Palmer.

Now on paper, this is no bad thing.  He is kind.  He is charming.  He is witty.  He is also very tall, somewhat Scottish and has hair of the most spectacular shade of auburn.  He's about my age, he's got a good job, his own flat, his own car.  On paper, he's just what I should be looking for in a man.

That's the snag, those two words: 'on paper'.

For Fergus, my lovely, dearest Fergus is entirely fictional, supposedly confined to the pages of Looking For Buttons, in which he isn't even the heroine's love interest.  Yet here I am, sitting here with the laptop on my knees, sighing in a distinctly piney* fashion for a figment of my imagination.

Surely I'm not the only one who does this?  I've been falling for fictional men for as long as I can remember but when I started to write I never suspected it would happen with one I'd created.  I have the nasty suspicion that part of the trouble I'm having getting going with the next book is that I've yet to get over Fergus sufficiently to produce anyone to take his place.

But isn't this what writers do?  We put together people in a curious hybrid of doll's house and photofit and if we get it right by some elusive alchemy they step right into our heads and let us report on their lives.

I just wish he'd take me out for dinner while I'm doing it.






*piney as in yearning unrequitedly, not piney as in forest-fresh

Tuesday 22 March 2011

A little ado about nothing

I wrote a little anxiously a while ago about the dangers of over-editing.  I knew I needed to make alterations to Looking For Buttons but I wasn't at all sure I'd know when to stop.  In the end, after far too much faffing about I read an excellent book by Jane Wenham-Jones that gave me the boot up the rear I needed.  I got stuck in.  I read.  I reread.  I tweaked.  I cut.  I rewrote.  Occasionally I laughed and then felt sheepish at laughing at something I'd forgotten I'd made up.  But I persevered.

Until tonight.  Right, I thought, time to do some writing.  And nothing sprang to mind.  Nothing at all.

Oh, I hear you sigh with no noticeable sympathy, another post about writer's block.  But no!  This was quite a different class of nothing.

I have nothing more I want to do to Looking For Buttons.  My subconscious seems quite happy to leave it alone.  So it's time to print out the manuscript, give it one last check for typos, and then send it to the next agent on my list.

I would like to celebrate, but unfortunately the Difficult Second Novel has woken up and is demanding attention.  Excuse me, I have plotlines to organise...

Sunday 27 February 2011

This is not about me

Looking For Buttons started out as an idea: what happens if your teenage crush goes on to become a worldwide star?  How do you get over them when their face is everywhere?  I started playing around and soon I had a set of people in my head, doing things that I wrote down.  After a while, I found a beginning and got to the middle, which was actually where I started, and eventually I reached the end.  Gosh, I thought, I've written a whole book.  And then I thought about trying to get it published.  The problem with publication, however, is that people might read it.  People I know.

I'm a thirty-something woman writing about a thirty-something woman and it's my first novel, so readers may assume the book is in some way autobiographical.  It's started already.  One of my guinea pigs read an early draft.  She rang me: "Charlie [the Hollywood star] is a mixture of X and Y, isn't he?", X and Y being two gentlemen of our acquaintance at university.  Another claimed delightedly to recognise herself in yummy mummy Poppy on the grounds that she is married to a man in Poppy's husband's profession - which she wasn't when I began writing the book.

The thing is, I didn't set out to write barely disguised portraits of my social circle (actually, these days it's more of a social arc: I don't get out much).  It's fiction.  Poppy is not a sketch of my friend, she's a figment of my imagination.  And Charlie is simply Charlie (though he'd dislike being thought of as simply anything).  But now, as I prepare to send out the manuscript to another agent, I'm starting to worry.

What if people I know read it and think it's about me?  What if my friend who isn't Poppy reads the whole thing and ends up mortally offended?  What if my family read it and think this is the sort of thing I get up to?  And, most alarmingly of all, what if X or Y reads it and thinks the book is about them?

Excuse me, I have some nervous editing to do...

Monday 31 January 2011

Getting Le Carré'd away*

For a writer of romantic(ish) fiction, I have a deep and possibly incongrous passion for Cold War spy thrillers.  Before I start rhapsodising about Adam Hall's Quiller series and the delights of early Alistair MacLean, let me explain how this relates to the writing process.

In 1974, John le Carré launched the first part of his Karla trilogy, pitting the British spymaster George Smiley against his enigmatic Soviet opposite number.  The book was, of course, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Hence my modus operandi for getting my book up to scratch:

Tinker... until everthing's just right.

Tailor... the work to your audience.

Soldier... on until you get published.

Spy... go and celebrate publication by reading The Scorpion Signal with a nice cup of tea and a packet of Fruit Gums.

While step four is somewhat personal to a thirty-something aspiring writer with a crush on a fictional secret agent and a weakness for PG Tips and Fruit Gums, I think the first three are good tenets to write by (or by which to write, if I'm going to have a crack at not battering the English language around the ankles with my prose).

The problem I'm having at the moment is Tinkering.  Looking For Buttons has been coming together for a few years now and has gone through seven drafts.  I give it a read through before I approach a new agent and sometimes I change things before it goes out.  I need to know when to stop.

But how?


* é appears courtesy of Lexi Revellian, who told me which keys to press (thank you!).

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Naming no names

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I have trouble with names.  Not in remembering them, mostly (although I once had a GP I could only ever think of as Dr Hyphen-Thing because I saw him so rarely that the only fact that stuck in my brain was that his surname was double-barrelled).  No, my problem is my own name.  More specifically, my name in relation to book covers.

Having given the matter some thought, what's letting my novel down is not its title.  Looking For Buttons sums up the tale neatly, and I've always been happy with it and its Cinderella connotations.  But my name is not terribly authorly.  It's not snappy or modish.  It's also only a few syllables away from a Famous Author, which could lead to complications.  So I think I need a pseudonym.

But what to choose?  I could Make Something Up.  I could reverse my school nickname, but May Brian is more family saga than romantic comedy.  (Yes, my nickname was Brian May.  It's a hair thing.  Life is too short for straightening irons.)  I could seek inspiration from my ancestors, but one of them was called Euphemia and that's even less apt.

With the WIP (work in progress), the problem is reversed.  I've got a great pseudonym, a no-nonsense thriller writer's name (conveniently, the book is a no-nonsense thriller).  Fab.  Except I can't think of a title for the book.  I'm a third of the way through and I haven't the faintest idea.  Nothing quite fits.

So I sit and I type and the Untitled on the title page sits there and sniggers at me. Heigh ho.

 

Sunday 2 January 2011

Buttons? What buttons?

No, not those sort of buttons.  This has nothing to do with haberdashery or electronics, or even bellies.  But it has everything to do with Cinderella.

Have you ever wondered if Prince Charming is really the man for you after all?  Perhaps you just want someone kind, gentle and caring.  Someone who'll unblock your drain or jumpstart you car in the snow, someone who's seen you with no make-up and a temperature of a hundred and three and still won't run away.  Someone who's not rich, not flashy, not necessarily drop-dead gorgeous, but always one hundred per cent real.

Maybe you should be Looking For Buttons.

Looking For Buttons - a comedy for the romantically hopeless.  A new novel for 2011.