Tired & desperate

I really miss being able to go into my writing zone for lengthy bouts of fiction writing and I really miss doing both Inktober for the art and NaNoWriMo, however, this year I won’t have done either.

I can’t do it, there is just too much stress and chaos around the house lately, I am not allowed more than twenty minutes in my zone before someone wants to either disturb me or start a new screaming match again.

The only time I have is late at night when everybody is in bed, but that means strange sleeping habits for me – for example, I am writing this blog post at 5:28am on the 28^th October 2022.  I had five hours sleep last night and I had only managed to eat 800 calories all day.

It’s nearly 6am; I guess a new day has started?

It torments me when I can’t add to my current projects.

At the moment I am too tired to think about doing it, I haven’t slept in twenty hours and I am doing all of this without caffeine, remember, I went cold turkey and I only had three slip ups this month!

I really want my AD project and the Christmas and Easter project to get done as well as my steampunk lesbian adventure story.

You know I was too embarrassed to share this at the time, but I had to turn down winning a prize for a writer’s retreat a friend nominated me for, because I couldn’t afford the transport money to get there?  But imagine if I had been able to afford it, a whole month in solitude writing at my heart’s content, no interruptions.

You realise I could easily write 12k a day again, don’t you?  Most probably only 4k on average because the scenery was beautiful and I am a natures child by heart!

I rarely watch TV because of the noise too and my average of 150 books a year has gone down to 70 if I am lucky, all because of noise pollution from my other household members and invasion of personal space.

When Henry was a toddler, he was much quieter, seriously, he was very quiet and undemanding – he is twelve, surely things should be easier now?

Surely he’d want to shut himself away in his bedroom doing his own thing?  No, that’s not him he wants and needs constant attention, its tiring.

I have lived with cousins who had three kids under the age of seven playing around me, not necessarily quiet, regular kid noise and I still could write – but it’s different here, because it’s not normal noise and it’s not just kids shouting.

I hate the idea of not getting my work done, because whilst it’s not getting done it means I am staying less than mediocre, I am unable to pull myself out of this poverty or bettering myself in any way.  I can’t practise art anymore, I can’t do puzzles, I can’t do anything, just sit there and exist and be drained and to listen to vitriolic crap being fired between Paul and Henry.

I try to take myself upstairs out of it all, because if I open my mouth it makes it all worse; no matter how much of a Pollyanna I try to be, that doesn’t work here!

But then I still hear them shouting at each other, but it’s muffled so I don’t know what’s going on then I hear screams and doors slamming, then silence.  Then it starts again around twenty minutes later.

I have outlined my story plans so well because I can’t get into the zone to write the story, that once I have the peace around me to write, I am writing very quickly and I am not needing to edit as much as I used to.

Because I have to re-read my notes a lot, because I lose track of what I just read because of a sudden scream or bang.

I am beginning not to need to refer to hand notes anymore.

I know through experience that with this kind of depth that I have of my story plans, that I could write the AD project within three weeks to completion.  But it will require three hours a day to do it.  I write at a pace of 3k per hour on an average day when I am undisturbed.

Problem is, I need my music on and I need to be left alone without any interruption so I can go into the zone a trance-like state and do my work.  Without that, my writing is trash and bland.

Henry hates certain types of music I love for writing, he is using this as a supposed “Trigger” to his bad behaviour and he laps up the “trigger” remark to the fullest capacity that he can.

When he realises I am writing and I have ear phones on, he does everything in his power to come upstairs a lot and open my door constantly, making me have to take the ear phones off to hear him, because I am deaf without my hearing aids and I can’t use hearing aids with ear phones on. 

Then, when it’s not him coming upstairs every five minutes, it’s his father, the amount of times they need to use the bathroom is stupid, funnily enough when I don’t write, they can go an hour between pees, when I am writing its every fifteen minutes.  But they don’t just go to the bathroom and leave, oh no, they want to give me a running commentary on the news or backstabbing each other to me.

I can write my blog posts, because it flows differently to a story.  I can lose my way a little here, but in a story I need to be consistent and shift perspectives a lot of the time.

I’m exhausted, I just want to write.

Thanks for reading.

Camp NaNoWriMo started late for me

I didn’t remember that it was Camp Nanowrimo month this month until the 2^nd of July and made no preparations for it; I intend to start my words in progress again from today. 

I haven’t written anything towards a novel since February, due to getting Covid and my son being in and out of hospital and school, because he is sick. We don’t know what’s wrong with him yet, but we’re waiting on tests, so it could be an ongoing thing, we don’t know.

But from today I am going to be writing towards a project I need to be finished by October 2022, that’s my deadline, after it is written it is going to be sent to an agent, because I feel ready now – whether or not an agent wants it or not, is another matter!

I won’t be sending my other finished works out yet, because I need them to stew a bit more as I am unsure of them.

The project is Anthropomorphic Dystopian 1.  You can read more about what I am doing with this project here… https://tardycreative.com/2022/06/25/anthropomorphic-dystopian-1/

A couple of my finished projects are favorited by my beta readers, but to me, I am unhappy with their overall plot because I am undecided on the ending.  I am happy with everything but the end result.

With the above project, I am very happy about the beginning, middle and end, so this is why I am very happy to send it once finished and redrafted and edited.

I have always been a planner, not a pantser, but this particular project has been planned within an inch of its life that purely in its planning stage it is almost a finished product in itself – though in my mind, it is too rough around the edges to send out as is.  In Paul’s mind, the story is finished, but in my mind that is not even the first draft, it’s just a bunch of planning notes!

Whether or not this book is really a novella however isn’t determined yet, can’t really tell through notes alone!

But it is an exciting project, a lot of fun, it is intended for a family audience and I love it!

I should be able to work on it for an hour or two a day and for me that’s around 3k words lately.

I have given myself seventy three days from today to finish it, let it stew for a week or two, re-read and potentially edit again before sending it out by my deadline a week after my birthday – around October the 10^th it may be late in the year, but I will try my luck.

Happy reading!

Anthropomorphic dystopian 1

Anthropomorphic dystopian 1

The above is a mouthful, but that is not its real name, aren’t you relieved?– its real title will give away too much about what is in the story and we don’t want to do that this early on!

The general themes in the story are as follows;

Cyberpunk

Anthropomorphic animals

War

Revenge

Dystopian

Survival

Imprisonment

Inventions

And last but not least – comedy

The above story has been inspired by;

The animals of Farthing Wood

Wind in the Willows

Watership Down

Mad Max beyond the thunderdome

Secret life of pets

The hunger games

Nuclear warfare

Rude dog and the dweebs

Frankenweenie

And very much Tim Burton inspired

The above is the work that is likeliest to be sent out first and it is only really a couple of months away from being perfected to its final draft!  However, with the upcoming surgeries I am going to be having, it is best that this work should not be sent any sooner than mid-autumn, potentially before winter – though November to the second week of January is not the best time to send anything to an agent – it’s their busiest time of the year!

So unless it’s polished before NaNoWriMo 2022, it may not be sent until late January 2023, but I am working on it being sent out by early October!

This book will be a series, so this is only book one that will be polished by then and I know that agents are not keen on new writers sending in series as a first approach, but I think this is something special and I am sure they will see it too?

I have spoken to a handful of very close friends about this story and I have several people excited over it – this is why this story became my primary focus and I dropped my original first novel whilst I do this one.  Because, the other story I think should be my first novel – is actually less exciting to my friends than this project.

Some friends think I should ditch it as a novel and make it a comic, but I have had other friends suggest that my prose like writing does better as a novel and that to write it as a comic may actually kill the story’s effect overall.

Time will tell – it may be a case that it may turn into a comic a few years down the line, I don’t know if that sort of thing happens, but I suppose it’s possible?

Anyway – happy reading!

Character development and Nanowrimo

NaNoWriMo has changed a lot from what I remember it to be like, updating words per day seems more confusing to me and I can’t figure out how to talk to people on there anymore!

I am not as active on there as I want to be because of it, I am not very technologically minded at the best of times, in fact I can be quite dumb regarding new-fangled technological stuff – I am not doing NaNoWriMo now, I have given up.  Though I am still writing the book I set for the project, as well as a couple of other stories too.

I can’t focus on just one thing; it makes me less productive if I am being honest!

Just trying to focus on the one novel for the past ten days has meant I have written on average eleven thousand words less than I would usually in a writing week!  The goal was to increase my writing output and it didn’t do that, but stifled it a bit.

I do much better writing fifteen hundred words a day towards three different projects at once, where my word output is approximately five thousand a day in total.

I have said it before and no doubt I will say it again, I have problems with my attention span, I get easily bored no matter how much I love something and if I have to focus on something more than forty five minutes at a time, then I need to multi-task to get through it!

I am often found making notes and reading a book whilst watching movies for example, it’s no disrespect to the movies I am watching, but I tend to drift off into deep imagination when I watch a movie that is too long and slow paced that I don’t get to see or hear much of it at all – but when I multi-task I am still conscious of the movie. 

I think this is why I love horrors, comedy and action movies the most.

I know it sounds strange to admit this, but I also use movies as research for my writing, research on how a character is developed on screen and their stances, the way that they talk etc.  It helps me write, because I have lived a very isolated life.  I think I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if it weren’t for movies and television.

I would be absolutely clueless about humanity without television and I know that television isn’t a substitute for reality by any means, but it does help those who don’t get out much!

I think it is because I study the movies that I watch, that I am able to create realistic characters and imagery.

There is a YouTube channel I love called “Just an observation” where they study character development in movies and the development of individual actors throughout their careers.  It is something I like to watch to help me build realistic characters and Henry likes to watch some of the videos too, because he has had some interest in becoming an actor, though saying that he has actively turned down audition invites for Matilda twice!

I will apologise right now about how messy my blog is becoming as I am sure some words are put into confusing contexts at times and I may not make sense or I am confusing the spelling of certain words – I am under investigation for a serious neurological condition to get to the bottom of this, if you see anything in my blog that doesn’t make sense or a word used that doesn’t make the sentence seem to make sense, please let me know as this is something I have been struggling with increasingly – it is not something that I am used to and it is worrying me a lot!

I know it is not your job to do this, but I may have missed somethings which my brain may have seen as perfectly normal! 

Happy reading everybody!

1st, 2nd & 3rd drafts

In a discussion at the NaNoWriMo forum, somebody asked whether adding “what ifs” were something that people do when they are stuck on the event?

My reply was pretty long for a forum post, but nonetheless I hope it was helpful for them and I hope it would be helpful for you too – here is a more fleshed out answer to my response.

When I am writing a novel, my first draft is usually part of the ideas and planning process.

In the first draft I ask questions and try to answer them as strongly as I can to help me develop strong characters and scenes that make sense to the plot as a whole.

I ask questions such as, what is the relationship of this character to the main character.  How will this characters existence help move the plot along?  What vital actions would this character do to play a part in the plot of this story? 

I would also write alternative paths for the story as a whole as they come.  This is made easier by love for lists and random.org.  For example, if the story is a fantasy where people are going onto a journey, are the characters turning towards the forest, the farm or a shadowy path into a darkened valley?  This is usually done at times I feel stuck about how to progress – when this happens, for me it is important not to stop my flow of writing by overthinking it, but to get all possible ideas down on paper and then pick one later on, when you have run out of energy to do more for the day; or if you are truly desperate for a decision to move your story along, use random.org to force a decision for you and you will often come out with some surprising alternatives you’d never thought of originally for your story!

The second draft is all about the elimination of the stuff that didn’t survive your story in the first draft, then sewing all you have kept together as neatly as possible.  But, I am a psychopath, I have been known to write similar plot stories based on two to four alternatives, to see how I feel about them several months down the line, then I choose the best one to continue onto the third draft with!

The third draft is all about tidying things up and cutting scenes out or adding new ones, for me it is the preparation for polishing the finished product, because for me, it is rare that a story gets past a third draft.

It can be a nightmare trying to sift through the first draft in between the chunky messes that appear out of nowhere, but for me it is worth it and it is the only way I manage to stay productive without feeling frustrated or coming to a dead end.

I am a chaotic thinker, I understand this is not for everyone, but this system works for me. 

I think too many people try to make the first draft too pretty and polished immediately, novels don’t work like that.

I can be found in the UK, Leicester region of NaNoWriMo throughout this month.

Good luck in your writing ventures everybody!

Happy reading!

Oh to Hell with it…

Even though I have said I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I have joined it anyway for the community spirit; I have joined the UK, Leicester region there, let me know if you are in that region and maybe we can say hi to each other?

My personal goal is to finish six novels by 1^st November 2022 to be sent for the first time ever to a literary agent – this is a goal and it may very well be unrealistic, but I am hoping it can be achieved!  The writing of six books is very realistic for me, because I tend to always be in writing mode anyway – the writing I have shared with my blog, or at least my word counts are not accurate according to Paul, who realised that I have not been sharing my handwritten notes in those word counts and I write more by hand than by computer!

What I meant about being unrealistic was my idea that an agent would take on all six projects in such short notice!

I understand no literary agent will take six books at once, I am not dense, they will be sent with reasonable gaps between each book!

I am a perfectionist and my own worst enemy regarding my writing – I was often told by tutors in my past that I overwork things and rewrite when it is not necessary, this is something I have never really learned to stop doing!

I do have OCD in many things in my life; this is another difficulty I am trying to overcome.  The OCD with my novel writing has got a lot worse since seven years ago it was suggested to me that I need to redraft some work, a notion that was alien to me at the time and now I redraft each novel at least three times a year and when you think I have over ten near complete works, this is nightmarish to some people – who may even find what I say unbelievable!

Paul has told me this is why it is important to send my work out there, so people know just how manically I do write and how it is part of the fibre of who I am!  I am never not thinking about writing, I am constantly in creative mode!

My brain cannot switch off from work of any creative type! 

When I am not writing, I am thinking about writing.

When I am not doing that I am drawing pictures or painting or planning art projects; then when I am not doing any of those things I am crocheting or knitting!  My mind is constantly creating something – it is not work for me, I don’t regard this as work and Paul finds that irritating, because to me, this is a lifestyle!  I can’t feel pressured doing any of this, because it is a lifestyle for me!  What I do feel pressured about is other people’s expectations of me when they know that I am working on something!

I don’t fear the blank page because of lack of ideas; I fear the blank page because my brain will fill it up with unplanned stuff before I can write down what I wanted to in the first place!

I don’t struggle with ideas for new projects, I am drowning in them!

So with that said,  I am now going to get back to my novel which is a steampunk adventure with an adult female main character – a novel of which has caused me to only have fourteen hours sleep in four days!

Happy reading!

New system

All year I had been planning to do NaNoWriMo, the one for July, but that was cancelled due to the loss of my computer desk and sickness, then the one happening tomorrow – but I have changed my mind.

I remember that on two occasions I have participated in NaNoWriMo only to burn out by the twentieth because I felt I wasn’t as good as other writers who had already proclaimed that they have finished their novels and were now in the editing process.  By the way – don’t be perturbed by this, as I eventually learned that a majority of writers, who do this, have had words in progress long before NaNoWriMo even started!

I have a handful of writer friends online who started two weeks ago on their projects and one of them even started in the second week of September!

I find writing hard these days because I am not alone anymore when writing; I have no personal private, quiet space.  I have to write around my family and their noises and demands in very cramped conditions!  My work, both art and writing is spread in many parts of the house, because we lack space and there isn’t much cooperation in helping me get a larger space to put everything into, just so I can work like how I used to.

I am also doing all of this with very bad health, bed bound for at least four or five months of the year, so I don’t even have the comfort of my desk at times!

I used to write thousands of words per day, for my stories, poems, songs and a huge amount of online articles that were published daily on various websites!  There were times that Paul remembered me doing 12k in total in an entire day, he used to laugh and call me his future wife Barbara Cartland!

Regardless of my health, I could still produce that amount of work per day, if I did not constantly have to move around the house getting notes and using things in different locations all the while, whilst fighting to get to the places through mess and dodging fidgeters who are constantly on the move around the house! 

I have copious notes for each project and used to have postcard snippets to help too, but I have no table space to see them all at once, so I have to try and look at things by hand and put them back into places all the time so they are not lost!  This is difficult for another reason too, because I have a badly deformed underperforming left hand!  It is amazing that I am able to type 60 to 80wpm with that disability!

Before I lived in these conditions, I had half an entire room, the size of 10ft by 15ft and an L shaped desk that took up two whole walls.  I could use my swivel chair to slide from side to side and have up to twenty sheets of paper out or one hundred postcards, to constantly view whilst working, as well as having two large corkboards on the wall around me!  With this, I had total privacy and control over all stimuli that surrounded me!

I could still have that here in this house, but there are two rooms that are unused purely because we have a leaking roof and rising damp in them so it is not comfortable nor safe for electrics and paper!

We simply can’t move there is no option but to stay here because the cost of the house in such conditions would mean we would need to move thirty miles or more away from this village and Paul’s family and entirely out of our county, in order to buy a property of a similar size!  Henry has a three hundred year ancestry in this village, he is not eager to break it.

The roof will cost 5k to fix approximately, once it is fixed, I will gain two rooms and one of those rooms could have a C shaped desk set up that is even bigger than my previous set up.  So eventually, I will have what I need again and more.

Instead of doing NaNoWriMo this year, I plan to write differently.  A new way, in my tight noisy space, that will help me get less noise and more words done in a day, rather than sparse times in a month. 

My new plans are to write for ninety minutes before Henry comes home from school and ninety minutes on my laptop in bed when everybody is asleep.

By doing this, I will be producing an average of three to seven thousand words per day as an average, because my average fifteen minute timer says when I have planned words I can produce up to eight hundred words and on a bad day that is unplanned five hundred words. 

At the moment I am able to squeeze in twenty minutes around three times a week without hand notes, in between family quiet time or when Henry is in the bath or whatever.

Given the right environment I was very productive and proactive and very addicted to my work and was never tired nor burned out by it!

Happy reading!

Ideas and the life of them

Having lots of story ideas is an author’s dream, well I guess I have the dream creative life then, because I have more ideas than I can handle!

But it is not nice to be like this, having more ideas than I can reasonably write!  How do I manage being like this?  I have noticed there is not much literature on people who are overloaded with ideas, but there is plenty literature on how to try and get them! 

For me personally, I have learned that I can’t write enough to get every idea down on paper, even writing more than one paragraph about the idea is a challenge at times! 

How I manage the best ideas;

I keep a bullet point journal about the general ideas; usually just one sentence per idea as a trigger to remembering, so that later on in the day, usually just before I go to sleep, I write a further paragraph or two in an ideas folder.

I have to say, I am often brutal with my ideas, ideas come and go quite quickly for me and not all of them are worthy of note!  Weirdly enough most of the ideas come when I am on the toilet, in the bath or at a busy café!

I have ideas that are not even for my favourite genres to write, many times I discard ideas because I feel that their plots are too complicated for me or requires much more research than I am willing to do on a new subject I know nothing about!  Believe me, I am not in any need for further research material, I read mostly non-fiction these days as it is!

This past week alone I have had six entirely new ideas come and so far, only two have survived further summaries.  Those two were of the genre I write, three of the others were not of my genre and one other was way too technological – as we all know technology is not my strong point!

The ideas that remained were another dragon story and a comedy vampire story. 

The ideas I discarded were an Italian romance story, a story based on the life of a rabbit, a story that seemed too similar to the plot of a recent book review I watched on YouTube and the complicated story was a space opera.

You can’t hoard all these ideas if you are sure you are not going to write them!

I firmly believe in Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea in Big Magic; ideas are alive, they have souls, they are like ghosts of stories that want to exist, they flow from person to person seeing who’d write them and if they decide not to write them, they flow onto people they know who might.

This doesn’t mean that a person steals another person’s idea; most of the time people don’t even know that those ideas are in people’s heads – because a lot of creative people are closely guarded by what they merely think about.  Especially if they do not know that they are not going use those ideas. 

But it is strange how many times a person has claimed that a story their friend has wrote, was weirdly an idea that they had had for a long time but didn’t take the plunge.  I too, have found this! 

In fact the more creative friends I make, the more ideas I seem to get and it is not because of a feedback of ideas they talk about (because most of them don’t), it is usually about the ones they don’t talk about!  Elizabeth Gilbert explains this phenomenon in Big Magic, if you haven’t read the book I strongly recommend it!

Because of this book, I have learned not to get so uppity and upset when people write things I wanted to write, but didn’t – it’s not copyright theft if they really genuinely didn’t know that you thought of it first – the ideas just got fed up waiting on you as an agent for their life!

However in the past I have got upset over this, purely because ideas were shared with trusted members of the family and they were literally sold to the highest bidder – usually for a crate of wine or a new computer and then I get to see my books on film after all a couple of years later.  Missing out all of the time, Bitter?  Of course, because it happened a lot through that relative!  Some of those ideas were actually near the point of being sent to agents, it was the last draft when I discovered the damage that happened yet again.

Thankfully those people are out of my life, but unfortunately it has made me afraid to share too much with anyone.  I say only vaguely what my stories are about, but I am not inclined to go to writers clubs anymore, in case strangers do the same thing.  I can’t lose my hard work again and again, it is soul destroying!

My ideas folder is thicker than a dictionary. 

I get ideas flooding me at intervals that happen as frequent as every six months on average, they come for two or three weeks completely disrupting my life like some violent storm and they can come at first in around five the first week and blow up to be as many as twenty near the end of their flow, generally totalling around forty to fifty ideas by the end of the event. 

How many of those ideas do I actually write? 

I write towards approximately six to ten stories a season, but finish them entirely, usually not… I tend to pause for a year or two at chapter seventeen; there is something about chapter seventeen that seems to do that to me.  Because my pauses are lengthy, most stories take an average of three years to write, because pauses like that are necessary for me. 

There was one very rare occasion, I think it was 2017 – 2018 NaNoWriMo, I can’t remember which, where I was approximately five chapters away from finishing a novel in a month, that for me, was record timing!

It is a habit I am trying to get into, have been trying to get into since 2016.  I want to write all of my novels in one month, they need life.

I feel like some sort of literary Dr Frankenstein, these books must have life, life you hear!  LIFE!

I haven’t recounted my unfinished works since 2017, back then my unfinished works were seventy six with a further two hundred un-started, synopsis stage other works.

At present there are four near to finished works and two finished works that are pending an extensive review and potential rewrite. 

I am far more organised than I used to be and funnily enough, I believe that I am becoming a faster writer when I do write. 

I haven’t written much lately because I am beginning to get apathetic about everything regarding life as there are some serious health problems cropping up where I am unsure of my future at present.

I am determined to do NaNoWriMo this year for my sanities sake, but I can’t tell what will happen until those emergency hospital appointments are done and dusted and another health problem is confirmed or denied… hopefully denied, or else, well… let’s just say; I won’t have much of a career in writing if it’s confirmed.

Happy reading everyone!

To pants or not to pants that is the question…

“I don’t think I really want to wait for NaNoWriMo to start this new story idea, but would it be considered cheating if I started this early?”

This was posted on my twitter @CreativeTardy yesterday and I can only imagine my friends sitting there staring at their screens in disbelief shouting “oh, for fucks sake, just start, will you!”

Well, you see, I have never been one for breaking the rules… well… certain rules.

“Bloody Hell, what rules?  Fuck rules! Just get on with it, creativity has no blooming rules”! 

OK, tone down the language please.  No these are not real actual replies on twitter… but, I do know there are friends who talk like this to me from time to time in private.

I frustrate them no end, I can see that it takes a lot for the poor dears not to slap me one when I get like this!

 Usually I plan my stories a little.  I have certain ideas about what I would like to include in the story and the types of characters even if I have no idea of the direction of the book, I usually have some sort of idea about some of the future of the story before I write it – sometimes I don’t know how the stories end, sometimes I don’t know the middle but I know its beginning and end.  I don’t usually pants it, as the NaNoWriMo vernacular goes, I am or was a planner.

I am thinking this new story idea called Dragon 2 will be totally and completely pantsed, but I am fighting against it at the same time.

I am, in my personal life, a little bit of a control freak – I don’t like micromanaging people, I am not that type of control freak, but I like things organised and simplified in my own personal life and I don’t like surprises!  I am prone to panic attacks when surprises jump out at me, my brother often described me to his friends as the “rabbit in headlights”.  I am the sort of annoying person who always asks for reassurance and a reminder of what to expect at certain events and so on and Paul has a lot of patience with me as he tells me for the fifth time that day that it will assuredly be such and such.  I am only like this in certain things, not everything.  I am not constantly like this throughout my life, just things that could potentially… terrify me. 

Funnily enough, I am not somebody who suffers from stage fright or being surrounded by large groups of people, especially people I know even a little bit.  I am not like that.  I am more likely to be jittery around small circles of people I hardly know or never met and I am more likely to be this way around my birthday, Christmas, parties hosted by other people I don’t know well or anything regarding health… occasionally I can be like this when food shopping, I don’t like being around small groups of strangers alone, at all.

Never really understood why – but Paul reckons it has a lot to do with things that have happened in my past with my mother.  My mother is usually antagonistic with strangers especially if she feels there are no witnesses to dispute what happened!  She often dragged me along with her for whatever ride she hoped to have from the event she caused.

I like to be organised – artist friends are astounded at how neat my areas are when they used to visit, how as I painted I would wipe up spills and go back and forth from the kitchen cleaning the water jars I used as I did my work.

Reader friends who note my bookshelves look twice at my shelves and cannot believe that my books are in genre and alphabetical order and that I had at the time eleven bookcases around the house, now I have twelve.

I also have around thirty box files all with different genre story ideas, poems, research files etc., those are not in order at the moment because I am struggling for space and that is damaging my mental health no end, the torment knowing that those are not in order when everything else is – it makes my writing work very hard!

They mostly reside on the upstairs landing balancing on our very wide bannister at the top, that acts like a half wall and guests who use our bathroom sometimes sheepishly quiz us on why there is a box marked vampires and another marked dragons by the bathroom door?

One such visitor joked that they thought perhaps I was some kind of cryptozoologist as a secret life.

No, but it would be interesting…

I know I was a pantser before 2006, but I was told that planning is key, strangely enough my writing habits have been declining slowly ever since! So I became a planner, I know being a pantser should be as easy as it was in the past, but I don’t really know anymore.

Anyway, back to the NaNoWriMo story – I would like to start in a few days’ time, but at the moment I am trying to decide whether I should plan the characters and some of the scenes now or let it flow naturally?

Paul suggests naturally – but I have never worked that way before… I have had a lot of dreams regarding this book; a lot of the dreams suggest it will be very successful if only…

Happy reading!

NaNoWriMo fresh idea

I had planned to write towards the giant story 1 for NaNoWriMo but something has occurred in my mind to change that; Instead I have decided to write an a new idea with a remastered old idea combined to make a very different story, which will be called Dragon story 2.

In the old story I wrote as a short story around fifteen years ago, a young farm girl finds a baby flying unicorn and flies off into the clouds into a new magical world at night.  This time it is not going to be a flying unicorn, the story will still exist in how I originally wrote it untouched/undeleted; but this time the farm girl will find a baby dragon and an entirely different story takes place, where the girl this time will not be adventuring alone!

This will be a family fantasy, whether or not there will be funny moments in this story or not, remains to be seen at the present time.  I am in planning mode right now and intend to fully write this story throughout NaNoWriMo simply because it’s very fresh and I do better with fresh new projects than old stale ones.

When doing NaNoWriMo, I force myself to forget all other projects except for the one I am counting words towards for the event. I become completely absorbed in that story alone, so it is vital I choose correctly!

Happy Reading!