I have spent something like three hours tonight searching for a memory stick and a set of keys.  Fruitlessly. I am fairly fed up because well, my memory stick’s got lots of my stuff on it, and, the set of keys are for work. The only positive in all this is that I’m fairly certain everything is still in the house. But I have no idea where, and I’ve searched all my usual places.

During all this hunting, I came across notes from a writing course I did two years ago. Then I came upon a notebook with a synopsis for a novel, tentatively entitled “Steam Dragon,” which I have absolutely no recollection writing.  It’s pretty detailed too.  I’m amazed as I would have sworn by the power of my memory, and yet if I hadn’t found that synopsis, that novel idea would never have entered my head again. Also, where are my keys and my memory stick?

So much for my awesome memory. So, I’m one synopsis up, and one set of keys and a memory stick down at the end of my search.  Synopsis making me slightly happy. Keys and stick fairly annoying me.

I woke up this morning with a dead fly on my pillow. This would be more disturbing rather than particularly notable  if I hadn’t predicted this occurrence before I fell asleep.

It started like this. After I had been in bed for between ten and fifteen minutes, a fly zoomed past my face in the dimly lit darkness of my bedroom. Then it went quiet. Little b*****d, I thought. How dare you stay quiet while I potter around my room getting ready for bed and then whip out just as I am about to fall asleep, and start your buzzing nonsense.  I considered getting up and chasing it out. Not killing it, mind. I am a vegetarian after all, although I still reserve the right to call creatures rude names if they deserve it.  

The fly buzzed quietly from the curtains. One more buzz out of you, Mister, I thought, and your night is suddenly going to get a whole lot more interesting.

Nothing.

I waited.

Nothing.

OK, I thought. I’ll chance relaxing. Perhaps it’s going to stay quite. Then a thought struck me. What if it decided to land on my bed and sleep there during the night? What if it died there? After all, it seemed a fairly unhealthy fly, hardly a decent buzz out of it.

That’ll be just my luck, I thought, that damn, unhealthy fly is going to hop into my bed right beside me and die here during the night.  That was my last(ish) waking thought.  On my honour.

Woke up this morning. Dead fly on the pillow beside me.

Damn!

I’ve given some thought as to what uses I can put this newly acquired, demise of flies, prediction skills to, but, nothing so far. Oh, well. Perhaps it’s just not immediately apparent. J

The first word I ever heard my niece utter was “toe.” She actually said, “toe, toe, toe,” all the while pointing at her toes. I hadn’t the heart to tell her she needed to use a plural. Anyway, today, I am sitting here in something like despair, hoping and praying I don’t have a broken toe. And she is connected. Although I accept full blame. The child was not in procession of a gun.

I’m off to do a Vedic Astrology course tomorrow. This is not something I’m massively fascinated by, I’m more of an I-Ching and the Tarot woman myself, (and angel cards, of course,) but when a friend mentioned it, the writerly part of me went, hmmm, might be useful for a story sometime. So, I signed up.

However, apparently as part of the course, we get a reading so the time of our birth is required. Pretty seriously required. My mother has never been able to remember my time of birth with any degree of certainty, although there was a time there, a few years ago, when I thought she had told me eleven a.m. Then she contradicted this and said she didn’t know. So, I was left wondering where eleven in the morning came out of. Anyway, I decided I would get straight down home and persuade my mother she really did remember. Thankfully, she was in the mood for it. After asking her a million questions to get her back in the correct time frame, as in, who brought you to the hospital, who minded my older brother and sister, who else had a baby at the same time etc. etc. etc., things started happening. I left her with strict instructions to think and think and think, and brought the dog for a walk on the beach to allow memories to percolate.

(An an aside, my eight year old niece wanted to know why we just didn’t consult my baby book.  Sweet! Babies just didn’t have baby books in those days, which aren’t ALL that long ago. We were lucky if we photographed occasionally, well I was, being a third and middle child. J )

When I came back she had got this far. She had suffered from blood pressure with me and therefore had to be hospitalised and induced.  She still couldn’t remember the time, but given that I was induced it had to be during the day.  Also, she has a memory of very efficient nursing staff and felt pretty certain it would have been early in the day. For some reason, the time eleven o clock was in her head. I would have thought, Da Daaaaah, except, I may have been the one to put the eleven o clock in her head.  Anyway,  I have settled on eleven for a birth time.

The other thing of interest is the fact that I was an induced birth. I remember meeting an old friend of mine once who just had a baby in that manner.  You could still see the memory of the pain in her face. She told me they had to hold her down in the bed because the pain was so extreme she wanted to throw herself out the window.  It sounds like an exaggeration but you could see the truth in her eyes. That birth hurt. Anyway, I have heard that being induced can be traumatic for the mother but I wonder what it’s like for the baby. Perhaps it explains my hatred of being pressured or rushed in any way. J

In WIP news, shorts have been abandoned, put aside, half written and weeping. J There was obviously never going to be an end to,” just two more shorts,” unless I unceremoniously abandoned them.  In  getting this novel back on the road, I’ve been sorting through all the work I’ve  done on it previously, you know, world building stuff, snippets of ideas, descriptions of cities, scenes, attempts at outlines,  false starts, etc.   Apparently I’ve written over 50,000 words on this novel already. None of them usable in their present form as part of the novel, but pretty fabulous at providing me with a foundation to work off. Now, I will say no more about the novel, as I’m an induced child and you know how we hate pressure. J

I have discovered also that it is imperative to have a good system for filing on your computer. Mine has been a little crazy; stories filed under different names in different locations, no easy way to see which is the newest version, a million version of the same stories saved forcing me to check why I have so many versions, only to realise, there was no reason, just me haphazardly saving things everywhere to be certain I didn’t lose them and not realising that I was creating a giant mess for myself to sort out in the future.

No more. I will be a Queen of filing from now on. I swear it. Why isn’t an efficient filing system for your work ever mentioned under writerly advice? J

bogwitch64

marshallpayne1

Blackbeauty-Anna Sewell

Lord of the Rings- J.R.R.Tolkien

The Hero and the Crown-Robin McKinley

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter- Michael Swanwick

The Heavenly Horse From The Outermost West-Mary Stanton

A Dark Adapted Eye-Barbara Vine

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell- Susanna Clarke

The Warrior who Carried Life-Geoff Ryman

The True Game -Sherri  S. Tepper

Horse Heaven -Jane Smiley

The Pern Series-Ann McCaffrey

The Stonor Eagles-William Horwood

A Requiem for Homo-Sapiens-David Zindell

The Chronicles of Narnia-C.S. Lewis

The Witches Boy- Micheal Cruber

Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel

I went to an Open Mic night in Westport this Thursday. The Creel Restaurant on the Quays were good enough to provide the venue, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the place if you ever find yourself in town. The setting was fabulous, the restaurant looked out onto the quay itself and, the surrounding hills had sheep that insisted on parading up and down the ridge of the hill as the sun set, creating pretty spectacular silhouettes.

You Are a Mermaid

You are a total daydreamer, and people tend to think you're flakier than you actually are. While your head is often in the clouds, you'll always come back to earth to help someone in need. Beyond being a caring person, you are also very intelligent and rational. You understand the connections of the universe better than almost anyone else.

It is true that people I meet normally go through a phase of thinking I'm flaky before realising I'm not. I see what's happening and I never help them out of it. They normally confess afterwards. :)

Also, I scare approx 70% of the people I meet on first contact. Two of my close friends have confided that they were absolutely terrified of me on first meeting. I have no idea why.

A work colleague told me when she first met me she had to give herself a pep talk on not being scared of me. The awful thing is that the effect soon wears off, completely. Sigh! :)

I got a sixty one day personal reject from Strange Horizons which was lovely and gentle and explained several things that might be wrong with the story.   This is a story I cut swathes out of to make it short enough for the short story world. I also cut swathes out of it to make it, well, more short storyish,  if anyone else understands what that means. I sent that story out into the world for the first time maybe two years ago.  The text was much rougher then than it is now. I’ve become a much tighter writer over those two years. Two years ago there was one huge POV violation that I didn’t even spot until it had got its first rejection. It’s been tightened up and rewritten several times since then.  I don’t believe you could fault the prose in that story right now, but, obviously there’s something wrong with it. I was thinking about the story this week as I waited for that email and I wondered, did I really want the story published at all.  I had had a rethink about it, and I had identified several other things, that the editor didn’t mention, that I thought were wrong.  But to fix them up, IMO, I would need to expand the story, probably bring it from its current 5,800 words up to maybe 8,000, perhaps a bit more to be comfortable.  That’s a hard sell. So many markets and especially the ones that take this type of story have a cut off point at about 4 to 5000 words. So, even if I did all the work, I expect at best I’d be looking at a semi pro or a token market. Plus, I really would need to do a whole lot more research on decomposition of bodies.  I kind of guessed all that and maybe it’s very inaccurate. J

Anyway, as I read the email, I just thought, that’s it, Mr. Story. I’m retiring you. It feels right, like I’ve learned a lot about writing from my efforts with that story. I’m going to say a big thank you to it, and let it sleep now. Who knows? Maybe someday when I’m preparing my short story collection I’ll be able to drag it out and add just as many words as will make me happy. J

Anyway, I’ve two more short stories that want me to write them.   So, I’ll get on with them and hope they naturally confine their length to something sellable.  I managed to cut 1,600 words out of an 11,600 words story recently to make it submitable, and I never want to put myself through such a tortured edit again.  I think my subconscious is whispering, “go long, Sharon, go long.” J

I just did my first Liberty Hall trigger in God knows how long. It’s well over a year anyway. As usual, I was at least 35 minutes in before I had any idea what I was writing about. Don’t know will anybody guess what the story is about. I can foresee lots of puzzled critters ahead.

I’ve got the “voice” for my novel. It came in the car as I was driving home from work last Friday. I swear, the obsession my muse has with cars is not funny. At least half of my breakthroughs occur in the car.  I was thinking about the when and the where of ideas flashing into my head and the top four locations are, in no particular order, the couch, my bed just prior to falling asleep, out for a walk, and driving.

Except for the couch, all those places are pretty difficult to just jot down ideas in or during. Especially the car. J  But anyway, I started to think about what those places had in common and the obvious answer is that these are all places where I’m generally day dreaming and spacing out. So it’s kind of frightening to think I’m doing that in the car on such a regular basis. Except it’s not really, I suppose. Daydreaming while driving is fairly usual.  I hope.

Anyway, chapter one if the novel is roughed out in the “voice” that I am happy with. And if I hadn’t done so much prior work, it wouldn’t have been possible.  All of that world building and character development that I sweated over just flows in, well, like I had just made it up. Nice. J

Anyway, the second chapter came to me as I was driving today, (when else?) It is to be tentatively named, Four Kinds of Ghosts. Chapter one has no title. I’m not quibbling the small stuff at this stage.   Some of it is new and some of it will be taken from some stuff I wrote earlier.

Basically though, despite all this seeming productivity, I’m being very easy on myself.  Work had me completely burned out and I’m only gradually recovering. I have a couple of shorts I need to tidy up but I’m putting no pressure on myself. Even this novel is going to be a no pressure job.  I’m heading off to Cork this weekend and the week after that I’m off to Portugal.  I’m not even going to consider using the words, writing and discipline, in the same sentence until late April.  (Except for that one, obviously. J

Oh, and if anyone would like to do a group read,  I have signed up to do one of The Worm Ouroboros over on the A Song Of Ice And Fire forum.  I’ve had this book in my TBR pile for, oh, maybe, eighteen months now, and it’s just looked too intimidatingly convoluted to  even begin. However it is considered one of the Fantasy Classics, so I’ve always wanted to read it, and I reckoned a group read was one way to motivate myself.  We are going to read 70 pages a week and report back and discuss. So far I’ve read the prologue and chapter one and am surprisingly pleased about how easy to read it is. Yes, it is description heavy, but there’s also a charming innocence about it.  I mean, so far the three main territories are Demonland, Witchland, and Ghouland. J  I’m actually really enjoying it. It’s like settling into a comfortable armchair with a nice cup of tea.   Anyway, if anyone is interested there’s a free eBook of it here.

I came across this fabulous article by the writer Hilary Mantel in one of my Saturday newspapers and so I tracked it down online in case anyone else wants to be similarly impressed.

Fabulous article.

She wrote one of my favourite books from last year, Beyond Black, a lucky airport find which turned out much better than many of my planned holiday reads.

Anyway, about the article.

Mostly I loved her feelings on why writers hate beginning and sometimes fear writing. I know I felt myself nodding along with her as I read.

She says, “You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible.”

I know that’s what bothers me, or one of the many things that bothers me. As soon as I start writing in one “tone of voice,” something is immediately lost; all the other ways I could have done it, and is this way the best or even good?  Even a particular sentence can frog march you straight into the next one, leaving out something which you desperately want to include.  I guess it’s  a type of Darwinian selection, as the strongest push themselves forward and try to hog all the resources.  But sometimes the concepts and plot lines that appear to be winning don’t interest me and I have to wrestle them aside to see what else is happening, and what the quiet ones are mumbling about.  Or something like that. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, maybe just that it can be difficult to control what emerges sometimes.  I take comfort in the fact that a host of big names are behind schedule on expected follow up books so I suspect the wrestling never ends. J

I'm on holidays. I've had a nap.  All the presents are bought. Nobody I haven't sent a card to has shocked me with one. (And only one day to go. Fingers crossed)