Diving in!

I am excited to say that my story proposals were more on the button this time than they have been in the past *wipes brow* and my lovely editor picked out the idea that I liked the best!

 After a couple of weeks of major league character planning, during which I filled out huge character questionnaires and imagined myself shopping, holidaying and goodness-knows-what with my hero and heroine, I am now ready to start writing the story. So in the next couple of days (small one has been ill, so everything has been on hold) I will be revisiting my plot board and getting started on Chapters 1-3 of The Date Pool (my pet name for the story, although my editor is calling it Alice and Harry).

Hope to blog in the next week or so about how it's going, can't deny I am super excited to be starting a new story but I am also trying to ignore Captain Doubt whispering about one-book wonders.

In the meantime I am taking part in Tea Cooper's roundup of the progress made by some of the entrants of New Voices 2011. Come and join me over at her blog if you have time for 'New Voices - Where Are We Now?'  www.teacooperauthor.com

A New Start

After only a week or two of nailbiting I was really lucky this week to get a phone call from the editor who's dealing with me. And so I have news about Honeymoon and a new direction.

I hadn't expected anything like this quick a response and was grimly settled into revising the second half of Honeymoon, all the while trying to ignore my gut feeling that it really wasn't good enough. Unfortunately I was absolutely right. I got some really great feedback though, and any low feelings passed pretty quickly. She reiterated that they like my voice and that they like my portrayal of the heroine very much. She said there were moments of brilliance, which was lovely. But the feeling was the story itself wasn't strong enough. If I'm honest I can see where she's coming from. I found it very difficult to keep writing as I got further through the story, it was like pulling teeth, but I plodded on regardless. So Honeymoon goes onto the backburner, at least for now. Perhaps I will go back and finish it at some point in the future when I'm more experienced and have a better grasp of what is required.


I am thrilled, however, that she liked one of my story ideas and after giving me lots of advice, has let me loose to start on a new project! I am beyond excited about this and filled with all the optimism that always seems to accompany starting a new story. I'd only supplied her with a brief idea of the story and a few lines about the possible conflicts for hero and heroine, so my next step is to go back to her with a more detailed synopsis and story plan. As a result I am now up to my ears in research, which is something I did hardly any of for Honeymoon, and I can't help wondering if that was part of the problem. As it was a New Voices entry, I dashed off one chapter of it without doing any of the usual groundwork beyond basic character sketches. When Liz Fielding first got in touch with me after it went through to the second round I had only the vaguest idea of where the story was heading and I could never have produced such a strong Chapter Two without her excellent guidance. I can't help thinking that the way the story weakened as it progressed was partly to do with my lack of planning before I started writing the thing.


So I'm determined not to let that happen this time. I'm doing lots of background research first, which currently involves watching episodes of Made In Chelsea (completely insane but strangely addictive). I also intend to spend loads of time on my character plans. Only then will I look at coming up with a skeleton plot. I hope (crossing fingers) that all this background work will stand me in good stead when it comes to actually writing it.

In terms of advice I can share...well what I can say is the editor used the terms 'sparkling, daring, edgy, glamorous..' an awful lot, and there's very much a feeling that it needs to have global appeal. I was told to make sure my hero remains extremely alpha as that was something I was losing sight of now and then in Honeymoon. She also advised me to read lots of the line, which I am already doing - I find this helpful in showing what kind of story and feel they are after, but at the same time it often fills me with a desperate 'I'll NEVER be that good..' kind of feeling!

So to sum up, one project on the back burner, and another at the starting line. I will post progress updates as I go along, but for now its back to King's Road for me!

Happy New Year From the Edge...

Happy New Year everyone! I wish you all luck and happiness for the next twelve months.

I am writing this hopefully from somewhere edgy, and the reason for that is that I have news about Honeymoon, my New Voices entry!

To quickly recap, part of my prize was a telephone evaluation of my entry by a Mills & Boon editor, and I received my call just before Christmas. I was delighted that the editor I was assigned is the same one who dealt with me throughout 2011 - she gave me revisions on my first submission and when that was eventually rejected she also dealt with a partial I'd sent her for a new story. She is lovely, able to be brutally honest without crushing your spirit, perfect for someone like me who really needs to develop the skin of a rhino.

And so my news...she has asked me to come up with three new story ideas and send them to her in January. She will then choose the one she thinks has the most potential and will work on it with me. To say I am happy about this is an understatement! I am so excited! I am also rather terrified, and filled with self-doubt. What if NV was a fluke and I just can't maintain that standard? But I know this is a fantastic opportunity and I am going to give it my all.

Where does Honeymoon come into this, I hear you ask... I asked this too, because I'd rather thrown myself into the Honeymoon story after investing so much angst and effort into it for the two weeks of NV voting. I've actually got a working draft of about 40k which I was intending to finish by Christmas then leave alone for a month or so before revising. The editor asked me to send over what I'd done if it was in a presentable enough state and she would read it. Her overriding view, however, was that she'd like to see me tackling something a bit more 'edgy and daring', and so despite requesting my draft, her suggestion is to put the Honeymoon story to one side for now and work on something new.

As a result I spent the seven days before Christmas frantically trying to revise the Honeymoon ms into something coherent and (I wish) so fabulous that putting it to one side won't be necessary. But I totally underestimated how long it would take me to polish it to that extent. In the end I only sent her the first six chapters although I was desperate to send it all. She has emailed me to say she will look at it in early January and she looks forward to my three story proposals.

So there we have it! I am so excited and can't believe all this has come about from my little NV chapter. My only concern now is whether I can be edgy enough. Wish me luck!

Definitely Do Sweat The Small Stuff...

Because of the disjointed time I have to write - demands on my time come at me from all domestic angles! - I tend to write my first drafts longhand on a huge pad which I dig out whenever I have a free ten minutes. Then I spend any longer spells of time (chiefly Tuesday and Thursday mornings when the small one goes to preschool) writing them up. I tend to play around with my rough draft as I type and it ends up (hopefully) as a coherent story in a Word document.


Following New Voices I've decided to experiment with self-editing as I go along. Prior to this I waited until I had a finished draft MS and then worked back through it. For NV, however, I had to redraft and polish my Chapter Two over and over, and the same for the Pivotal Moment, to get it to a standard where it it passed the approval of my mentor, Liz Fielding, whose self-editing abilities were staggering. I want to be her when it comes to self-editing. My draft would read pretty well to me but she could pick up tiny flaws... sentence or paragraph structure which was clumsy, words that had the wrong connotation for the scene, all sorts of things which alone didn't amount to much and so passed under my radar. When all these little things were corrected, however, the result was amazing. The whole thing flowed better, sounded tighter, the pacing was stepped up. My jaw dropped at the difference, I sounded so much better a writer!


I can give one example so you can see where I'm coming from. In my Chapter Two I have the hero break into a bathroom where he believes the heroine is suicidal, only to discover she was actually trapped because the doorknob had snapped. I wanted to use their close proximity and the fact the heroine is wearing only a towel to put across their growing physical attraction. In the middle of all this I had the hero touch the bathtub (which was covered with bath oil) and I described it as 'greasy' under his palms. This choice of word seemed OK to me, I certainly didn't pick it up in my many read-throughs. Liz, however, pointed out that 'greasy' has unpleasant connotations and therefore didn't belong in a paragraph where the hero is thinking about how gorgeous the heroine is. I eventually changed it to 'slippery'. 


Having worked so hard on Chapter Two and reached a point where I was really happy with it I also found I had a really clear idea of how to proceed with Chapter Three. So I'm hoping that by trying hard to be objective and self-edit as I go along I will not only keep my writing tighter and more effective, I will also make the path ahead clearer. I definitely will be sweating the small stuff from now on.

Where I'm At...

OK so New Voices has finished and I no longer have the need to feverishly check the website and/or my inbox. Let's have a quick roundup of the story so far.

I reached the second round of revisions on my first submission at the beginning of this year. It was eventually rejected as lacking the emotional depth required (although I read during NV that the on the editors' list of things never to do is have an Elvis impersonator in your MS, and I not only had one in that MS, I actually introduced him during that second revision stage *cringes*). Anyway enough of that!

I currently have a revised partial awaiting feedback with M&B, sent beginning of September but recently out of mind due to the excitement of New Voices. My feeling now is that I want to ask for it back, revise it again and resubmit it! I learned so much during New Voices from my brilliant mentor, Liz Fielding, (about emotion, structure, streamlining my writing to name just a few things) that I no longer feel that partial is the best I could do.

I also have Honeymoon With A Stranger (HWAS), my entry in this year's New Voices, which has consumed me for the last month or so as I worked on it with Liz's help. It didn't win but the feedback I received has been a delight. People liked my story and the way I write and it has been the most amazing confidence boost. Yes, winning the comp would have been a dream, but to be perfectly honest I feel like a winner anyway. I've learned more from Liz in a few weeks than I've gleaned in a year's reading of how-to books and internet sites.

M&B have told me they'll be in touch shortly regarding HWAS, and this is the story I plan to work on for now. I feel so invested in it after the intensity of the competition that I want to take advantage of that. So the next stage is to develop the story fully (I'd only written the first chapter and when I unexpectedly went through to the Final 21 the only plan I had was 'she blags a job at the hotel and they fall in love'). Once I have a proper plan I can crack back on with writing it.

Introducing...The Blog

New Voices 2011 has just finished and by some miracle I managed to end up in the Final 4 with my entry 'Honeymoon With A Stranger'.

I haven't kept a blog before. As someone who squashes writing into the gaps between running a family of five, I didn't think I would have much to say on the subject that would be of interest to anyone but me. However, the wake-up call that was New Voices made me realise how much I like this writing thing. I've had a fabulous, brilliant time these last few weeks (possibly apart from the rather manic refreshing of my inbox that took place last Friday). And going forward I want to take it more seriously and aim high.

So... this blog is partly acknowledgment to myself that I'm going to work at my writing a bit more rather than just playing at it, and partly a way of recording the journey that will (hopefully in some dream world) end in publication. As mum to two teenagers and a three year old, I'm used to not being listened to, therefore although followers will be welcomed excitedly, I will blather on to myself quite happily anyway!