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Plodding on, amidst the crises
Suddenly, there are lots of worries. The cost of living crisis that has just had me buying dried pasta instead of fresh, and flour instead of dried, for next time. The global warming crisis, which saw our temperatures reach 40°c last month for the first time in thousands of years, and starved us of our…
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To describe, or not to describe
I’m sure you know that, while some authors love to describe everything, others prefer to leave it to the mind’s eye of the reader. And it’s probably a sliding scale. And I’m wondering where I sit on it. Dialogue is my favourite style of writing. It comes to me quickly when I’m writing and it…
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Dialect and narrative
I’m cringing at the stark difference between the real, Yorkshire characters in book one and my stuffy narrative voice. It kind of reflects me and how I feel, living here. My favourite people are totally authentic, genuine, no choice but to be themselves and no reason to be any other and then there’s me and…
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Maybelle’s intro was a tough edit
It’s only reading it so carefully, three years after I first wrote Maybelle’s intro, that I realise quite how two-sided the dysfunctionality of her friendship with Zoe is. There’s so much to unpick! I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I wonder what they would make of it. The rivalry is strong, with Zoe’s…
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“You’ve written something beautiful. Don’t change it.”
Words spoken by my dear partner the other day, as I was contemplating a Hollywood-style, high octane re-jig of the very first few chapters. You know the kind: a car chase, a murder, finding the absolute, shocking climax of the whole series and plonking it right in there, at the start. “It’s too slow,” I…
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I am still finding mistakes.
Odd words. ‘If’, instead of ‘of’. Syntax issues. Sentences that are tangled up by themselves, like a wild and unattended clump of brambles that grows any which way, over and under and around and beside itself. When I come across such a clump, either in my writing or on our land, I sigh and inspect…
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Voices, again
Argh, the voices! The voices. Sometimes, I regret my decision to put the comtemplative one in italics. It makes things so complicated, not least, the dividing line between the two. It’s sometimes not really clear whether a sentence is contemplative or narrative. Sometimes, it seems like it might be both. I’m editing the very beginning…
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The slow grind
I did some thinking exercises this week, designed to improve my editing productivity. So far, I’ve made milk kefir, kombucha, kimchee and sauerkraut. I have been harvesting vegetables from the garden and batch-cooking with them for the freezer. I’ve been drying and processing herbs and flowers and making various brews and concoctions, filling teabags and…
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I started a sentence with the word “Observationally”.
Started a paragraph with it actually, to my eternal shame. (Para 3, Chapter 2, Book 1, to be precise.) Don’t worry. It’s gone, now.
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Back to the beginning again
Starting another round of editing, my heart wasn’t in it. Five or six days passed, without me doing any work whatsoever. *Checks date of last blog post..* Okay, two weeks passed. The very thought of tackling yet more editing was depressing. I had to do something different, switch it up, make it interesting for me…