Julie Cordiner

ooh, hark at you, the hotshot expert!! 🙂 Well done, Daeds, this is fabulous. Exciting to be a part of, I imagine?

That’s interesting @elle. Is it that level of tutor contact in all the online courses?Sounds like it runs the risk of being a bit hit and miss. I did think the London based courses looked a lot more in depth and directly tutored. And they have a great reputation .. But they are A LOT of money, and yanno, in London. Sigh.

I’ve never started a piece of fiction knowing the ending. I like to start with a scene, put a character into it, and see where it goes. I enjoy the ride.

INteresting question. Funnily enough, sometimes the first thing I get is the setting. I’m very into the atmospheric setting & its role in the story, so that’s definitely there before I start any planning or research or even think about characters! The other thing though is a pretty formless idea of some sort of ‘issue’ I want to explore. Not big…[Read more]

Wow, well done, Alan. That’s a major bit of validation, and those courses look great. I’ve eyed them a few times, but never bitten, so will be really interested to hear how you get on.

Oh, well done, @alanr! That’s fantastic. So which course are you going for?

@KazG & @emmad – oooh, I like the phrase ‘thinker on paper’! That sounds a lot closer to what I do. For all my love of graphs and themes and character outlines, and more graphs, very little of the detail gets decided until I’m in the story. I think it’s a little like my old self’s data analysis process – first you gather all the plethora of…[Read more]

I’m pretty sure I’ll get the words down. But right now I have only the vaguest plan and I can’t think of even a working title.

Very interesting blog. I, too, have listened, enthralled, to Craig’s lectures on this, and have read an enormous amount of stuff about structure. I’m struggling rather with it now, at the almost-finished-the-second-draft-of-my-novel-stage. I don’t know if my struggle is because I’ve read too many different models/descriptions and have become…[Read more]

Good article, Daeds. I might try to hunt down the Twitter thread to see what else was said.

I saw someone (Hellie Ogden I think) say that 60% of her submissions either fail to meet the submission criteria (format, genre, basic spell checks etc) or are clearly at way too early a draft to be sent out. I was so guilty of this last with my first…[Read more]

Hi L,

I think you could trim most of the paragraphs in the first half of the story, really. The Physics thing (tight pants) early on could go, you use this analogy later on anyway. Watching a film at the cinema, that paragraph could be less wordy I think.
And towards the end – “zipped her hoodie and pulled the hood over her head” etc. I know…[Read more]

I think “Spotting an opening…” needs a new para. The lipstick thing is a little over complicated, I think you could shorten it without losing anything.
The “pills like skittles” analogy doesn’t work for me.
“Small-to-medium-time” seems a cop-out, he’s a small-time crook, I think.
“Anticipated to sit..” should be “anticipated sitting”.

I’d take…[Read more]

Hows the planning going, NaNo Denizens?? I have a title. That’s good, right?

Sorry @daedalus – for some reason your latest didn’t appear till after I’d posted the above. Really interesting breakdown there, I’d seen the film, and it came across to me (many moons ago, I admit) as extremely captivating and clever but essentially typical alpha-male adventure type thing. But no! PErhaps I should watch it again to pick up on all…[Read more]

I think I do a bit of both tbh. I do plot out the character arcs at the start, but things change as I write (as they do, the wee buggers), so by the end I need to do it all again for my major edit. That’s when Julie Cohen’s post-it notes come into play! I’m basically a walking advert for Julie and Craig.

@daedalus re the tragic/heroic thing – it…[Read more]

Also @squidge – The entire universe makes profound and powerful sense when Craig talks!! 😀

@richardb and @squidge – I don’t think there’s anything wrong in not wanting to use models like these! I have a penchance for graphs, which is probably ~60% of why I love it! No – I like the tie-in between internal and external, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

@athelstone, yeah you’re totally right, I agree it’s foolish to think that any…[Read more]

I remember doing these sessions at York…it all seemed to make perfect sense when CMT was explaining it, but I can’t put it into practise. I don’t think I have the kind of logical and structural mind that can break a story down into these kind of segments. Which is annoying, because I know it’s all good stuff and very useful – I just can’t apply…[Read more]

Very nice… There were a couple of points only that tripped me up in the reading:
‘Tasha and she nicked the lipstick’. Didn’t sound right. I wondered about ‘She’d nicked the lipstick when she was with Tasha’, but wasn’t sure how that’d affect your word count.
‘The salty scent of sweaty skin trapped in every pore’. I read this first as the sweaty…[Read more]