Knicks

“Let’s go. Everyone’s gone!”

“Not yet, there’s still one coat left.” I only been working in the cloak room for less than a month, but I take it seriously. It’s my first job after my stint in jail. Nothin’ bad, just got me some sticky fingers is all. Then of all the jobs to land after that, I gets a job takin’ care of other people’s belongings…[Read more]

I know @raine!! It’s just too good to be true eh? AND now you love me forever 🙂 What a very fine day this is turning out to be. Back atcha BTW (and apologies to all others for PDA. She’s Scottish and I’m Aussie so the English emotion rules don’t apply :-))

@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]

Last day to put in an entry for the Den monthly competition, people… 🙂

Sorry @athelstone, just saw your question – I’m Kaz Ginnane over there. I see I’m already friends with @daedalus, @jillybean and @raine 🙂

I have a title. And a reeaallly rough idea of what happens. But there are still many strands waving wildly around and I have no idea where I’m going to stuff them, let alone tie them together neatly…

I’m apparently planning it now, but here I am instead!

And now I’ve seen this and am very, VERY sorely tempted to whip out the credit card…Margaret Atwood is one of my all time lit heroes. And can I just boast that when I first started on Twitter, my first tweet was to her and she REPLIED!!

(Twitter has never lived up to that since, needless to…[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.

What a lot of clever things have been said on this thread! I have read through them all now and it’s all fascinating.

I love Dara Marks, @raine, and your summary is brilliant. I’m getting ready to do NaNoWriMo with book two now and I’m holding these ideas in my head (as opposed to an actual firm plan, which truly is beyond me at first draft…[Read more]

Well, I’m feeling a tad more apprehensive than in previous years. There’s a certain investment in succeeding this time – for me. Well, succeeding in writing the requisite number of words anyway. My record is one complete children’s story, one block of 50K words that I eventually deleted, two failures.

I often think “getting” story structure is like one of those damn magic eye puzzles. All these people around you are like “oh yeah! It’s dolphins!!” while you’re staring at it like, “whaaa?”

And then, you glimpse it (maybe in a CM Taylor workshop), but then it’s gone again. You glimpse it, it disappears, you glimpse it, you go…[Read more]

I think we all did that with our first book Raine! And some of us, with our second…

I know what you mean, Hilary. And FWIW I try now not to worry too much about the minutiae of all the different (with a lot of similarities) theories of story structure. That way lies madness for me. I read them and enjoy them and sometimes I get a light bulb moment and often some part of them sticks in my mind and comes to the fore when I’m trying…[Read more]

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]

@StellaOlivetti – thank you for your feedback and please don’t feel back about nitpicking. I like nitpicking, I want nitpicking because that’s what’s going to help me improve on my story so all your comments are very helpful!

The main reason about the grandmother being Russian is a kind of nod at Neil Gaiman and American Gods and the idea that…[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]

Still missing three quarters of the story….