2 in 2

2 posts in 2 weeks over on my new website....come and visit.

www.sandiedocker.com

this week - all about endings


S

Moving Sale

OK. I don't really have anything for sale, unless someone wants to pay me for my wit and charm...no? But I am moving....

to a new website and blog.

You can now find me here www.sandiedocker.com

Pop over and say hello if you can! I'd love to see you there.

Sandie

How Do I Write

I was supposed to post this yesterday, but I think the whole school not going back till today thing threw me off a bit. Besides, it’s still Monday in the USA (just), so technically I’m not late. That’s my excuse and I’m a-sticking with it!

The lovely Sandie Will (what an awesome first name)asked if I wanted to participate in a blog tour on the writing process and I’ve never done a blog tour, so why not? Hopefully I can answer the questions without looking like a fool. Before I get started though, I’d like to thank Sandie for welcoming me to this opportunity and suggest you all take a look at her blog on How Do I Write?

So here we go...

What am I working on at the moment?

I’m currently working on a piece of Contemporary Women’s Fiction with a working title of THIS SHADOW LIFE. (I stress this is a working title, though it is growing on me.) It is the story of Alice, a woman who fled her small town as a teenager and finds herself running a café in an equally small but vastly different town. When she opens her café one morning and finds a homeless girl in her pantry, Alice is forced to face her past and the secrets she left behind.

How does my work differ from others of its genre? This is a tough one. My work in general focusses on small Australian towns, but what I love exploring is how the past and present are so closely entwined, even if there’s no obvious connection. My first novel, THE POINT had two parallel stories woven through it and Shadow Life is doing the same, even more so. With Shadow Life, however, I’m playing with the structure of the novel, intending the ‘historical’ narrative to be told not in chronological order.

I think the other difference is that while my stories are Australian, they are not ‘ocker’ Aussie stories, if you get what I mean.

Why do I write what I do? Like most writers, I write because I have to. There is simply nothing else I can see myself doing. The type of stories I write are what I’d like to read; the interplay of past and present that fascinates me; small town settings I love (I grew up in what was then a small town); female protagonists who are past the ‘bridget jones’ stage of their life (I never could relate to characters like that – shh, I’m sure that’s sacrilege); and while there are romantic elements to my work, the pivotal relationships are not ‘girl meets boy’ and I write that because these other relationships are so darn rich.

How does my writing process work? I tend to start with a seed of an idea – a picture of a character or scene in my head, a sentence, a title, and just start writing, sometimes with very little idea of where the story is going, sometimes knowing where it ends, but not how it starts. With THIS SHADOW LIFE, for example, I had the end in my head, just a scene, and I’ve gone from there.

Once I’m abut 20k words in, when I’ve got a better understanding of my characters and their story, then I plan. I ask myself perhaps the two most important questions of all Why and How? until the story comes together. Then I write more.

I used to get hung up when I wasn’t sure where the story was taking me, or couldn’t resolve a plot or character issue. Now I write through it and go back later to sort it out and funnily enough, the solution has usually presented itself by then.

One interesting thing about how I write is, perhaps, that I write the old fashioned way; with pen and paper, before going to my computer. Something about that movement across the page just gets me going. Hey, there are worse things to get excited about.

Up next week:

I did have three writers lined up to blog next, but due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, not everyone can play along next week. So, if you’d like to focus all your love and attention on the wonderful Bianca Nogrady on Monday 6^th May, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. I met Bianca at a writing course and her novel BIOHUNTER sounds like a cracking good read to me. She was a finalist with it in the recent Twitter Nestpitch competition, and I hope she gets picked up soon so I can find BIOHUNTER in my local bookstore.

BiancaNogrady is a freelance science journalist by day, non-fiction author by night, and aspiring fiction author in the twilight. When not writing about everything and anything in science and medicine, she reads and writes speculative fiction in all flavours and colours. She is querying her first novel BIOHUNTER  - an adult science fiction - and starting work on a second novel, an urban fantasy based on Greek mythology. Bianca writes, blogs and rants at www.biancanogrady.com

 

 

Well, Hello again!

I popped in here the other day to prepare for a blog tour I’m participating in next week, and was shocked to realise that it’s been almost a year since I've posted anything! Really? I knew I’d been neglecting my blog, but a year? That’s just a bit ridiculous. And I can’t claim alien abduction or being on a secret mission for the government all that time, because, well, let’s face it, that would be even more ridiculous. I can’t even claim that I’ve been soooo busy with my WIP that I just haven’t had time, because, while I have actually made significant progress with my latest WIP, we all know that there’s always time in the week we can find for these things.

Have I really had nothing to say for almost a year? That doesn’t sound like me. At all.

My original plan was to blog about this writing journey, but it turns out between queries and rejections and requests, there’s a lot of quiet time. A lot. Quick update on my querying stats to date: countless rejections (around 7,553,621 – or so it feels), 6 partials, 6 fulls (none of which have yet turned into an offer, though 1 is still outstanding – fingers, toes, eyes, intestines crossed).

So, if I am going to bring this blog back to life, how exactly am I going to it?

Already published authors can blog about their books, or tours or appearances, sneak peeks of up-coming works etc. And they have a group of people genuinely interested in what they have to say.

Some aspiring authors do book reviews, but I just can’t bring myself to go there, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are so many review blogs out there, many of them really excellent, I’m not sure what I could add to the mix. Also, I believe if you’re going to review books, then you need to be completely honest or there’s no point and I have two problems with that. 1. The authors I’d be reviewing are published. I’m not. So who am I to criticise their work? Yes, I’m also a reader and entitled to an opinion, but so too am I a writer, which leads me to number 2. I’m a writer, so I know no matter how good or bad a book is, that author has given their soul to that work, and for that alone I couldn't say a bad word about them.

Of course, there’s always the option of being controversial, which usually results in high readerships, but I’m not the type of person that can (or will) be controversial for the sake of it, and I really don’t like stirring up trouble. The original peace-keeper I am.

So, where does that leave me?

I’m not quite sure. Next week, as I mentioned above, I’m participating in a blog tour on the writing process, and I’m hoping that gives me the kick up the proverbial to breathe some life back into this blog. The next few weeks and months will tell, I guess. Fingers, toes, eyes, and intestines crossed.

S
keep chasing those pavements

Next week : The Writing Process Blog Tour