Category Archives: Writing Craft

Control, plans and other wafflings

Writing Craft, Writing Life,

In a fit of organisation I decided I need to blog here a little more regularly. Or at least that’s the plan. And get some more guests as Sarah was so awesome. (Anyone wanna guestblog?) And in the spirit of that decision, I thought I’d actually write about writing. Not just craft, although there will surely be some of that, but also about my writing life, the things that impact me and don’t and hopefully some of it will be helpful.

And if it isn’t helpful hopefully I’ll make you laugh. At me.

Oh dear, I’m not sure this is working out the way I planned.

I’m pretty sure someone else did a post similar to this recently but I can’t for the life of me find it. If I didn’t dream it (entirely possible) I will be happy to link back if anyone can identify it for me. But here’s my take on Control, anyway.

A writer friend of mine emailed the other day to let me know that due to a conversation a few of us had been having via email she had experienced something of an epiphany.

“I’ve been stressing for a year and a half over things I can’t control.”

My first response was: “Aren’t we all.”

Which led to my second: “WHY do we put ourselves through that?”

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Guestblog: With Shovel and Pail by Sarah A. Hoyt

Awesome authors, Guestblogging, Writing Craft, , ,

Thanks to the recent Steampunk Workshop on Romance Divas (which was brilliant btw) I managed to blackmail persuade the fantastic Sarah A. Hoyt to write a guestblog for me. We also discovered that we share a brain have a lot of similar interests – Robin Hood, Musketeers, Swashing and Buckling, Brave New Worlds – preferably those we create ourselves.

With Shovel and Pail

Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been building worlds as long as I can remember.  I started with legos, paper and glue, and – at the beach – shovel and pail.  I built houses and cities inhabited by tiny, plastic dog figurines, I built huge sand castle complexes and filled them with imaginary princesses and knights.

It is not that the real world wasn’t good enough, but that it often wasn’t INTERESTING enough.  I wanted people doing heroic or silly stuff and, from a very early age, I found the need for a world that my characters should inhabit.

The details of these worlds, particularly as I moved from stories in my head to stories on paper, were harder to establish.

For instance, while I was making stories for myself and enacting them with various materials, no one much cared if I were building elaborate cities to be inhabited by dogs who, lacking opposable thumbs, couldn’t possibly have built them.  Turns out readers care more about this than my young self did – who knew?

So I started the long and stumbling road of world building.  I never had such bad judgment as to assume that my world didn’t need to be internally consistent, or that I could wave a magic wand and change everything halfway through and no one would mind.  No, I always knew the first commandment of world building:

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The Random in the Fiction

Writing Craft

Warning: may turn into pointless waffling. Also contains spoilers for an episode of Bones called “The Plain in the Prodigy” (Season 5, ep 3). If you’re a fan you may want to stop reading so.

Something occured to me the other night while watching Bones. Something kind of writing related. So I thought I would share. It may well be that everyone else knows this already. Certainly, I knew this already but I’d never seen it demonstrated so susinctly as a “Bad Thing”.

I love Bones. Normally I sit and giggle the whole way through, enjoying the characters, the interplay, the grisly murders… all the normal things a girl wants to watch on a worknight. And this episode was great, up to a point.

*Spoilers follow* with added waffle…

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