There's a spoke in the works...

Just twenty pages left to edit on StarMark - and I have just been told this morning that I have tendonitis.

So I'm typing this very awkwardly, wearing a splint.

"Rest it," the nurse said. "Keep taking painkillers regularly and at night, take the splint off and give your wrist a good wriggle."

*sigh*

Just twenty pages left. It will probably take me as long to do these last few as it did to do the first one hundred and sixty...

At least my arm isn't fractured, which was my fear after an argument in the garden with a bramble root, spade and buried concrete block...

Anyway - if my Scribbles are shorter than usual ('Hooray!' I can hear you all saying), at least you know why.

And a few hundred words a day on StarMark will still get me to the finishing post eventually - just later than planned.

Where to leave a review of Granny Rainbow?

I had a bit of a surprise today - I received an unexpected email, copied here:

Hi Katherine, hope this will find you, Can't find where to leave a review.
Granny rainbow should be in every kids story box, a lovely selection of stories about someone that could be your own dear granny. My G kids loved it and I thought it was great WHAT NOW! is there more from Granny rainbow 

It's an anonymous comment. At first sight I thought it might be spam, but I don't think it is; it was added to an old post about Granny Rainbow and is too specific for a spambot. 

But it set me thinking about reviews. 

Reviews seem to be very important in selling books. I can have the best cover in the world to catch your eye, the most enticing blurb which promises you a fabulous story, but at the end of the day it's what you, the reader, thinks of what lies between the covers that's important to a book's success or failure. A review - whether by word of mouth (Have you read x? My son really enjoyed the action in it) or on the internet (How many stars? I didn't like it at all!) - is what prompts people to see what all the fuss is about or give a new author a try. 

Amazon is one major source of reviews but as I'm direct selling at the moment, Granny Rainbow is not currently listed there. 

Instead, there are two other options for anyone who would like to post a review.  

1. Goodreads. Granny Rainbow is the only book with that title, so it's not difficult to find - feel free to leave a star rating if you don't want to write a 'proper' review. 

2. Email me. For emailed reviews, I've got to work out whether it's best to have a separate page for reviews and whether it should be here on the Scribbles or over on my website, but I will find a way of publishing them to a wider audience. 



Thank you to everyone who's already told me what they think of Granny Rainbow. The positive response to the book so far has been a huge boost and there are around 160 copies already 'out there', being read!

To everyone who's considering writing a few words (and that can be young readers too - I'd really love to know what the kids think!) please, please do!

And to Anonymous, who sent me the email which sparked this post - YES, there will be more Granny Rainbow stories! Probably next year. (And don't forget to check out the competition on the website, where YOUR idea for a Granny Rainbow story might make it into the next book!)

And if you still need to purchase Granny Rainbow to see what Anonymous is on about...buy it here. 

Will this editing never end?

You know I'm editing StarMark? And that it was all going swimmingly? It feels right, it's in what I now recognise as my voice, it's going well, blah, blah, blah?

I take it back.

Like a marathon runner - in spite of all the training - I've hit the wall, about three quarters of the way in.

I'm rewriting so much! Not light editing, folks, oh no. I'm literally rewriting. Yes, it's making the story stronger; the dialogue feels more realistic, I've been able to put more emotional depth into the characters, revisited their motivation for certain actions and tweaked things they couldn't possibly have known...

But it takes so flamin' long!

Now I know I'm a fairly impatient person - not the 'quick to anger' kind, but the 'I wanna get on and see the results' kind. I'm an ideas person, quite happy to come up with the bigger picture, but always needing others who support my vision to achieve the fine tuning and planning which turns my my idea into a reality.

With writing, you can't really do that.

I can't say 'here's a great idea for a story' then hand it over to someone else to write. (Though I'm sure there are many ghostwriters and biographers who can and do, most successfully...) I have to write it myself, at least up to a certain point when I can pull in my trusty beta readers and see whether they think there are plot holes or I've misused en and em dashes again...

I know it's worth the effort to edit - even to rewrite if I think the story needs it - but at this precise moment, I'm tired of StarMark. Tired of only getting a few words 'signed off' each day in the new version and finding there are still hundreds, nay, thousands to still be checked.

But I don't want StarMark to be less than it can be - I don't want to give up on a story that I believe in or allow myself too long a break from it that I lose the feel of what I'm creating here.

I mean, I still don't even know whether the changes I'm making now will make it any better. StarMark was rejected by publishers before. What makes me think they'll  be any happier with it second time round? (Assuming of course that it ever got to land on their desks again.) I could be doing all this work and making it worse. I don't think I am, but that could be due to the rather fetching rose-tinted specs I've taken to wearing... I have to keep on keeping on, or I will have failed the characters in this story by not giving them the story they deserve, as well as failing all the folk who've supported me directly and indirectly as this wordy, try-too-hard wannabe writer begins to morph into an author of reasonable quality.

My aim is to get StarMark print - and possibly digitally - ready for next year. Maybe a few hundred words a day ain't so bad after all. I certainly won't get it finished by talking or writing about it.

I'll get there - eventually.

Pic source http://thejosevilson.com/

The Colour of Life and other stories

Delighted to announce that this anthology is now published! And I've got a story in it...

From charity shops to tube lines and stalkers to monsters under the bed, the winning stories in the Retreat West Short Story Competition are brilliant examples of how one writer takes a theme and does something completely different with it to another. There's funny, creepy, sad and downright weird stories in here - and a chance to discover some great new voices and emerging writers.

It's special for me for several reasons;
1. It was the first formal competition I'd entered and been placed in.
2. The title of my story has also been taken as the title of the collection - a huge honour.
3. This publication is the first one I get paid for! (Though hopefully not the last...)

It's available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon if you'd like to buy a copy. Please do...I'm saving up my royalties so I can celebrate all my writing successes of the last year at the Festival of Writing in September!

There are more short story and flash fiction comps available through Retreat West - check out the site for details if you fancy a go yourself...

The flowers are back!

If you're a regular reader of the Scribbles, you might already know that I am involved with the flowers at my church.

At this time of year we get to go...well, not exactly wild with the flowers, but after the austerity of Lent - a whole six weeks with bare walls and an unadorned altar - Easter Sunday hits the senses in a striking and sweet-smelling display. Today was no exception; for my blog today, I thought I'd share them with you...

As soon as you walk into the porch, you're greeted with flowers...

The window above the altar.

Arrangements of orange, purple and yellow were in every other window bar one,
at the font and in the passageway to the Chapter House. Funny thing was - the tulips had all
started to grow upwards in the light from the windows!

The Easter garden.

Happy Easter, everyone - He is Risen indeed, Alleluia!

What's good about Good Friday?

I don't usually write about my faith...but today, I feel it's pretty important to do exactly that.

Today is Good Friday. Yet when you look at what the Christian church 'celebrates' today, there really isn't much good about it at first sight.

A case of political intrigue, the flexing of religious muscles, the betrayal and execution of an innocent man... and two thousand years on, we still see similar things happening around the world. Nothing's changed.

Well, one thing that has definitely changed is how we mark Good Friday.

When I was a child, there was a sense of awe for me about Good Friday. The shops were shut for the Bank Holiday but there were always hot cross buns (the only time of year you could buy them), there was nearly always a biblical epic or re-telling of the crucifixion on the telly in the afternoon, and in the evening: church. The service was always a sombre one with all the linen and flowers removed - the only 'decoration' was often a bare cross, draped with purple fabric and a crown of thorns.

More recently, I attended a Walk of Witness through town, when I was very aware of how the approach to Good Friday has altered...diminished in some way by our secular society. On that particular occasion, a crowd of us followed a man - carrying a cross and escorted by 'soldiers' - through the busy marketplace, enacting various scenes from the Bible which culminated in a 'crucifixion' outside the Town Hall.

I was struck by how many people ignored us as they carried on shopping. I wondered if that was how it was when Jesus was crucified? Was the sight of men being led to a grisly death by crucifixion so commonplace that normal life carried on around it? Or did you ignore it because to show any hint of compassion or interest might tar you with the same brush and land you in trouble with the authorities? How many turned a blind eye and opted for the quiet life?

With the benefit of hindsight, I know how the story ended - or rather, how it continued. As a Christian, I can 'celebrate' the events of Good Friday because I know there is something beyond the death of Jesus that opened up a whole new world of possibility for a personal relationship with God.

In spite of how any of us mark this day, the essential truth of why it happened remains the same; that's what's good about Good Friday.

My fingers aren't green...

I am lucky enough to have a fairly large garden and I love spending time in it. What I don't like is the gardening.

Mr Squidge cuts the lawn but on the whole, the rest of it falls to me. I suppose I'd describe myself as a pot-luck gardener; if it grows where I put it, it was meant to be. If it dies, so be it. We had the garden landscaped about ten, eleven years ago. The blank canvas was great - I had a ball picking my flowers and bushes and planting everything up. It looked fantastic.

But then everything started growing - as it does - and over the last couple of years the garden has gone to pot. Not sure why, exactly...

Our neighbour had a HUGE bramble growing between our fence and his brick pile (a pile now converted into a garage, thank goodness) which has given us the most wonderful berries for the last three years. The neighbour, having access to the roots, has cut them. Which left a massive dead bramble for me to sort out on our side of the fence. Done today - there are scratches all up my arm to prove it.

And the nettles...they're sneaky little blighters, running their roots under the ground and popping up somewhere totally unexpected, usually in the middle of another plant so they catch you unaware when they sting you.

Stickyweed...ugh! I try to catch it before it seeds, but end up covered in a rash.

And ground ivy...it's ruined the fence down one side of the garden; we're going to have to replace no end of the topping strips.

There are lots of a feathery leaved red flower (a bit like a campion) which self seeds and grows like the clappers, suffocating everything in sight. Very pretty, but extremely rampant.

It sounds like the garden's all weeds - it's not, honest! At the moment, there are patches of forget-me-nots and bluebells, the lavender's sprouting and the lilac's forming on the tree. I've got aquilegias all over the place - and the caterpillars haven't found them yet! There's a lovely yellow-flowered bush under the blossom-filled pear tree, and the forsythia is just going over. Today, I've bought a few sweet peas, hoping to put them in next weekend when the threat of frost goes...and I've got some dahlia tubers from Mother's Day to plant out. I keep saying I'll get veg seeds in and bulbs...but I never have much success as I'm too impatient to prepare the ground properly.

I really envy folk with lovely looking gardens. I have to keep telling myself I could have a nicer looking garden; ultimately, it's down to how much effort I'm prepared to put in, isn't it?

I just wish my fingers were naturally a little greener...