A bit more about StarMark

StarMark is so much a part of my life now, I tend to forget that some folk don't know anything about it. So, forgive this little indulgence of mine, but I'm going to tell you about it.

The book is a middle-grade fantasy (for the Brits, that means it probably sits in the 9-12 age bracket) about a girl called Irvana. The story is built around the fact that Irvana has a secret...but is completely unaware of it. The problems start when someone else discovers this secret before she does - and as a result, Irvana's life is threatened. When she does realise the secret she holds, she has to fight - with the help of friends - to regain what should have been her birthright. The StarMark of the title is a birthmark - black on the skin at birth, but turning to gold when the StarChain is worn at the point of succession by the new overlord of Koltarn.

The story began life way back, around 2008, I think. I sent it off (as you do, when you're an inexperienced newbie writer) to agents and publishing houses galore, only to have it firmly rejected by every single one.

And there, the real story of StarMark's writing begins...

October 2009 - first critique by Writer's Workshop. StarMark is roundly slammed for being inappropriate for children (too many adult themes).

October 2010 - a new version of StarMark is produced, taking into account everything that was wrong in the first critique. Second WW critique with the lovely Debi Alper - who said it had potential.

February 2011 - 3rd WW critique, also with Debi. Finally feeling like it's polished enough to send to agents. Make tentative enquiries with a local agent who asked to see the first few chapters. By the end of the month, I had an agent.

October 2011 - after a bit more tweaking, StarMark is sent out to publishers. All say no. Begin writing another novel - 'Rurik'. StarMark is shelved.

May 2013 - after not managing to tweak 'Rurik' to meet the agent's requirements, part from said agent.

September 2014 - can't let go of StarMark. More work, more editing, with the view of self-pubbing after the success of Granny Rainbow. Took it to York for agent's comments. Was asked by one agent whether I really believed enough in this story to rework it again and make it good? I decided I did.

late 2014 - submitted to Bedazzled Ink firmly believing that they'd say 'no', which would justify me self-pubbing as I'd planned.

January 2, 2015 - hear back from Bink - who offered me a contract!

September 2015 - StarMark gets a cover.

From September 2015 until whenever - editing!

April 2016 - fingers crossed: publication.

If you take into account the time I took prior to that first critique to actually write the story, I reckon it'll have taken StarMark around eight years to go from conception to publication. There is no overnight success...

What have I learned from the process so far?

Well, I suppose the main thing is don't give up on a story if you believe in it; if it's the one that fires you up, that's a story you simply HAVE to tell, do it!

The second is never stop trying to improve your writing skills. Learn all you can - from courses, from fellow writers, from readers... listen to advice and make it work for you. I certainly wouldn't be in the position I'm in if I'd stuck with the dreadful (I can admit it now) version of the first critique.

So there you go - all you ever wanted to know about StarMark - so far!

StarMark has a cover!

It's already up on Dragonfeather Books, so I reckon I can share... Ta-daaa!

Sharing my love of writing

I've been gratified to receive not one, but two, requests recently for creative writing workshops.

Now, I have to be honest - I'm not a qualified teacher. I do have training in my background; years ago I gained a Certificate in Training and Development when I was designing and running cleanliness courses at work. That learning was backed up with an NVQ Level 3 in Training and Development as an Association Trainer with the Guide Association. I've also spent quite a few years (paid and unpaid) supporting primary school children in the classroom. And I help to run a small creative writing group locally.

And I write. I've even had work published, so I do know a little bit about writing stories.

But does all of that really add up to me knowing enough about 'creative writing' to run a kosher workshop?

Having recently been to York and sat in some fabulous workshops (check out the FOW15 Diaries on dialogue, theme and taking risks), I feel woefully inadequate compared to those very distinguished workshop leaders. Almost like a fraud...

I suppose it depends on what you want out of a workshop. If you want to kick your writing into shape, you most probably need to find someone who's more of an expert in sentence formation and story arcs to run the session.

If, on the other hand, you want to play with words, explore ways of inspiring stories, create characters and settings to get your story-juices flowing...

Well, then I might just be the right person for the job.

That's what's gone into the session plan for now, anyway; I'll let you know how it works out when I do it for real with the children...

Getting to grips with technology during an author visit earlier this year...

Someone's following me...

I'm always enormously chuffed to hear that someone is following me (and therefore the Scribbles) on Google+. It makes me feel like I'm not talking to myself! I also know that many of you are regular readers but choose not to 'follow' - and I'm just as chuffed when someone who isn't an official follower tells me they've enjoyed a particular post or starts a conversation about something I've shared with the wider world.

I enjoy blogging and sharing my experiences with you all and lots of you seem to enjoy reading, because recently, I've had a flurry of new followers. Well - almost a dozen in the space of five days, which is unheard of for this blog.

Without exception, my new followers are all male, single, and involved in the military.

I have no problem with this. I understand that there are algorithms and the like that search out and suggest people to follow. But it did set me thinking about search engines that exist simply to root out female profiles for men 'looking for a relationship'. And I found that thought uncomfortable, probably because I've never experienced it first hand before - other than to ignore the 'single men looking for women' ads on facebook. I know there is a risk when you 'put yourself out there' on the internet - and I don't mind being followed by people I don't know. That's part and parcel of being a blogger.

But somehow, I don't think I'm going to be providing what these guys are looking for with a blog about writing and life.

That said, if you are one of my newer followers, stick around. I hope you DO find something to catch your eye and keep your interest on the Scribbles.

PS. And I'm not talking about my profile pic or the fact I'm female...

Who Dares, Wins - Taking risks with your writing (FOW15 Diaries)

How often do you get stuck in your writing? You look at what you've written and go 'bleurgh!' because it just...isn't...working?

Sometimes we need something to pull us out of the hole we appear to have dug ourselves into - and this workshop, run by the lovely Shelley Harris (author of Jubilee and Vigilante) looked at some intriguing methods to get our writerly juices flowing again. But it meant taking risks, forcing ourselves to move outside of our comfort zone.

The first thing we tried was character names; we had to write five names that we would never give our characters. When asked why we'd not use them, the reasons were many and varied - but Shelley challenged us to go away and write a colourful character for the boring name, to write Tarquin Roderick Matthias Jameson the Fourth without a penny to his name... I found myself writing quite a few 'upper class' names, or ones that sounded like doddery old ladies. Wonder what that says about the names I do choose and perhaps my prejudices for those I don't...?

Then we considered what stories we'd write if no-one were ever to read them. That's because we've all got no-go areas in our writing. Perhaps we choose not to write about our past, because we worry about upsetting people still living. Perhaps we choose not to write about sex or violence, for fear of shocking our readers. (She seems so nice! How on earth would she know about that?)

There are bound to be other examples - these are just what popped into my head as I was writing the blog - but the real reason we don't write certain things is because we are afraid of being judged; we edit ourselves, even before we've begun writing the story. If you could write, knowing that no-one would ever read what you've written, you have edited out instead other people's judgements and allowed yourself the freedom to commit what you want to write to the page. I'm not sure what I'd write if you were never going to read it; I fear my own self-editing rules are etched too deep inside to ever erase completely...

(Both of these ideas were attributed to Susie Maguire)

The next idea Shelley showed us was a morphological matrix. The creative think tank on wikispace describes this as 'a tool for generating options. It provides a structured or systematic way to generate a large number of possibilities including many unique or highly unusual options.'

Sounds complicated, but it's not, really. Draw yourself a grid. Across the top of the columns, add labels like 'jobs I've done, locations I know well, skills/knowledge I possess, favourite smells, current obsession'. Now fill in the lists with at least eight items for each one. Dig deep.

When you've done, combine the items across the grid in many and varied ways - and when you have, for example, egg pickler, the brook path, how to knit socks, lily of the valley and notebooks, (yep, they really apply to me) sit and think about what story you'd tell with them. Mine the familiar - but tell an unfamiliar story. It's a bit like those books you had as a kid, where the page was split into three parts and you could flip over different sections so you had a diver's head with a doctor's middle and a ballet dancer's feet...

On the subject of mining your own life experience, ask yourself questions - do you believe in justice or mercy? In nature or nurture? If you could return to one time in your life, when would it be and why? Complete the sentence 'Most people wouldn't guess that I...' Can you use these things to add to or generate a story?

You could BE your character. At which point, Shelley shared her experience of dressing up as a superhero for a day while she researched her novel, Vigilante. (You can read about her experience here.) Easy, it was not. But without that experience, Shelley couldn't have known what it felt like to put on a mask and hide behind the anonymity whilst trying to do good.

Make the unexpected happen; Pixar story rule #9 states 'When you're stuck, list what WOULDN'T happen next and material to get you unstuck will show up.' Your subconscious inevitably finds a way - which led us onto Petals problem solving.

Now this one was spooky - lots of folk in the room seemed to come up with a solution to a problem using this method - all starting with a single, completely random word from a dictionary. My problem was trying to make a character more active in a scene where she's arriving at an island on the king's ship - I had no idea how to solve that.

Shelley asked for a number, which gave her the page in the dictionary. The second gave her which word to pick on that page; can you believe the word was 'ahoy'? When my problem was ship-based? Spooky moment number one...

On a clean page, we drew a central circle, and surrounded it with eight 'petals'. In the centre, we wrote 'Ahoy' and around the outside - in the petals - we wrote words we associated with it. Mine were all very piratey and sea-faring, as you might expect.

Then the work began. We had to use the words we'd written in the petals to solve our problem. And the weird thing? I did - but I'm not going to tell you because I've not worked it into the story quite just yet. We were asked to share our thinking process; some climbed up into their crow's nest or looked through a telescope to see the bigger picture, and solved their problem that way. Everyone agreed that this method felt 'spooky' because from just one word, we solved our many and varied problems.

The idea is that the apparent randomness isn't really as random as you think. The process simply allows your 'good' mind to step out of the way and allow your subconscious access to the problem; it might have worked just as well if we'd had the word 'bell' or 'foot' in the centre of our flower, who knows?

And the last thing to try, to get your writing out of a slump?  Ask yourself what you'd write if you couldn't fail? And get it written. (Or as Shelley said, The F***-It Draft, or FID) Only to be used as a last resort, mind you, this method can come up with moments of sheer genius because it releases you completely.

In summary, taking risks in your writing is about being counter intuitive, about finding strategies to unloose your subconscious - and, probably most importantly, to stop caring about what others think!

Here's to a riskier Squidge in future...

Finding your novel's theme (FOW15 Diaries)

Julie Cohen is a great author, a wonderfully bubbly lady and she runs fantastic writing workshops. My last two York festivals, I've attended her Learning story structure from Pixar and Character sessions and got an awful lot out of them.

This year, I put myself down for another one - Finding your Novel's Theme - which was held on Severus Snape Sunday. Why Severus Snape Sunday? Because Julie decreed it so.

Anyway... theme. I can't say it's something I think about consciously up front, but apparently there are people who do - which makes me a discovery writer (pantser!) rather than an analytical one (planner!).

So what is theme? Well, it's the emotional core of your book... The question you're asking... The main abstract idea you're exploring... The problem you keep returning to... The pivot on which your book turns... The cakeness of your cake.

Sorry, have I lost you on that last one? Let me explain - Julie also recommended we look up one of Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog post about theme, which uses the analogy of CAKE (among other things) to understand theme. Chuck wrote;

'In cake, every piece is a microcosm of the whole. A slice contains frosting, cake, filling. Okay, that’s not entirely true — sometimes you get a piece of cake where you get something other pieces don’t get, like a fondant rose, but really, let’s be honest, fondant tastes like sugary b***hole. Nasty stuff. So, let’s disregard that and go back to the original notion: all pieces of cake contain the essence of that cake. So it is with your story: all pieces of the story contain the essence of that story, and the essence of that story is the theme. The theme is cake, frosting, filling. In every slice you cut. Man, now I really want a piece of cake.'

(To see the rest of Chuck's post, follow this link.)

Sounds simple, doesn't it? The emotional core of your book. But...but...how, if you're like me and you don't start with a theme up front, how the heck do you figure it out so that every single morsel of story contains that essential essence? Does it fall into place naturally or do you have to work at it?

In already published novels, the covers will often hint at the theme - Julie's own novel, Dear Thing, is based on parenthood, reflected by a cover picturing baby shoes. Great for hinting at the reader what they might be getting. But for those of us still working on unpublished stories? Who can't use visual clues?

Well, THAT was the focus of the workshop - we had to find our own novel's theme.

Julie suggested looking at several things;
1. The main character's conflicts and desires
2. The premise of the story
3. The title and/or the first line
4. The main emotions
5. The idea or problem that as a writer, you are exploring
6. The resolution.

I tried it out with King Stone...and came to the conclusion that its central theme is 'doing the right thing'. Which sounds a little clumsy when you consider themes cover such huge issues as sacrifice, abandonment, loss, justice, identity, 'there's no place like home' and the like.

Incidentally - there was another 'doing the right thing' theme in the group, but as Julie pointed out, they would be totally different stories because as authors, we approach the theme from different directions and may choose to focus on different genres.

So, having found the theme, we moved onto a mind-map to explore it further. Here's mine:

Which gave rise to one of my favourite quotes of the weekend; 'How far you take this depends on how far you want to procrastinate.'

So with all these ideas now in the bag, how do you use them in your novel? Well, you could select subplots, using a 'branch' that is separate to your main character's branch. The central theme is reflected, but the subplot is distinctly different. You could design secondary characters to work with or against your MC. You can refine character conflicts. You could even choose your setting - in Julie's case, her parenthood theme led her to schools, hospitals, school playgrounds, antenatal classes, maternity shops and infertility clinics...all related, yet all distinctly separate.

Getting the drift?

I was surprised to see how much of my theme had subconsciously seeped into what I'd already written of King Stone; somewhere along the line, I must've given in to gut feeling and gone with where the story was heading. And as a pantser, I wonder whether that's preferable to trying to plan too much? (Although I think King Stone has been planned more than any other novel I've attempted to write, so maybe I'm moving towards a mix of the two?)

It's an interesting exercise that, having done it, I'm sure I'm going to be able to use to enrich King Stone. I can certainly see how my mind-map works for minor characters as well as main ones... And if it works for King Stone, who knows? My next WIP might start with theme rather than stumbling upon it halfway through the story.

So huge thanks again to Julie for another useful tool to go in my writer's toolkit.

And completely off-topic, I was delighted to see that Lego Hannibal (Lector), who travels everywhere with Julie, also made it to York!

Perhaps I should've introduced him to a few of the Lego peeps from the Squidge household? Next year, maybe...

Dressing up time (The gala dinner - FOW15 diaries)

This time last week, the gala dinner was done and dusted - and I have no pictures from it at all. You'll just have to imagine the scene...

From DJ's to dirndls, sequins to sassy, we had it all. Even a vampire - complete with red silk lined cloak and eight inch high stand-up collar! Definitely a first for York...

The vast majority of folk were dressed up, though no-one was turned away if they were still in jeans. There didn't seem to be as many long frocks this year, more cocktail dresses than formal gowns. And a lot of the ladies wore trousers - I did, for a change. Some of the frocks were outstanding - special mention goes to the Writer's Workshop lass who was a veritable glitterball of a photographer...

The dining room (when we finally got in - they made us wait outside and it was freezing!) was a forest of red and black serviettes. I don't know how many folk sat down to dinner, but there were at least 33 tables, each with 8 people sitting round them.

The menu:
Prawn and salmon starter with lemon and dill cream.
Guinea fowl and veg. (Never eaten guinea fowl before - liked it.)
(Posh) Chocolate brownie with ice cream.
Coffee and mints.

After dinner, it was time for thank yous and competition winners. Flower maidens Jane and Moira, Hil, and Rachel were joined by 'the festival's poster boy', Imran. I can't remember all the competition winners, but I'll do my best. The children's star was a young man who wrote 'The Sound of Colour' (he also read at Friday Night Live). Best pitch was won by the same author who'd won Friday Night Live. (Interesting that her pitch was built from the opening few paragraphs of her book, all about her childhood with a veteran soldier father. And there was only one prize for best pitch, when previously there'd been information suggesting there would be two - one for an adult book, one for children's. Never did feel brave enough to collar the judges and ask what'd happened...) There was another prize, offered by a printing company, but I can't remember what it was for - the lady who won seemed utterly delighted anyway. And then there was The Big One - The Opening Chapter competition. I was dead chuffed to see a fellow cloudie, Sophie Wellstood, walk away with the prize.

There was the traditional self-edit course graduates photo - after 16 courses, there were loads of us! And it is so satisfying to see so many of those graduates who have gone on to reap the rewards of the course with MS requests, offers of representation and publishing contracts.

Then...Disco! We've been asking for one for the last few years. Whether WW finally gave in, or whether they decided to give us a treat for the WW 10th birthday celebrations, I'm not sure, but it was great fun. Several die-hard cloudies boogied the night away into the wee small hours, including Jody Klaire dancing on her new wheels and Dave Gaughran in The Hat. I was called a minx - whether because people saw me dancing, or the fact I was wearing a corset that didn't have much of a back to it, I do not know - but it was great to let our hair down. I think some folk found it too loud when the music started, but there was plenty of bar space or outside lounge to sit and chat if you wanted somewhere quieter...

I finally sloped off to bed just after half twelve, my feet killing me and my ears ringing; at least I got a bit more sleep than those who stayed up till 5am...

So tell me, what else did I miss?