X is for...(e)Xit

So I'm out of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. And don't get me wrong, I would have loved to go further in the competition, but I'm still very proud. For Ravensborough  to have gotten into the top 5% in its category has been a huge achievement for me. Now I just have to wait for my Publishers Weekly review and get my synopsis done for submitting it to potential publishers. I think I'll incorporate my pitch into my cover letter, it got through round one so I know it's fairly decent.

But the next week is aimed towards submitting Storms in Teacups. Which means writing another synopsis and doing another edit job.

Congratulations to everyone who progressed in the competition, it's a big achievement and you should be very proud of yourselves. :)

W is for...Waiting, Wondering and Working

Hope everybody had a lovely Easter. I know I did. Well, I did until I had an incident.

I'd been thinking for a while that dairy wasn't agreeing with me. I was getting sick after I drank tea, was having a lot of nausea and other issues. At first it was mild, but over the past few weeks I noticed it had gotten worse. I tried a couple of days dairy free, and my symptoms stopped. So, I thought fine. I obviously have a food intolerance. That I can deal with. I can avoid milk products most of the time, and then occasionally I can indulge as long as I realise that there are consequences. Fine.

But yesterday was Easter Sunday. And I am a chocoholic. My husband had very nicely bought me a bar of Toblerone all for my very own self, and so I decided to do what any good chocolate lover would do. I ate three quarters of it. Only then did I discover I was not lactose intolerant, I have a full on allergy. My immune system went into full force trying to protect me, and the result was kind of scary. My body itched all over, I got bad nausea and headaches and my mouth swelled up. My husband wanted to bring me to the hospital, but we waited it out with antihistamines and water. Husband was very worried, I thought he was overreacting. He pointed out that I had rashes and tingling, I said that I'd had it for weeks. My husband, who has a severe allergy to paracetamol, said that they were symptoms of anaphylactic shock. Great. Every woman loves to discover she's allergic to milk on Easter Sunday!

But, on the bright side, I was vegan for a while, so I know how many great substitutes there are out there. And while I'm going to miss my Starbucks frappucinos, I'm sure I'll deal.

 Tomorrow I find out if I made it through to the ABNA semifinals. I don't expect to, competition is very strong and I'm delighted to have come so far. And I'm not going to lie, getting through would be amazing. But for now I just have to wait. And wonder. And work on my next novel.

V is for...Verbosity

Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday's blog post. I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself, and it was nice to have people be nice to me rather than tell me to 'shut up you moany old bint.' I'm still the same physically as I was yesterday, except for the fact that I've gotten over myself and am in a more accepting frame of mind. I'll be fine.

Anyway, I've started to notice a worrying trend. I am becoming more verbose. Not as verbose as Polonius in Hamlet but still pretty impressive.

The thing was, in college I was always the one who came in under word count. I used to hear about crazy people (in fact, I married one) who would burst through the word limit and hand in assignments that were substantially longer than the guidelines. For me, brevity was what was important. I outlined my argument, made my case, concluded and still with a sizeable (admittedly, sometimes too sizeable) amount of words to spare. I managed to get decent grades, both in my primary degree and in my master's, so it was all gravy. Occasionally I worried about the shortness of my essays, but mostly I spent my spare time in college daydreaming about the stories I would write when I went and got a bit of self-discipline for myself. My journalism.articles were tighter to word count, because they had to be, but my the first draft of my first novel came to 40,000 words. It's now at 70,000.

But over time, my writing has evolved and I now find that my writing is in fact too long. My books are getting longer, my blog posts could do with being more concise, and I have now turned into one of those crazy people.

What about all of you? Has your writing got more concise or more verbose?

U is for...Ugh.

It's a lovely bank holiday weekend. The sun is shining, my husband is off work, there is a ridiculous amount of chocolate in my house. But I have decided to disregard all these things in order to have a rant thread.

My fibromyalgia has been bad this week. My hips and knees are so bad that I had to bow out of a fun game of rounders that my husband and his friends had organised. I was never going to be playing, I wouldn't be able to, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand and watch or sit on the grass either. So my husband went off on his own. He didn't want to leave him, but I made him go. He misses too many things due to my ropey health. Even so, I know that he'll be worried about me while he's there, and I feel so guilty for taking the shine off the day for him. And I really wanted to go out, enjoy the sunshine and chat to some nice people. I'm a bit down about that.

I had four of my siblings over yesterday for dinner. They're 7, 10, 11 and 14 and I love them to bits. We had a good time, but I struggled to seem cheery and upbeat for them because of the pain I was in. I really hope that they didn't pick up on it. They're only kids, and the last thing I want is for them to think I don't enjoy their company. I do, so much.

And then, of course, there's my writing. Despite resting my hands and arms, they're in bad shape and it hurts to write. This is bad, because I've reached a seam of writing where it's all flowing, and I'm in the middle of some intensive edits too. I can't work right now. Writing is what got me through my illness, and now I worry that physically my body can't do it.

Living with a long term illness is hard. Not only the pain, the nausea and the lack of energy, but you sometimes feel like you are losing yourself, the person you'd like to be and the person that you want to become. I think to be honest that that's the worst part of all.

I'm just having a bad day. Tomorrow will hopefully be better, and I'll remember that in the scheme of things I'm a very lucky woman. I've a great husband, a lovely family, I get to write a lot and have a lovely house and supportive friends. But right now? I need to vent.

Anyone who has a chronic illness, or knows someone who has should check out The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino. It gives a great explanation on what being ill feels like on a day to day basis, and my husband said it really helped him realise what it's like to be me.

Hope this all finds you well, and that you have a great Easter. I'm going to go cuddle my dog, drink copious amounts of tea and read a book.

T is for...'The Five Things You Wish To See More of In Fiction'

Ok, so this is a little bit of a cop out, but the people over at Paper Hangover are great at coming up with blog prompts, and if I don't take them up on it then I'll end up talking about how much I missed my broadband connection. Again.

So...

5: More non-white protagonists. I'm Caucasian, but one of my sisters in Chinese and another is mixed race (my parents have seven children, but I'm the only one that's biological). I never realised until my sister's came along just how unrepresented they are in popular culture. Though that is getting better.

4: Strong female protagonists. I like there to be more going on in my YA fiction than just the love story.

3: Less of a dichotomy. Some YA books pretend that teens don't swear, drink or have sex. Other books assume that all teens do these things all of the time. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

2: More elements from medieval history, but that's probably just the historian in me. Or the fact that I've just discovered Game of Thrones.

1: More books with the name 'Christine Murray' on the front.

S is for...Surprise!

This device is mostly used in crime or mystery novels, but most books will have some element of surprise in them. After all, if you knew exactly what was going to happen to either the character or plot, you wouldn’t read the book, would you? This reasoning may be slightly different for classics where the story is well known and part of popular culture, or a book that has been made into a movie that you’ve seen. You may know the story, but want to see how the book is written. But as I’m sure most of you, like me, don’t have books that are part of the literary canon or that have sold movie rights, I’m going to plough on.

Surprises are great. They can change the dynamic of the characters, and the pace of the book. It can raise the stakes, or bring the story to a suspense filled standstill. It’s a great device, but it is one that you have to be careful using, especially if you’re using the deluxe 2.0 version: the twist.

The twist does exactly what it says on the tin. Everyone has seen a movie or read a book where at some point, usually in the last quarter, the story is flipped and everything that you believed to be part of the tale changes. This can be brilliant, if it’s a fair twist. A fair twist is tricky to do. In order to pull it off, there must be moments throughout your story that lead up to the twist, and retrospectively the reader can see where it was going. The hints should not be so strong that they flag to most readers (you always will get some people that see it coming) what is going to happen. If a twist is effectively foreshadowed, then it is easily accepted by the reader. ‘Of course!’ they’ll think, as the story clicks into place. It’s a satisfying conclusion.

An unfair twist, a twist that is not foreshadowed at all, is not satisfactory for the reader. It can be what makes a reader throw the book across the room in temper (unless they have a Kindle. Anyone who destroys over a hundred euros worth of gadget over an unfair twist has anger management issues.) Changing the book up without warning usually suggests that the writer is too lazy, or doesn’t have the skill, to use a twist seamlessly. An unfair twist usually doesn't mesh with the story, and feels like it’s been thrown in solely to prevent the book being labelled ‘predictable.’ Like throwing Tabasco sauce into a delicate lemon flavoured sole dish.

                ‘You weren’t expecting that, were you?!’

                Ahhhhm... No.

R is for...Respect

When I started writing first, I came across a couple of writers groups that were a little exclusionary and hostile. I'm glad to say that other than that, everyone else has been so nice and supportive.

I got some great feedback from the query blog hop, so thanks to Alicia Gregoire for that. The advice was spot on, I have a heart of my novel and I need to emphasise that in my query. Also, while my novel is about ordinary people and their lives, what makes it special is its voice, so I need to write the query in that register. My comments were nice yet constructive. Seriously, it never fails to overwhelm me that people take time out of their busy lives to help each other out. If I ever manage to sell a book, it'll be partly because of the support of the online writing community. You're all fantastic.

Broadband man is coming tomorrow, so I can return to my blog to its usual level of verbosity. Which will save my husband's ears  :)