Writers Abroad

February is almost over and spring must surely be on the way! A lot going on as usual here at WA...

1. Vesna has provided some pictures and prompts to tickle our Monday Muse this week. Amazing images, you must have a look!
2. Mary has written the Weekly Blog on revising her novel and the difficulties with an interesting conclusion.
3. The  Bragging Stool is toasty warm this last week with Jill and an article accepted for Destination France, Nicola has had a novella accepted for an anthology and Paola and her phallus article are still going strong!!
4. Dianne has put up the minutes of our formal chat yesterday in the Meeting Room - very expertly chaired and lots to do.
5. We'll be voting on our preferred theme for the Anthology 2012 and setting up some discussions about the nitty gritty, watch this space...
6. Foreign Flavours ebook will be launched through KDP select which means it will be free for a short time, then it will also be available via Smashwords. Please advertise through all your channels
7. The March Challenge will be set up shortly and there are still three (well almost) days left for the February challenge
8. The next informal Chat will be on Sunday 11th March, 11am via Skype

​Happy Writing! 

This Weeks Writing Quote

"Writing keeps you liberal. It shakes up your ideas about everything. Half the fiction we love, maybe more, looks nothing like the pictures their authors started out with."
Roger Rosenblatt

I'm posting this on behalf of Mary who has some connection problems...

Revision. There’s no way out of it, is there? I think I’ve finished my novel or whatever and it’s as good as I can make it. But, just in case, maybe I’ll have another read through. And then it’s, “How did I miss that?’ or, ‘He just left, so how can she be talking to him?’ or even, ‘Did I say my main character had blue eyes or brown? And what page was that on?’ And then I come upon this sentence:Mary called as she walked to her car, still bouncing with energy…

My first draft is painfully slow. I cannot resist going back to see if what I’ve written makes sense, although I’m told that I should just beaver away and sort things out on the second draft. And I agonise for ages if I can’t quite remember the right word, the only word, the perfect one for what I want and no other will do… All of which makes the first and second draft a protracted affair. It’s like making a sponge cake, isn’t it? If you don’t use the ingredients in the proper order it’ll never rise. But then, my sponge cakes never rise either.

Somewhere about the third or fourth draft I begin to make sense. I don’t really know what I’m writing about until then; what I really want to say. But then there’s the fatal flaw. The whole premise that the book is based on is impossible, like: the heroine couldn’t have met the hero because he was somewhere else at the time. So it’s back to the drawing board.

At least at this stage I know what I want to say. Perhaps now I can plot using graphs, bubbles, boxes or wavy lines? I’ve been advised to try all those. No way. It’s back to muddling through and another two or three drafts.

At the moment I’m revising a book that I wrote for Mills & Boon which didn’t quite make it because it didn’t have heart. I thought of Shylock wanting his pound of flesh at the time because I’d given it my all; or so I thought.  I’ve used the original story as a synopsis for a main stream romantic fiction book with a bit of trouble from a ghost. 

I’ve got to Chapter Five already. My son-in-law, who was very good at picking up inconsistencies in my children’s book, had to be coaxed into reading romantic fiction. But because the book has a bit of sex in it, he’s now shouting ‘Where’s Chapter Six?’ every time I see him, and he’s even offered to be my agent. So I think I’ve found the answer to my problem: write the synopsis before the book. Or am I kidding myself? Should I just write more sex?

As we seem to have come to a standstill about the theme for our next anthology, a few thoughts about what people are reading at the moment. Or at least what appears to be selling most.

About once a week various German mail order book sellers send me their catalogues. They are quite weighty, comprising about eighty pages. I'm sure there would be a lot more fir trees in Scandinavia if these firms did this just twice a year. As a writer - and someone who spends too much of the housekeeping on books - I naturally peruse them from cover to cover, dog-earing pages with titles which I really must order one day.  (Then the catalogues are left lying around till they end up in the bin...) Usually my dog-eared pages are towards the back of the catalogues, where the biographies are, and the humorous books, or the ones about people finding kittens that go on to enrich the lives of whole towns.

The reason for this is that the first thirty-or-so double-pages of these catalogues are devoted almost entirely to crime fiction and thrillers, with some spy stuff thrown in. Interspersed of course with the odd vampire or five. The covers show daggers dripping blood, smoking pistols and ladies with spiky incisors.

The next ten or fifteen pages portray books with women in medieval gowns but with 21st-century cleavages. These are the books I just cannot read. They usually contain unsavoury medical practices and horrendous child-birth scenes. In other words "historical fiction".

So, once I get past the gardening books and Teach Yourself Turkish, that only leaves the humour and the kittens.

Does this truly reflect the reading habits of just the German nation or is this an international tendency?  And where does it leave those of us who don't write about crime, crinolines or the un-dead? And to what extent should we be writing for the market?

Maybe I ought to pen something about a spy dressed in a red velvet bodice, who stabs a vampire which turns into a kitten, which goes on to enrich the lives of a whole town.

All we need now is an anthology theme which could contain all that. Please give it some careful thought, everyone.