Procrastinating with style - jewellery pics

I like to call it down time. Recharge time. Time to get the hands busy and allow the mind wander where it will, and rest a little.

So this is what you might find me making when I'm not writing, which seems to be fairly often lately.

 

Sterling silver, cultured pearls and lapis lazuli

Among those who value the meaning of crystals and gemstones, lapis lazuli is reputed to enhance intuition, awareness, and psychic ability.

Crusaders present arms! First challenge post

Being a literary construct,
I don't have any interesting quirks
or annoying habits...
and bloviate I will not,
save to reveal here what few know;
I save even the tiniest pieces
of aluminium foil
until I am near a recycling bin
which can properly house them,
thinking this will really help
protect my beloved Earth,
from its watery depths
to fuliguline shallows,
from soaring mountain tops
to the humblest blade of grass
on a single isolated plain,
and the rabbit which eats it.

I have told a single lie.

Can you guess it?

If not, then be patient,

For next post I'll confess it.

What challenge? What the $#%^?
If confused click here.

Sound trumpets, rally horses...the Second Crusade is here...

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, soon you, too, could be one
of the world's great bloggers...

Most of you will have already heard of the Crusade, but for those in the dark, click on the link above, or on the link at the bottom of this post.

This is a special kind of Crusade, a Writers' Platform-Building Crusade - one to help interested blogging writers form new connections within the blogging community.

I was involved last year and as someone new to the blogosphere, it was the perfect way to get my feet wet.

Click here for more information and to join the Crusade!

And to all those who've found their way here - hello and welcome!

If your story has legs, let it stand!

Hopefully this post will be useful to others, even though I've actually written it as advice to myself, mostly, because I've been going in circles with my latest project. Let's call it Project P. The problem? Too much thinking and not enough writing.

Don't get me wrong. Thinking is good. It's necessary. But too much of it, like anything, can be paralysing.

Project P (a novel) started with the idea for a basic scenario. And with two characters, two very different characters; I thought starting out that there'd be plenty of built in opportunity for conflict based on their differences alone. And conflict - in novel-writing - makes the world go 'round, right?

An ooops! moment

I'd been waiting a while for feedback from one of my beta readers, and was a little nervous about what he'd say as

a) I'm writing primarily for women and he's most definitely male
b) said beta reader has been writing professionally since before I was born

'The art of suspense'

Cover of The Pillars of the Earth

 Well, I've sent my manuscript to my agent with completed revisions, so now I'm taking my own advice and turning my attention back to another project, one which I started earlier this year during the wait for news on my MS which was out on submission.

It's a completely different genre from my last MS, and I've had trouble pinpointing what genre it is (though I think I've decided it's more a psychological thriller than anything else), so I'm still at the point of feeling my way, trying to work out how to tell the story, whether to include multiple points of view and all that other fun stuff which will be familiar to most of you.

Of course, books don't have to conform to a particular genre. And they can straddle boundaries between genres, or shun genre boundaries entirely. But...in the interest of informing myself a bit more about what the heck I should be doing if in fact I am trying to write a psychological thriller, I've just watched Ken Follett's online video lecture on the history of the thriller. Though he has a career spanning more than thirty years as a writer of thrillers, to some he is best known for Pillars of the Earth, his historical novel about the building of a cathedral in the Middle Ages. His writer's biography is comforting for anyone contemplating genre hopping at some point in their career!

110,000 words and counting...

Image via Wikipedia

I've been working on revisions discussed with my agent for the last couple of months now.

And there's been progress...finally! November - the early part of it at least - wasn't a good writing month for me. Those of you who've read my earliest posts will know I'm a believer in writing mojo. I sometimes think there's a finite quantity in the universe to go around, and all those busy NaNo writers used mine up.