It’s nearly the end of another year, and time for a few reflections before I have to start panicking about hosting Christmas next week (Can I possibly cope with making bread sauce? Especially when bread never lasts for long enough in our house to actually go stale? Will 12 bottles of wine be enough? For four of us for two days? When one of us doesn’t really drink? Maybe I should go and get more?).
Well, if 2012 was a transformation, and a vintage year, 2013 can perhaps be best described as ‘mixed’. In the winter, I moved to a four day week at the day job. In the spring, I lost my beloved Nan. In the summer, I finished one book, The Heartland of the Winter, secured an agent, and started another book, Forever 27. And in the autumn, I strained my back so badly that I’ve been essentially out of action for seven weeks and counting. Out of my creative writing and my husband’s rock climbing, who’d have thought my hobby would turn out to be the more dangerous?
Overall, I’m not sure I’m going to be looking back at 2013 with great fondness, but it hasn’t been a total annus horribilis. The last couple of months have been painful and a bit surreal at times, but it’s at least been a chance to rest and reconsider, and I’m trying to take away a few lessons. Bittersweet lessons about the important things in life, about the need to be patient and enjoy things for what they are, as they come. And harder lessons about the need to make choices, to prioritise the things which are really necessary, work hard at what matters, and accept that sometimes, you have to let go. To quote the Rolling Stones: no you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. This can perhaps be summarised by my reaction to my injury: at first I wanted to just let it get better by itself, without actually doing anything to help it. Then I tried throwing money at the problem: massages, chiropractor, private yoga tuition. But then all these people I was paying to make me better told me that, in this instance, I have to heal myself. Exercise, posture, breathing technique, not overdoing it, all that stuff. Boring, maybe, but necessary.

And so another year will shortly begin. What does 2014 hold in store? A publishing deal is too much to expect, but not too much to hope for. Completion of my second novel, Forever 27, should be within my power. And also, perhaps, some refocusing, a bit more yoga and a bit less time slumped over a hot computer.

I’ll leave you with some half-baked homilies, fresh from the same oven I used to bake the loaf of success in a previous blog post. If you have to do something, do it with a smile. If you don’t have to do something, don’t feel bad about not doing it. All things in moderation, including moderation. Enjoy the good things, and remember, you don’t need to leave room for dessert, because you have a separate stomach for that.
Anyway, a merry Christmas to all, and a happy and productive 2014.

I’ve just come back home from my second stint at the Writers’ Summer School at Swanwick. While many things were similar to last year – the inspiring courses, the entertaining speakers, the stodgy food – the overall experience was very different. For starters, I managed to pace myself a lot better: instead of greedily hoovering everything up until my brain burst, I was more choosy in what I attended, and made sure to take time out to relax and recover. Instead of meeting dozens and dozens of new people, I caught up with the friends I made last year, checking on progress and celebrating success. And I did find the time to make some new friends too.

Highlights of the week included: Alexa Radcliffe-Hart’s course on literary fiction, which enabled me to develop an interesting idea throughout the week and gave me some very useful exercises; Alex Davis’ course on horror, which helped me outline a scary tale; and of course, the evening speakers, especially Deborah Moggach, Syd Moore, and Curtis Jobling. Sadly this year the ‘TopWrite’ scheme, which offers subsidised places to younger writers, did not run, but a generous donation from an old Swanwicker means it will resume next year.

In addition to the outlines for a literary novel and a horror story, I was also able to make a plan for a new novel, Forever 27. This started life as my NaNoWriMo project in 2011 and has languished on my hard drive for nearly two years while I finished The Heartland of the Winter. This week I dusted it off and worked out how to extract a strong story from the mass of infodumps, continuity errors and unedited verbiage. It’s a complete departure from my previous work, a magic realist novel inspired by the ‘27 Club’ of musicians who have died before their time. I’ve drawn up a detailed plan, and I’m feeling sufficiently inspired to create a playlist of songs to go with it. My intention is to write it whilst waiting for a response on Heartland, and get it ready as a ‘Plan B’ in case the response is negative. Of course, if a publisher calls and says they want to give me a three-book deal for a fantasy trilogy, I’ll have to drop it and start work on the sequel to The Heartland of the Winter instead, but hey, I think that’s known as a problem I’d love to have, and I can always come back to it later.

All in all, an excellent week – the only problem is, it has to come to an end, and drop me back into mundane reality for another year. I’ll just have to try to keep the buzz going as long I can.

 

Websites of the tutors and speakers I mention:

Alexa Radcliffe-Hart: http://servicestoliterature.co.uk/

Alex Davis: http://www.alexdavisevents.co.uk/

Deborah Moggach: http://www.deborahmoggach.com/

Curtis Jobling: http://www.curtisjobling.com/

Syd Moore: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Syd-Moore/118216464935269

The school: http://swanwickwritersschool.co.uk/

A general update and an excerpt from new story, ‘Amanita’.

Just a very quick update from me today. It’s now a month almost to the day since I finished my first novel, The Heartland of the Winter (you can read an extract here on this very blog). Having set it aside for a while to allow the beta readers time to get through it, and myself time to gain a little bit of distance, I’m now almost ready to start the final edit before sending it off to an agent (eek!). After a gentle nudge last week, my betas have assured me they’ll have some feedback by Thursday so I can start editing this weekend. Even if they’re a little late with getting back to me, I think I’ll have plenty to be getting on with – my own thoughts for minor tweaks, a few suggestions from my husband, and of course, thinking about the sequel. And I’m sure there will be a whole load more typos to correct – I swear those things breed when you’re not looking. I’m just hoping I won’t need to make a really major change (or two) which will require extensive re-writes. But if I do, I guess I’ll just have to get on with it with as good a spirit as I can muster. I’ve spent too long agonising over this book to want to send it out the door in any state less than perfection – or as close to perfection as I can possibly achieve.

While The Heartland of the Winter has been in beta-read, I haven’t been idle; I’ve written three stories for competitions. Here’s a brief extract from one of them, written for for Writing Magazine’s ‘fairy story for adults’ competition. It’s called ‘Amanita’. Enjoy:

It was a beautiful crisp autumn day, a carpet of fallen leaves underfoot, a multi-coloured canopy overhead. The forest was quiet around them but for the sounds of squirrels and birds. Valerie walked on ahead with a firm stride, basket hanging snugly over her shoulder, grey hair tied back in a pony tail, purple velvet skirt sweeping almost to the ground. Sarah followed, constantly shifting her own basket around to try to get it in a position which was comfortable to carry. She wanted to pause and look around her, absorb the tranquillity of the scene, but Valerie kept pushing on.

‘Can’t take too long,’ she said, ‘they say an awful lot of strange things about this wood. I don’t believe any of them, of course, but still, I’d rather not be stuck out after dark.’

‘Why? What sort of things do they say?’

‘Oh, you know, spirits, witches, the fae folk, all that rubbish. We’re not interested in any of that, we’re only here for the mushrooms. Still, if you see an empty fairy ring, don’t go inside. No point taking chances.’

‘An empty fairy ring? What are you talking about?’

‘A fairy ring is what they call a circle of mushrooms. They grow like that sometimes, it’s perfectly natural, nothing to be afraid of. But there are a few stories about them, from times when people didn’t understand them. One story goes that you should never step inside an empty fairy ring – one which doesn’t have a tree in the middle, that is – or else the fae folk will come and take you away.’

‘Take you away where?’

‘Nobody knows, because nobody ever comes back.’

The Heartland of the Winter – extract

This is the first 500ish words of my young adult/crossover fantasy novel, The Heartland of the Winter. Enjoy.

The first snowflakes were fluttering through the trees, gently, like tiny feathers. It was a beautiful but ominous sight; for, as those who saw it well knew, while each flake taken separately might be insignificant – a barely noticed moment of cold on the skin – taken all together they could be lethal. For now, each one was melting away to nothing as soon as it landed on the hard ground, as if it had never been. But soon – all too soon – they would start to come thicker and faster, and they would start to settle, and soon the delicate flurry would become a blizzard, and soon after that the forest path would be lost beneath the blanket of white and travel would be impossible. Shenaisa knew all this, and she knew what that would mean for her and her younger sister.

‘Hurry up!’ she called anxiously.

‘I’m coming! I’m tired, can’t we rest for a bit?’ whined back Mardia, who came trotting up behind, red-faced and panting. She was shorter and more stockily built than Shenaisa, and struggled to keep up with her on long walks.

‘No, Mardia, you know we can’t rest, we have to get there before the storm closes in or we’ll be trapped here all night,’ Shenaisa snapped, and then added sarcastically, ‘Do you want to sleep in a snow cave?’

‘No,’ Mardia replied sullenly, ‘but my feet hurt… can’t we stop for a short while?’

‘No we can’t.’ Shenaisa walked on faster than before. It was not a response that brooked any argument; the deep woods of the Greylands at the sharp end of autumn were not a place for casual conversation. Already the snow was falling more thickly and gathering in small patches wherever there was a break in the tree cover.

The two girls knew the path well, having walked it many times before. Even so, they had to keep pausing to check their bearings, looking for signs of human passage, or trying to make out the direction of the sun through the tangled branches and the thick cover of cloud. In some places the path was edged with stones, or there were arrows carved on tree trunks to show the way, but elsewhere it petered out and they had to guess which way to go. Several times they guessed wrongly and then had to back-track, the snow falling steadily around them all the time and gradually obscuring the ground. They picked their way over rocks and twisted roots, crossed frozen streams by bridges made of single unhewn logs, climbed over banks and ditches covered with fallen leaves and waded through patches of thorny undergrowth. Always they kept on going, moving relentlessly through the unchanging and unyielding landscape. Around them the wood was silent, the snow and cloud and cold seeming to muffle all sounds. There was no sign of any other living thing but them, two young girls with unwieldy backpacks trekking alone through trees which stretched endlessly in every direction,  with only their woollen caps, rough green clothes and brown leather boots as protection against the immensity of the forest.

If you enjoyed this extract, please follow this blog/me on Twitter for further updates as the novel progresses towards final completion and (fingers crossed) publication. Thank you.