Tag: Reference

Christmas shopping

I hate Christmas

I hate shopping

Could there be a worse time to do the one thing that drives you bonkers?

Perhaps there is, but never a time when so many people are wandering aimlessly around looking for stuff that no one really needs.

And in the process, trash the shelves, and leave the store in such a mess that anyone who thinks shopping in the afternoon is a good idea, is left with little more than a dumpster dive.

Christmas shoppers are a very distinctive breed. First identified but the stultified manner in which they shuffle along the mall walkways, stopping to look vacantly at the wares in the windows, unable to figure out whether the sizes would fit their victims, sorry, giftees.

Or whether the sheer unadulterated inappropriateness would work, because we all know many of the gifts we receive are unwanted and even if they had a degree of acceptability, it was the wrong size, the wrong colour, for a different age group, or needs batteries.

It’s called grandparents revenge.

As for parents gifting their children as a surprise, well it’s a well-known fact they don’t have a clue about the younger generation and what they want.

We made a conscious decision years ago to only buy what the children wanted, no surprises, unfortunately, but never getting it wrong makes it worthwhile.

Of course, what the children want is something else and it took us a while to realise they were using us to buy stuff their parents had strictly banned. Yes, interesting lesson learned.

It only proved how desperately out of touch each generation is with the one below, and worse for those two generations adrift.

Two items of special note, are the number of parents who go shopping with their children, and the level of blackmail used to get their best behaviour, that overused phrase, ‘misbehave and you’re getting nothing for Christmas’ flogged mercilessly to death.

The other is the number of unwilling spouses who would prefer to mind six rotten little kids than brave the dumpster shelves, or worse, the endless racks of clothes that would be more suited to cleaning the house rather than being worn.

I say this out of experience, because in my day girls’ clothing did not have large chinks of material missing or whole swaths of exposed skin

I’ll be leaving the Christmas shopping to someone else from now on.

A photograph from the inspirational bin – 2

It’s the obvious items in the photograph that you see first, or that your eyes go to first.

The ocean, the beach, the buildings. You can see a shopping mall with MacDonald’s sign above it.

Yes, it’s late afternoon, and you can see long shadows of the buildings.

So, if I asked you what did you see in this photo, what would your reply be?

From a thriller writer or murder mystery writer’s point of view, it’s what you don’t necessarily see.

So, for the purposes of the story, the opening line for the world-weary detective, handing the photo to his partner, “What’s is it you can’t see in this photo?”

A partner that hadn’t been on the job very long, in from the suburbs, and had seen little more than break and enters car theft, and school kids hi-jinks.

“What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“You want to be a detective, or be looking for old ladies cats?”

His partner takes the photo in hand and looks at it again.  There has to be a reason why the old man had given it to him, or perhaps there wasn’t and he was just playing with him again.

No, he thought, there has to be something…

And then he saw it, quite by accident.  A hand, a gun, and following the line of fire, at the end, what looked like someone in the bushes.

In a photo taken from a higher floor of the building over the road, looking down on what was supposed to be a rooftop recreational area.

Only there had been no report of a missing person or a gunshot wound in the last seven days.

“When was it taken?”

“Two days ago?”

“And no reports of a shooting, or a body?”

“No.  And yet the person who took this swears he saw a body, but by the time he came back, there was nothing.”

The detective handed his partner a second photo.  Time-stamped five minutes later.  With no gun and no body.

What will happen next?

I just want to be finished

Just when you think that the story is done, and you’re on the third re-read, just to make sure…

Damn!

I don’t like the way that chapter reads, and what’s worse, it’s about the tenth time I’ve looked at it.

It doesn’t matter whether the last three times you read it, it was just fine, or, the editor has read it and the chapter passed without any major comment.

I think the main problem I have is letting go.  For some odd reason, certain parts of a story sometimes seem to me as though they are not complete, or can be missing a vital clue or connection for the continuity of the story.

That, of course, happens when you rewrite a section that is earlier on in the story, and then have to make ongoing changes.

Yes, I hear the stern warnings, that I should have made a comprehensive outline at the beginning, but the trouble is, I can change the ending, as I’m writing it and then have to go back and add the hooks earlier on.  Not the best method, but isn’t that what an editor is for, to pick up the missed connections, and out-of-the-blue events that happen for no reason?

I find that often after leaving a finished story for a month before the next reading, the whole picture must formulate itself in my head, so when I re-read, there was always a problem, one I didn’t want to think about until the re-read.

Even then it might survive a second pass.

I know the scene is in trouble when I get to it and alarm bells are going off.  I find nothing else to do but look at it.

So, here I am, making major changes.

But, at least now I am satisfied with where it’s going.

Only 325 pages to go!

Why is writing so hard

In just about every book about how to be a good writer, there seems to be a pile of problems that at some time in a writer’s life will need to be overcome.

Writer’s block

Don’t have it.  The ideas pour out of my head like water over a waterfall

Don’t use abstract descriptions in your writing

Damn, I do that all the time

But, back to writer’s block, is that where you write 37 chapters and there the story stops?

Oops.

Plan your book and have an outline so you can write it from start to finish

Plan?  What Plan?

That only happens when I’ve written the book and prior to the first edit, I make a precise of each chapter to make sure of continuity.

Plan your characters and give them a timeline

Oh God is that why characters’ names are often changing as the story progresses.

Believe it or not, I’m working on this issue.

Manage your time.

Still can’t get it right.

Write at least a thousand words a day, no matter if it’s rubbish or not.

Does that include writing for social media?

Apparently not.

At least this is one of the requirements I follow religiously. Sometimes it’s a lot more words but a least some writing finished up either on paper in on the word processor.

Now it’s time to write those thousand words.

Look, there, I’ve at least got one part of time management under control.

A photograph from the inspirational bin – 1

We think of tropical Queensland having pristine white beaches and azure sparkling seas.

Not necessarily so.

This used to be a mangrove swamp.

Perhaps this is what happens when you mess with the natural environment, you’re left with something that’s not very nice.

There’s no beach, no sand, and sometimes not a very pleasant odor.

We can imagine what this might have looked like before man turned up to urbanize the area. In the background, there is an inlet and on either side lush vegetation.

It must have looked very inviting once upon a time. Now the shoreline is completely built on, the vegetation that was once there completely cleared, and the inlet leads to a marina.

Perhaps the story here might be about greedy destructive property developers who care not for anything but profits.  But in their quest to destroy, there is always someone else aiding and abetting, someone in government.

But what if there was an even darker secret hiding just below the surface, and about to be uncovered.  How far would someone go to preserve that secret?

 

Timelines, deadlines, and disasters

Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people who work well to timelines, so the very thought of using something like Microsoft Project to get my writing into some sort of timeframe, with deadlines, seemed, to me, to be a bit extreme.

Say for instance the major deadlines for a writing project are

  1.  Write an outline, with as much detail as possible, with an overarching plot, characters, key points in the novel, and scouting for locations
  2. Writing.  This could be broken down into chapters, but more practicable would be sectioned, each consisting of a number of chapters.
  3. Editing, planning for one, two or three, or more edits
  4. Proofreading
  5. Send to editor

Clearly if I was going to take this approach, then I would have to allocate hours of the day specifically for writing and doing all those other writer chores in less time, and with fewer distractions.

And, it might work for a more dedicated author.

But…

I did make a new years resolution that I would try and do things differently this year.

Except…

I set a goal to restart editing of my next novel on 1st Feb. I thought, setting it so far into the year it would be easy.

It would give me the time to clear up all the outstanding, get in the way, distractions, and be free to finally finish it.

But there’s always something else to do, other than what we’re supposed to be doing.

For me it used to be going away, spending long, sleepless hours flying from one side of the world to the other had fuelled my imagination more than I expected and where this used to be the impetus to write more stories that that had not happened yet this year.

I have other stories of course, all in carious stages of writing, but if only I could focus on one story at a time.

So…

I’ve tried to set some new, more realistic goals to finish playing with these other stories as soon as I can, so come the first of March, I can resume work on the next book to be published.

Or not.

I go missing for a day, and…

It’s like dying a literary death.

The silence is deafening.

It seems, after a lot of trial and error, trying this that and the other, I’ve discovered that you only get out of social media what you put into it.

And it means that unless you are on it 24 hours a day, every day, spruiking, or whatever it is we writers are supposed to do promoting ourselves and our work, nothing happens.

Don’t get me wrong, there are those who are raging successes, and I am happy for them.

But for us living on the fringe, and there is quite a lot of us, trying valiantly to reach the public eyes, the battle is just that, a battle.

When do you get time to write?

Is it a choice between writing, or trying to garner support and a following?

The authors who are published by the large publishers will tell you that it is the only way to become an author, where all of the marketing is done by the publisher and all they have to do is put in an appearance and pocket the royalties.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

But when I find that happy medium between marketing and writing, I’ll let you know.

Until then, I guess there will be more days like today, and that battle going on in your head that is telling you to give up, it’s never going to get any better.

Maybe not.

But give up? Not today, nor tomorrow.

After all, we live in a world where anything is possible.

The day that never ends

It sounds like the title of a book and maybe I should write it.  Along with the twenty other story ideas that are currently running around in my head.

Is it any wonder I can’t sleep at night?

I’m working on the latest book and it is not going well.  I don’t have writer’s block, I think it is more a case of self-doubt.

This leads me to be over-critical of what I have written and much pressing of the delete key.  Only to realise that an action taken in haste can be regrettable and makes me feel even more depressed.

I think I’d be happier in a garret somewhere channelling van Gogh’s rage.

Lesson learned – don’t delete, save it to a text file so it can be retrieved in saner moments.

I was not happy with the previous start.  Funny because until a few weeks ago I thought the start was perfect.

What a difference a week makes or is that politics?

Perhaps I should consider adding some political satire.

But I digress.

It seems it’s been like that for a few weeks now, not being able to stick to the job at hand.  I recognised the restlessness, but I’m not happy with the story as it is.

So I rewrote the start, added about a hundred pages, and now I have to do a mass of rewriting.

What a dazzling book cover might do…

And, of course, the description.

Probably one of the hardest things for a first-time author is not so much the writing but what is needed after the book is written.

You need a good description.  Short, sharp, incisive!

There’s a ream of advice out there, and I have read it all.

And, still, I got it wrong.

Then there is the cover.

I wanted simplistic, a short description to give the reader a taste of what’s in store, and let the story speak for itself.

No.

Apparently, a good cover will attract the reader to the book.

When I tendered my books on various sites to advertise them, sites such as Goodreads, and ThirdScribe, all was well with what I had done.

Then I submitted my books to a third site and they rejected the covers as too simplistic and the descriptions mundane, and wouldn’t post them.

Wow.

There’s a huge blow to the ego.  And just the sort of advice that would make a writer think twice about even bothering to continue.

But…

Perhaps the person who wrote that critique was being cruel to be kind.

But while I thought my covers were quite good, I made a mock up of them and then put the books n the shelf as they would in a book store, along with a few other books that I have bought, and I could see why they might not have the impact I was looking for.

So, with my graphic designer, both an app, and a person, namely my daughter, we started looking at the plot of the story and of weaving that into the cover, for at least three of my books.

Whilst I am far more impressed with the new covers, I wonder if they’re just too busy.  Certainly, after you’ve read the book, you will understand the nuances and layers.

Will it be a case of ‘what a difference a cover makes’?

A twitter biography

Every year I come back to revisit this, and each year it becomes a harder issue to deal with.  All that’s recently changed is the number of characters you can use

I’ve been trawling the endless collection of twitter descriptions provided by their users, noting that there is a restriction of 280 characters.

How do you sum yourself up in 280 characters?

I don’t think I can, so we tend to put down a few catchphrases, something that will draw followers.  I’m thinking the word ‘aspiring’ will be my catchword.

I’m aspiring to be a writer, or is that author?  Is there a difference, like for instance, one publishes ebooks on Amazon, one publishes hard copies in the traditional manner?

Is there a guide to what I can call myself?

Quite simply put, but in more than 140 characters, married happily, two wonderful children, three amazing grandchildren, and a wealth of experience acquired over the years.

Actually, that sounds rather boring, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it would be better if I was a retired policeman, a retired lawyer, a retired sheriff, a retired private investigator, a retired doctor, someone who had an occupation that was a rich mine of information from which to draw upon.

Retired computer programmers, supermarket shelf stackers, night cleaners, accounts clerks and general dogsbody s don’t quite cut the mustard.

I have also become fascinated with the expression ‘killer biography’.  Does it mean that I have to be a ‘killer’?

Better than the self-confession above.  Should we try to embellish our personal history in order to make it more appealing?

It’s much the same as writing about daily life.  No one wants to read about it, people want to be taken out of the humdrum of normalcy and be taken into a world where they can become the character in the book.

And there you have it, in a nutshell, why I write.