All posts by celia

Waiting for submissions feedback

waitingroom
an old British Rail waiting room

Waiting. Waiting. Drumming your fingers on the desk. Making another hot drink. Not being able to settle. Can’t read. Not even a newspaper.

I hate waiting. So, I don’t. I write instead. Actually, I blog and network and do some writing. Maybe a bit of editing, too. I go outside with a coffee and do A LOT of staring into space. Walking helps with the waiting thing as well. We have plenty of places to walk – mostly through the vineyards surrounding the village. I take my camera and see what’s new for the upcoming Wednesday Vine Report. The whites have begun sprouting leaves already.

vineyards
vineyards below the village near the river

So, my time is filled productively without too much waiting. And a very strange thing happens while I’m out walking along the lanes. Ideas arrive! They pop up from behind a bush or they streak across the sky with Ryanair on its way to Beziers airport. My feet crunch through gravel and here’s a tale of lost luggage and a mix-up at the car hire desk where a kind person offers the lost luggage person a lift home. Hmmm. Romantic interlude or Samaritan from Hell? I think that’s already been done. Left, right, swishing through the grass and here comes another idea. Fast on its heels there’s an answer to that question I had about a character in a short story. I meet a couple walking their dog and now I know exactly what my elderly male character ought to wear on his head. I climb towards home. There’s a young man sitting on a bench by the side of the road. He has his mobile phone to his ear. Hang on a minute, goes the old grey matter, that there is an old folks’ bench. What is a young man like him doing sitting on an old folks’ bench using his mobile phone?

And before you know it, another short story is bubbling like Evian, featuring the very handsome young man, a distraught, wronged lover and a victorious wife biding her time for the killing. I dash indoors for my notebook. Then, I come back to my garden for some more staring into space.

DCF compatable JPEG Img
Flowers and fruit at the same time

Outside on my baby lime tree there are mature fruits and fruits barely formed and flowers waiting for the bees. A bit like my writing really.

I have three completed novels. Let me rephrase that. I have one novel under consideration at the moment and I consider that one finished after two rewrites. The other two novels need complete, hefty editing. They’re all different genres. One’s a family saga and at 140,000 words needs the heftiest axe. Another’s a psychological drama and needs a restructure. The third’s a book club read and at 86,000 words is close to optimum. I think. I’m waiting to find out. I’m also waiting for feedback on two short stories submitted to Woman’s Weekly. And the serial. So, that’s four pieces of work I’m waiting to hear about.

Then there are the flowers waiting for the bees. Two half-written novels, umpteen short stories and a file called Ideas which keeps growing longer every time I go out for a walk and see handsome young men on their mobiles in the wrong place.

By the time my limes fizz at the top of a clinky drink of Gin and Tonic, I’m really going to need it. Make it a big one. Easy on the tonic!

OMG – here it is!

See, I don’t understand the language. Did I mention that before? I thought I had to put the widget thingy in the widget area for the static front page option as my site doesn’t open with the blog page. So, I fiddled. I got hold of my trusty mouse and dragged the little bugger into the sidebar. Nowhere, in all the FAQs in the world did it point that out in simple terms people like me could understand. Yeah, yeah, I know there are WordPress for idiots books out there. But that involves READING and, as I already said, my eyes are shot, bloodshot. I can’t actually see what I’m writing here.

And now, tah-dah, we have the Celia’s tag cloud.

Tomorrow, I’ll have another go at linking to other sites -if I can see – if my head hasn’t imploded.

Wishing on a Tag Cloud

I said I was green at all this stuff. I told you I didn’t have a clue. So far, the learning curve has been vertical. My knees are grazed; my fingers keyboarded to the bone. Don’t even ask about my eyes. Alright then, okay, my eyes hurt. They’re so tired they feel as if they’re all dried out.

I can’t read any more Help forums ( should that be fora? forii?) See what’s happening. My brain’s giving out. Cache memory full and spilling its grey matter. I CAN’T HOLD ANY MORE INFORMATION. I only wanted to drag and drop and click once every so often. I didn’t want to have to read the equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And now, my Tag Cloud isn’t showing itself. Maybe the Tramontane blew it out to sea. Maybe it’s raining all my nice tag words in a village in Provence. Look, everybody it’s showering WRITING in Nimes and SHORT STORIES in St Tropez. So here’s an image of a tag cloud, just so we all know what I’m talking about. If you see mine hanging over the coast somewhere, drop me a line.

tag cloud
somebody else’s tag cloud

 

But, there is an upside. All this thinking and reading about tag clouds has seeped into the subconscious mind and presented me with another idea for a short story. C’est la vie.

Blowing a hooley!

tramontaneWe’ve got the Tramontane today. It blows over the top of the snow-capped Pyrenees and circles around rattling shutters and stabbing you between the eyes – a perfect afternoon for staying indoors and watching the start of the Six Nations.
I won’t beat myself up if I don’t do any writing today. That’s how it goes. Sometimes I write two or three thousand words; sometimes I struggle to get down five hundred.

Killing my babies

It has to be done. The thing’s too long. I have to bring out the edit knife and chop.

My serial is set in the French village of Bugarach. On the night of twenty-first December 2012, Bugarach was at the centre of international media interest over the coming end of the world. This remote village in Languedoc is the location of the magic mountain. Its rock formations are upside down; the oldest rocks are at the peak rather than at the base. Legend has it that one day the rocks will part and aliens will arrive to save believers.

Where better to hold an end of the world party? Where better to set a story about struggling relationships and people who want to make changes in their lives?

Bugaracg2
The Magic Mountain of Bugarach

But it’s too long. Pass me the light sabre.

Writing a serial for a women’s magazine

She likes the idea. The Fiction Editor at the magazine is intrigued. I think I’m getting closer. We’re keeping in contact while I do the rewrites.
This is my third go at writing a longer piece for serialization. The first, by chance, was too similar to a story they were currently running with a similar main character. The second was considered too downbeat. I understood perfectly. It’s more of a story for Mick Alec Idlelife and if you haven’t met him yet, check out his page under ‘A writer in the making”.
So, fingers crossed for third time lucky.

Ae Fond Kiss at the Burns’ night with guitar accompaniment

He was an excellent guitarist. When he sang to his own accompaniment, the room hushed and listened. But, we couldn’t work together. He didn’t know what I was doing with my voice and I didn’t know what he was doing with his chords.

See, if we’d had a chance to prepare, things might have worked out better. So, after the first verse I asked to carry on ‘a cappella’ as they say in the music world. The term comes from Italian and means in the style of chapel singing without instrumental accompaniment.

We had a word afterwards and he told me I’d done the right thing.

So, this brings me to the subject of my previous post. You have to have the confidence to sing in your own voice, to write in your own voice. Some people will like it; some people won’t.

Finding your own voice in your writing

Do you receive Holly’s weekly tips? I do. Holly Lisle writes fantasy novels. I don’t, but what she has to say on all manner of writing issues is relevant to all genres. Find her at http://www.hollylisle.com

Here’s today’s gem from Holly: ‘It’s disastrous to use someone else’s style as your own.
Consider—the writer whose work you love is an original.
If you set out to use her style, you can AT BEST only
ever be a second-rate copy of her. Worse, you will work
twice as hard copying her style as you would developing
one of your own.

What you love about her style is the way her mind puts
the story on the page. But you don’t HAVE her mind.
You have yours, and what comes naturally to her and flows
from her hand as a part of her would sound false coming
from you.

If you managed to make yourself a good imitator and
managed to sell your work in her style, some of the
people who liked her work would certainly find you.
But many of them would consider you a pale imitation
(and they’d be right), and they would wander away.

Whereas, if you develop your own style, the people who
find you and love your work CANNOT find another voice
like yours. There IS no other voice like yours. Your
readers will stick to you because only you can give
them YOUR stories.

You’ll find your own voice as you write. It isn’t
something you have to struggle with; it isn’t something
you have to twist yourself into pretzels to “create.”

Your voice is you, talking naturally to your reader,
telling stories that matter to YOU. It takes time to
find your voice, and a lot of words written to get
past early awkwardness that comes from trying too hard,
but once you come home to who you are as a storyteller,
no one will ever mistake you for a cheap knockoff.

Be yourself. Pretending to be someone else will
leave you miserable, uncertain of the value of your
own work, certain that you only gained any success you
ever obtain because you copied some quirk of another
writer’s mind.

You would never be able to believe that the people
who loved your work loved YOUR work. You would
always believe it was the way you copied someone
else’s punctuation and grammar that they were
responding to.

Only you can tell your stories. Be sure you tell them
in your own voice.

Cheerfully,
Holly ‘

And my response – ‘thank you for this. It’s brilliant! I think it’s so important to find your own voice – like a singer whose style is instantly recognizable as soon as she opens her mouth. I’d go further. It’s in the timbre of the voice, to borrow a musical term.
Some people have operatic voices; they sing great arias, but get them to attempt something contemporary and it comes out all wrong and out of place. Others sing rock to raise the roof, or blues to make you cry and they’d sound just as misplaced trying to sing something from Puccini.

Tonight I’m singing a Robert Burns song at a Burns’ Night celebration. It’s a well-known song, but I’m doing my own thing with it. Isn’t that what we hear on X-Factor? You took this song and you made it your own?
I’m not looking to be a great singer. I just like singing. I love writing more. I know I have to have the same kind of confidence to do my own thing with it.’

Holly always signs off with ‘Write with joy’.

I do. So does Mick although he wouldn’t admit it.

13th Red Day

Our electricity tariff in France is what we inherited when we bought the house. It’s called Tempo. You need a university degree to understand how it works. There are Red Days, White Days and Blue Days and within each price band there’s a cheaper night rate that kicks in at ten pm. A forecast box on the wall in our utility room tells us what to expect for the morrow. From November onwards, it’s a house rule to check the forecast.DSCN0087

White Days equate to standard charges. Blue Days are cheap rate all day long. They come in summer when you don’t want any heating and it’s too damned hot to cook anyway. Red Days, though. Oh, Red Days. There are twenty-two of them spread through the winter months. Red Days are when you switch off all the lights. Red Days are when you hope somebody invites you out to dinner. On Red Days, we bring in the camping gas stove and set it up on the hob. We don’t use the electric kettle or the dishwasher or the washing machine and tumble dryer, or the vacuum or the iron. We don’t have on the computer and the television. We eat stir-frys and anything else that cooks quickly in one pan. Red Days’ electricity costs ten times the cheap rate.

The upside of all this is

a)    Red Days are a good excuse not to do any housework.

b)   On summer Blue Days you can afford to put on the air-conditioning

c)    By law, our supplier can’t give us a Red Day on Sundays or Bank Holidays.

d)   It’s rather nice sitting by the log fire in a room lit by candles

The downside of all this is

a)    I spend all day Sunday washing, drying and ironing

b)   I’ve taken to wearing winceyette pyjamas and taking a hot water bottle to bed

c)    You can’t read by candlelight

d)   Dinners can be a bit boring

With this last in mind, an idea for a book comes to mind. Red Day Dinners. Now, how would I pitch that?

First of all, I’d have to ask friends to donate recipes. I’m no great shakes in the kitchen. My greatest culinary strength is the one handed down by my mother: never waste anything. Throw it all in a pan and fry it up. The results can be surprisingly tasty, even if they are an odd colour. If the colour turns out too obnoxious, you crack in a couple of eggs.

See, there’ll probably be an expert out there who knows how to use a steamer on the one gas ring of a camping stove to cook a whole three course meal. I think I might manage two: warmed up leftovers in the bottom and a steamed slab of chocolate cake in the top. Voilà. And there we have it. Celia’s Simple Red Day Supper. Perhaps I should rethink the title of that book!

But, I’ve neglected to mention what’s happening outside on Red Days. It’s cold. It’s very cold. It’s a dry kind of cold that feels like daggers in your eyes. The wind slices through your clothes as if it’s trying to rip them from your back. Huge cedars and sky-piercing cypresses rock and sway  and the distant mountains have done some overnight magic. The peaks are covered in snow. In the crystal light of a Red Day, they seem closer than ever, majestic against that winter blue sky, rock faces glowing pink at sunset.

Birds gather each morning on the top of a neighbour’s television aerial. They sit in tight rows and speculate on the day before they fly off to eat. At four thirty every afternoon, there they are, back on the aerial again before dusk summons them to roost.

Only 9 more Red Days to go.