I baked some cookies last night. 95 of them to be exact. 5 went into Kev’s tummy, and 76 went into the below. The rest were bullied and outcast. They now live on the street.
Periodic cookie table! Yeah boi! Idea borrowed from http://notsohumblepie.blogspot.com
This is how happy they made us.
Yeah boi! We have booked a summer holiday and it’s all good! I really can’t wait to be lounging on a sun bed, going on boat trips and eating good food.
I’ve actually never been to holiday in Spain, so it’ll be a first for me. I’m not going to count the one time we went to Tenerife, because that just didn’t cut it. Anyway, we’re going to a town/resort on the north side of the island called Puerto de Pollensa and it looks wonderful. Kev has been there before and can vouch for its niceness. As can this picture:
Yes, I did!
I entered a metaphor and simile challenge over at webook. The challenge was to write 3 sentences of no more than a total of 100 words containing a metaphor or a simile. Here’s what I submitted:
Bewildered she looked at the little creature peering back at her from across the room with dark, beady eyes. They were jet black, two little pools of tar, and she had a feeling the soul that lived within was just as treacherous.
She’d known from the moment she heard the words “auntie Bess” and “poodle” that the little beast would be trouble.
You can read more about the whole thing over at the webook blog!
So now I have a free submission to Page2Fame in my inbox. Don’t quite know what to do with it yet. Probably submit a revised version of the page I’ve already submitted, if it doesn’t go through to the second round that is!
Yaaaay!
A lot, I’ve discovered after some thinking and talking to Kev. I’m speaking specifically of the names of some of my characters in Nevermore. They have strong religious (Biblical) connotations and I’ve come to realise that this might mean trouble for me, mainly because my characters may not act or reason in accordance to those connotations. Their roles might be slightly different and it may cause confusion because sometimes their roles overlap with the religious figure they share a name with and sometimes they don’t, and maybe then the reader’s not quite sure. It will most likely cause a degree of confusion. Is the character meant to be this figure I’m already familiar with and is he then terribly out of character at points, or is he supposed to be this other, unrelated person that just happens to be quite similar to and share a name with a well known Biblical character?
No. I can’t have that.
It’s been annoying me for some time now, so I’ve decided that I’m going to change the names and keep the characters as they are, keep them my own, and let the reader draw parallels if they want to. I think that will be the best solution for both me and my reader as I already have a clear idea of what roles these characters will have in the story, and since I’m not willing to change those roles to adapt to the characters’ current, heavily associative names. It’s better to create something new and then the reader can be allowed to think and draw parallels themselves, should they want to.
That leaves me with one problem. I have to come up with some new names. Names that will have to sound good in my head, suit the characters and on top of that, they have to be original.
I have a few ideas, but none of them sounds quite right yet. Obviously, I want them to be spot on. I’m in the process of looking for inspiration, and of course, any help would be welcome.
Do you remember my “Secret Project”, or Nevermore? (Which is really just a working title, I need to come up with something else so I can stop feeling like an E.A. Poe fangirl and feel more like a proper writer.) Anyway, I’ve taken up work on it a bit more vigorously in the past week or two and I’m quite excited. I’m past the 10k word mark and I don’t feel like I’m even close to finished. That’s a good thing, in case anyone was wondering. The recommended word count for a first time author (by agents and publishers) is somewhere between 60 and 80k. By comparison Tolstoy’s War and Peace is just over 587k words heavy. (A list of other famous and/or heavy books and their word counts can be found here.)
What I’m doing right now is to plan out all the chapters (still don’t know how many it’ll amount to), just outlining each of them with a sentence or two, so I know what’s going on and what to consider while developing the characters etc. Now, you might not be able to see much of this progress right away, but I believe it will make the writing of future chapters much smoother.
I’ve found this wonderful word processor called yWriter that I’ve been using to plan out my chapters, as well as scenes within those chapters when I feel the need to go into more detail. It really has all the functionality and organising features and OCD-freak like me can wish for. And it’s free! What a wonderful treat. And I guess the beauty is that it works just as well as word or any other tool like it for doing the actual writing. And since you can tackle your story in terms of scenes instead of chapters, it all feels a bit more manageable.
Now, something else that I’ve found motivational is a site called WeBook. It’s basically a site where aspiring authors can submit their work for discussion by their peers, create groups and debate various writing related issues that they might have. That’s one part of the site. Another part, and arguably the one that’s the most appealing, is the chance to get in contact with agents and publishers through features like AgentInBox where you can submit your finished work to a number of agents for free, and Page2Fame where you, for a fee, can submit a first page to be rated by the readers. the first pages that gets the highest amount of positive votes then gets put through to a second round where the authors get to submit 5 more pages… and so on. The ultimate prize here is of course to get published.
Mostly out of curiosity, but also because I think it’s good, I’ve submitted my first page. Yeah, I did it! But the ratings it gets will be kept secret for the next 3 days. It’s apparently to prevent people from trying to manipulate the votes. Suspense! I say. How fun would it be if I got through to round two?
If you want to read what I’ve posted so far, and keep an eye on my updates, you can go read here: http://www.webook.com/project/Nevermore-1 Feel free to leave comments and constructive criticism if there’s anything that pops into your head.
