If I Were Famous...

Occasionally I fantasise about what I'd do if I became a rich and famous writer.  And I'm not talking rich enough to give up the day job and pay off the mortgage.  I'm talking about rich beyond the realms of reasonable possibility.  JK-Rowling-sort-of rich and famous.

The first thing I'd do is buy a house with an indoor swimming pool, so I could do daily laps without having the general public get in my way.  And the pool must be heated to 35c all the time. I'm a wimp - I hate getting into cold water.  Of course I would also need to hire a Pool Boy - heated swimming pools require a lot of maintenance.

In this fantasy house there would be at least two gaming rooms, each with a couple of types of consoles and a 50" flat screen TV.  This is so at least two multi-player games could be going on at the same time.  There would also be a retro games room, full of old arcade machines, including the original Space Invaders.  There will also be a juke box in there, belting out 80s hits.  In fact, I'll just recreate Flynn's arcade from TRON, and I'll be set.

There will be a bar, of course.  Stocked with plenty of bottles of Cloudy Bay.  And a bartender to make cocktails.

While we're on the subject of staff, I'll need to have a housekeeper who will do all the chores, including the ironing, making the bed and changing the sheets weekly.  And there'll be a chef.  I like to eat nice food, but I'm rubbish at cooking.

Sigh.  Guess it's time to stop daydreaming.

What things do you fantasise about buying, if money were no object?

WIP Woes

When I first started writing, I used to scribble in the back of school exercise books, in pencil. Towards the end of the 1980s I got my first computer - an Amstrad PCW. It was one of the machines with green fonts on a black background. It didn't have a hard drive, so files had to be saved on floppy disks.

I tell this story because the influence that machine had on my writing is still with me today. Because the floppy disks didn't have much memory, files had to be small. I used to save each chapter as a separate file, because it would take several disks to hold an entire novel. I still use this system of saving each chapter as a separate document. Only when the manuscript is nearing completion do I compile it all into a single document - and only then do I really know how many pages I've got.

Currently, I'm working on draft 2 of the horror WIP. Up to now this has largely been minor amendments to each of the early chapters, though as I go through it I start thinking about any major changes that might need to be made. Things were going quite well until I got to chapter 12. And then I realised chapter 12 was missing from my 'Draft 1' folder.

An extensive search failed to unearth the missing chapter, but because I keep meticulous logs of when I write each chapter, I have worked out what has happened. The early chapters of the first draft of this WIP were written from October to December last year. At that point, I was still on my clunky old laptop, and my old NetBook. My writing routine has always been fairly rigid. If I was writing the chapters in Starbucks during my early-morning writing session, they were written on my NetBook. When I got home I would boot up both machines and copy the files from one machine to the other, so that there was a back-up. If I was writing at home, then I would transfer them the other way.

However, the old laptop was very slow, and sometimes waiting for it to boot up to transfer files was a frustrating process. What clearly happened is that when I was copying over my new chapters from the NetBook to the laptop, I somehow overlooked chapter 12 and didn't copy it.

I got my new laptop for Christmas, and copied the files from my old laptop to the new one. Then the hard drive on my NetBook died - suddenly, and without warning. All files were lost. That was OK, I thought, I had everything backed up. Or mostly everything. Only now have I realised I had failed to back up chapter 12, and the only copy of that chapter is now lost forever on the dead hard drive.

What I am left with is a log of how many words were in that chapter (1,330) and a summary of what it contained. But the file is gone. I have to rewrite it. And that realisation was a depressing thought.

So the next day, I got up early for a writing session, took the NetBook into London and sat in Starbucks staring at chapters 11 and 13 or quite a long time. I did not get hit with any inspiration to re-write chapter 12. What did occur to me, though, is that there are a lot of problems with this section of the novel, and there's a lot of rewriting that needs to be done. Maybe that's why I couldn't write chapter 12 again. There are a lot of 'talking heads' - people talking about things instead of doing things. Too much 'telling', not enough 'showing', as the writing group would probably say.

What I am attempting to demonstrate in this section of the novel is the changing personality of a character who is being possessed by a demonic creature, in the way he interacts with his friends, and how he's becoming more violent to his girlfriend. At present, the girlfriend tearfully relays to her friends how her boyfriend raped her. I haven't actually got a scene showing the rape. But I think I'm going to have to write it. The action will have a lot more impact than the telling.

I haven't been able to face writing this scene in this week's writing sessions. It's going to be a very difficult and harrowing scene, and writing such scenes can be emotionally draining. But it needs to be done. Sometimes your WIP takes you to places you really don't want to go to. But you have to go there anyway, in order to grow as a writer.

The ironic thing is, if chapter 12 had not disappeared, I would not have scrutinised that section of the novel quite so hard. Some times these things happen for a reason...

Geek Excitement: Resident Evil 6

This week's post is not about writing, but if you will indulge me I want to burble on about one of my other obsessions - computer games. More specifically, one particular game.

If you've been following my blog Imaginary Friends, you will know I have something of an obsession with playing 'Resident Evil 4'.

We have 'Resident Evil 5' as well, but in my view it's just not as good. Sure, the graphics are better - RE4 is only available on the Nintendo Wii, and it was never really designed to be a superior graphics machine. But I prefer the Wii controls to the PS3 controls. I am a hopeless shot. The Wii controls are gentler on those who are crap shots.

But the game itself just has more atmosphere than its sequel. In RE4, Leon spends a lot of time runing around alone (apart from occasional cut scene interactions with NPCs, and of course the interactions with the very annoying Ashley) in a lonely and creepy part of rural Spain, being attacked by zombies and other unnatural beasties, on a dark rainy night. RE5, set in the daytime under the baking sun of Africa, just doesn't have the same atmosphere.

And then, of course, the game has Leon. Leon is hot. I have a solid faction of female friends who all drool over Leon. The main character in RE5 is Chris Redfield, who doesn't have the same lust factor.

'Resident Evil' as a series has been around for years. Not being familiar with the game before RE4, I can't say anything about what earlier games were like, but I gather that the same characters have been popping up periodically throughout the series - Chris and his sister Claire; Leon; Krauser; Jill Valentine; Ada Wong. Each game progresses the plot along, with points from the previous series occasionally referred to. The films follow through with this. I hear rumour there's a new film in development - live action this time - that will feature all of the series' characters. Including Leon. Can't wait for that one.

Anyway, more exciting than that is the news that 'Resident Evil 6' is being released later this year. It's on the PS3, not the Wii, so I will have to get a handle on the awkward controls. But the graphics will be great. And, more relevant, this game features Leon. In full PS3 CGI glory. Woohoo!

For a taster, here's the trailer:

IT Fail

My little NetBook has died. I mourn its passing. I have to come to rely on it completely in the last couple of years. Not only is it my lifeline during my early-morning Starbucks writing sessions, but I also take it on holiday with me. This year it's been to Egypt, where it witnessed the birth of my new horror WIP. It's also been to New York.

I used to do all my writing on my Dell laptop, which sits docked in my Writing Corner. When I decided to be more disciplined in my writing, my husband suggested we get a NetBook, which was much more portable than the laptop. It's fair to say it revolutionised my writing habits.

The Dell laptop is seven years old, and has been getting decidedly slower and clunkier of late. In fact, when I turn it on I have to go away and do something else for twenty minutes, because it takes that long to think about things. So my main gift this past Christmas was a shiny new laptop running Windows 7. It's lightning fast in comparison to the old one.

But, on New Years' Day, the NetBook died. Literally. In the morning it was working fine; I went back to it a few hours later and tried to wake it from its sleep mode, and couldn't. Continuous restarts failed to get me past a black screen with the words 'failed to find operating system' on it. Apparently this means the hard drive has failed. Getting it fixed is going to cost almost as much as a new machine, and even then there's no guarantee we can retrieve any of the files.

I am, on the whole, pretty good at backing up. I transfer all my writing files between the laptop and the NetBook regularly, and every so often back them up onto the desktop PC as well. However, I'm not so diligent about doing this every day. I'd made a start on editing my short stories for the collection, and hadn't copied them over anywhere. This wasn't the end of the world, as I was able to retrive my Stumar Press editor's copies from his email to me, and it just meant having to do them again. However, when I had my novel critique session for the second Shara book, I made notes as we went along on the NetBook. That I hadn't copied anywhere, and so it's lost forever. I do have the hard copies from my critiquers, but the idea of making a document with my own notes was so I would have an easy-to-access precis of what I need to fix in the next draft. Bummer.

What's most inconvenient, however, is not having the NetBook to carry to my writing sessions. That I really miss. Not wanting to expose my shiny new laptop to the hazards of Central London, I have had to resort to hauling out the old Dell again and taking that into London with me for my writing mornings. It's very heavy. And as I said before, it takes a long time to warm up.

However, I have learned my lesson with regard to backing up. This little guy in the picture was one of my stocking stuffers. I call him Robbie. He's a USB flash stick with 8GB of memory. I have copied over all my WIPs onto him, and I carry him around everywhere. Every time I write more words, I copy them over straight away.

Having just forked out quite a lot of money on a new laptop, replacing the NetBook has to wait a while. In the meantime, I have to either get used to lugging the ancient laptop around, or I need to rearrange my writing schedule to give myself more time to write at home. Because I really don't want to use the IT fail as an excuse to not write. Much as it's made me realise how much I rely on technology, that would be a poor excuse indeed.

Two-Reader Household

Hubby and I are both die-hard bibliophiles, and our house has always been full of books. In fact, it's so full of books that was one of the reasons I decided to buy an e-reader - less storage space required.

I love my Sony e-reader and after Hubby saw me happy with it he decided he wanted an e-reader, too. Given the fact that many e-books are only available in one format, we decided, rather than get a second Sony, to get him a Kindle - figuring that we'd be increasing the chances of us being able to get hold of desired e-books in a format we could read.

So we are now a two e-reader household, and Hubby has enthusiastically embraced e-book technology. On our recent holiday we took along both e-readers, and we spent many hours relaxing by the pool, him with his nose in the Kindle and me with mine in the Sony.

Having compared the two, I think aesthetically I still prefer my pocket Sony, which is neater and more compact. But the Kindle has its advantages, too. There are now Sony e-readers that will allow one to edit documents, but my particular brand will not. The Kindle will, and it's also wifi compatible, which the Sony is not.

Buying e-books on the Sony is fairly straightforward. You have to download the reader library software onto your PC. When you buy an e-book in EPUB format, it will download into your reader library. You then plug the e-reader into the PC, and drag and drop the relevant EPUB files from the library onto your device. Unplug the device, and your new e-books appear on your e-reader.

The Kindle's even easier, though. When you buy a Kindle from Amazon, it automatically links itself to your Amazon account. Buying an e-book for your Kindle, after that, is literally a case of one click. Browse the available Kindle books on Amazon. When you find one you want to buy, you click the 'buy now' button. And that's it. The next time you switch on your Kindle, your new e-books will automatically download. You don't even have to worry about payment details, as they are already stored in your Amazon account (which makes buying Kindle e-books potentially very expensive, because it's far too easy to lose track of how much money you've spent).

Both Hubby and I still buy paper books, but I find myself buying ever more e-books. So many books, so little time.

There's still a fear out there in the publishing world that e-books will make paper books obsolete. I still believe that won't happen, but maybe I'm being optimistic. A few years ago Hubby didn't believe he'd ever stop reading newspapers - he used to read one every morning on the daily commute. But now he doesn't read newspapers at all. At some point over the last couple of years he changed to getting all of his news online, read with a cup of coffee at his desk before he starts work in the morning.

If e-books take over from paper completely it will be a shame. In the meantime my paper TBR pile continues to grow - but the Sony TBR pile grows even faster.

As an extra complication, I now have an addition 'TBR pile'on the Kindle. I just have to prise it away from Hubby first...

Writing Lesson #10: Mobile Writing

I am a creature of habit. It took me a long time to adapt to writing on a word processor, instead of long hand in pencil in the back of note books.

Once I had adapted, though, I had a new routine. I created for myself a ‘writing corner’ around my computer. Wherever we’ve lived over the last twenty years, I had to have a ‘writing corner’ (I would like a whole room, but we’ve never lived in a place big enough). And I decided I couldn’t do any writing unless I was in my ‘writing corner’.

This was all well and good in the days of desktop PCs, which weren’t mobile. But when SUFFER THE CHILDREN took 10 years to write, I was using far too often the excuse that I had no time to write because I wasn’t in my ‘writing corner’. A few years ago, my husband bought me a lap top, in an attempt to encourage me to write more often. I decided I didn’t like writing on the laptop because it took me out of my comfort zone. I bought myself a cradle for it, and set it up on the computer desk with a separate mouse and keyboard plugged into it. I could write on it then, because it was in my ‘writing corner’, which defeated the whole purpose of having a laptop.

And then, a couple of years ago, he bought me a NetBook. And with the arrival of the publishing contract, I had to change my thinking. I could no longer afford to spend months and years away from the writing. I had to be more than a one trick pony (or, indeed, one book author). I always complain about the day job getting in the way of writing time. But since giving up the day job is not a feasible option (at least not yet), the alternative was to try and find time to write around the day job. I had to get used to writing on the NetBook, and get out of my head the idea that the only place I could write was at home in my ‘writing corner’.

And I have to say I have finally made some progress in disabusing myself of this notion. The NetBook keyboard took some getting used to – I am a touch typist, and the keys are so close together it is easy to hit the wrong one – but now that I have, I am getting quite adept at carrying the NetBook around with me and writing in places other than my ‘writing corner’. I sit in Starbucks and bash away for an hour or so before work a couple of days a week. Sometimes I even take the NetBook on holiday and set up camp in the hotel lobby to get some writing in.

In theory I have time on the train on my daily commute that could be put to good use writing, but in practise that’s not going to happen. First of all, I don’t always have a seat on my train. Secondly, we are all packed in so tightly if I tried writing on the NetBook I would have several people who could see over my shoulder. Writing on the move is one thing but having someone watch me write is seriously off-putting.

But there are plenty of other places where I could get some writing time in with the NetBook, and after 20 years of the ‘writing corner’ I am once more getting used to writing on the move. It is, after all, going back to the beginning. Before the days of computers, when I wrote in notebooks, I used to be able to write anywhere. Why it’s taken me so long to go back to that, I have no idea. As I say, I’m a creature of habit. But I am learning that habits can be changed.

Writing Lesson #6: Discovering Technology

Note: Sara is on holiday so I'm posting this on her behalf.


About the time I started submitting short stories, I began to think about investing in one of those newfangled devices called a ‘word processor’.

In high school I took typing classes, and before I left school I typed out all of my stories. But once I started submitting, it didn’t take long for the copies to get pretty dog-eared. Unprofessional, I thought, and I was trying to build up a reputation as a ‘serious’ writer.

So, in the late 1980s, once I started working and earning money, I invested in my first word processor. It was an Amstrad PCW. It had a black screen and green type. It didn’t have a hard drive – instead everything was saved on three-and-a-half inch floppy disks.

As I’ve already mentioned, I was very well entrenched in a writing routine that involved hand writing the first draft. In pencil. When I got the word processor I began to rethink this. After all, it was so easy to make amendments on the word processor – everything could be changed on screen. Surely I would save myself time (and paper) by typing directly onto the screen, making amendments and then printing out the final copy.
Being a creature of habit, it took me a while to get used to doing things this way. Change is not something that comes naturally to me (I think I’ve mentioned that before, too).

But the Amstrad heralded the start of a new writing routine. The first draft got typed directly onto the computer. Because of the limitations of those early floppy disks, which really did not have much in the way of memory, I got into the habit of saving each chapter as a separate file. It took three or four disks, as I recall, to save an entire novel this way.

Now, of course, the modern PC will let you save huge files, But because I am a creature of habit, I still work this way. I still start a new file for each chapter when I am in draft stage. I start a new sub-folder for each new draft.

This has been my writing process for over 20 years now. I couldn’t go back to writing that first draft in pencil even if I wanted to – and yet I still remember how difficult it was for me to break the old routine and type directly onto the computer.

The next turning point in the learning curve of my writing processes came when I joined a writing group. That’s the subject of the next post in this series.

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet...

...that is the question. Or, to put it another way, do social networking sites help the e-author with sales?

I have a MySpace page. I don't do much with it, as since they fiddled with the layout I can't work out how to make anything work on it. My LinkedIn page is similarly neglected. I do spend a lot of time on Facebook - at least I know how to make that work. But I've so far resisted Twitter.

It baffles me that in our world of mobile communication, instant messaging and social networking sites, things that were once considered private are blatantly broadcast to the world. On my daily commute to and from work I listen to people having very private conversations on their mobile phones - conversations that twenty years ago they would never dream of having in someone else's earshot. People use Facebook to put up embarrassing pictures of themselves - or other people - after too much to drink on a night out, and don't seem to be too concerned that the whole world can see them. Is this really the impression you want to make on a potential employer - or editor? Every once in a while one hears stories of someone being fired because they bad-mouthed their boss on Facebook whilst forgetting that they've added said boss to their friends list.

And then there's Twitter. The combination of Twitter and mobile phones with instant internet access (and I don't have one of those, either) seems to result in people posting inane statuses every five minutes. Do I really want a minute-by-minute account of your trip across the road to the shop to buy milk? If you're Jon Bon Jovi and you're going to the shop across the street from me, maybe. Otherwise, probably not.

And this, in a nutshell, is why I've resisted Twitter so far. But I keep being told that as an e-author, it's an essential marketing tool.

There's no doubt that for the e-author, the internet is the way to promote one's e-book. With a print book, you can do signing session. With an e-book, all of your readers are online, so the best way of reaching them is through the internet. I have, I admit, been using Facebook differently since the publication of SUFFER THE CHILDREN. Once upon a time it was just a means of sharing my holiday photos with my family and friends in Canada, and playing Scrabble with people far away from me. Now I find I use it to plug guest blog posts and news about my e-book, and most of my status updates have to do with writing.

At the moment, though, I am one more writer nobody's ever heard of, and I've become something of a publicity tart - seeking it anywhere and everywhere. But I know there's at least one copy of my e-book I've sold because of someone I've connected with on Facebook, and that alone makes my presence there worthwhile.

So I shall probably crack eventually and sign up for Twitter, even if it's just to tweet about my e-book.