Miriam Joy Writes

while real life does its best to get in the way

15 May 2013
11 Comments

Books: The Greatest Lovers

I thought about doing this as a video blog. I was going to take footage from this afternoon where Charley and I hung out in a bookshop in London, unexpectedly having been granted the opportunity to meet up during the interminable months between November, when we spent a weekend together, and August, when we plan to do a similar thing. However, I was so excited to see my co-writer again that I completely forgot I had a camera with me and left it in my bag the entire time. So I did what any blogger would do — abandoned the video idea, and decided to write it up. With WORDS.

Shocking, right? Absolutely appalling. How dare I, a writer, decide to use WORDS to tell a story?

Anyway, I’m sure even those of you who don’t watch Doctor Who (and I hope very much that you are few and far between, else much of my blog will not make sense to you) will have heard by now a quote from the Tenth Doctor in the second series since 2005:

“Books! The greatest weapons in the world!”

And, you know, the Doctor has a point. Books are a way of arming yourself against the world with knowledge and experience that you can’t get anywhere else. When you’re in a weak position, you can turn to books for advice, and they can help you.

But I don’t think that’s really what books are like or for. I think books aren’t weapons: they’re lovers. (And I’m not talking about the really nice edition of Lord of the Rings that you sensually finger every time you’re in a bookshop because of the way it looks at you from the shelves. Seriously. Don’t deny it. I’m not judging you. We’ve all been there. Those maps are sexy.)

People—especially children—turn to books when they’re hurting. Books are a way to make sense of a new place or experience, from moving house or school to falling in love for the first time. You turn to books to find characters who are going through the same thing. And you know what those characters do? You know what those books do?

They take your hand and they lead you through it.

Books are a support. In many cases, they’re a lifeline. Many months ago now there was a Twitter movement called #YAsaves, where people told their stories of what YA fiction meant to them, and how it had helped them. There was also a fantastic article on the subject about YA fiction and what it can mean to people whose lives are difficult and traumatic, which you can find here.

I didn’t have a difficult or traumatic childhood. While there are things about being a teenager that haven’t been a walk in the park (unless it’s the kind of walk where you fall in the pond and then get hit by somebody’s bike but aren’t seriously injured, in which case I’d say the metaphor was apt), I would definitely not say that I was one of the people described in this article, for whom books hold nothing new, and therefore turn to them to find people like themselves.

Nevertheless, in difficult times, books have been a comfort. When school gets boring, books are the friends that take you on wild adventures as soon as the bell rings. When you’re angry at your parents / society / the world, books lead you up onto the barricades to start the revolution—but guard you from the bullets. Books are the friend that movies made you believe you’d have but who never materialised through all your time at school, despite trying. Books are there to love you when you’re not sure if anybody else does.

Yes, books can be weapons. And books, if written in the right way and put in the hands of the right people, can turn humans into weapons too.

But books can teach you how to love. Books can teach you how to be loved. Books can love you.

Because when you’re different, it’s books about kids that are different which tell you it’s okay to be who you’re are, to tell you that you can be accepted. When you’re grieving, it’s books that show you other people going through loss so that you know how to overcome the emotions. When you’re seemingly lost in darkness, books are quite often the guiding light.

Books are lovers. Not weapons.

That’s why I write them. Because somewhere out there is a reader who needs to be loved.

But more to the point, that’s why I read them. Because that’s what we all need, really. Every little monster just wants to be loved. And aren’t we all monsters of a sort, in our own world? Don’t we all scare ourselves sometimes? (Please tell me that’s not me…)

So let me amend that quote.

“Books! The greatest lovers in the world!”

What do you think? Weapons or lovers? And do you stroke nice editions of books when you find them?
Posted in Books and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,
09 May 2013
22 Comments

Why Do Zombies Want Brains?

My mind not only wanders: sometimes it leaves completely.

This is a fact (as well as something written on one of father person’s t-shirts). My mind is apt to wandering so completely that when I opened my school planner to write a reminder to the effect of read Pliny introduction, what I actually wrote was why do zombies want brains? 

After staring at it for a few seconds trying to work out why it looked wrong, it occurred to me that that hadn’t been what I intended to write. Nor was I sure what I’d been thinking about to bring that to mind. Nevertheless, being ready to improvise and try and explain myself, I started to consider the question.

Why do zombies want brains?

I wasn’t really sure what I was asking myself. I mean, did I want to know why actual zombies wanted actual brains, assuming that they were real? Or was I looking at something deeper than a biological craving for brains, at the philosophical reasoning behind writers of zombie fiction for this characteristic? Of course, after I’d considered this for a while, I ended up with the zombie ninjas song stuck in my head (and now you can too!), but the question remained.

An undead creature incapable of rational thought craves the brains of living humans, right? That’s basically what we tend to consider as zombies, isn’t it? 

Well, why does it want the brain?

Perhaps the zombie’s longing for the brain is an unconscious desire to regain the capability of thought that it lost when it became this twisted, undead creature. It no longer has the intelligence to recognise that eating the brain of another will not return its cerebral functions, so erroneously assumes that it’s a way back to becoming sentient. And why not? After all, we are what we eat.

At this point, a friend looked across at what I’d written in my planner and said, “Are we zombies?”

I considered this. Perhaps we are. Perhaps zombies are the writer’s reaction to a world where intelligent thought and reason has been lost, and where people are driven by simplistic, mistaken desires in the hope that they will give them back the level of being they feel they have lost. Perhaps it has a theological message: in turning away from faith, humans have become lower creatures, and are destroying the faith of others in an attempt to regain their own.

There is philosophy at work here. Somebody, somewhere has looked at society and said, “We are zombies.” And they have created books and films that reflect this, but society is missing the point. Society thinks, “These creatures are awful. And fictional.” Maybe they think the zombies are funny, and write them into humorous stories. But that first Somebody is looking at society saying, “You are destroying my creation because you are incapable of seeing that you have lost your own ability.”

We are zombies.

I turned to my friend and said, “Perhaps philosophers are showing us this through films because nobody listens to them anymore. Zombie fiction is their reaction to reduced credibility in the modern world.”

The philosophers are reasoning: “The desire of zombies is not driven by a desire to gain intelligence. Rather, it is driven by a desire to regain intelligence. It is only because they unconsciously know that they have once had that brainpower that they are now searching to find another way of obtaining it, though it is causing death.” And then they are saying: “People seek what they are feel is their entitlement, something that they have been denied. But frequently their attempts to obtain power or affection or status results in destroying the life of another.”

And philosophers are showing us this in a basic form: a creature incapable of rational thought eating the brain of another.

That, my friends, is why zombies want brains.

But this tangent has been long enough. Perhaps now I ought to amend that note in my school planner to read Pliny introduction. Or, better still, I should read the Pliny introduction, and then the note would not be necessary.

Posted in Humour and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
30 Apr 2013
17 Comments

When Miriam Edits…

… the world burns, her family runs out of teabags, and she spends an inordinate amount of time making writing playlists to get out of doing anything.

I don’t know how long you’ve been hanging around my blog but if it’s anything more than a couple of months, you’ll know that editing—or more specifically, rewriting—is something that I do all the time. If people could get degrees in things just by doing them a lot, then the nine separate drafts I wrote for Watching could probably count towards at least an MA. And you know, fair enough—I was young and inexperienced when I first started writing it, and it’s only because I’ve improved so much that I’ve been obliged to keep redrafting it.

Nevertheless, there has been a lot of redrafting, and while I don’t intend to do that number of redrafts to any other novel before I even start querying, I feel like I’m pretty experienced at writing slightly different versions of what is, essentially, the same book.

Actually, I don’t hate it as much as I used to. When I first started this writing malarkey, I assumed that editing and redrafting was the boring bit and that the most fun stuff was in the first draft. You know what? That was a lie.

First-drafting is NOT the fun bit

It has good moments. Hell, it all has good moments. That’s why we do this (or we’re masochists who are paying for something horrific that we did in a former life). First-drafting is where you get unexpected subplots and characters taking things in completely different directions and you muddle through and somehow those two characters ended up together when you were fairly sure at least one of them was straight but it doesn’t matter because you’re at the end.

It’s a good feeling.

But second drafts? Second drafts you get the characters who appear out of the woodwork and steal the show. Sometimes they’re minor characters you decided to bring out, but sometimes they’re new. They turn up and fiddle with your plot and usually make it better (or they get with the characters you thought were straight—DAMN IT, KAY). And what’s more, you no longer have quite so many plot holes and meandering purple prose, because you’re not trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Now you’re crafting.

(Note: I’m assuming that you write like I do.)

There’s just one thing.

To write a second draft, you need a first draft.

The scene you had in your first draft that was vaguely decent but needed considerable work to make it good is the one that comes into play here, and you will sit there polishing it and smiling that you wrote this scene. But then you scroll down a page in your first draft and find that the next scene was never written. Instead, you’ve got something akin to this:

thanks first draft

Thank you, 2011!Miriam.

Now you’re scuppered, because you’re not second-drafting any more. You are, once again, writing new material. And you want to know the secret?

You never stop first-drafting.

Or at least, not if you’re me. The ninth draft of Watching had stuff in it that I’d never seen before. A character who appeared in the third draft of Destroying then hung around to mess up large swathes of plot in book three, Returning, when I wrote the second draft of that (which was thirty thousand words longer than the first draft).

There is always new material!

But you get to refine it, and rewrite the old material, and hopefully by now you should know what the plot is doing. And this is GOOD. And this is fun.

And that’s basically why I’ve discovered that I kind of like redrafting. Because it’s got the fun bits of second-drafting (vaguely decent prose) with the fun bits of first-drafting (unexpected characters, plot twists and relationships—they are always my downfall) mixed in together. Sure, it still has the points where you kind of sit there thinking, “Well, this is abysmal, and I have no idea what happened to my plot,” and occasionally you find the dramatic chapter endings you wrote in the first draft that should have led to a plot point but didn’t and you curse your younger self with inventive passion, but that’s not the main thing.

REDRAFTING CAN BE FUN.

This post was basically me trying to find a more interesting way of informing you that I am currently writing a second draft of my 2011 novel, The Quiet Ones, and my younger self was incredibly unhelpful with the scenes she randomly left out. Did you guess that?

So, tell me about redrafting! Have you rewritten a book? Was it more or less fun than the first draft? Does your process sound anything like mine? Let me know!

Posted in Editing, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,
26 Apr 2013
14 Comments

Is Poetry For Old People?

I’m a young writer. Well, up to a point. I’m young (17) and I write (novels being just one facet of that, this blog being another).

Quite often, these two aspects of my existence are lumped together, and not in a good way. A ‘young writer’ means a ‘new writer’ or an ‘inexperienced writer’ or a ‘practising writer’ or even a ‘bad writer’. Never mind that people of any age can be a ‘new’ writer (and what counts as new? I’ve been writing novels for four and a half years, but I’ve been writing stories far longer than that), or can have varying levels of experience. And of course, it means nothing to these critics that teens can and have been published, both traditionally and independently.

But that’s about prose, and novels, and stories, and I genuinely believe that that world is changing so that young people are becoming recognised, and older writers are realising that we can write just as well as many of them — or at least, shouldn’t be dismissed because of our youth.

Poetry is an entirely different kettle of fish.

A recently Freshly Pressed post had a mention of a 17-year-old poet. In this post, the writer mulled over the relative inexperience of this girl, and how this caused them to be prejudiced against them, before realising that they weren’t even looking at the poems on their own merit. (They also went on to talk about one’s personal experiences impact on how we read things, which is definitely true.)

I’ve talked about life experience before. So I’m not going to repeat everything I said there. Just this: “In the end, the experiences I have had are more important for writing than the ones I haven’t had.”

I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently. Some of them can be found floating around the internet, although not my best ones, which I’m keeping hidden in a folder on my computer. Why? Well, because Charley is nagging me to publish them and while my initial reaction was to say “Nah, that’s pretentious” and “anyone can write poems”, I’ve started thinking about it. So they’re going to stay under wraps for a while.

The thing is, I know that a lot of my poems are angsty. I appreciate that and expect it. Many of them I wrote deliberately angry or stressed out or sad, because that was the emotion I wanted to portray. For me, they’re deeply personal, and every single one comes from an aspect of my own life, even if it has been changed or altered to give it poetic value. My poems are my struggles and my thoughts, and while I know that other people can appreciate them (as some of my friends have read them), I also know that there are lines only I will understand, as only I know what I was thinking when I wrote it.

As a result, I know that somebody reading it might think of lines as pretentious. Or childish. Because they don’t understand the context, and they don’t know what’s going on in my life that I might be writing about. Because they assume that youth means poetry is going to be overwrought and without any poetic value.

Maybe it is. Maybe I’ll come back to them in a few years and feel the same.

But I’m not so sure. Because I’m at the point where I read my poems and 70% of them I hate, but there are 30% that I’m willing to keep, even if they need a bit of work before I’ll let people read them. When I was younger, I enjoyed everything I wrote. Now I’m more discerning.

Surely that’s a sign that I’ve improved?

I can’t imagine that I’ll get to 18 and simply because I’m a legal adult, my poetry will ‘grow up’ and be instantly different. So many poets started young that I don’t understand why still we associate “17-year-old poet” with “pretentious” and, more often these days, “hipster”.

Maybe we just like to express ourselves through verse.

Posted in Poetry and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
21 Apr 2013
8 Comments

When Should Books Be Banned?

How far can you go in a book before people start to react negatively to it, perhaps even to the point of banning it? How far should you go?

These days, the Western world is so obsessed with feeling like they’ve got total freedom of speech that banning a book usually results in an internet outrage and numerous petitions, even if it’s only forbidding it to be taught in schools and not expressly banning it completely. (See: Looking For Alaska, where much of nerdfighteria campaigned to have this decision overruled.)

But in the past there’ve been all sorts of books that have been banned just because they went too far. There’s a ‘Banned Books Week’ where people celebrate these books by reading them. Yet what exactly is too far?

See, nowadays we’ve got horror movies and books with intensely detailed descriptions of gore; we’ve got access to almost anything on the internet, and a result, people are kind of desensitized to reading about violence, let alone sex or controversial social issues. The world has also moved on a lot in terms of civil rights, so books like To Kill A Mockingbird that challenged racism wouldn’t be banned these days, even though they have been in the past.

I don’t think these days that graphic violence or sex are reasons that books are controversial, for the reasons I’ve stated. Yeah, so they might get put in a different section of the library, like Horror instead of General Fiction, but they’re not going to be taken out and burned. So writers, go ahead and include that torture scene you wrote. 

But there are still books that cause issues, and maybe rightly so.

I’m currently studying A Clockwork Orange. Most of you probably know a bit about it, or you’ve read it, or you’ve seen the film. The film itself was incredibly controversial, and the book perhaps more so. However, if you don’t know anything about it, I’ll give you a quick rundown:

Alex, our narrator and main character, is fifteen at the start of the book. He’s violent, anti-social, and skips school to listen to Beethoven and rape ten year old girls. The entire novel is narrated in first person from his point of view, even during horrific moments of violence, but his use of ‘nadsat’, a slang language spoken by the characters that was invented by Burgess using elements of Russian and Cockney Rhyming Slang, means that as readers, we’re slightly detached from this. It’s quite hard to read at first, but by the end of the book you start to understand Alex’s language.

Do you start to understand Alex, though, as a result? Do you start to see things from his point of view?

It’s generally accepted that this use of language is designed to make us gradually understand Alex’s speech and therefore his perspective, and this is one of the reasons why this book was so controversial. Alex enjoys violence, and sees it as something beautiful. We’re reading it from his point of view, therefore we’re kind of being asked to think of it like that, which can make you feel very uncomfortable after a while.

Are things like this okay?

The YA genre in particular has a lot of responsibility, because many teens are shaped by the books they read and, more widely, the films that are based on them (as these may attract attention from those who don’t enjoy reading, but they’re beyond help anyway). If certain attitudes and behaviours are presented as okay, that’s going to cause some concern among parents and teachers who might just try and stop their teens reading those books, thus ensuring that they do so ;)

I don’t believe books should be censored, and I also believe that telling your 12-year-old sister not to read a book because it’s unsuitable is only guaranteeing that she’ll read it as soon as you go to university and leave your bookshelves unattended (I totally didn’t do this… ahem), but I think as a YA author, one has to watch out. To ask questions:

1. Is this novel sending a message that could be considered controversial?
2. Was this deliberate?

Because if it was deliberate and you’re trying to raise questions about society, then it’s hopefully going to come across as that. A Clockwork Orange is asking us about free will and governmental control, and that is made very obvious. It’s controversial because it seems to be saying that Alex has the right to be evil, as otherwise good means nothing. The questions are raised very obviously and didactically, and it makes a reader think.

But if you read your novel back and you realise only then that your character are violent racists and that this is never addressed as an issue, you need to watch out. Whatever you write, your readers are going to have that opinion in their minds. Even if they don’t agree with it. Even if they don’t want to agree with it. It’ll be lurking there, and who knows what influence that might have on them in the future? 

Controversy can be great — if it’s thought through. If it’s deliberate. If it’s there to make a point. But you have to be careful.

Posted in Books, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
15 Apr 2013
14 Comments

All The Best Stories To Tell

Do you ever read someone’s blog posts about things that happened to them in the past and just think, Your life is so much more interesting than mine?

Because I do. All the freaking time.

Like Kristen Lamb. She’s got stories to tell on all sorts of topics, like when she lost her job because of a misdiagnosis and befriended gangsters which resulted in them parking her car rather than stealing it. I read that and I think, “You’ve had such an interesting life.”

Bob Mayer writes things based on his experience in the special forces. I once read an autobiographical book by someone whose sister went crazy, written entirely in poems, and though I’m not trying to say that having your sister go crazy is a good thing, it certainly counts in ‘interesting life’ points.

There’s a line from a Frank Turner song that says “And we’re definitely going to hell, but we’ll have all the best stories to tell.” I don’t particularly want to go to hell. I’m not sure anybody does. But at the same time, I want to have stories to tell. I want to live so that when I’m hanging out with people, I have anecdotes to use.

Oh, I’m funny (apparently — it’s usually unintentional), and I’ll tell stories, but they’re not my stories. They’re stories passed on to me by my sister: her stories, her friends’ stories. Or my brother. They’re stories passed down as family folklore, stories I’ve picked up on the internet, stories people tell me. And I never claim they’re mine. I say, “Someone I know…” or “a friend…” My gift is to make them interesting even when they’re not mine.

But recently it’s occurred to me that that isn’t enough. I want stories. I want my own anecdotes and experiences. I want to bring humour from my own life, not other people’s. I want to use my own background in my novels.

I do a lot of things, in life, generally. Yet they’re routine things. My days are busy, but I’m not gathering stories. I’m in orchestras and bands — they happen every week, and occasionally we have a funny story, usually as a result of our annual tour. I take ballet classes. I do archery. I have music lessons. And these things happen and they use time but they don’t give me any stories. They give me background information, detailed experience, but no stories that I can sit down in ten years’ time and say, “Don’t you remember when…”

What? When the string on my violin came off in a concert? That’s hardly a life-changing experience.

Unfortunately, I know that I’m not the kind of person to have adventures. I’m stuck in a permanent state of being Bilbo before his journey. I’m a coward, I would rather stay at home than go away even on holiday, and I like knowing that I’ve got my books, my bed, and the ability to make the kind of food I like. I like to be safe. I don’t have adventures.

I read books about other people having adventures and I enjoy it. And I get to the end and I think, Rather you than me.

Because however magical the worlds, these days most authors are staying away from the perfect experiences of the hero and they’re highlighting the realism. The cold and the hunger and the lack of sleep and the injuries and the general discomfort. Me? I think, “Yeah, maybe not.”

And I know that in the seventeen and a quarter years that I’ve lived so far, I’ve had more experiences that some of my friends. There was that time I spent a week living on a sailing boat in Norfolk, or the week I spent working with one of the army bands. I’ve tried activities like horse riding and rock climbing and kayaking and all of these things that should give me so many stories.

Yet sometimes I still think, “I need to go on a road trip.” You know. People always go on a road trip to ‘find themselves’. Sometimes it’s a literal road trip: you get in a car and drive. Or hitchhike. Sometimes it’s transplanted into a fantastical setting, like the journey in The Crossing Of Ingo by Helen Dunmore. Sometimes it’s metaphorical. But they always come back with new stories, new experiences, new emotions, and despite hating travelling, I still think, “I want that.”

I’m young. I know that. I’ve got so much time to accumulate stories. But I want the assurance that they will happen at some point, and no one is able to give that to me.

I don’t know what I’m expecting to do by writing this. I think I’m hoping that one of you will say, “I know exactly how you feel. I used to be the same, and then I did [insert wondrous thing here] and I don’t feel it anymore.” Or perhaps I’m hoping that one of you (preferably someone I’ve met in real life and can ascertain is not an axe-murderer) will invite me on a roadtrip. On an adventure to reclaim gold from a dragon, or a key on behalf of an angel who turns out to be evil but it’s okay because we can sort them out because we are Heroes and we are plucky and bold, or a journey to find a prince who went missing, or to search out fragments of soul so that we can defeat the guy destroying everything. On a quest.

Yes. That’s what I need.

I need a quest.

Anyone got one handy?

Posted in Life and tagged , , , , , , , ,
10 Apr 2013
23 Comments

Writing Ultimatums (TCWT)

This post was supposed to go up on the 5th, which for anyone not keeping count was last Friday. (It was last Friday even if you were keeping count — Xuan from St Mall’s would be reprimanding my use of the conditional there.) And I don’t even have a good excuse. I didn’t do anything on Friday. Admittedly, I’ve been in Scotland since then, traipsing around St Andrews and Aberdeen and Glasgow and driving through landscapes that resemble Middle Earth, Narnia and Hogwarts in turn (I remain convinced that Scotland is fictional), so that’s kind of an excuse, but not really.

The TCWT chain for this month wants to know what our ultimate goal is as a writer. I have a few, but some are more important than others.

I want to be published,  obviously. I’m not fussed if that’s indie or trad publishing. As you can imagine, I want my writing to be available to as many readers as possible, which is largely possible with trad publishers and their print distribution at the moment, but the future is a rich and varied tapestry of possibilities. Who knows? With St Mall’s already out there in the e-book/POD market, I’ve kind of hit this goal already, but I’d like one of my ‘solo’ novels to make it too.

And I’d like to make my living as a writer. I’d like writing to be my day job, not something I’m forced to squeeze into evenings. I’d like to be able to write and know that I can pay my bills, that I have enough money to live on. Of course, becoming a bestseller, winning some major prizes, and earning enough money to buy a castle like the one I stayed in a few days ago would be great, but if all our dreams come true, what is there left to dream about?

(That’s a butchered Frank Turner quote, by the way. I can’t take credit for philosophising.)

However, on a less commercially-focused side of my aspirations, I want to give something to young readers just as writers gave to me. I want someone one day to come up to me and say: You changed my life.

Nathan Bransford is organising a thing at the moment called ‘Thank A Writer’, where you write to a favourite author and basically thank them for the impact they had on your life. I’ve written to Maggie Stiefvater, because the impact and influence she had on me was huge. But there are so many writers I’d like to write to: Kate Thompson, for starters, who changed my life in a thousand different ways and is probably the reason I write now and am interested in the things I’m interested in and basically is completely brilliantly awesome and asdfasldkfja;ds why can’t I find her address to write to her?

Fangirling aside, because writers have done so much for me, I’d like one day to be the writer who inspired someone else, who triggered somebody’s interest in mythology or history or being a modern-day knight, or whatever the book was about. I’d like someone to write to me and say: You were my inspiration. Or, your book helped me when I was struggling. Or, which would be extra special, your book helped me to make sense of myself.

Because that’s what books have done to me. And I use allegory in my work. I write about people who don’t conform to societal norms (whether it’s magic powers or not!). I write about people who have to come to terms with who they are and how that relates to their lifelong beliefs and values. I write about people who have struggles that, whether or not they’re caused by fairies, can be related to everyday life and the struggles of teenagers.

And I want those to help people.

Of course, my goal as a writer is also to make my beta readers cry (okay, mainly Charley, but she deserves it). I want to have people tell me that they sobbed in a silent library over my books, like I did over Tolkien’s Children of Húrin, or in a classroom, like I did over the first draft of Charley’s Ikarus, which is why I am tormenting her with my current project. But that’s not as important as making a difference.

And there’s a quote that I heard recently: if a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. My poems are dedicated to people I know and love. Many of my characters take inspiration from people I know. Writing, for me, isn’t just about me living on after I’m dead, as Anne Frank said, which Nevillegirl alluded to in her post. It’s about everyone I know being preserved in ink on a page.

So that’s what I’m doing as a writer.

Changing lives, provoking tears, and granting immortality. No big deal, you know. A bit of fame and money isn’t too much to ask if I succeed, is it? ;)

The rest of the chain!

5th – http://miriamjoywrites.com/ <- Let’s just pretend I posted on the right day, in which case YOU ARE HERE. Also, please note that my blog is .COM and not .WORDPRESS.COM :D (Not that it matters: the other redirects anyway.)

6th – http://www.inklinedwriters.blogspot.com/

7th – http://www.paulinaczarnecki.wordpress.com/

8th – http://insatiablebeforedeath.wordpress.com/

9th – http://musingsfromnevillesnavel.wordpress.com/

10th – http://avonsbabbles.wordpress.com/

11th – http://theloonyteenwriter.wordpress.com/

12th – http://insideliamsbrain.wordpress.com/

13th – http://kirstenwrites.wordpress.com/

14th – http://creatingtherenaissance.wordpress.com/

15th – http://charactercentral.wordpress.com/

16th – http://realityisimaginary.blogspot.com/

17th – http://www.novelexemplar.wordpress.com/

18th – http://charlieeatmybook.blogspot.co.uk/

19th – http://zarahoffman.tumblr.com/

20th – http://thelittleenginethatcouldnt.wordpress.com/

21st – http://theangelicauburn.wordpress.com/

22nd – http://eatwritedie.blogspot.com/

23rd – http://writerbewildered.blogspot.com/

24th – http://veewhoa.wordpress.com/

25th – http://www.alwaysweavingwords.blogspot.com/

26th – http://anqiyu.wordpress.com/

27th – http://bloodoverithaca.wordpress.com/

28th - http://incessantdroningofaboredwriter.wordpress.com/

29th – http://teenscanwritetoo.wordpress.com/ (We’ll announce the topic for next month’s chain)

PS: I know I say don’t apologise for your blog, but I have to right now. I’ve been abysmal about keeping up with regular posts at the moment. I am so sorry.

Posted in Teens Can Write Too Blog Chain and tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
04 Apr 2013
14 Comments

The Next Big Thing (Blog Hop)

I was tagged for a thing! And because I said I’d try and post a bit more and I haven’t yet started writing for today, so I’m not distracted, I’ll fill it in now.

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Forget My Wings, though I’m not sure I’ll keep the title. I’m also working on a short story called Status: Offline but that’s another post :)

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I took some of the basic premise of my first ever novel, which was abysmal, and jumbled it up with a few ideas I’d jotted down in an English lesson, including a phrase: in which he is good and moral and young and she is damned and as ancient as all time. Not sure how much I’ve stuck to that, but that was the basic idea. I also tried reversing a whole bunch of concepts to see what would fit — I knew I wanted to use the original premise but I didn’t know how to rewrite it, so I literally sat down and thought up some ideas. They didn’t ‘come’. I also made a playlist which helped inspire me.

What genre does your book fall under?

Historical science fiction. If that’s a thing. It is now.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Ooh, I don’t know. I often cast characters but I haven’t yet cast this book.

A teenage version of Jenna-Louise Coleman combined with Samantha Barks would make the perfect Georgina. Georgina was originally intended to be a minor character, but turned out as a badass Cockney street-fighter, who stole everybody’s hearts along the way. Hmm, sounds about right. She’s only sixteen or thereabouts, so she’d need some new up and coming actress to play her, therefore she’s hard to cast, but these two provide the appropriate aesthetics!

She’s basically the only character that I’ve cast mentally, and that’s only because I caught sight of a picture of these two (on two separate occasions) and thought, “Oh, look, it’s Georgina!”

Georgina is my ‘awesome female brunette’. I’m making it a point to write one into everything I write, so that cosplayers like myself have someone they can dress up as who doesn’t have “interestingly coloured hair”. Ehehe!

Perhaps Emilia Clarke could play Susanna, my main female character, simply due to how wonderfully she wears white hair.

I’ve not seen her in Game of Thrones, but if Daenerys is anything like she is in the book, she definitely has the authoritative air to her, which would suit Susanna.

Susanna also has a lot of really hard decisions to make, and some moments where she is very vulnerable, and I’ve seen some pictures of Emilia Clarke as Dany where she looks just right for those. So, she can be Susanna. New headcanon — Susanna is friends with Dany Targaryan. I think they would definitely get on well.

If I think of any others, particularly to play the male characters (Joseph, my narrator and main male character; Nathaniel, another awesome side character and adorable scamp; Finn, Oscar, and the Commander, all of whom are fairly important; plus all the random humans, the fae, and all the bad guys… yeah, this book has a huge cast), I’ll post them here some other time. Probably won’t, though.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Joseph Aldersey is a human caught up in a war between two opposing alien forces — except he might not be quite as human as he thinks.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I don’t know, I haven’t thought that far ahead. Depends what my critique partners think of it, and how long it takes me to edit.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m still writing it, but I’ll be finished in the next couple of weeks, if all goes according to plan. I started it near the end of February, so it’s taken me about five weeks so far.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I really don’t know. Is Historical Sci-Fi even a thing? I guess perhaps it’s influenced by things like Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart books, simply in style of writing and story-telling and some of the characters. Other than that, I’ve never read anything I’d compare it to, myself. Which I guess is a good thing…

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I don’t know. In English we were discussing the presentation of good and evil as well as male and female characters and I observed that frequently, the guys in YA fiction are evil and brooding and supernatural, while the girls are innocent and dragged into events and then it turns out they’re secretly a vampire or something. So I wanted to reverse that. I guess that contributed.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The combination of Victorian London with spaceships and aliens and demonic/angelic races. Also I guess I’m cheating on the science-fiction genre with fantasy, because there’s magic in there. And, yes, romance. Though it’s all angsty. Oh, there’s a lot of angst. Like, ALL OF THE ANGST. Angst is my speciality.

Tags

I’m not sure if there’s a set number of people I should tag, but I can never think of anyone anyway, so anyone is welcome to do this and say I tagged them if they want to. Meanwhile, I am tagging Charley Robson, because I would very much like to know who she would cast as the characters in Ikarus, should she choose to write about it — I need faces on which to pin my angst. Oh, that book. (I will have my revenge…mark my words.)

Posted in Books, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
02 Apr 2013
18 Comments

Binge-Writing

Last year, I finished one first draft, and one first draft only. I wrote lots of redrafts — in 2012 I took Watching from a sixth draft to a ninth, as well as rewriting Destroying. But I did a lot of starting first drafts.

I started a novel called Rite inspired by the Rite of Spring, about ballet dancers and sacrifice and friendship and love. I got about twenty thousand words into it, if that, before realising I didn’t have time right then to finish it.

I started a novel called Isabel that I’d attempted in the past. I wrote over thirty thousand words of that during NaNoWriMo before realising that it had failed before with good reason — I don’t read enough murder mystery / crime novels to know how to write them. I wasn’t ready to write those characters or that plot. That just wasn’t the time for Isabel to happen, so I abandoned that.

I started a novel called That Was The Bus which was a huge, hilarious, Tom-Holt-meets-Douglas-Adams kind of book, but I had to abandon that one too, partly because I got quite seriously ill and wasn’t able to write for two weeks, and partly because I hadn’t planned it and I couldn’t do the concept justice (but might, one day, even though it would have immense copyright issues).

I played with the idea of a prequel to my Death and Fairies trilogy, called Forgetting, and wrote two and a half chapters before putting it aside to work on later, not because I couldn’t write it then but because other things demanded my attention.

I basically abandoned a lot of things.

And I binge-wrote. Most certainly I did that. During November alone, I wrote 200,000 words — more than I’d written the whole of the rest of the year. After that, I felt completely drained, with no energy for writing, and yet … I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I’d used up my creative power, and that was that. I spent December writing background notes and the abandoned prequel opening chapters, because I didn’t have any brain power to think up another story.

In 2013, I decided I was not going to binge-write. NaNoWriMo be damned, I was not going to use all my writing energy in one month and then spent the months after it going through a creative drought. I signed up to WriYe, set a yearly goal of 350k (which I later changed to 500k), and decided that I was going to write every day. For the whole year. I was going to write over forty thousand words every month, and I wasn’t going to take long periods of time off writing.

It’s April now, and I’m beginning to wonder if binge writing maybe suits me better.

Because the thing about writing every day is that I don’t treat it like a job where I get holidays and weekends — I write every day, Saturday and Sunday included. And even if I occasionally miss my wordcount, I still try and write every day.

My creative brain never gets to stop. My words brain never gets a rest. That part of me is always working, always thinking, and it doesn’t get a day off.

I gave it Easter Sunday off. Partly because I felt it was needed, partly because it was the day before April’s Camp NaNoWriMo in which I’d decided to participate (mainly as an aid to WriYe, not as a challenge in and of itself), and partly because I just didn’t have the energy to write anything else.

Binge writing probably isn’t as productive as slowly slugging it out over a long period of time, and it certainly isn’t a habit that lends itself to become a full-time writer, but I’m beginning to think it has its benefits. What my brain wants right now, more than anything else, is a break.

I’m not giving it one. Partly because I’m nearly finished with my current novel, and if I stop now it’ll never get done. I’m determined to finish it: I want to reach the end. But partly because if I stop, I know it’ll be hard to start again.

Slowing down, though. That’s allowed. I wrote nearly eighty thousand words in February. I’m 73k ahead of my WriYe target already. I don’t need to beat it, I just need to meet it. I keep telling myself this: 1507 words per day. Not 3000. Just 1507. And then you can stop. 

I need to learn to stop. I need to learn to say, “Okay, that’s enough,” and not to overwork my brain. I kid myself that I’m not binge-writing if I do it all the time, but I am. I’m just never stopping. Writing 80k in a month is still writing 80k in a month, even if I do it three months running, and sooner or later I’ll burn out.

So, I’m slowing down. I’m saying it here so that you keep me to it. Oh, and I’m going to actually try and blog regularly, too. I might be writing words, but none of them are going here, and they probably should.

How about you, readers? Do you binge write? Do you start novels and abandon them?

Posted in Writing and tagged , , , , , , ,
27 Mar 2013
10 Comments

Insecure Writer Bingo

Despite having first-drafted around ten novels, the majority of them have been left to moulder instead of being edited. I find first-drafting hard. Sometimes I hate it. It used to be my favourite bit, and when I got to the end, I was tired of the book and didn’t want to edit. Now, I see first drafts as something to be got through, so that I can rewrite.

The few of you that have read my early posts on this blog will know that I used to hate editing. And there are still times when I want to cry because a scene has to be rewritten in a way that’s not only difficult, but will also result in one of my favourite lines being cut. I’ve learned to get over that, though. Back then I thought that editing was boring and had none of the random plot twists that happen in first drafts.

Really, young!Miriam, really? Clearly I wasn’t rewriting very effectively!

When I redrafted my novel Returning, it went from 83k to 112k. I had subplots from the first two books to round up, but I also had characters who came out of the woodwork and stole the limelight. It was awesome. The second draft was great fun.

However, I’m first-drafting at the moment, and while it has some good moments (for example, discovering that Georgina was a badass Cockney street fighter rather than an unimportant minor character), I’m also finding it difficult. Some days I struggle to hit my wordcount, even when other days find me flying over the top of that target as though in a rocket. Some days I’m convinced everything I’ve written is useless and am afraid of sending it to Charley, who is reading this novel in segments whenever I finish a section and force her to look at it for me.

Thus, while stuck in a pit of writer’s block (which is not a thing dammit Miriam do not let yourself be fooled into thinking that’s a thing) and insecurity about my writing, I made a game: Insecure Writer Bingo.

Obviously, people’s individual worries vary, so it won’t work for everyone, not least because I made it in about five minutes flat and probably could have put a little more thought into it. But, to illustrate my point that sometimes first drafts make me want to cry, I have a nice graphic for you.

insecure writer bingo

Feel free to utilise it at NaNoWriMo write-ins or critique group meetings.

When you get ‘Bingo’, click here for the antidote. (Note: you’ll need speakers/headphones, i.e. some way of playing sound, as it’s an audio post.)

Posted in Writing and tagged , , , , , , , ,

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