HOME GROUND ebook edition

Good news everybody!

My third novel, HOME GROUND, is getting an ebook release! I'll post the link as soon as I get the thumbs-up from the publishers, but for now, if you would like a sneak preview the first three chapters are available to view here.

nice day for a white wedding

Weddings are always historic events, to a greater or lesser extent. Their dates are the ones we record, remember, recall fondly, and occasionally panic over forgetting. Each anniversary is a new milestone in our lives.

Last week my best friend KT got married. It was historic for a number of reasons, not least because none of us had properly appreciated that, beneath her hard and cynical exterior, there beat the heart of a Disney princess who wanted nothing more than a perfect wedding to the man of her dreams.

It was also the first wedding to take place in the grounds of Peel Castle on the Isle of Man. We're currently trying to find out when the last wedding was conducted at the cathedral in Peel Castle (if any ever were), but given that the cathedral has been in disuse since the 1800s, it's fairly safe to say this was the first wedding at the castle in at least a century.

And it was also one of my first outings as a newly-trained Registrar for Ceremonies, and I am utterly delighted that I could be the one to pronounce Adam and KT husband and wife.

Congratulations, you pair of wonderful, beautiful freaks. <3

cheesy-chorizo pizza muffins

There're about a dozen things I keep meaning to blog about, but for one reason or another I'm always putting them off (ah, procrastination, my constant companion). So, in an attempt to get out of my bloggy rut, here is one of my favourite recipes: savoury cheesy-chorizo muffins.

The original recipe came from a woman's magazine years ago, but since then I've lost the original copy and also adapted the recipe quite a bit, so this is kinda fudged together (you can probably tell that from my haphazard measurements). On the plus side, it's a pretty forgiving recipe, and doesn't mind a bit of fudging.

300 gm self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon salt
50 ml vegetable oil
300 ml milk
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon tomato paste
150 g mature cheddar
200 g chorizo (or more if you want)
1/2 teaspoon crushed black peppercorns
Big pinch of oregano

(A few notes on ingredients. Fresh oregano is lovely, but I never have any in the house, so I use dried. Also, if you can get the amazing black-pepper-mature-cheddar that some supermarkets do, use that and don't bother with the peppercorns. You can vary the amount of oil to personal taste, as the chorizo makes the mix quite moist anyway.)

Sift flour, paprika and salt together. Mix oil, milk, eggs, mustard and tomato paste together in a separate bowl, then add to the flour. Smoosh it all together.

(At this point, opinion is divided as to whether the mixture should be kneaded. I rarely bother, but if your mix is dry enough and you want to feel like Paul Hollywood, turn it out onto a floured surface and give it a minute of kneading.)

Chop up the cheese and chorizo into fat chunks and stir into the mix, along with the black peppercorns and oregano.

Spoon into a muffin tray and bake at 200 degrees centigrade for about 25 minutes (my oven is a bit slow sometimes; in a better oven they might only need 20 minutes). Should make about 12-15 muffins, depending on size.

Eat 'em either hot or cold (but not straight from the oven because the melted cheese is hotter than the sun).

Like I say, I've always found this to be a forgiving recipe, and if you want to add or subtract ingredients it usually still works out fine. I like throwing in a handful of sundried tomatoes instead of the tomato paste if I'm feeling decadent. If you don't have or don't like chorizo, any kind of spicy sausage works well. I'm also pretty sure you could do an acceptable vegetarian version substituting chopped red peppers and/or olives instead of the chorizo (and chilli flakes instead of the peppercorns), although I haven't actually tried this yet.

So there we go, that's how I make spicy cheesy awesome pizza muffins. Enjoy!

declaration

In approximately two thousand days, I will quit my day job and become a full time writer.

This number isn't pulled entirely out of thin air. Two thousand days, more or less (and I'll admit I've not added it up with any huge degree of accuracy), will bring us to my fortieth birthday. As a special present to myself, I intend to get off the treadmill of the nine-to-five day job and instead hop aboard the from-coffee-a.m.-to-why-am-I-still-awake-p.m. rollercoaster of freelancery.

I've given myself this long-date deadline for several reasons. One: I ain't ready to do it now. With two kids and a student husband, it is completely the wrong time to abandon a nice stable job. Two: I like deadlines. I work well to them. Giving myself some tangible date to aim for will make me more likely to stick to it. And three: by making a public declaration, like so, I hope my friends and family will spend the run-up to my fortieth birthday asking me pointed questions about how my quest for job-independence is going.

As prosaic as it is, I also need time to save up a monetary cushion. I'm under no illusions about my ability to pay the bills by my writing talent alone. I'm hoping that in +/- five-and-a-half years I'll be in a position of relative stability (touch wood) where it wouldn't cripple my family if I became a penniless hack.

So there it is--my public declaration. By the end of 2019, I will have quit my day job and become a full time writer. Anyone reading this: I'm relying on you to remind me of this, in case I attempt to wuss out nearer the time. :)

april kicked my arse

Well it did. For reasons I'm still trying to figure out, April was quite an awkward, busy month, which is one reason why I've not updated things here in a while (the other reason is I couldn't think of anything good to say, but shhhh).

So what have I been doing? Well, I've not been working on the second draft of my military sci-fi novel, which is what I'm supposed to be doing, and I've not been reading through the first draft of my haunted-house-plus-time-travel story, which is the other thing I'm supposed to be doing. On the plus side, I've managed to stick to one deadline - I completed Camp Nanowrimo. So, y'know, yay.

Anyone who knows me will know I luuuurve nanowrimo. It's a structure that works for me - I like having deadlines, daily word counts, a little graph that tells me when how well I'm doing, and a certificate at the end. Not everyone needs that validation, and not everyone thrives under an enforced deadline, but like I say it works for me. Camp Nanowrimo is marketed as a more easy-going version of the November event - you can pick your own word count (so long as it's over 10,000 words, apparently), work on multiple projects, or write something other than a novel, like a screenplay or a play or whatever. (Obviously you could do this during November as well, it's not like the Nano police are gonna come after you.)

So, in the spirit of trying something new, I attempted to write a graphic novel. For reference, I know nothing about writing graphic novels. It was all a big fun learning experience... and the most obvious thing I've learned is that I don't work well outside my comfort zone. 50,000 words on a novel? Brilliant, bring it on. 18,000 words on a graphic novel script? Ehhhhh...

I did make my word count, and now have what I reckon is about eighty percent of a graphic novel script (and of course that's entirely a guess because I've no idea if I've got the formatting, pacing, layout, or anything else right). It's a hot mess at the moment, of course, but all first drafts are. It's also (to be entirely honest) unlikely to ever progress beyond a script. The premise is absurd, the plot's hackneyed and ridiculous, and even if I could bribe an artist to draw the panels for me, I doubt it would ever be worth the effort.

In a way, this has been greatly liberating. I've spent a month writing something that no one will ever read, that will never be published, and which I wrote for no other reason than it was fun. And, at the end of the day, isn't that the true meaning of April?

Retrospective

It's one of those times when, for whatever reason, I stop and look backwards rather than forwards, and feel pleasantly surprised by how much time has passed since such-and-such an event. Probably these retrospective glances should take place at the end of the year (or the beginning of the new year) but it usually takes me a couple of months to find my feet in a new year, since they're always a bit mad and busy to begin with.

As it turns out, this year is full of convenient anniversaries. At the end of this month it'll be ten years since I first kissed the man I would eventually marry (I then panicked and hid in the toilets for half an hour, but that's maybe a story for another time). Looking back further, it's twenty years since Therapy? released their album Troublegum, which became the soundtrack to my teenage years. It's still arguably one of the finest albums of all time, imo, and it's getting a shiny rerelease this year, which makes me exceptionally happy.

It's also twenty years since I decided I wanted to be a writer.

14 year old Rakie wanted to be a staff writer on a computer games magazine. I had a moderate obsession with a certain gaming magazine, and a teenage crush on one of its staff writers. (By an odd coincidence, I recently found out that my sister's friend now works with my teenage crush-object on a different magazine, so she at least is fulfilling that childhood dream even if I'm not.) If I couldn't work for a magazine, I wanted to be a screenwriter. That one was Tarantino's fault. So I started writing.

It goes without saying that all my early stories and screenplays were awful. I'm happy to report that none of them survive to this day (that I know of), except as fragments in my head that might one day find their way into a completely different story.

Twenty years on and I'm still listening to the same music, reading computer game blogs (so much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than magazines), shouting at Tarantino for being better than me, and writing. Although a lot has changed in those intervening years, those fundamental things haven't, and I sincerely hope they don't. In another twenty years I'd like to be a better writer, with the same backdated taste in movies, music and computer games.

how many drafts?

This came up in conversation a while ago: how many drafts do you do on each novel before you consider it finished?

Which led to the further question: what do you count as a draft?

My idea of a first draft differs hugely from someone else's idea. What I consider a second draft could be considered a third draft by some, or a not-even-first draft by others. It was interesting to see how opinions differed, and it revealed a lot about everyone's working habits.

This is how it breaks down for me... or, more accurately, how I'd define my drafts:

The first draft is the one with the spelling errors.
The second draft is the one with the plot holes.
The third draft is the one with the character problems.
The fourth draft is the one with the niggly little problems that are a complete ball-ache to fix.
The fifth draft is the one with the overwriting.

More accurately still, those are the times when I realise those problems are present and attempt to fix them. :)

So, for me (and I'm speaking exclusively about me here, since everyone's methods are different and no one should attempt to imitate me in anything ever), the first draft tends to be written as fast as possible and is therefore a bit of a hot mess. The first sweep I do it is mostly to make notes, figure out what works and what doesn't, fix some obvious problems, and generally sit with my head in my hands wondering how the hell this story will ever be made good. While I'm at it, I tend to fix any spelling errors I see. I know other people will advise not bothering with things like that at this early stage (chances are that the amended paragraphs will eventually be discarded anyway), but if I leave the spelling errors they'll annoy me every time I read through the story, and that distracts me from the process of, y'know, actual fixing.

At this point I can see where the plot is falling down. So the next draft is for shoring up the gaping holes.

The completed second draft is usually the one I send out to my writing groups for critiquing. I don't like to send it out any earlier because... well, if there're really obvious problems then I should be able to spot them myself. It's not polite to waste everyone's time asking about things I already know, and I'd much rather get their valuable input on the things I can't spot - which is usually everything else.

I find it very difficult, for example, to identify problems with characters, probably because I'm too close to them, and tend to find them charming and endearing rather than, say, obnoxious and annoying. I need someone else to point that out to me.

So the third draft is for fixing up the terrible characters. Which in turn usually creates more plot difficulties (at least for me) as the characters start to act/react in different ways.

Writing groups are also the best way I've found to spot the niggly little ball-ache problems. This can cover just about everything else - POV issues, technical mistakes, problems with pacing and dialogue, etc. Some of these are obviously easier to fix than others. And some create more plot holes or character difficulties, so then I've got to go back and fix those as well...

By now I'm completely sick of this story and just wish it would disappear into a hole forever. On the other hand, it's also the point where the story is finally taking shape and the finish line is in sight. Or, alternatively, it's where I realise the story is never going to work - its foundations are too wonky, its plot is too blah, or I've inadvertently stolen the entire middle section from a much better book. But I'm too close to finished now so all I can do is push for the end...

Final draft is for clearing out the overwriting. I overwrite a LOT. I don't know what the national average is, but I'm sure my writing is towards the top-heavy end. To be fair, I try to take out some of the overwriting as I go through the other drafts, again because otherwise I can't properly see what I'm doing, and because it annoys me. But on this final sweep I'll try to take out everything that's not needed. Take out the unnecessary adverbs, dialogue tags, redundant sentences and repeated words. Leave only the good stuff. Which is, obviously, much easier to say than do.

And then I'll read the bloody thing through once more, this time aloud. This is to catch any remaining awkward phrasing, bad dialogue, residual spelling mistakes (yes, they're still there), and that sort of thing. It's also my least favourite bit of the whole process, because a) I am SO SICK of reading this story by now, and b) I hate the sound of my own voice (not that you'd believe it, I know).

It all makes me quite nostalgic for the innocent times when I used to think the process of writing a novel was just writing it down, printing it out, then putting up your feet and feeling chuffed with yourself.