Coming second

Still no news. I'm now so tired and stressed I got a weird dizziness last night which made me feel sick. However...a house full of guests keeps me distracted and I got an email from the Yeovil prize about A Baby's Bones:

“Second Place: A Baby's Bones - an excellent, richly imagined and deftly plotted story that keeps revealing new layers as it progresses. The weaving together of present and past is expertly done, and the authorial voice is confident and sophisticated.  All the different elements are woven together perfectly here: story, character development, setting and atmosphere.” 

This from the judges, which included Sophie Hannah! And they are going to send me a cheque for £250...it seems to be my year for coming second but out of a thousand entries, I'm getting there! Now all I have to do is get on and write the remaining 12k of the book and take a breath. Hopefully I'll hear from my agent in the next week or so.

PS She will follow the editors up on Monday - I can stop worrying over the weekend. Not that I'm that worried now, more resigned, and excited about the new book!

Writing in the doldrums

At the moment, I'm a maybe going-to-be professional author, because my book is still officially out with editors. On the other hand, I feel if they wanted it they would have said something, offered me money or at least sweets. At the same time I feel like a real bona fide author of my current book which seems so much more real than the shadowy draft doing the rounds. 

I'm at the finishing stages of producing a reasonable draft. I have set myself one month to write a thousand words a day of the historical strand. I know how it starts and ends and the middle is starting to fill in the pieces. I've just found myself quite nauseated by what someone has done to a pregnant cat. How is that, that we can summon such a real scene in our heads that we make ourselves (and our characters) feel sick? 

I'm reading a book at the moment that, for me, has overdone the nausea bit. I don't think I can read it. A Respectable Trade by Philippa Gregory contains some gruesome details of the slave trade that actually, I can't deal with. Of course, the stark facts are awful, and gruesome, but it's just not for me, especially as I mostly read before I go to sleep. 

I know it sounds as if I can dish it out, but not take it, but so far one of the slaves has been raped, tried to kill herself by eating soil, been fitted with a metal scold's bridle so she can't eat more, and has now died in agony. I just found the body of a tortured cat. It's well written, it's evocative, it's honest and I'll probably enjoy it more when I'm a bit more robust.

This is always a bad time of the year. My daughter died in August and I'm already dreaming of her ahead of the anniversary next week. I'm stressed out about other stuff, and the Secrets/ Borrowed Time book feels like it's just drifting about without me. Who knows where it will end up. Meanwhile one of the things that feels solid is Baby's Bones. Which I'm enjoying, and succeeding at. 

On another, more scary note. How do you back up? I've heard some sad tales of people's cloud storage being breached and wiped, especially if they don't use separate passwords for it. Hard storage like memory devices are great but not if you keep them with your computer, and definitely not if you keep them plugged in. If your house caught fire... I use a combination of a separate hard drive for regular backups, DVDs that aren't kept with the computer (normally for things like photographs) but the easiest backup I have found is to open a gmail account (or yahoo or whatever) and send myself drafts every day. I can access my gmail account from anywhere and open my inbox and pick up my latest draft. I regularly send myself a folder full of drafts, and so far I've only used up 2% of the available space. Sure, gmail could be compromised, but it's unlikely that my computer will die, and my house catch fire on the same day. Just a thought. 

Virtual post-its

I've been using virtual post-its called 'Sticky notes' to plot the book. As I write a scene, I stick a summary on my desktop, or over whatever I'm working on. It's helping me keep a handle on what revelations I show and where they are going. I did it for the contemporary strand and now it's working for the historical strand. I feel like I'm trying every approach and gradually whittling them down to what works best for me. 

Sticky notes!

   As I write a scene or change something I add what needs to be changed in other scenes in capitals. Simple system. I know that Scrivener would do this way better, but I don't have time to learn another software package and I understand as much of Word as I need.

Meanwhile, the sun is out and the words are photon lubricated. We have friends coming for the weekend which will be great for Russell, as he will play music until his fingers bleed, grow black and drop off. He's missed playing with his mate that much. It will be lovely to see them.

I really must write my rationale but all the time the book is in limbo I only seem able to focus on A Baby's Bones. I'm having to research the religious intolerances and laws of Elizabethan England which is interesting but time consuming. Maybe next week... 

Rearranging chapters

I'm working on A Baby's Bones and have had to rearrange all the historical bits into proper chapters. I've arranged them behind the contemporary ones, but I'm still struggling to get a strong sense of plot for the historical strand. I'm not sure it stands up at the middle (I am really happy with the end and fairly confident with the beginning). I think I need to unravel the strand and write it as a story, then thread it back, maybe not tidily, one chapter per contemporary chapter, but where it needs it. Back to the drawing board. Me and that drawing board are now old friends, except that I hate going back and possibly wiping out the 8k I've written in the last 6 days. I seem to spend a lot of time faffing about cutting and pasting at the moment.

Meanwhile, the badger watching has progressed, we now have two badgers visiting at ten o'clock promptly (presently known as Small and Medium because the huge one that comes later is bound to get called Mr Big). They are unbothered about us, their sight isn't brilliant and we obviously don't smell like a threat. We spend the money we would spend keeping a dog on our bird and mammal visitors. We have such a rich range of birds visiting, so it was a bit of a shock to find the garden empty this morning. Not a sparrow, not even a baby blue tit. Then I noticed this on the edge of the washing line, moulting and bedraggled in the rain.

One female sparrowhawk, looking for a crunchy snack. It's difficult to know what to put out on the bird table for that one!

It's raining

I should be writing (I did do a few words this morning) but it's Sunday so I'm cooking a big family roast...in August. It's so dark we're having to put lights on, the rain on the conservatory roof is deafening and it's actually quite cold. As if by design, I've packed a few days with more excitement than I can handle. A lot of visitors on the 11-19th, the deadline for the editors contemplating buying my book - the consequence being that I will have a career as a writer...or not is the 16th. My daughter is moving house the same day - and her Dad can't go and help because he's here helping me with the above visitors and ready to congratulate/commiserate if necessary. At least her eldest brother is going to be there to help, and Sophie's moved so many times she's an expert. 


I need some quiet time on the 21st August, and usually the run up to it is painful. My daughter died that day and years later, my husband had a massive pulmonary embolism and nearly died, also on the 21st (he made an amazing and complete recovery. Hooray for warfarin). I have booked a few days gibbering and being hand-fed chunks of Galaxy chocolate when our visitors depart. Meanwhile, I need to get ahead on the final chapters.


I decided to change the order of the historical strand/contemporary strand and this means all the careful clues I laid down like breadcrumbs are now arse-about-face. So I'm rewriting them and writing a brand new first chapter to keep the sequence making some sense, but my feeling is it will need a lot of jiggling about. I'm hoping to get one good week's work in, then friends are coming for the weekend, then I have a couple of days before family arrive. I just need to focus. It would be easier if it wasn't raining, I'm more productive when I can see the keys and hear myself think...    

Not sleeping

I'm not sleeping very well. This is probably for lots of reasons but I would like to introduce you to the best of them.

He has been helping himself to the snails and slugs from the long terrace outside my bedroom window. Last night I put a few cat biscuits out as well, but when Russell snapped the 'noise' out of the window it wasn't the enormous badger that's been crunching most nights but one of the babies. Extremely cute, and very unbothered that a large man was leaning out of the window above him taking photographs. Russell disturbed one of the big ones just outside our front door a few weeks ago. Amazing wildlife we have here. A few months ago a female sparrowhawk brought a wood pigeon that must have weighed as much as her down, right outside our kitchen window. Then it ate the breasts, taking about half an hour, before taking off, so full it could barely fly. Fantastic. The wildlife does creep into the writing...

Feeling a bit crushed

There's a lot going on at home, at the moment. Visitors, family stuff, kid stuff, that sort of thing, that builds up and leaves you feeling tired before the day even starts. Then at the end of the day, you can't sleep...


The one thing that's going according to plan is the writing. The deadline has stuck, the writing is flowing - in a kind of lumpy, chapterish way. Now I have a dilemma.  For Borrowed Time (that became The Secrets of Life and Death) I alternated chapters between the present and the past. This time, I'm sort of putting chunks of the old in with the new and I think I ought to stick to the formula I used before. Only now I have to move everything...the contemporary strand is about 60k words in 31 chapters, so quite short chapters really. But adding the old would make a 90k book into sixty odd chapters - even shorter chunks. I think jumping from chapter to chapter needs a change of pace or a reason, because it does stall the flow for the reader. But jumping four centuries or more is also distracting. I don't know. I may have to try both. 


The other problem is, the first sentence needs to be strong, engaging. The contemporary strand is much stronger from the beginning. 

It was a bone from a baby’s hand. A slimy twig on Sage Westfield’s latex glove, the ends crumbled away by the action of the sieve, it was still distinctive to a trained eye. 

The historical strand starts out quiet and tenses up. Choices, choices... at least, this time, I can ask the opinion of my agent. (That hasn't got old, saying 'my agent'). At least the stress at home has stopped me fretting about the book at the editors...