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Crushed Petal

3/15/2018

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Have come to conclusion that I'm an enormously delicate flower of a person.  This is not a good thing to be in this world.  Outside the orcs are cutting down the trees and I can hear them (the trees) screaming in pain, all the leaf buds dying, all that life extinguished by an evil fucker's chainsaw.  I put on some pretty music and tried to write my not-very-good story but it's quite entertaining (to write, anyway).......only to have my computer tell me there was no more storage space.
Was it utterly nuts???? Brand new computer, with about one millimetre of blue used on the C drive.  Something to do with OneDrive, whatever the hell that is.  And do you think I could contact Microsoft???!!!  I was howling with frustration, blinded by tears, when finally I worked out I had to click on the "disabled" persons thing (I don't understand this - they only talk to disabled people, everyone else gets a crap email?)  Anyway, since my feet are in agony, my arthritis hurts, I have had terrible earache for two weeks and am thus partially deaf, I figured I was disabled enough.  Also, I'm a hypochondriac, have agoraphobia, claustrophobia, suffer from severe bouts of depression, and frightened of people, germs, dirt and taxes.....so I figure this makes me quite disabled too.
Or, at best, a crushed petal of a person, who cries at the most minor of life's challenges.
Anyway, totally fab Microsoft guy took remote access of my computer, got rid of stupid OneDrive which I don't need and I'm back in action.
A Very Big Writer's Tip:  if this happens and you think you're going to lose what you just wrote, copy and paste it as fast as possible into an email.  I did that and thank God I did because the last paragraph I had written vanished.  Easily retrievable from gmail.  Hoorah.
Think I'd better go and have lunch before I die of starvation.
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"Out the" vs "out of the"

3/9/2018

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Out the.  Out of the.  Out the.  Out of the.  Out of mind.  Out the mind.  Out the.  Out of the.  Mind.  Out of.  Going.  Out the.  Out of the.  Out of mind.  Out of the mind.  Going out the mind.  Going out of the mind.  Out the.  Out of the.  Mind.  Going.  Gone.
I finally got around to doing the corrections I needed to do on my new novel (the one I wrote last year......currently being ignored by several agents).  They weren't particularly major things, for example, I used the word "highway" instead of "motorway".  The former is not British, apparently.  Growing up in South Africa, my English is littered with what appear to be Americanisms.  Decades of living in the UK seem to have made no difference.  Once the idiom is grooved in, you're stuck with it.
One of my (very well educated, intelligent and sharp-eyed) beta readers spotted that I had left out the "of" in thousands of cases:  "out of the" instead of "out the."  Horrified at my bad English, I rushed off and changed them all.  But as I was changing them, I began to have serious doubts.  In many cases, it didn't scan properly.  It didn't sound right to my ear.  It seemed clumsy.  More importantly, it was contrary to the way I "think."  While I'm willing to Anglicize highway, "out of the" - in many cases - just seemed wrong.
So I asked a friend with decades of editing experience and he said he'd had the same problem when editing and had at first changed them all to "out of the", only to realise that it must be an Americanism.  THIS I can understand.  South African English (at least at the time that I grew up there) is full of Americanisms, the most obvious reason being that during the Equity ban, we got to hear no good English i.e. all BBC programmes were banned and those that did turn up on TV were dubbed into Afrikaans, which was excruciating.   
So today I changed all the instances of "out of the" back to "out the."  It was enough to drive anyone bonkers!  Obviously I still say "out of the blue" but I don't say "she looked out of the window" or "she walked out of the door".  I checked online to see what others make of this problem and one person insists you can't have anyone falling out of a tree or even out a tree - they fall OFF a tree.  I think all the people I know who have fallen out of trees would probably disagree with that!
In the end, I decided to go with consistency.  And fluidity.  And the familiar.  After all, it's not a work of high literature - other readers didn't notice the lack of "of" at all!!
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What to do when a story fails

3/4/2018

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Nothing is quite as daunting - for a writer - when you realise the story you're writing has failed.  What to do ... what to do ...  First I cried a lot, then just felt REALLY depressed.  Then my sore foot (that hasn't been sore for nearly two years) started hurting again and that made me even more depressed.
Then in the bath - by chance - I heard a quote by Douglas Adams on the radio.  Naturally, after a long and protracted Google search, I can't find the quote.  It had to do with writing.  It had to do, more specifically, with editing.  It made me realise that no matter how crap the story is that you are writing, it can be edited into something spectacular.  It emphasised the need to get something down on a page - ANYTHING down on a page - so that you can actually edit it.  
I live by this advice.  "You can't flesh out the skeleton unless you actually have a skeleton to flesh out" is my version of this.  But I have another piece of advice that has helped me over the years:  if a story grinds to a halt, it's because there's something wrong earlier on.
In the quote, Douglas Adams quite rightly pointed out that quite often you only work out what is going to happen in a story when you get there and that is what changes the earlier bits.  This is SO true:  I've had characters develop on the page which means, often, that earlier pages are just wrong as the characters are now "out of character" as it were.  Often elements of the story only reveal themselves when you're a long way down the road, thus changing things that went before.  Basically this boils down to your imagination only getting into gear once you really know the story and have written thousands of words, most of which you're now going to have to change. 
So I have a choice here:  to keep grinding on even though I know everything I'm writing is wrong and the ending can't actually happen because it hasn't been set up properly (or at all.)
Or I could just make a thousand notes and start editing now.
I know I've got a good story here.  It's a unique idea.  Original ideas are also worth pursuing.  I may just have failed to develop the idea properly.  Also, I find that I'm wandering off on tangents that stop any action from occurring.  This is what I wrote in my notes:
"This story is not going well.  It hasn't, er, evolved* the way I wanted it to.  Too much talking, explaining, flashbacking and almost no action at all.  You've been sidetracked by creating the universe and have forgotten the story, of which there is almost NOTHING."
I like the way I talk to myself crossly.
So I may take a break from this for a few days, get some space, go for a walk (damn sore foot notwithstanding) and then get on with those editing notes.
Then edit.  Although in this case I think it's going to be a major rewrite.

* An irony, since the story is called Evolved.
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Photograph by Catherine
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