Don’t panic.  Don’t despair.  Don’t run away and resolve never to write again.  Don’t let the ocean of failure to close over you so that you are forever drowning and wondering why it is you couldn’t be happy with just being an unimaginative nobody.
Yes, well, it’s all very well to give advice but very hard to take it, particularly when you are talking to yourself, however sternly.  When something you’re writing doesn’t work, what are you supposed to tell yourself?  Keep writing, you can edit it later?  It’s garbage, dump it now?  Everything you write is garbage, anyway? 
I’ve learned several tricks over the years that help when writing goes badly.  There have been many years, mostly writing into a total void, so I have some idea what I’m on about.  A new short story I’ve been trying to write recently keeps failing and for several weeks I tried all my usual tricks.  These are to:
 

•     Change the title
•     Change the main character’s name
•     Change everyone’s name
•     Start again and change the viewpoint
•     Start again with a different scene entirely
•     Divide the story up with chapter-type headings for each
•     Change the title again
•     Edit everything from the beginning to fix up the weak points
•     Decide grimly that you’re going to get to 10 000 words without looking back
•     And then run aground on poor plotting
•     Have a brainstorming session in which you:
•     Change the title again
•     Change all the characters names
•     Cut up a sheet of paper into 12 and on each write a different ending to work out where your story is supposed to be going
•     Go and make some Lemsip because you’re ill and can’t think anymore (this is optional)
•     Realise you need to change the MC’s vision
•     Realise how you can tie this in to the ending
•     Suddenly come up with a brilliant ending
•     Sit down the next day to start writing and it’s still all shit
•     Beat yourself up with a rolling pin

 
Between the Lemsip and the rolling pin, there are some good points here:
 

•     The title is vital.  Once I found the right title, I knew what the story was actually about.
•     Names are vital, too.  If you don’t like a character’s name, you’re not going to be able to develop them well.
•     Viewpoint is everything.  Once I found the right viewpoint, the story opened up much more easily.
•     You can’t always know the entire plot when you begin.  Not all stories are the same.  Sometimes I know everything from the start, other times I have to stop and think about it.  Some stories develop while you write them.
•     Make notes.  I often make more notes than I need.  I often then ignore almost all the notes and come up with a good story, anyway.  It’s just a way of getting the juices going.
•     Know your ending.  The hardest things I’ve ever written are those in which the ending isn’t clear.  It’s always blindingly obvious when an author has no idea what the ending is and either just trails off or comes up with something that doesn’t make sense.  Even in a ten-volume work, you need to know the ending from page one of the first volume.

 
By now, I’d had some excellent ideas and knew exactly where the story was going.  It was exciting, interesting and I couldn’t wait to get (re)started.  Unfortunately, I then hit the next brick wall:  the actual words on the page.  So far, they had been lumpy, unstrung, and felt like the kind of Worthy Fantasy that I loathe.  This was not what I was going for.  Yet another new start (fresh document, the old ones abandoned in the folder like crumpled-up paper in a wastepaper basket) and I still couldn’t find the story’s style. 
 
At this point, my writing spirit died.  My confidence expired.  I was convinced I’d never be able to write again.  This wasn’t writer’s block:  it was just writing bad.  But for this, at least, I have advice too, which I will endeavour to follow:
 

•     Leave it alone.  Stop writing.  Go and do something else.  I’ve been ill so I should concentrate on getting better.  Walks under the few trees left in London.  Bake tea breads.  Read.  Knit.  Do jigsaw puzzles.  Clean the bathroom.  Write blogs(!)
•     Handwrite it.  This is very painful.  And slow.  And prevents you from going back and editing anything because reading one’s own handwriting is inevitably quite an effort.  You are thus forced to keep going until you get to the end.  It doesn’t matter how bad it is – it’s now ON PAPER.  It’s done.  It’s written.  Your writing spirit is restored.

 
At this point, all your troubles will be forgotten.  You’ve got your story, even if it is on lined school paper.  By having to retype it (long, slow, laborious, particularly if your handwriting is anything like mine), you will see all the errors.  Feel free to make editing notes.  Write them up as The Big Edit.  This is the fun part:  this is when you get to bash the story into the exact shape you want it.  Confidence will long since have returned because you GOT IT DOWN.  Fixing something that is already written is way easier than fixing something that hasn’t even been written yet.
 
So.  I have my pen.  I have my paper.  Next week I’m going to write.  By hand. 

Last Wednesday I sat down for the first time in four months to do some Real Writing.  Having spent the summer working on my website, my brand, my new editions and a million other admin-type things, it was a relief to sit down and so some Creating for a change.
The first day didn’t go well.  I hadn’t expected it to.  It isn’t always easy to get back into the saddle, after all.  Earlier this year, I had written most of a new Exodus Sequence short story, what will be the second story in the second volume.  Thinking that the story had failed, I abandoned it, planning to return to it later.  Upon rereading it, it didn’t seem too bad after all.  The main character was entertaining and funny.  Since the story is primarily a character sketch, that was quite important.  So it was with more confidence that I approached it on Thursday.
Imagine my delight to discover, at the bottom of the Word document, something called “Focus.”  I clicked on it to discover Writers’ Heaven:  nothing on the screen except the document with a black background instead of that pale grey glare you usually get when using Word.  No ribbon.  No taskbar.  Suddenly I was exactly where I wanted to be:  inside my short story.  I was focussed, just exactly as the new document view intended.
Now imagine my horror when, on Friday, that Focus view was gone.  I couldn’t find it anywhere and couldn’t either recreate it, though I did try.  I googled it.  I studied the Microsoft website.  Then I got into a chat box with someone from MS.  By this time, I was in tears.  I was actually sobbing.  Well, shit, you might think;  what’s she crying about.  Some stupid gizmo on Word that vanished.  But it was just the last straw, I think.  I have spent the summer battling.  For quite a while, I was at war with KDP.  Our emails burned with politeness but weeks went by with an agonising problem I couldn’t solve (more about that in another blog).  The battles with editing, with new covers, with getting things to fit, with streamlining almost thirty manuscripts………
Losing my Focus gizmo was that proverbial straw and I was the camel’s back.  Through all those months of slog, all I wanted to do was write.  I wanted to escape to my funny little universe that I’ve created.  I wanted to feel like myself again.
In the end, though the MS support person tried really, really hard, we couldn’t find the Focus gizmo and couldn’t recreate its brilliance.  I realised finally that something like this had happened before:  after a major update from MS, I got a brilliant new thing on Word – only for it to disappear the next day.  You know what this is?  It’s a way to make you realise that your Word is old and shit and that you should go off and spend a million dollars a year on Office 365 because THAT’S  where that Focus gizmo is.  It doesn’t exist in the cheap MS Office for Home and Student 2016.  It was a fucking carrot. 
Realising that, I closed down my computer, made myself an enormous cup of tea, and started again, wanting to just wrap up a sentence or two.  Deciding to experiment first, I opened another document, clicked a few things and discovered I COULD recreate Focus mode.  I can’t get the black background, though the dark grey is quite nice.  I can get rid of the ribbon and have figured how to get rid of the taskbar (temporarily).  This is great.  It means I can now write without distraction.
It’s not as good as real Focus mode, though.  Focus mode is achieved with one click.  One more click and you’re back in normal mode with your pretty blue ribbon at the top, so it’s just a temporary thing.  By creating this dark grey background, it means that ALL documents I open now are like this.  Even Excel, which surprised me. 
To achieve this, go to Options/General and select Dark Grey for your Office Theme.  To get rid of your ribbon, there’s a weeny arrow called Ribbon Display Options at the top of your document.  And to get rid of your taskbar (while you work), right click on it and select Taskbar Settings, then Automatically Hide the Taskbar in Desktop Mode.  All these things are easy to get out of, too.  Just hover your mouse and everything reappears.
So this is how I’m focusing on my writing.  Grey mode.  It’s a bit like being on a Federation starship in reserve power mode. 
As for actual writing and getting to the end of the story…..that’s yet another tale for another time.
 
(You can read about that here:  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gray_mode)

It was only after I started writing the Exodus Sequence series that I discovered that collections of connected short stories were already in existence.  Even Wikipedia has a page on this, calling them a short story cycle.  My reason for using this format was that there were too many characters over too vast a range of time and any kind of novel I could write would be clumsy and too long.  I liked the idea of focusing on a single moment in a character’s life in a story that seemed complete, that could stand alone, while having a thousand threads connecting it to other stories that seemed quite diverse.

The overall connecting idea is that all the stories have something to do – often indirectly – with the loss of Atlantis.  It isn’t obvious at first what is meant by Atlantis since there is no referral to Plato’s account nor the usual accepted myths and legends that have since been developed.  For me, Atlantis wasn’t a society that existed ten thousand years ago, nor do I regard it as some kind of marvellous utopia.  I don’t think there is a shred of evidence of it ever having existed – not because it didn’t exist but because it existed so long ago.  There is no miraculous building that can stay up for millions of years – and, for me, this is when the Atlantians* walked on this planet.  That there are no bones to find is because there are no bones.  (*Though I never call them Atlantians or Atlanteans, or whatever).

Many of the stories are set in the near or distant future, fewer in the present or past.  The connections are subtle, sometimes even unintentional.  Characters appear more than once but are not always recognisable.  These differences go beyond simple name changes – it’s often entire lives that change.  Mars is a strong connector as is various aspects of a war fought in the future.  The name Miranda crops up often but it isn’t always obvious who she is or was.  Later in the first volume, the Golden Queen thread picks up, a story-line I have already developed fully – the notes for this series are unintentionally copious.

The stories are arranged in trilogies, with three trilogies per volume.  Each trilogy also has its connections:  for example, in the first trilogy, attention is drawn to a mysterious alien and there is evidence of a war ended (Wired), a war begun (Reflected) and a war that is still current (Walked).  In the second trilogy, the connection is actually not revealed at all and won’t be until the second volume!  Many mysteries are created which are only unlocked in later stories, revelations which serve to unmask characters as much as Atlantis itself.

Some of the connections are immediately apparent:  the revelation in Spooked is discussed openly in Crashed.  The prison scenario is echoed in the first and last stories of the first volume, and again in the central trilogy.  Mars crops up in several stories, referenced or actually visited.  But it’s the themed connections that appeal to me the most:  the meaning of the title Reflected isn’t really understood until Caged.  Apparent immortality, lightly touched on in the first trilogy, is developed in Suicided and explained in Woken in great detail.

It should be understood, though, that the stories are not linear.  Nor have I written them in order of publication.  I’ve had to work out the best way to reveal information without signposting spoilers.  Despite this, the stories could be read in any order as they are stand-alone:  each one is complete within itself.  One short story, titled Sacrificed, went on for rather a long time and ended up being near-novel length.  So I wrote another rather long story, cobbled it on the end, believing it would make a novel.  It didn’t.  It was disastrous.  A single scene was rescued from Sacrificed and became Spooked, while the violence that opened the second story became Suicided.  The rest will appear – eventually – in stories yet to be written.  Sacrificed will, eventually, become the story that connects Spooked to Woken.

Work has already begun on Volume Two, with the first short story published as an ebook and in paperback.  It's an extremely long short story, so long in fact that it's actually a novella, coming in at over 45 000 words.  None of the stories are under 10 000, which is how I came to call them "substantials" - longer than a short story but not quite novella-length, they are thus substantial short stories!

You will find Shattered here and the first volume of The Exodus Sequence here.

It’s a no-brainer for me.  I’d rather write than work on my marketing.  I’ve got loads to do and loads planned but the thought of it makes me feel awfully glum. 
 
So instead of finishing that paperback I was formatting, instead of sprucing up my website, instead of finding a good book cover, I’ve started a new short story instead.  Quite happily poured out 1000 words in an hour.  Now THAT’s the sort of thing that cheers me up!
 
I only just finished a novel last week.  It’s the second Everlast novel and has turned out better than expected.  I’m still looking for an agent for the first (that’s something else I have to do…..) and should be feeling despondent about it.  After all, I’ve been looking for a year and a half now.  I’ve forgotten now many agents I’ve already approached.  Twenty, possibly!
 
My reluctance to do any “marketing” type stuff comes about because I’ve been so bad at it so far.  I haven’t been able to get anyone to notice my books, let alone read them.  I’m either doing it all wrong or just not doing it at all.  I used to berate myself for this.  I don’t anymore.  I’m a writer.  It’s what I do best.  It’s what I like doing best.  Does it matter that much if I fail at other stuff?  It just makes me write more, and that can’t be a bad thing.  It probably looks like a selfish endeavour:  who am I writing for if no one reads my books?  That would have to be me, then.
 
The short story is the next in the Exodus Sequence.  Story 2 in Volume 2.  It’s Volume 1’s cover I should be improving (the expense makes me baulk).  It’s the paperback version of Story 1 of Volume 2 that I should be working on (but Kindle Create is a bust and doesn’t work half as well as CreateSpace, which I loved).  And my website could do with a huge facelift but it’s such a big job that I’m not sure where to start. Is it any wonder that I’m overwhelmed by it all?  And summer is approaching, with heat and responsibilities and less time and less inclination to bother with anything. 
 
It doesn’t surprise me at all that I’d rather turn my back on everything and write about people who don’t exist, in a world that doesn’t exist, talking about things that don’t exist.  Writing them makes it exist.  What could be more satisfying than that?

​Diary of a Bloomsbury Writer also appears in my WordPress blog which you can follow HERE.

 

It isn’t hard.  Take a trip on a tube or a train.  Open your eyes.  If you really start to look at people and see beyond their façade, you begin to realise just how weird and wonderful they are. 
Sometimes it’s just in the way they look. 
Today I stood behind a guy in the tube lift who was about 6’3”.  I could judge his height because he was about the same height as my late stepfather.  Near us was a young woman who was at least three inches taller.  And her boot heels were lower than my trainers.  This meant she was at least 6’5” or 6.  This is really unusually tall for a woman.  She was quite splendid, too.  Very slender, wearing tight black leather trousers on the longest legs I’ve ever seen.  As we all surged towards the turnstiles, a short, round, brown man went through at the same time as this tall girl.  The contrast was fantastic.  You couldn’t make this up.  At 5’7”, I came up to this young woman’s shoulder.  The short man came up to her waist.  Put the four of us together and it would have made an hysterical photograph (I’m the, er, older one with the silver-gold pixie cut).
The richness of human diversity is hardly a new idea.  Diversity itself has been a serious topic for quite some time now, particularly on the political stage.  I’m thinking about it more in fiction.  Is there enough diversity in writing?  I don’t just mean diversity in writers themselves:  I mean in actual characters.  My demographic is never, ever represented.  This is, no doubt, because my demographic is considered to be utterly boring.  All middle-aged women are, apparently, conservative;  are married/divorced/sexually frustrated;  have growing up kids;  are caring for aged parents;  have a mortgage and a career;  are juggling a thousand things on a daily basis;  are struggling with weight, menopause and/or some or other illness;  like foreign holidays;  would consider an affair with a younger man;  read literary fiction;  have an educated opinion;  think Fleabag is funny.
But what if you aren’t like this?  Oh, right, in that case, you are a bit funky, smoke dope (my generation does not say weed) and would consider an affair with a younger man/woman.  If you’re a middle-aged female artist type, then you’re a hippy.  A different class?  Then you’re a drudge. 
None of these stereotypes are me.  And yet this is the only type of middle-aged woman I can find in fiction.  At least, this is the only type I’ve found so far.  Diversity isn’t always about race or age.  Physical diversity is probably quite easy to do – superficially, you can come up with all sorts of variations.  But the problems are always the same.  It’s this lack of diversity that drives me nuts in fiction:  no one ever seems to think/do/act any differently to anyone else, no matter who or what they are or where they come from.
It’s true that the mark of a good author is one that creates a character which you can identify with, even though they aren’t like you at all.  This isn’t really the kind of diversity I’m talking about, though.  Everyone my age in a story (whether in books or television or film) is always a “mom” character.  Much as I like being a mother, this isn’t the only thing that defines me!
 
I’m quite sure, though, that for every divergence from the norm, there is someone who never sees themselves represented in fiction.  No matter how original an author might be, characters can invariably be categorised in some way.  And if you can show me an author who doesn’t do this, please, let me know, because I’m so unutterably bored with “normal.”

Diary of a Bloomsbury Writer also appears in my WordPress blog which you can follow HERE.

It's taken me all the way to chapter 12 to find my main character's voice.  And now that I've found it, it's funny and clever and brilliant.  Scenes are rolling from my fingers.  I'm writing twice as much each session.  The novel itself has come alive and feels exciting.

But why did it take so long?

Several things hampered this novel's progress:

• It's the second in the series.  The first in the series was exciting, not only for the protagonist, but for me as a writer.  It was all about discovery.  My heroine was discovering the thrill of hidden magic.  I was discovering the delight of writing a novel that was lightweight, funny and magical.  I was afraid I wouldn't be able to recreate the tone of this novel and was proven right.  It's going to take some hard work to recapture the magic (during edits).
• It has a different narrator.  It's a feature of this series that each book will have a different narrator.  And they won't all be teenagers or girls, either, which removes the YA tag at once.  This means I have to find a new voice for each novel.  The teenage girl in Book 1 came to life at once.  I got inside her head and no problem with her.  She was alive from the first page.  The narrator in Book 2 is this heroine's mother.  The reader has already met her and knows she's funny and interesting.  So how did I lose her voice?
• It has a new point of view (POV).  While Alice, the mother, was easy to create in Book 1, by changing the POV to her POV meant that something was lost.  She worked less well when I was looking through her eyes.  This has proven to be excruciating for me as a writer.  I can't recreate her humour, her cleverness, her quirky opinions.  It all seems to have died in the switch.  I wonder:  if I hadn't created her so well in Book 1, would I have had less problems in Book 2?
• The MC knows nothing.  In Book 1, our intrepid heroine is on adventure of discovery.  The reader goes with her and the discovery is mutual.  Alice, however, knows nothing.  The reader is thus left in the frustrating  position of knowing everything while the MC is blind to the facts.  This is intensely frustrating to write.  It's also hard to create any excitement when the MC is being so thick-skulled.

There has been no secret formula in finding Alice's voice.  I couldn't tell you how I did it.  I had planned to just chug away to the end of the first draft, knowing that my work was going to be cut out for me in the second.  The resurrection process was going to be huge.

Then two things happened:

• My MC Alice had an extraordinary experience which basically freed her as a human being.  I'd had no idea that this sequence was going to affect her in this way.  In fact, in my notes, it appears that she was to have remained untouched and that the change was to have happened later.  But later was too late.  And her experience, once I began to write it, took on a life of its own.  Thus Alice was freed from the shackles of her character.
• My MC left the location of the book's setting.  By leaving it, she becomes exterior to the village and her experience there.  She is (briefly) thrown back into her old life (she attends a funeral) and the changes in her character become apparent.  Because she is free and unaffected by her horrible family, the real Alice emerges:  funny, clever and brilliant.

At the same time as these revelations, subtle changes to the plot have occurred to me as well.  It seems that by understanding my MC, I am now able to write her story properly.

I still don't understand, though, how some characters arrive fully formed and blaze through a novel, while others are dead on the page.  On the other hand, some of the characters that I've struggled with the most turn out to be the strongest, most complex, and fully formed characters I've ever invented (V. Gomenzi, in his eponymous novel, is one.)

So if a character doesn't work, take heart.  Battle on.  His or her secrets will eventually be revealed as long as you're prepared to work for it.

A series for Lent.

I am grateful for coffee, cookies and dolphin singing.  Because sometimes it's really hard to get into the writing zone.

​

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for editing.  Nothing I write is carved into stone.  It can be deleted, changed, pummelled into submission or reworked into all perpetuity.

Creation starts somewhere inside you - for the sake of argument, let's call it inside your head.  There, your novel, your painting, your composition (any form of art:  from a knitted sock to a rocket to Mars) is perfect.  It's a thing of beauty.  

But when you try to recreate it by writing it, painting it or designing it, it's a lump of hideous, formless, colourless clay.  Occasionally you'll get lucky (when the gods are smiling on you or you've had a seriously large shot of caffeine) and the recreation works.  Mostly, it's garbage.

This is what editing is all about:  you now have to take your formless lump of clay and work it.  You have to pummel it, chop bits out, add bits, go over it again and again.  You have to shape it and reshape it.  You have to sweat over it.  You have to research bits of it.  You have to rethink other bits.  You can even get someone else to inspect it and get their opinion, but, ultimately, the recreation is yours.

In the end, you're never going to recreate that perfect thing you created inside your head.  But you can get close.  And it takes work to get close.  With experience, you get better at it.  With time, your first lump of clay requires less work, less sweat, less tears.  

Editing isn't about fixing up mistakes.  Editing equals Art.

What do you do when your head is full of novels?  There are so many I want to write.  And I want to write them all now.  
I want to write the fifth and last novel in the Fleet Quintet so that would be, at last, a quintet and not a quartet (though for many years it languished as a trilogy....)  Ideas for this keep popping into my head.  The problem has always been how to tie up all the lose ends.  There are quite a few!  And no part of what is remaining of the story is linear.  I have finally hit on the idea of a Storyteller.  This in itself probably isn't very original but it leads to several twists and revelations.  In fact, the revelations are what draw me to the story.  I am, quite frankly, just dying to reveal them!
I also want to write the next Exodus Sequence story.  The main character has appeared fully formed in my head and man, does she talk a lot.  I can hear her voice, her accent, what she has to say, who she says it to and why.  There are two other characters, both instantly recognisable from an Exodus Sequence story called "Crashed."  This isn't particularly a sequel (the stories aren't constructed that way) but it does explain an awful lot.  In fact, there is quite a lot of explanation in this story but because it is done by this brilliant character (the one whose voice I can hear in my head), it sounds great.  I really need to start writing these conversations down.
I also want to write the next fantasy novel.  I've been trying to get the first one published for a year now, so far in vain.  It's created something of a dampener for me but I decided I just had to get going on the second one otherwise the series will never get going and I'm really keen that it does.  So out of all my choices, I picked that one and am into Chapter 2.  Commercially, it makes the most sense, despite an agent not yet picking it up.
And then there are the short story spin-offs from this "low fantasy" series.  The short stories take place in the fantasy-type realm, while the series of novels are set in the real world, so to speak.  I've loved creating both.
And then there are those present-tense literary style short stories, snippets from my own life told in the third person, a very strange experience which is proving to be amazingly cathartic.  I've written one so far and it was wonderful to get it all out - truly turning aspects of my life (which bother me) into art.  There are quite a few more where that one came from too.
And then there's that strange novel I want to write which was my first ever screenplay.  Fortunately I abandoned the screenplay idea (I'm no good at it) but the story is well-developed and would make a great novel.
And then, finally, there is That Difficult Novel, where this diary began way back in February 2015.  Has it really only been four years since I started it?!  How is that possible?  It feels like decades ago.  My Great Literary Work, this has turned into an albatross and it weighs heavily around my neck.  I know I can fix it up.  I know I can turn it into something spectacular. 
But, dear God, when?  I've got enough work to keep me busy for the next ten lifetimes.  It doesn't seem to matter that no one is reading my work.  I am more fuelled than ever.  It just doesn't die.  The fire is burning so high it's lighting up the whole sky.
It's overwhelming.
​

I am lightheaded with joy and relief.  At last my novella is finished.  This is the one that got lost several times.  The one that I started last January and abandoned.  The one that turned out to be so long I thought I'd have to divide it in two.  The one I thought I could rewrite into a serial.  The one that I thought was terrible.
It wasn't.  It's bloody brilliant. 
Of course, one always thinks the most recent thing one writes is the best ever, so that feeling may go away, but for now:  I'm just going to run with it.  It's lovely.  It makes me remember why I'm a writer.  I created this thing, this story, out of absolutely nothing.  It has people.  They have lives.  They do things that have consequences.  And behind it all is a vast backstory that would take a million years to tell.
I love it.  I love being able to do this.  I think I might just actually take off and fly.
​