Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Lighthouse Award

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the-lighthouse-award1How lucky am I? My lovely writing friend, Cat Lumb, has nominated my blog for another award! You can find Cat’s blog here. Cat and I have become friends through a shared love of writing and we are now working as critique partners for each other’s novels. You can read about her writing journey on her site and pick up lots of valuable writing tips there too! She has helped me in so many ways and I am very grateful for her support, advice and friendship 🙂

This new award is called The Lighthouse Award and it’s a bit different from some of the other awards out there. So, without further ado, here are the rules for it:

  • Display the Award Certificate on your blog.
  • Write a post and link back to the blogger that nominated you.
  • Share three ways that you like to help others.
  • Nominate as many bloggers as you like.
  • Inform your nominees of their award nominations.
  • Have fun!

Here are my nominees, chosen because I enjoy reading about their experiences and I’m sure you will enjoy them too:

Helena Fairfax – Romance Author

Diana Scott – The Pelican Writer

Touching Light – The Thoughts and Fiction of H B Slade

Okay, so now to the difficult bit. How do I think I help people?

Well, I suppose the most obvious way in which I help people is through my part-time job as a teacher. Helping children to learn is an important job, whether they’re your own children or someone else’s and it’s a job that the children make worthwhile.

I have a family of my own and I think I am pretty helpful to them. This ranges from making sure that my kids get up and go to school every day, to planning and booking interesting holidays for us all, which is one of my favourite activities.

We are a very pet-friendly family and have rescued three cats over the past twenty years or so, helping them to have better lives than they would have done otherwise. One of our cats passed away recently and it was just as upsetting as the previous time but they really have enriched our lives 🙂

So that’s my bit done. Do go and have a look at the other websites mentioned here. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them as much as I do. Thanks for reading. My next post will be on Monday, as normal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Julie Stock and My Writing Life, 2013 – 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Julie Stock and My Writing Life with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Three Ways Evernote can help you as a writer

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EvernoteMy husband has been telling me how good the app Evernote is for a while now and how he thinks it could help me. This week, I finally started to pay attention to what he was saying when I read this article on Lifehacker, called ‘How to use Evernote for writing fiction.’

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-use-evernote-for-writing-fiction-1523798600

I had a quick read through the article and immediately picked up three ways that I thought Evernote could help me as a writer which I want to share with you today.

1. Evernote’s Web Clipper Even in the short space of time in which I’ve been writing, I have started to gather lots of bits and pieces of information to help me in my writing process. I have been bookmarking interesting websites, following other WordPress sites which then pop up in my reader and subscribing to some via email. This gives me a lot of reading material and I try and keep up with it all as best I can but never quite manage to finish reading.

As a result, I have a whole reading list of ‘How To’ articles to re-read later and when I have something specific I need to do, like writing a synopsis, for example, I find all the articles I bookmarked about that, sift out the least helpful ones and then find myself left with about half a dozen really useful articles to help me do the task in question. Now, I know that I will have to write a synopsis again at some point (unfortunately!) so what I’d like to be able to do is to keep all these articles together somewhere, other than just holding them on my reading list on Safari for ever or printing them out and storing them in a file to gather dust. This is where Evernote comes in 🙂 This facility allows you to ‘clip’ an article you want to keep and to store it for good without it cluttering up your desktop or your house. You simply clip the article from the internet using Evernote and it saves as a note. I can then create a notebook called ‘How to write a synopsis’ for example and then clip all the relevant articles into that notebook for future reference. This took very little time and now I have them all stored in one place.

2. Synching to all devices Evernote syncs on all your devices so you can access everything you’ve stored in it wherever you are, allowing you to read, write, take notes, look at images, listen to sound files and so on. I downloaded Evernote on to my Mac and on to my ‘phone and have already made good use of the synching facility. It’s a free application too which is even better for the impoverished author 😉

3. Capturing Images and storing them for research When you’re out and about, you can use Evernote to snap photos of anything you see that inspires you for your writing project. When you get home, you can then sync your devices and these images will be on your computer for you to use as you will. I will then copy images into Scrivener which is where I do my writing and may use these for characters or setting to give me ideas.

There are other ways of doing these things of course but what I like about Evernote is that it allows you to keep related things in one place and from an organisational point of view, I think that is very helpful indeed.

Do you use Evernote already? If so, what’s your favourite aspect? I’m looking to pick up tips! Or maybe you use another app which you think is just as good. Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Write

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DSC_0176I have two children and I was very lucky not to have to work when they were small. Of course, there were days when I thought I might go mad with only two young children for company but mostly, I just enjoyed that time whilst I could. Once my youngest was at school though, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, finally deciding that I should retrain as a teacher. I had thought about it many times in the past but it was only through volunteering in my children’s school that I came to realise that this was a job I could do and perhaps enjoy.

A year ago, I had been teaching for about four years when a personal crisis came in the family. This only confirmed for me what I had been thinking for some time, which was that my own family and my own life, were coming second to my job. As anyone who is a teacher knows, it can be all-consuming. You never get to the end of your to-do list and the paperwork is overwhelming at the best of times. Add to this the constant scrutiny and it can feel like a very miserable job indeed. I made a decision then that I would ask to go part-time. Whilst I waited to hear the school’s decision and I struggled to deal with the personal crisis, I started to write my novel.

Writing became an escape for me. I found it calming and therapeutic to write and in no time at all, I had a complete first draft on my hands. Suddenly, a new world had opened up before me and I wanted to know more about it. In September last year, I switched to part-time working and now, on my two days off from work, I try and write as much as possible and I try to write/edit on every other day as well. My life feels more balanced and I have more time and energy for my own family.

My ultimate goal is to publish my novel now and to finish the other one I’m in the middle of writing. A lot of hard work lies between now and then but whilst writing continues to help me make sense of my life and what I want from it, I will keep on doing it. I’m not afraid of the hard work at all, although it is daunting to be learning something new (as I’ve documented on my blog here 😉 ) but with each achievement comes satisfaction and that makes it all worth it. This week, I finished my one page synopsis for example and sent it with the first two chapters of my novel to the Bath Novel Award competition. It was a long hard slog writing that synopsis but now I’ve done it, it feels great and I feel ready to go back to my rewriting.

So, in summary, I started writing to help me through a difficult time in my life and now that I have passed through that crisis and come out the other side, I am glad to say, I find myself doing something so enjoyable that my only question is why didn’t I do it earlier? Who knows? But I truly believe that now is my time to spread my wings through writing and I plan to make the most of it.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. If you’d like to share your story about why you started writing below in the comments, I’d love to hear it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why you should attend a writing course

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DSCN8178At long last, I have attended my first writing course and I wanted to share with you how useful it was for me at this stage in my writing journey. The course was run by a company called Write Stars and was one of many that they run throughout the year. See their website here:

http://www.writestars.co.uk

This particular workshop was run by Katherine Garbera, a prolific romance novel writer, published by Harlequin with more than 60 novels to her name, and the objective of the course was to help us introduce more passion to our writing. We were a small group and Katherine encouraged us all to share what our current writing projects were before we began. The atmosphere was very positive right from the start with everyone expressing interest in each other’s writing activities and Katherine was so encouraging of us all.

The format for the workshop was that Katherine would introduce an element of romance writing, for example, how to write the first kiss between your characters and then she would read out one of her own examples to give us the idea. We then sat and wrote our own version and we had plenty of time for this. Not one of us sat there unable to write. The explanations Katherine gave were so helpful and carefully structured so as to enable us to get straight on with it and her years of experience really showed. We then shared our writing with the rest of the class and listened to their feedback. I found it so heartening to receive positive comments and it was such a confidence boost!

We also had lots of time to ask questions of Katherine and of each other and I felt we bonded very well as a group. It was so good knowing that we all shared the same insecurities as writers. I felt I learnt a great deal on this course and I have already put quite a few things into practice since returning home.

So if you have been thinking about attending a course, I would encourage you to get on with it. You will learn something, you will interact with other like-minded people and you will probably make some new friends. Not only that but the whole act of sharing your writing will hopefully make you realise what a good job you’ve been doing so far and that will boost your confidence enormously, which has to be a very good thing 🙂

Have you been on any good writing courses? Let me know in the comments below. As always, thanks for reading 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to stay sane while rewriting

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5448851027_fa53139280_mFear seems to be the theme for a lot of my posts so far this year 😦

I have been steadily rewriting my first draft for a while now, in fact for the first part of my story, this is more like rewrite number four and every time I think I’ve got it in the bag, I realise that there are still far too many aspects of the story that aren’t quite right yet. Admittedly, I have sought external feedback and now I’m having to take that feedback on the chin, which is proving to be very hard. It feels like I will never be done with the rewrites and that fills me with gloom and fear. I am normally a very optimistic person, a great feat considering I have been married for nearly twenty-five years to someone whose favourite band of all time is The Smiths and favourite singer, Morrissey, by extension 😉 I have spent my life being a glass half-full kind of person but since I started my first novel, I have found myself feeling daunted by the uphill struggle that writing involves. Naturally, I have spent some time wondering why this is and here is my conclusion.

Although there is a wealth of advice out there, there is no single tried and tested method for writing a novel and you wouldn’t want there to be. It’s just that there are so many choices. Should you outline or fly by the seat of your pants? Should you just write until you finish then edit or should you edit as you go? Should you aim for a beginning, middle and end or should you have five plot points, maybe even seven? I could go on but I can see you nodding and don’t even get me started on punctuation! I’m just reading Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ at the moment and whilst I’m enjoying this book by one of my writing heroes, even he would agree that he doesn’t practise what he preaches (see what he has to say about the use of adverbs, for example). As a result, the whole writing process is very confusing for a new writer. It will all be such a relief when we’re writing book number two and we know what to expect!

I read an interesting article by an author called Ryan Casey about five steps you can take to make rewriting less painful. You can read it here:

Rewriting a Novel: Five Ways to Make It Less Painful

Three of his points really stood out to me, as follows:

I found his suggestion about creating a rewriting outline very helpful. He talks of the ‘beat sheet’ idea put forward by Roz Morris in her book ‘Nail Your Novel – Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence’. Interestingly, I had been trying to do this very thing in an Excel spreadsheet myself, having seen a synopsis tackled this way by a writing friend. I say trying because I was copying and pasting my scene descriptions from my Scrivener document and it was taking so long, I had become bored and given up! I have decided that I will try and finish this to help me get my head round what I have put into each scene so that when, I said, WHEN, I need to go back and change things, it might be a bit easier.

Interestingly, he suggests setting a target of rewriting two scenes a day, in an effort to be realistic about your targets and goals. I have been doing much more than this, steaming ahead on my days off from work which is my precious writing time. The result of this approach for me has been that I now have so much more to put right following the feedback I’ve received. I am under some pressure in that I have joined the RNA’s (Romantic Novelists’ Association) New Writers’ Scheme and this means I have to submit my manuscript for assessment by the end of August at the latest, although I would prefer to do it sooner. However, I think I have to slow down and be patient if I want the end result to be as good as possible.

Finally, he suggests that we should work on a new project to boost our creative energy. I have left my Nano 2013 novel untouched, pretty much since the end of last November and this point made me realise that I miss it 🙂

I now have some new goals to help me and hope that I will be able to get back to it with renewed enthusiasm. I know this is new advice and we’re all feeling overwhelmed with it but the trouble is, when you don’t know the answers, what else are you going to do? Of course, we will all do what feels right for us individually and only in doing so, will we know whether it was right or not. Writing this first book to completion will be trial and error and we will either make it to book two or we will give up between now and then. I sincerely hope that what I have learned so far will help me get there and if I have helped you too, then so much the better.

If you’re stuck in the middle of rewriting, let me know how you’re getting on in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

Image credit – Flickr – Becca Peterson

http://bit.ly/1gE0LKb