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Today is the 12th of May, the following is a scene of internal conflict, posted here for The Alliterative Allomorph's blogfest. Links to other scenes of internal conflict are on the Allomorph's blog.
This is from my new novel, TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE, which is written in the form of a letter from a woman to her lover. I don't actually know if I'm going to use this scene in its entirety in the book, but it's the way it's written as of now.
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I couldn't sleep that night. I lay awake in the dark, listening to the whispers of the house, the old ghosts, and thought about you. How strange you seemed to me, how exciting, how different from anything I had known. You were a riddle, a puzzle, and I wanted to fit the pieces together. Where were you sleeping? Where had you gone? More importantly, why did it matter so much to me? You were a stranger, a phantom that appeared against the sunlight and pulled my wheelchair out of a rut.
A phantom who claimed he brought an albatross from the sea. Restless beneath the soft covers, I threw them off and stumbled out of bed. My hands groped for the light. A glow settled over the room, but it didn't chase the ghosts or the shadows or you away. I fancied I saw my mother's silhouette in the corner, watching me from the doorway as she had once used to do, making sure I was sleeping soundly. Only, of course, she would never do that again. I won't try to explain to you the grief that clutched me, thinking this, and the desperation I felt to find something, anything, to distract me from it.
Outside, somewhere, a wild dog barked. Elephants trampled somebody's coffee bushes. A tigress guarded her cubs. Wild boar snuffled at the earth, searching for treats. The forest was awake, and so was I, and maybe you were too.
I went to the bookshelf in the next room, searched the volumes until I found the one I needed. My father's book of birds. I flipped through the pages in the old creaking house, my heart thumping beneath my ribs. Like a clock going wrong.
I found the page I needed. The albatross. Seabird, omen, curse. My breath sucked in sharply. There it was, the great bird I had seen circling the silver-oaks outside, the white, the grey-black feathers, the enormous wingspan.
You had brought an albatross from the sea. Only we weren't near the sea, and there were no albatrosses in this half of the world, anyway.
Where had you come from? How? What secrets were you keeping? And why, why did I care?
This post was really Steve's idea, as he knows all too well the frustration, annoyance and general lunacy that can inflict me when I'm trying to name characters. The fact is, when you've written well over fifty stories, you kind of start running out of names you like and kind of start having to reuse them. But the problem with reusing names is that, with me at least, I start associating the old character's personality with the new one.
You know how you might have a friend called Tom, who's completely childish and stupid, and you just can't name a character Tom because you know you'll start thinking of him as childish and stupid? Yep. That's my problem. And a name has to be right, has to suit the character to a T, otherwise he or she lacks that authentic ring.
So how do I name characters, and what qualities do the names have to possess?
1. Top of the list: I have to like the name. I can't name a character HotStuff McLean (no offense to anyone called Hotstuff McLean) when I know that won't let me take him seriously. 2. I prefer names that aren't terribly common. In ECHOES, for instance, some of my characters are named Echo, Sean, Erik, Matthew, Mina and Declan. Most of which aren't unusual names, but you don't hear them every single day. They're not Tom or Harry or Emily. All of which I like, but I just know too many Toms, Harrys and Emilys to be able to separate their personalities from my characters.
3. When I attach a name to a character, they have to click. If there's no sudden spark, it just doesn't work. I know. I'm fussy.
4. The name has to, obviously, be appropriate to the character's race/gender/religion/ethnicity/nationality, though I will admit I bend the rules for this one as far as I think is reasonable and believable.
5. For some characters, a name with iconic literary, mythological or historical connotations is just perfect if that's the kind of irony or impression I want to convey. My first choice for a last name for Sean, in ECHOES, was Holmes (because he shares many Sherlock-ian qualities), but I decided in the end to scrap that and to use the comparison in a more natural way through the text. By pointing the comparison out in the actual text, I've opened up room for foreshadowing and irony that Sherlock Holmes fans will appreciate (I think) and those who know nothing about the stories won't be any poorer off.
6. The actual process: I look through lists and lists of baby names, often narrowing them down by gender or nationality or origin. I ask Steve for suggestions and then shout at him when he gives me ones I don't like. (As I've said before, his patience with my writerly whims is legendary.) I pick names I like, try them out for a few paragraphs, and then change them when they don't work.
7. Sometimes I get really lucky. A couple years ago, I wrote a novel called NO DREAMS IN WHITESHIRE. When thinking of the main character, I didn't even have to try thinking of a name: somehow, the name Jake Quin popped into my head, utterly unbidden and utterly free of any outside influence. I swear I wanted to open a bottle of champagne and serenade my brain. Often, though, this is the exception rather than the norm.
How do you name your characters? How do you pick that right name? What requirements do these names have to meet, or are you less fussy than I am? And to those of you who don't write but love to read, how important are character names to you? Do you remember them better based on anything?
I felt compelled to transcribe this particular assault upon my senses several days ago, when it happened. But, as I'm continuing to post popular choices from the post-poll, I thought this would make a fine example of my insanity in the 'conversations with my characters' category.
The Scene. I lie peacefully in bed, on the very cusp of falling into a blissful sleep, when, to my horror and disbelief, I become aware of voices.
DESIRE [hushed whisper]: Rage. Rage. Stop it, can't you see she's trying to - don't you dare -
RAGE: Sangu? Magpie? Favourite scribe?
DESIRE: Hmpf. You dared.
ME [opens eyes, sees Rage, and shuts them again, convinced the gods aren't this cruel. Opens eyes again. No, he's still there]:
ME: I wanna sleep.
RAGE: Which is fair and all that, but I really do have to tell you -
ME: Where's Death? I want him to take you away. He's the only one you ever listen to.
DESIRE [indignantly]: And me!
ME: Does he? Does he really? I do hate to break it to you, Des, but if you had a smidgeon of command over Rage, he wouldn't be here destroying my peaceful slumber.
DEATH: Did I hear somebody ask for me?
ME [shrieks]
DEATH: Sorry. Did I startle you?
ME [infuriated by the stupidity of that question]
ME [sulkily] And you're supposed to be the clever one.
DEATH [grins]. This is enough to set Rage off, who adopts a look of inappropriate good humour.
ME: You're all far too happy for this unearthly hour of the morning. Goodnight.
DESIRE: See? I told you you shouldn't have woken her. Now you've gone and upset her. Apologize at once.
RAGE: But -
DESIRE: I am trying to prove I can command, Rage, would you do me the courtesy of humouring me?
DEATH: I do hate to be a kill-joy -
RAGE: No, you don't.
DEATH: But I do.
RAGE: You don't. You're always ruining the fun. Hey-ho, what can you do? In your nature and all that.
DEATH: And you are what, precisely? A ray of sunshine?
ME [with my head buried in a pillow]: I really don't deserve this.
While this is part of my collection of posts relating to the popular choices in my recent poll, it's also, I admit, a rather overdue post that I've been promising to do for a while. A follow-up to my post Editing a Novel (Part One) and loosely related to Anatomy of a Night Out vs. Editing a Novel, this is a fairly accurate account of how I edit my work.
Warning: enormous post ahead.
It bears mentioning that my editing process has evolved a great deal since I first started writing novels. I was not quite sixteen when I first sent query letters out about a project I'd written (needless to say, my queries and sample chapters were politely rejected because that book, while not quite tripe, was not very good), but I was about thirteen or fourteen when I finished my first novel, a 70,000-word epic fantasy called The Seventh Saviour. Believe it or not, I still have spiral-bound copies of it, mostly because I'm sentimental like that. When it doesn't make me cringe, it makes me laugh at some of the crap I came up with and occasionally, very occasionally, think 'oh, that's quite a nice line there' or 'hey, good paragraph'.
Before the age of submissions, I didn't bother to edit my work. This was because I wrote it for my own pleasure, purely, and I never had the slightest expectation of ever having this stuff published. So I'd write a book, put it aside, and rush straight on to the next one. Often, I started many a novel and never finished it. In my entire life, I must have written about twelve entire novels, ranging between 70,000 and 160,000 words, and started or written large chunks of about fifty others. And no, I'm not actually exaggerating. Those figures come from counting the documents filed neatly on my laptop, along with estimating as to all the files and spiral-bound copies I've lost through one careless mistake or another. (I still have a strong sense of regret about the loss of a nearly-finished novel I wrote at the age of fourteen. I'm sure it was lousy, but I still love its characters and story, even if it did owe an embarrassing amount to Sleepers and The Godfather.)
Anyway, that rambling introduction aside, my point is: my editing process didn't really exist as such when I was sixteen and first sending out my query letters. You might marvel at my arrogance, thinking that anything written at the age of sixteen could have been worth publishing. But although I wasn't good enough and didn't know enough, I really think age has nothing to do with how good a writer you are.
In describing my editing process, therefore, I'm going to focus almost entirely on ECHOES, which is the last project I've edited and also the first I edited extensively.
If you've read my post about my 'first drafts', you'll know that I don't really have first drafts, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. When I've written a few pages, or a chapter, I always go back to fix sentences or flesh something out or whatever takes my fancy. I've got serious OCD when it comes to writing, so if I don't feel a chapter's quite right (for now), I can't move on to the next one.
But, once I had the completed 'first draft' of ECHOES (going by the above definition whereby a lot of it had already been tweaked along the way), this is how I edited it: 1. While out shopping for food, I stopped off in the stationery aisle and bought the following:
a packet of fifteen coloured gel pens
a notebook for world-building, character and plot notes as well as for tracking submissions and queries
a yellow-papered notepad
and, when back on campus (this was this February), I bought some printing credit too.
2. I made a list of all the Big edits that needed to be made. These things include adding entire scenes, or subplots, or changing a character's character, and so forth. These were things that might have struck me while writing my 'first draft', or while thinking about the book late at night, and I just didn't have the time or energy to make the changes at the time. Two of the things on my list, for example, were 'weave Esmeralda in through the book' and 'rewrite scenes from Amarra's POV': the former involved incorporating an entire, though small, subplot into the narrative while the latter meant focusing closely on a few scenes/letters that were written from the point of view of a character who wasn't my narrator.
3. I put aside everything except my list and the notebook and started reading through the entire manuscript on the laptop, chapter by chapter. While doing so, I edited: I rewrote entire paragraphs and sometimes chapters, I incorporated the above subplot, I worked on the above character's voice, I cut out unnecessary words that struck me, and, the biggest change of all, I changed my opening chapter about three times.
While doing this, I also simultaneously made character notes. I didn't make enough, for which I'm sorry because I'll now have to go through it again and make more. These notes include noting down your characters' hair and eye colours, their tastes, etc. You'll need this if you're writing a sequel or trilogy or series, as ECHOES is supposed to be. You don't want to search the manuscript every time you wanted to be reminded of a minor character's eye colour.
This was a brutal stage of the process for me, mostly because big changes had to be made, and it's difficult to muster the strength to make such changes when it means so much more work and slicing into your newborn. But it almost always makes the book better, so bear with it.
4. Once I had gone through the entire manuscript this way (in the course of which I managed to cut my ridiculous word count of 139,000 - far too long for anything remotely classified as young adult fiction - to 128,000, which just goes to show how much of a first draft involves unnecessary uses of 'very', 'suddenly' and other extraneous sentences, clauses and words that you'll feel bogged down by as you read back through it), I printed it off. Let me tell you, that cost me, printing off 450 flipping pages.
5. Armed with my shiny new materials (and it's amazing how professional and cool those shiny new materials will make you feel) and my whopping whale-sized manuscript, I sat down, with Steve, and got to work.
Steve was only up in Lancaster with me for a few days, so we couldn't go through the entire manuscript this way, but we managed to edit the first few chapters thus: I would sit down with different coloured pens and read carefully through a chapter. I would circle, underline or make notes next to any sentences that needed changing, words that needed cutting, mistakes, or typos. Then I would hand the chapter over to Steve, who would go through it with a pencil and make his own notes and mark out anything that struck him as unwieldy, awkward, not clear enough, or unnecessary.
After Steve left, we did this largely by email, but I also went through the manuscript by myself. I can't stress enough the importance of having someone else read your work before you consider sending it out anywhere: someone you trust, who will be honest but not cruel, and who, preferably, is an avid reader and knows what makes a good book and story. Steve is thankfully all three, and though I think he's biased, he is one of the reasons I managed to a) finish ECHOES and b) make it worthy of being rejected, yes, but also of having three very, very good agents read some of it and then ask to see more. So far.
I owe Steve for that, and for being exceedingly patient whenever I went into a tizzy.
6. I'm listing this as a separate step, though #5 and #6 are interwoven. Each time I finished editing a chapter on paper, I would get on the laptop and make the changes on screen. I did it this way so that each change would be fresh in my mind, rather than wait until I'd done the entire manuscript before starting over.
7. Once I had finished #6, making the changes to the final chapter, I would have very nearly been finished had it not been for an email from an agent who had read 30 pages and then, politely, passed. He told me the plot felt too scattered. And while I have to say that you shouldn't make changes just because one person tells you they feel this way (because, after all, everyone will have different opinions and it's up to you to be sensible and humble about what you listen to and what you respectfully decide you aren't going to change), I made changes because the agent had made a good point. I had also felt that the opening tried to cram too much in and in too varied a form. So I rewrote the opening. More editing.
8. And finally, what was more or less the last stage of my process. The final proofread. This might not be necessary for other writers, depending on how thoroughly they did their earlier edits and with how sharp an eye. But I change little things so often (a sentence there, a paragraph here, correcting a mistake) that I often don't note down every change. So, to be sure I hadn't made any mistakes while editing (because when rewriting a sentence, you can as easily throw in a typo as you might in writing that sentence in the first place), I went through the manuscript again.
This time, I resisted the urge to change much. As I mentioned before, I have terrible OCD about manuscripts, which I hope the rest of you are spared. If sentences don't align properly on the screen, if words don't look right, I feel that they're bad writing and must be changed. So I will often add unnecessary words or cut out words just to make a sentence look better.
So this is what I tried to resist and succeeded. Mostly. I caught a few more typos, tweaked a few more sentences that felt awkward, and stopped.
Phew. Done.
Final word count: just under 125,000. Still long for a YA, and indeed for a debut novel of any genre except epic fantasy or sci-fi, but it couldn't be helped.
There is such a thing as too much editing. It's what happens when you keep tweaking, and changing, and checking a manuscript, either because you're afraid of it being finished because that means having to put it out there, or because you're a compulsive perfectionist. While no manuscript being sent out into the world is ever going to be perfect, I really believe that there comes a point when it truly is the best you can make it. And that's when you should stop, take a deep breath, and send it out if that's what you want to do with it, because from this point on, I think only someone who knows how they're going to market it (i.e. an agent or editor) can make it any better or more polished. There's little more you can do alone.
(Or so I tell myself. But I daresay my manuscript is nowhere near as good as it needs to be.)
To anyone who missed it yesterday, I posted the winning post in the poll: an extract from one of my novels. It's the opening to TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE and I would love to know what people think of it, whether you've got any suggestions to make it better, etc.
And, as I promised in said post, because it won by such a close margin, I thought I'd post the other popular ones over the next few days. So today we have the runner-up: a childhood anecdote involving an elephant, an anecdote which, incidentally, has enormous writerly bearing as the event in question led to my writing my very first story ever. I was four. And yes, the story is hilarious and awful looking back on it now, but we'll come to that in a bit.
The first thing I should mention is that my father owns a coffee estate a few hours from Bangalore, in a place called Coorg where, actually, most of TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE is set. This place is surrounded by forest, a forest full of the loveliest things, like tigers, wild elephants, and deer. And not the fat little deer you see in England, either. Proper slender, spotted Bambi-like deer with their gorgeous brown eyes.
Anyway, we must have been staying on the estate for a bit, as we often did. On one of our little trips into the forest to see if we could spot some game, we happened across a rather large elephant. And, let's face it, when you're four, even the smaller elephants are pretty darn huge. We were in my father's white Jeep, I think, and if there's one thing wild animals don't like, it's bright white things (it's strange to them, and so, a threat). So the elephant, no doubt protecting a calf hidden somewhere in the trees, chased us.
You wouldn't think they can run fast, but holy cow, they can. Fortunately, my dad has excellent reflexes, and he jammed the accelerator the moment he saw her start to move. She stopped chasing us after about thirty seconds. Which doesn't seem long, but if you're sitting in an open Jeep and watching an elephant bear down on you, thirty seconds is a long, long time.
Being four, my memory of this incident is slightly blurred, especially since I get confused between this time and the other few times we've been chased by elephants.
The point of this, however, is that when we went back to the house that night, I sat down and decided to write a story about it. I think it ran something along the lines of 'we were chasd by an elefit and I was sked'. It was, dear readers, the moment the writer in me awoke, electrocuted by drama and nostalgia. It was my very first story, and I think my dad still has it, kept safe and folded in his desk drawer in his estate study. It's, quite frankly, somewhat embarrassing for me to look at.
I think I'm a better writer these days. But, hey, we have to start somewhere, don't we?
*I can't remember who took each of the photos, but they're all from various times we've been to the forest/estate. And yes, the elephant is real. No, it's not the one(s) that chased us.
So today, as promised, I write up the post that won the poll. It was 'an extract from one of my books', by a slim margin of one vote, followed closely by 'more about how I write and/or edit a novel' and 'a childhood anecdote involving an elephant', with the others not trailing far behind. I've decided, therefore, to write up each of the other posts that were popular over the next week. Today's, however, will be the winner.
Thank you to everyone who voted!
I thought about this extract a lot, and found myself torn for a while: should I post something from ECHOES, which is the novel currently out on submission? Or should I post something from TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE, which is brand new, three chapters in, and may or may not end up being finished (depending on how the plot unwinds itself and my enthusiasm for it)? In the end, I decided on the latter. I'm going to be superstitious about this; while ECHOES is being considered by agents, I'll keep quiet about it, so as not to jinx it. So, here we go, a small section from TEA:
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I sat down to tea with Death, Desire and Rage. My teaspoon clinked softly against my cup as I stirred sugar into my camomile. I gazed each one of them in the eye, in turn. “Do you know,” I said, “I think this might be our last tea together?”
They started visibly. At least, Desire and Rage did, the former spilling her tea on her fingers, the latter dropping his spoon with a resounding clang. Dearest Death only raised his eyebrows slightly. He must have guessed this was coming. There was very little he missed. I opened my mouth to speak before they could ask questions. I already knew the questions they’d ask; Rage’s first word would be “why?”
As his lips formed the first syllable, I forestalled him. “I think it’s time,” I offered, holding the teacup very tightly between my hands. “Twenty years of drinking tea is enough.”
There was brief silence. It was Rage, predictably, who broke the silence, with an even more predictable reply.
“Does this mean you’re switching to coffee?”
I can imagine you laughing, shaking your head. Yes, he really did say that.
That was earlier this afternoon. Already, I feel a chill in the air, so unlike the monsoon, and it seems to creep towards me, enfolding me. It’s drawing very close, the end of this life.
It was twenty years ago that you went away. It was the day that, as Mary so aptly put it not so long ago, I “shut up shop and went off to sleep”. She was so angry when she said that. I had never seen her so angry. I thought she would push me right down the front steps, wheelchair and all. But she only stared at me, her mouth pressed into a thin, furious line. Then, when I simply looked back at her, steadily and no doubt with maddening calm, she made an angry sound in her throat and released my chair. She walked to the door.
“Do what you want then, Layla,” she said, somewhat tiredly, “You know where to find me if you ever decide to grow up.”
I haven’t seen her since. She hasn’t come back to the old house. I watched her go from the far window, because I didn’t want her to see me. I didn’t want her to see that it was a struggle for me not to cry. As her car, a silver Santro, vanished beyond the bend, I turned away. I wheeled myself into the next room and poured tea.
“Layla and her tea-parties!” Mary would huff when we were children, her arms crossed as she watched me pour my dolls tea in pretty china cups. I think she was a little jealous that I spent so much time with them, though she should have realized she always had the lion’s share of my attention. I adored her.
When she disappeared in her silver Santro, I went back to my tea-parties. Only, of course, I was no longer drinking with dolls.
Twenty years, my darling. It has been twenty years since I saw you last. How has the time felt to you? Has it crawled slowly, far too slowly, like the last bits of toothpaste squeezed out of the tube? Or has it passed for you in a blaze of light and thunder?
Twenty years, my darling. It has been twenty years since I saw you last. How has the time felt to you? Has it crawled slowly, far too slowly, like the last bits of toothpaste squeezed out of the tube? Or has it passed for you in a blaze of light and thunder?
After you went away, my response was not unexpected. I cried bitterly. I lay awake late into the night, angry, anguished, devastated. I stamped my feet. And I refused, steadfastly, to set one foot off the estate again. It was here we had retreated to nurse our wounds, Mary and I, and it was here you had appeared. It was here you had loved me and it was here, I determined, that I would wait for you. I believed this was the place you would find me again. If I left, I was certain you would never find me again.
You can imagine how Mary took that. After all I told you about her, you won’t be surprised to hear she was outraged; more than that, though, she was incredulous. That I, who had never shown the slightest interest in the estate or this lonely, misty sliver of the world, should want to stay? All of this, I expected from her.
But she failed me, my darling, in refusing to believe me. You warned me, I know, but I was so sure she would understand, that she would believe me clever and honest enough not to make such a tale up.
At first she accused me of lying. Of being so afraid to return to our home with our mother gone from it, that I would make anything up. I remember that moment so clearly, the sharp hurt that shot down my throat at the thought that my own sister could think so little of me. When I lost my temper, and shouted right back her in my rage, she began to think I had become unhinged. I had always had a reputation for being the younger and more tempestuous sister, easily angered and easily pacified, but this time I refused to “see reason”, as she put it. As though reason had anything to do with it, when grief and loss and love had torn our worlds to pieces.
Our many and varied older relatives offered their views of the matter. Shaking their heads and glancing imploringly at the heavens, they tutted softly over my story, what little of it Mary had revealed. A few, like Ilana Aunty and old Jimmy Uncle, thought it was the ghosts. Everyone knew, they said, with more shaking of their heads and imploring glances at the heavens, that the old house was haunted. No doubt one of the poor old ancestors had possessed young, helpless Layla. Others didn’t go quite so far as to imply the old ancestors had possessed me, but instead suggested that perhaps the grief combined with the dust, age and decay of the house had gone to my head.
Mary, who is much too sensible to believe in anything of the sort, thought it was something far more prosaic: grief, yes, but not a few windowsills of dust, age, decay or ghosts. Grief by itself can do terrible things.
So it can. But it had not dislodged my sense, my darling. You and I know it, but with you long-vanished into the fog and the trees, poor Mary had no proof to cling to.
“Layla, don’t you see?” she said to me, her eyes wide with worry. “This can be fixed! We can go see someone in the city, you’ll soon stop seeing things—”
I could see how much she loved me, how worried she was about the state I had worked myself into. But I was in no mood to appreciate it.
“Go to hell, Mary,” I said, furious that, proof or no, she so adamantly refused to believe any part of my story could be true.
“What about school?” she snapped.
“I don’t need any more school,” I snapped back, “I’m clever enough.”
She exhaled a slightly hysterical laugh at that.
Long after every other relative had gone back to the city or to their own houses and estates in the area, my sister and I continued to battle over it. Mary threatened to get a few of the coffee-pickers to carry me to the car, kicking and screaming if necessary. In reply, I laughed at her, flung myself from my chair, grasped hold of the great table in the dining room, and wrapped my arms around it.
“Try,” I said.
She didn’t, in the end. Whatever she thought of me, I will give Mary this: she loved me far too much to have me humiliated like that.
What could she do? I was just seventeen, it was true, and she twenty-one, but with our mother dead, who could tell me what to do? So, when I set my wheels into the ground and refused to return to the city with her, Mary went back by herself. Back to our house, to the lingering scent of our mother’s perfume and my dusty dolls on the shelves.
Having just read and loved a couple more books this week, I thought I'd mention them and say, in the strongest possible terms, these are lovely and if you're looking for something to read, pick them! Yay!
Flyaway by Lucy Christopher A story about a girl and her family, a sick boy, and a swan. It made me cry. It made me care about swans, which I hadn't been remotely interested in before. And it's really, really well written and really captures the young protagonist's voice. Amazing. Read this in about two hours.
City of Masksby Mary Hoffman A time-slip novel about a sick boy who happens to time travel to 16th century Talia, a version of Italy. It's exciting, clever, emotional and really, really well-plotted. Read this in one night, and couldn't stop.
Sapphiqueby Catherine Fisher Sequel to Incarceron, which I've blogged about before. This ties up a lot of loose ends, continues a story that's part-adventure and part-political intrigue, does a lot of very clever world-building and world-destroying, and has a very surprising and emotional end. On a more personal note, the ending absolutely maddened me because what I wanted to happen didn't. Ah, well. *mourns*
If anyone's read any of these, I'd love to know what you thought. To those who haven't, do any of them sound like something you might fancy?
The poll ends tonight, so I'll be writing up the winning post tomorrow!
That is a photo of a poster I have on my wall. Such is its meaning to me. If anyone wants to read each line (and some of them are brilliant), I'm sure you'll be able to find it online and be able to take a look.
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The broken appliance will work the moment the fix-it guy comes to check it, and you'll stand open-mouthed, trying in vain to tell him that it really wouldn't work before. To get a loan, you have to first prove you don't need it. And, story of my life: there is a direct relationship between how much I have to get done outside of writing and how much I want to write one of my books. The more I have to do, the more I want to write instead. Coincidence? A cruel trick of fate? Or a mere procrastination technique? Who knows? It's a fact, whatever its reasons.
So, with about 1000+ words of an article to finish writing (and thank you again to everyone who helped me out with suggestions for that!), five books to revise for my exams next week (kind of revised one last night, so down one from six), a dire need to get a haircut, and graduation robes to hire - in spite of all this, all I really want to do right now is sit down and write more of TEA WITH DEATH, DESIRE AND RAGE.
Don't get me wrong. I love it when I'm this excited to write, when it's all I want to do. Like Sherlock Holmes, I work in frantic bursts of energy, getting loads done, and then go into a slump for weeks. So when inspiration's afire, I love letting it call.
