Tag Archives: SisterBook

Dealing in truth

05 Sunday Jun 2016

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Island Life, Word Birds & Process #7

It’s always about the process. I fear I may be in danger of overusing the word but the fact remains, it is. Any writer will tell you this. We put one foot in front of the other and follow the breadcrumbs.

Since my last post I’ve recovered my sense of proportion and more importantly, worked out whose story it is I’m writing. (Thank you, Terri-Lynne DeFino for pointing out that the person whose voice begins the story is usually the one who owns it.)

My ‘Sister’ book is another ghost story, albeit a much darker one than Ghostbird. (This ghost is angrier. She has an agenda and she deals in truth.) As do I, and once again find I’m writing about the nature of loss and redemption. These themes intrigue me, not least because they continue to shape me as a person. The various ways that women in particular deal with loss – and recover from it and find their voices – have long informed my writing.

In my prose passages I continue to weave spells. (My editor will almost certainly home in on an excess of ‘lovely’ and point me in the direction of my ‘Dead Darlings’ file. It’s why I need her.) My word spells may run away with themselves and occasionally need culling; they are still my preferred vehicle to tell my stories.

But regardless of whether or not she believes in magic per se, what I write has to feel accessible to my reader. I do my best. The magic I conjure is the kind that exists in the hesitation of twilight or a quiet dawn made soft by a lingering mist.

It hints at possibility.

Island Life, Words Birds & Process #2

24 Sunday Apr 2016

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This week’s highlight is a particularly nice one involving a guest appearance on Isabel Costello’s illustrious Literary Sofa. Like Virginia Woolf, I don’t believe in ageing per se and favour her inclination to ‘change my aspect to the sun.’ Writing a piece about being published ‘in later life’ was an exercise in acceptance. I am grateful to Isabel for the opportunity.

For the rest, I’ve been picking away at my SisterBook, managing at best a thousand words a day. I put it down to reclaiming routine after the excitement of being published and launched but sense this is about to change. I have it all – all but the filler and the nuances.  At least I think I do. One of my characters – whose nature it is to assert herself – is leading me into the dark wood, so to speak. I have a pocketful of breadcrumbs, just in case.

What concerns me most though is the quality of this new story and my fear that I may be repeating myself.

With Ghostbird, I never set out to write a ghost story and it took me a while to realise I was. Now I’ve embraced the ‘genre’ I love it. In terms of formula, a ghost story must naturally have a ghost. Readers need to be a bit (or a lot) scared. And teenagers (yes, I’m writing two teenage main protagonists this time), not least those living in remote houses in the middle of nowhere with eccentric mothers, are likely to run wild and be a bit ‘odd.’

So, what do I have? Another ghost story for sure. (“If you liked that you’ll love this?” Readers are renowned for wanting more of the same.) But when does familiarity become tedious or clichéd? I remind myself that the crime writer also follows a formula: Body! Murder! Investigation (maybe a maverick cop), red herrings and so forth. A love story insists that girl meets boy (or variations on this theme), obstacles to true love abound; misunderstanding and duplicity bedevil the lovers until the truth outs and they fall into one another arms.

Although I confess to liking some love interest in my own stories – love is all around us and so forth – the conventional ones hold little appeal for me. I’m drawn to flawed women and the men they often attract: it’s the survivors of ill-advised love stories that intrigue me. I write about the aftermath of these relationships and the women who, for whatever reason, proved too much for men lacking the emotional stamina for the dance. I write about the daughters of these unions and although it was never my intention, somehow now find myself making them the centre of my stories.

And then there are the ghosts…

In no way am I saying the way to make sense of your life – in the event your mother is slightly mad and you’ve grown up without a father – is to encounter a haunting. Far from it – in the real world it’s probably the last thing you need. But fortunately, fiction isn’t the real world. It’s the world of the imagination and making it up and I can create whatever situations and scenarios I choose!

Time will tell if I’m repeating myself or not…

Island Life, Words Birds & Process #1

17 Sunday Apr 2016

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In the recently created publicity blurb about me it says I have been blogging for nine years. To an extent, this is true although it depends on how you define blogging. For many years I did indeed chronicle my thoughts about writing and the process I followed during the writing of Ghostbird – up to & including getting the publishing deal. I used Live Journal (& even called what I did ‘journaling’ because I thought then & still think, ‘blog’ is an ugly word.) I wrote the thing entirely for myself & although eventually I gathered a small group of ‘followers’ only a very few of them were serious about writing.

When I got the book deal I decided to leave LJ. It had become a desert anyway and no longer served my purpose – which I thought was to have a more public profile. No one had heard of LJ so I moved to WordPress. I still don’t have a public profile! No matter. I have a presence on Twitter & Facebook & in terms of promoting the book, both serve me well.

I do however miss the old days when I recorded my writing process & I’ve decided to reinstate this. Not daily – I no longer have the time – rather I’m going to aim for a weekly effort and see how that works. As I embark on my second book, the process once again fascinates me & I feel a need to write it down.

The view from my study – a place I have come to call my ‘aerie’ – is regularly shrouded in mist. There is a sense of quiet isolation on these mornings; a feeling of being surrounded not only by mist but by the possibility of creative magic: the Avalon barge might appear & offer me a lift to the Isle of Apples where I could sit by the banks of a lake, listening for the words birds, conjuring word spells.

As a result, over the years I got into the habit of tagging many of my LJ entries: ‘Island Life.’ I even had a little icon (LJ likes icons): mist & mystery with added birds.

Mist with birds

I shall then be calling these Sunday offerings, Island Life, Word Birds & Process.

As a starting point, here’s a thought. One of the first readers of Ghostbird – when it was called something else – has read the opening few chapters of my current WIP. This woman is neither a writer nor an editor. She is however an acute observer with an eye for nuance & what lies beneath. And she has memories of her own life & childhood which she often shares with me. This morning she offered me her thoughts about the pages I sent & then went off on a related tangent. And that is when the magic happened. My friend has conjured pictures I can use, from life rather than her imagination. And they are a writer’s dream.

This morning there is no mist – only a gentle, pale blue sky & a sun the colour of buttermilk. I’m off to a writing workshop in a while & we shall be ‘doing dialogue.’ I need to do dialogue – it’s my bête noir so this workshop will be good for me. When I get back to my WIP (my SisterBook as I have nicknamed it) I shall reach for my friend’s imagination & with her permission, ransack her childhood.

Onward & sideways.

ps: This: Local paper (Cambrian News.) Famous for fifteen seconds?

me C News