Gone visiting...

I'm sure most of you already know what a fantastic blog Leigh Covington has.  Well, today, she's invited me over for an interview..
Can you vbelieve it?  My first interview!
If you've got five minutes, pop over there and see what brilliant questions she been asking.

Group nouns, anyone?

I’m have to admit, I’m fascinated by collective nouns.  The way that they don’t really make any sense, but are somehow fitting.  Personally, I think that these could probably all fall under the catagory of  ‘lots’, or ‘many’ as part of my new counting idea (see previous post).

A couple of examples that amuse me are:

A murder of crows.
A gaggle of geese.
(Sorry, I’m going to have to do the joke:
Q. What’s the collective noun for Cattle?
A. Herd of cows?
Reply. Of course I’ve heard of cows, that’s what I’m asking about!)

Right, back to the original idea…
It’s got me thinking whether there are collective nouns for the writing world.  From what I can gather, there aren’t, so here’s my stab at a few:

A Pen of Authors.
A Disappointment of rejection letters.
A Forest of Manuscripts.
An Elusive of Agents.

Please feel to add your own.

Is my number up?

Is it just me, or are numbers becoming more meaningless these days?
£22 Billion of Government borrowing
The nearest star with an exo-planet is 63 trillion miles away
I have a 2 terabyte hard drive
When I dropped a cup the other day, it smashed into hundreds of pieces.
Do you read these numbers and immediately have a clear picture of the exact amount involved?  (This is where I’m hoping that you say no.)
With this in mind, I have decided to use a new numbering system:

One, two, three, lots, many.

Seriously, this is all you need.
When you come back from the shops, and realise that you’ve spent far too much, you don’t need to tell people exactly how much you spent, you just say that you’ve spent lots of money.  They’ll know exactly what you mean.
When arrive somewhere after being stuck in a traffic jam, all you need to say is that you spent many hours sitting in a jam.
Now we come to the point where you'll really appreciate the versatility of this new system.  When you feel that Lots or Many doesn’t quite do the values you are trying to convey, you can combine them:
For Christmas, I received lots and lots of presents!
There are many many reasons why I won’t visit Uncle Betty :o|

Now, I’m off to write lots of many words in my new MS.
Have a funfilled day.

Feeling like I've received more than I gave

I’ve been (probably far too slowly) critiquing a friend’s YA MS over the past few weeks.  The experience has been incredibly rewarding for me.  Apart from my own MS, I think that this is the most in depth analysis I’ve ever done on a book.  This is probably because when I’ve read a book I’ve bought, I’ve looked for the major things like Plot, characters, style and how they’ve made the story active as opposed to passive.  Invariably, I’ve been drawn along by the story and not looked as deeply as I should.  But, from the next book I read I know that I will be delving a lot deeper into it.
Sorry, I seem to have gone off plot and started rambling.
Ahem… Right, now where was I?  Oh yes. My critiquing...
Because I needed to provide some (hopefully) good feedback, it made me look a lot deeper into this book.  (I can honestly say that the story blew me away.  If she doesn’t get a deal, then there really is no justice in the world.) and it’s made me wonder whether my MS is really a YA book.  It’s probably at the bottom end of YA, bordering on MG.  Looks like I’ve got a bit of working out on where this fits in.

Does this mean I'm growing up at last?

In all the time I’ve been writing, I’ve always struggled with revising/editing part.  I’ve understood the need for it, but just couldn’t get enthused about trudging through the text looking for issues and faults.
I think that I’ve tended to find myself immersed in the world in my head, and became carried away with exploring the story as the details flooded out.  Re-visiting something that was no longer fresh and exciting felt like treading water, and was holding up all the new plots and ideas queuing up and banging on the door for attention.

That was until I started on my current WIP.

This story has been different.  Although I know that it probably  falls well short of what makes it a ‘page turner’, I’ve felt compelled to keep re-working it to make it shine.  I don’t know if it’s the culmination of everything I’ve learnt over the past year, or whether it’s that the previous stories weren’t quite right, but with every little change I make, I get excited.  When I find a big improvement, I have to refrain myself from jumping up and down.
I still have the little voices whispering away in the darker corners, pointing out that the characters are probably not deep enough, or that the twists and rug pulling moment aren’t twisty and turny enough, but I’m going to ignore them and let my Crit pals confirm if that really is the case.

For the moment, I’m just going to enjoy the feeling that when someone else finally reads my MS, it’ll be the best I could get it.

Training Update

It appears that my training is going well... Click here for the news report

Nothing is as fixed as I thought it was

I thought I was quite flexible when it came to converting my plotted outlines into a WIP. In the process of writing it, the details of the tale unfolded, and I could adjust the story accordingly, ending up with a fairly tight story. It turns out that I'm not as flexible as I thought. I seemed to have been of the mindset that the major points in the story lead on to the next major point in a chain of events, and that they were all unchangeable. The story would fall apart if I tried to tinker with them. The realisation that I can move the final conflict's location, and increase the tension in the process, has caught me completely by surprise. My head is buzzing with excitement at the new and improved ending, and I can't get it written fast enough! I'm now thinking that I need to review the other 'fixed' points and see if they can be tweaked. And that is a very weird feeling. The knowledge that I'm not as close as I originally thought I was in getting my MS out to Crit partners is a little bit disappointing, but the renewed excitement I'm feeling for the story is more than compensating for it. Is it just me who sometimes he's better than he really is?