What I Wrote in September: 7,000 Words Total
What I Read in September:
Currently Reading: The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
My ‘To Be Read’ List for the Next Four/Five Weeks:
For a little while, I hadn’t been doing quite so many events. That’s just changed. I’ve gone from having a relatively quiet summer to having a series of awesome things lined up for Autumn.
I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago but had to hold off making it public because there was an embargo on the news item near the end. What’s happened in the meantime is that I read at the most recent Flash Fiction Armagh as well as at a Women Aloud NI event for Culture Day.
On Thursday the 10th of October I have co-ordinated a Short Story Showcase at Books Paper Scissors in Stranmillis. Then, hot on the heels of that, is DeptCon5: Ireland’s biggest Young Adult convention which I will be attending (just as a regular attendee, not as a speaker or anything).
November is, of course, National Novel Writing Month, and I’m hoping to get along to Purely Poetry in October and December, but by far the biggest thing I have lined up for the coming months is the SCBWI Conference.
I was absolutely thrilled to discover that I am one of SCBWI’s Margaret Carey Scholarship winners for this year. The start of NaNoWriMo will be a little delayed for me because, from the 1st to the 3rd of November, I will be in Winchester attending talks and panels and meeting literary agents face-to-face!
You can realistically expect plenty of blog posts on my return. I cannot, cannot, CANNOT wait!
Some people are oversensitive about money. Some people will be scandalised that I’m about to break taboo in talking about it.
Some people, in my humble opinion, need to get over themselves.
I mean, yes, this stuff matters to some extent (I wouldn’t be blogging about it otherwise) but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not half as important as we make it out to be.
It was back in May that I promised to lift the lid on my personal income but, all of the above said, I’ve actually gotten a slight case of cold feet between then and now.
Please understand that, when I criticise people for focusing on things that maybe don’t matter so much, I’m including myself in that too.
In my first post I was all like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be radical and awesome, breaking down barriers and laying all my sh*t bare!’ And then, having calmed down and thought about it some more, worry started to set in that people would see how little money we’re actually talking about and write me off as barely a professional.
I asked myself if I should wait until I was earning more before sharing my figures. Then I remembered that I was entirely missing my own point. I’m not making this blog post to be impressive, I’m doing it because I genuinely believe more open and honest discourse is needed and that everyone would be better off for it.
So, without further ado, here’s me putting my money where my mouth is:
I started freelancing during tax year 2013/2014 – the best part of six years ago. I’d just quit a “normal” job from hell (it was a call centre. Enough said.) and didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was enthusiastic. Foolhardy.
I was also living rent-free with my parents, which is a depressing yet important piece of contextual information.
For the first eight months, I earned nothing. Not a single penny. I call this my ‘year zero.’ Continue reading
This post is third in a series. You can find part one (covering January to April) here and part two (May to August) here. As outlined in those previous posts, I’m tackling this year in chunks, setting myself goals for four months at a time, rather than having a single set for the whole of 2019.
It seems to be working out.
My only year-long goal – the Goodreads reading challenge – has me sitting at 44 books completed off a total of sixty. That’s 73% complete/4 books ahead of schedule.
Before I get into my goals for the rest of 2019 going forward, let’s take a minute to recap on my summer goals and how well I did (or didn’t) achieve them.
In May, I set myself the following tasks:
From that list, what I didn’t do was lose weight or write a third novel. The number of things I achieved (listed below) definitely outweigh these two failures, which I’m obviously delighted about, but they are still two pretty big failures. Though I will point out that I did take part in Camp NaNoWriMo, as planned, and got a few words towards book three in my trilogy. Overall, I wrote 25,000 words during July, much of it fanfiction works in progress that I wanted to get out of my head at long last.
Here’s the full list of what I actually did achieve: Continue reading
I usually share some statistics regarding my fan fiction on the 28th of July each year (the anniversary of when I first started writing fanfic). This year, I wasn’t too bothered about it, but I do actually have some news to share in that regard so am deciding to write about it after all. Better late than never!
As I acknowledged in my annual fan fiction round-up post last year, I won’t always have the opportunity to write as much fanfic as I do right now, at this stage in my life.
If and when I get a publishing contract, my focus will be on working with my own characters and worlds.
So, as much as I’m impatient to hurry along any future success in that regard, I’m using the opportunity currently afforded me of not being on book deadline to continue work on my (unpaid) passion projects.
This past year, I wrote some new stories and finished off a couple of other pieces that had been left abandoned for way too long. I also won Elysian’s Field’s ‘Author of the Month‘ award – something I have coveted since it was first announced, a few years ago.
I continued the mega task of re-editing and uploading my older work to Archive of Our Own and, in completing my outstanding WIPs, ticked off another goal I’d been working towards: finishing with Fanfiction.net
All of the stories I have published on FF will remain there, but I won’t be adding any new pieces to that site (those will continue to be shared on Ao3 and Elysian Fields).
In the image on the right are my ‘legacy user stats’ as of the day I uploaded my last chapter to FF.
By this time next year, my goal is to have finished archiving old work to Ao3. Beyond that, I can only hope to have acquired one of those lovely publishing contracts, but we’ll see how it goes.
Sylvia Plath was thirty-years-old when she died. This is a sobering fact I have only just learned, having googled her to directly reference her fig tree analogy.
When I lie awake at night, I often think of the fig tree she described in the Bell Jar. Of all of the opportunities and the paralysing fear over picking one of them.
Somewhat fittingly, I have started to write this post several times, each with a different slant, only to scrap my words and start again. I almost scrapped the idea in its entirety, worried that not being able to select and follow a narrative was a sign that the whole thing wasn’t going to work.
Here’s a fun fact: life has many narratives. That’s the whole point!
I always felt like the fig tree analogy spoke to a deeper truth but from my perspective now, as a thirty-year-old myself, I actually feel there’s a lie at the core of it: “Choosing one meant losing all the rest.”
NO!
Choosing means choosing and nothing more. You can change direction down the road.
Changing direction is normal.
Changing direction can be the best thing ever.
Turning down one opportunity might mean it is gone and will never be open to you again but for every turn-off you miss, there is a literal infinite number of others and THAT’S OKAY. In many cases, that’s actually fantastic. Revel in the freedom of this knowledge.
Missed opportunities are not the end of the world, friend. I wish to god someone had sat me down ten years ago and told me that. Continue reading
I have something a bit different on this blog today for you, folks: an interview with local poet Colin Dardis about his new poetry collection, the Dogs of Humanity. Without any more preamble, let’s get into it!
Can you tell us a little about the themes of the collection?
I’m not a massive fan of reducing a collection down to themes; for a poetry book, it’s almost an injustice, although it has to be done. I don’t read collections due to the themes mentioned; I read because I want to be subjected to strong, startling poetry. For example, I have no interest in beekeeping, but I absolutely adored Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal.
To be absolutely drawn on themes, the poems use dogs and other animals as a central motif to look at how people treat each other in an increasingly toxic world, touching on bullying, self-identity, chauvinism and mental health. But there’s also so much more. As Mary O’Donnell kindly said in her blurb, there is “an avoidance of zeitgeist poetry, what really sets the work apart tonally and in subject is its assumption of a counter-position at all times.” That counter-position could be the schism between the individual and society, between perceived norms and personal attitudes; but it’s equally a stance that allows any subject matter to be explored, as long as it is well written. That’s what poetry validates.
Why did you feel drawn to the themes? How did it all come together?
The poet, at the starting point, is drawn to every poem they write as they are compelled to write them. In some ways, your best poem is always your most recent poem, as that has been the one that allows the poetic muscle to continue flexing. Only with time and distance however does the poet realise which pieces will continue to speak to them, and for them. Therefore, almost all the poems in Dogs have been about for a while. Only the closing poem would have been written from scratch in the past year. Many predate poems that were in ‘the x of y’, my previous collection.
Fly on the Wall Press had a call out for chapbook submissions at the end of last year. I knew I had a number of poems mentioning dogs; a few years ago I had done a set at a reading exclusively of dog poems. The collection bloomed out of that, and Isabelle Kenyon at Fly on the Wall Press was immediately on board with the idea. She’s made the whole process very easy, and has been incredibly supportive and motivated in spreading the word about the book. Continue reading
There are many different definitions of strength. Most of them, I find, are inadequate. Strength isn’t the absence of fear or weakness, and it isn’t something purely physical.
I’m partially thinking about this because I’ve been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer season seven, these past few nights, but also because strength is something I’m constantly striving for. I have to remember that being strong is also not the same thing as being hard on yourself. I mean, sometimes it is, but not all the time.
I’ve done a lot of hard things in my life so far – fought through a fair few difficult situations – and where I am now, I have more hard things in front of me.
I am fighting against my body and the medical condition I have to get pregnant.
I am trying hard to lose weight – something that even people without PCOS struggle to do.
I’m also trying to secure a publishing deal.
These are big things. A lot of people much better than me have spent big chunks of their lives tackling one or other of these. The fact that I’m struggling with them is not a sign of weakness. Or, maybe it is, but that weakness isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes, I gotta cut myself some slack.
I cannot be top of my game, doing my very best, all of the time.
Being strong is not an absence of weakness, it’s accepting the things holding you back – the things failing and falling apart – and going on, regardless.
I am both weak and strong. That’s okay. The same is true of all people, even slayers. I just need to remember that.
Some people might rightly assume there are only two things you should do when you finally get that precious publishing deal: sign on the dotted line and open the bubbly.
I understand this impulse, but I have five other steps you should also maybe consider.
I don’t think it’s particularly big-headed to say I have a somewhat decent set of writing skills at this point – it is my job, after all – but world-building is definitely not something that comes to me naturally. This didn’t matter, I told myself, because I mainly write stories set in the real world in the modern-day.
Well, as you can probably guess, I was wrong.
I may have been basing my descriptions on places and things that already exist, but I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of stuff even I know fairly well. Like, I can picture a road I’ve walked down dozens of times, but I won’t necessarily know the name of that road because it hasn’t ever been relevant to me before. And the thing about characters is that, if done right, they take on a life of their own, which means things will be relevant to them that have nothing to do with you as a writer.
If you don’t want your reader to stumble over something out of place, sooner or later, you’ll have to look things up. Even if the real world is your source material, the reader probably won’t know which part of it you’re drawing direct inspiration from, so you’ve got to rebuild that world inside their head – not as big a deal as creating an imaginary empire from scratch, but still no mean feat.
In preparation for National Novel Writing Month last year, there were a series of Instagram inspiration prompts and one of them was ‘Last Writing Related Search.’ Displayed in the photo, below, is what was in my Google search history.
Yes, it was all research for my book, odd as it may sound.
Since then, I’ve actually gone even further, to figure out what subjects my main characters would have studied at G.C.S.E., what dates the exams would have been on, and plotted this info on a calendar next to the plot points of the book.
No one else is ever going to need this information, and it doesn’t end up in the book directly, but it certainly helped me get my head around timelines and pacing, which ultimately makes the book better. Continue reading
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