I’m pleased that someone liked my story enough to share it with their readers but I’m also pleased that I found out just in time to add it to my list of publications before submitting a story for Story Shop.

Story Shop is part of the plan. I’m hoping (fingers crossed, wood knocked on, superstitions engaged) that they’ll take my story so I get to read at Edinburgh International Book Festival. It would be the coolest thing ever.

I’ve started working on the plot in a very similar way to the method I used for NaNoWriMo last year. This time I’m using a bigger piece of paper and many more coloured pens. It doesn’t look very structured and that’s OK. It isn’t. At the moment I’m at the brain-dump stage. I’ve put what little I know on a piece of paper, set out a time line and started putting in the few plot elements or scenes that I have. Hopefully, holes will become apparent and patterns will emerge. Then I can do research and generate ideas where the plot is weak. Finally, I’ll have a map. Then the writing starts.

Plotting begins in earnest. Timelines, interactions, mind-maps. Sharpies!

But I wanted to say YAY!

Good advice.

But a lot more difficult to follow than you might think.

The way I work, I have several projects on at the same time. Some are very short, some are longer and some are novel lenght. (I boast. This year is the first time I’ve got one of those on the go. I have yet to finish one outside of NaNoWriMo.) I have an idea, I take some notes, let it steep and ferment and then I write a draft. Then I leave it for a while – sometimes a very long while - before reading it and performing surgery. Once it’s in some kind of shape, it goes to my first reader for feedback. A brief hiatus follows.

After first reader, I make changes to the piece before sending it to a writers group or friendly editor (second review).  Then it sits. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for months. When I finally pick it up again, it is to do a final edit. The final edit isn’t as final as it sounds. It can take several rounds to get to the  final-final version. And even that isn’t really final.

I send the story out and depending on what comes back, I might make further changes before sending the story out a second time. And so it goes.

What was the advice again?

Don’t start anything before you’ve finished what you’re working on.

When you get going, coming up with ideas is a lot easier than finishing stories. Ideas take seconds; finishing a story takes hours, days and weeks.

For this year, I set myself the task of completing one story a month. I’m two months behind and I have eight stories on the go. One is on the concept stage, meaning, I’ve got notes and ideas but I haven’t written words yet. Three have some words, but not their full complement. One has been read by my first reader and the remaining three have been reviewed by my writers groups. If I sat down and finished editing those three I would catch up on my goal. Easy peasy. There are a host of reasons for why I don’t, not one of them particularly good.

It’s not always possible to work on only one thing at a time. Take my word for it: I freelance. External deadlines are useful to force you to finish things. Unfortunately, some of my works in progress don’t have markets, never mind deadlines. So I make excuses, allow myself to lose insterest and move off to other projects. To some extent, I think that’s OK. Not everything I write is worth finishing. Some of it wasn’t worth starting in the first place. That’s part of what this year is about: learning where to put my efforts. Still, the things that are sitting there, twice reviewed, I clearly like well enough to finish.

So I should finish them. Because drafts can’t be published.

• Send out one new story per month: behind by two stories. I’m not going to catch up this month but I want to be behind by only one story by next month.
• Send each story out at least five times before retiring: in progress (am circulating Neon Tetra Suicides, Space Carrot, L.V.I.S. and the flash version of Liz & Bob). It’s been suggested that sending them out five times isn’t enough so some of them might go out a few more times.
• Start plotting novel: I’ve started and am making progress. I’ll publish some of my scrawls later for the fun of it.
• Start writing novel: planned for June.
• Apply to Story Shop: looking dicey since I haven’t managed to get published yet I’m keeping an eye open for the call for stories. Last year it was released in May.
• Do three spoken performances: I’m upgrading this to four and am two down.

1. The main character is a child, therefore the story must be for children.
   I wrote a story about a young boy who has a very bad time. It wasn’t meant to be a YA story but my readers to date have interpreted it as one. To me, a story isn’t for children just because it’s about them. I’m clearly missing some nuance of tone or subject that makes my stories about children also seem suitable for them. (I’m sending the flash version of Liz & Bob around to some YA publications to see if they agree with that judgement. It will be interesting to see what they say.)
2. I’m female so my main character must be too.
   Quite a few of my stories are in the first person. I like writing in first person for a couple of reasons. It allows me to use an observational tone and means I don’t have to describe or explain the narrator too much. The first person also makes it easier for me to visualise the feelings and actions of the narrator. The voice puts not just the reader but also me as a writer inside the narrators’ head. Interestingly, this can cause confusion. Sometimes my narrator is male. If I don’t point that out clearly at the beginning of the story, readers assume that the narrator is female. Because I am.

The subject and the audience for fiction is as varied as the stories themselves. Your audience is not always someone like your main character, though. I’ve still to learn how to pitch my voice so that my readers know who the story is for.

This is the story I told in my 2010 NaNoWriMo project:

A young private detective finds a body, and, investigating the death, makes new friends, including a murder suspect. The investigation touches her own family and she learns things about her mother’s past. She also learns that she can’t always trust old friends. With help from her new friends she solves the murder and realises that her mother is in mortal danger. Meanwhile, the police, who have been doing their own investigation, also solves it and saves the mother. The ex-suspect starts digitizing the family records and life continues much as it was, except that she now has a dad.

How does this plot differ from standard gum shoe stories?

1. The main issue is that nothing much has changed at the end. The ‘grows up’ part of the plot needs to be bigger. I mean, if what she learns is so unimportant that I don’t even think it warrants a mention in a micro-summary it clearly lacks impact.
2. The second problem is the parallel investigations. The main character normally works with the police, for example as a consultant. This way, they get access to information and suspects. On their own, they just don’t have all the information they need to solve the problem. Or they start looking into something that isn’t a murder, get embroiled and decide to solve it themselves. That’s more like my plot. Except, traditionally, the private detective confronts the murderer (catharsis). In my version, she figures out the problem, realises that someone is in danger and completely fails to get in contact with them (anti-climax).
3. Family and friendship is central the story. These are important themes but they need to be more tightly integrated. The sudden appearance of the main character’s estranged dad is too important to be a throw-away at the end. It needs proper handling and introduction.

The novel I’m starting in June uses the same characters and many of the same settings as my NaNoWriMo projects. The plot will be very different. I’m spending the next couple of months working it out but I know that I need more plot than I’ve ever worked with before.

The imaginary strand of wool that is my main character’s journey from beginning to end needs twists, turns and maybe a knot or two. For colour and texture, my other characters needs their own strands. I look forward to messing all the strands up and then, carefully, untangling them again.

(And if you want a much longer version, in book form, there’s alway Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English.)

So I looked further and found a bunch of male writers in, what I thought, was the same genre. Mike Carey, Larry Correia, Ben Aaronovich, Malcolm Pryce, even China Mieville, write super-natural crime stories. They were very different from the first set of books that I read.

The problem was that most of the books with female characters fall in the supernatural romance cross-over genre. When I started my research I didn’t know that there was such a thing. I have some reservations about the genre, or rather, the female main characters. I like my main characters, male or female, to have gumption, agency and self-determination.

Part of the pleasure with the romance stories seems to be that the main character is swept along, unable to or stopped from taking control of her own life. Yes, many of them have agency and show pluck, and there are some areas of their lives they have control of – romance not being one of them – but there there’s all the other stuff that I find tedious and that male supernatural crime fiction heroes are delightfully free of. Silk dresses, for example. Male heroes don’t have to go clothes shopping and never risk popping out of their bras.

More importantly, male characters have to make their own decisions about relationships and sex. They can’t defer that to a much older but still young-looking partner. They aren’t always the most mature but they have to be adults: they chose their actions and take the consequences.

Here’s a table of some of the differences that I’ve noticed. I’m being unfair to both female and male male characters – some women have guns and some men have crushes - but I’m OK with that.

Do the gender differences in these books reflect the interests of the male and female reading public? The books sell and, presumably, to their intended audiences. So, I suppose they must. They don’t satisfy me, though, and I hope that there is room for a different kind of main character: a female who isn’t chasing romance. More of a crime fiction main character, in fact.

The main character of my first novel is a young woman with a psychic super-power. She’s also single, a private detective, of sorts, and neither hard-boiled nor meltingly soft. She’s fairly well educated and runs a business with her mum. Because of who she is and what she does, she’s in a tricky position socially and politically. This informs her behaviour. She’s might be pretty, and have long, glossy hair, but I’m not telling. It’s just not as important as all the other stuff that makes her what she is.

Yesterday, I remembered.

When I was little,  I was afraid of werewovles. Really afraid. I would cry in the night and cower from images of grizzly bears. The fear stayed with me for years. When I was seven, maybe eight, I bought a comic book with a full-page advert of Pez dispensers on the back cover. One of the dispensers was the wolf man. It scared me. A picture of a werewolf Pez dispenser scared me so much that I had to throw the comic away. And throw it away just right so that I couldn’t see the ad in the waste paper basket.

Over the years, the fear went away, but a certain fascination remained. My DVD collection contains American Werewolf in London, Cursed, Wilderness, Ginger Snaps and Dog Soldiers. I watch Being Human and miss George. (George was lovely.) In dusty corners of my bookshelf  you’ll find Cycle of the Werewolf, The Werewolf of Paris, Sharp Teeth and so on. Yes. I’ve seen the films and I’ve read the books. Still, if you asked me, I would tell you that I was not interested in shapeshifters.

My conscious mind had forgotten, but the storyteller in me remembered.

Which of them should call the exorsist?