Not only are we sexy, but we’re also smart. In this article on Intelligence.com, Science Explains Why People Who Love Writing Are Smarter there’s plenty of evidence to show why we writers are in touch with our emotions, better at learning and also following an activity that’s great therapy.
So stop doubting yourself!
As an ex-librarian, I understand the pressing need to free up shelf space. A lot of new books are published every year, as we writers understand from the competition we face.
A book’s return date label is good evidence of how popular it’s been, and with only so much room in the reserve stock basement, many titles end up in the library book sale or donated to charity.
They are deaccessioned, which sounds painful!
Some of the ripest titles appear on Awful Library Books, a site devoted to the weird, tasteless and downright bad books that shouldn’t have been bought or even written in the first place.
I found this example of fantasy fiction, written by Marian Engel, where a librarian enters into a sexual relationship with a bear! I like to include animals in my stories as wild creatures and pets, as they’re good indicators of a character’s personality, but this is taking things a bit too far….
What would Paddington, Rupert and Pooh Bear make of it all!
To cheer us up, here’s an article about how wonderfully sexy we all are….
7 reasons writers are sexy | Articles | Main
I know that none of you will disagree with it, though I’ve got to say that after recently finishing two months of querying 88 literary agents I feel about as sexy as a floor mop!
After completing the editing of a novel, I have mixed emotions. I may be pleased that I’ve come in 200 words under the recommended word count of 80,000. I sometimes use those words to backfill sentences to add to the impact of them but usually, after months of editing, I’m heartily sick of the process, and even a bit resentful of the story I’ve devoted seven months of my life to creating.
I need the stimulus of a new project and yearn to plan and research my next novel. Explaining the tedium of editing to friends, I’ve come up with a number of similes, including these:
1) Editing is like going through a fully-grown crop field, your wonderful novel, walking between the rows to find hundreds of weeds. Destroying them by hand, you turn around and walk back finding loads more!
2) Editing is like inspecting a house you’ve designed and constructed from the foundations up. Initially, you walk from room to room, seeing if it’s navigable and would be a welcoming place for a reader. Before long, you’re crawling the walls like a lizard looking for prey.
3) Editing a book is like examining a bowl of muesli with a toothpick, finding some of the ingredients you used are not of the best quality….
What is the editing process like for you?
Harking back to a post called Are You A Psycho? it turns out we all are!
According to a study published in Science Direct, creative artists share traits with psychopaths:
Great News: Artists Might Share Common Traits With Psychopaths
I’m going back to my padded cell now….
I have a feeling that this post will be about a quandary that doesn’t really have an answer.
I have a tendency to grasp tricky concepts, notice fine details and see things laterally—while missing the blooming obvious! The thought came to me last night while re-reading my last novel, that there were quite a lot of chapters—50—which made me wonder if it was too many.
A typical word count for my chapters is 1,600-2,250. I write crime novels, though I haven’t tailored the word count as being ideal for readers of this genre. Rather, it’s come about naturally, fitting the requirements of the mini-story that each chapter essentially is, imparting a discrete part of the whole. I’m conforming to the expected length of 80,000 words for a debut novel by an unknown author.
Chapters can be of any length, of course, and in my reading, I’ve seen one-word chapters and even blank pages used to convey emotion, while some authors don’t bother with chapters at all. With my longer chapters, I’ve used two or three section breaks, when the scenes described are potentially connected—through being a story about a criminal investigation, but I leave it up to the reader to decide the significance. They like to work things out before the detective protagonist.
I like a bit of variety in chapter length, for several reasons. One is that if a reader sees the next chapter is short, they may keep on reading—and if you prime that chapter with something intriguing, they may go onto the next!
Is chapter length something that you consider when writing erotica, romance, fantasy or science-fiction?
I’ve jokingly referred to writing novels as playing with my imaginary friends in various posts. Many children have imaginary friends, and I was no exception.
I had good cause to create an ally, for when I was three years old my privileged world was invaded by twin sisters. I loved them, but the attention definitely shifted from toddler me to entrancing babies. My role altered too, for suddenly I was a helper and protector.
To cope, I invented Peter—an invisible brother, who did all of the naughty things that I would never do. He stuck around for a couple of years until I went to infant school, where I suddenly had battles to fight alone.
Peter returned to me last night, as I waded through another round of editing my WIP. He came into my mind as an idea for a short story about a writer being haunted by a ghost that looks like himself.
It made me wonder if writers are prone to having kept company with imaginary friends when youngsters—an early manifestation of their creative powers, perhaps….
I’ve met my doppelgänger too, and it gave me great pause for thought. I lived in Southsea as a student in the mid-80s, which has a village feel to it and is the part of Portsmouth next to the sea. Occasionally, a passing car would beep me, and I’d think “I don’t know anyone with a white VW—who was that?”. Once someone hailed me from the other side of the road and even started to cross over before changing their mind.
I didn’t think too much of it until I went out to my neighbourhood store for some Saturday night snacks. Standing patiently in a long queue, I suddenly felt a hand creep between my legs and give my undercarriage a friendly tweak! I turned around to see a complete stranger, a woman some years younger than me who blushed furiously saying “I’m sorry, I thought you were Robert. You look just like him from behind.”
“Well, do I feel like him from behind?” I asked. It turned out she’d been picked up by this man in a club, spent the night with him, and he hadn’t contacted her since. She told me that he worked in a local wine bar, so I went along to have a look at him one lunchtime. He did indeed look like a version of me—though not as tall, handsome or sexy (tee-hee), and could have passed for my little brother.
When I told Robert about the incident in the store where I got goosed and described the girl, he replied gracelessly “Oh her, she’s a bloody nightmare.”
After meeting him, all of the cases of mistaken identity fell into place. Then I had the dreadful thought of what would happen if he robbed a bank—eyewitnesses would finger me as the culprit!
Remembering this incident, I wrote a novella called ‘A Man Out Walking His Dog’, about a man doing just that who discovers a murder victim floating in a river. The story was prompted by my experience of mistaken identity, and hearing that phrase so often on the news—dog walkers are often the first people to find a corpse—something they don’t tell you in the pet shop when you buy a puppy.
A pushy detective tries to frame him for the crime, as he resembles the real killer who’s seen by unreliable witnesses in the area at the same time. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate—a situation made worse if coerced by a biased policeman. My accused man escapes by the skin of his teeth, thanks to a video of the killer that his victim made on her iPhone.
We all like to think we’re unique, but we have replicants walking around somewhere—doing good and bad things without our permission!
Did any of you have friends that nobody else could see?
Are they still around?
This provocative article in the Guardian thrashes out the reasons not to self-publish while admitting that making a living as a traditionally published author is all but impossible.
For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way
Ros Barber makes some valid points, especially when she highlights how much time a writer needs to devote to marketing if they self-publish. It’s what put me off uploading ebooks, when I realised that I’d need to spend more time on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and writing entries for my blog than I did in creating my new novel. Hence, I tried querying literary agents in the hope that if I got a publishing deal the book company would promote me.
It’s worth clicking on the link to Ros Barber’s blog, where she lays out how much she’s earned from her novels.
Authors and the Truth About Money – Ros Barber
As William Saroyan observed:
Writing is the hardest way of making a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
A good friend posted an amusing and truthful observation from Robert De Niro, on my Facebook timeline today.
I’m sure you’ll recognise yourself in what he says….
