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20 January, 2010 11:05 am

100 Stories Needed To Help Haiti

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by Deb    in Fiction Writing, NonFiction Writing, Random Writing Rambles, Writing Diary

Fund-raisers are calling for urgent short story submissions to help raise money for disaster-stricken Haiti.

Out of the submissions, one hundred pieces of fiction will be chosen to appear in an e-book, proceeds of which will go to the Red Cross.

The Red Cross is just one of a number of charities and humanitarian organisations mobilising a vast aid effort to reach the thousands of injured, hungry and thirsty survivors of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake to hit Haiti on 12 January.

100 Stories for Haiti is the brainchild of author Greg McQueen. On the morning of January 19, Greg posted a video on his blog saying: “Dear Twitterverse, I can’t keep watching this on the news or trending on Twitter without doing something. I woke up this morning with the idea that together we could make an e-book and donate all the profits to the Red Cross.”

Within hours news had spread throughout microblogging website Twitter and story submissions began arriving. Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone Away World, will be submitting a new story for the book as well as writing the introduction. Lorraine Mace, the co-author of the ABC Checklist for Writers, and award-winning environmental journalist Sarah Lewis-Hammond are volunteering their time to help with the editorial process.

100 Stories for Haiti needs short story submissions, editors, sub-editors and volunteers.

If you want to send a short story, please follow these guidelines:

No more than 1,000 words

No stories containing graphic violence, death or destruction

Send all stories in the body text of an email to 100storiesforhaiti@gmail.com. Stories sent as attachments will not be opened.

Stories must be received by Monday 25 January 2010

Notes for editors

Greg McQueen is a UK author living in Aarhus, Denmark with his wife and three year old daughter. He writes mostly for teens and is the son of Geoff McQueen, creator of The Bill.

Greg’s video can be found here http://www.ireallyshouldbewriting.net/100-stories-for-haiti/

Story submissions and volunteers email: 100storiesforhaiti@gmail.com

The book will be sold on www.smashwords.com. Founder and CEO Mark Coker will be waiving the normal 15% commission.

100 Stories for Haiti will be published in mid-February

Contact details

Greg McQueen

gregmcqueen@gmail.com

+45 31 71 77 41

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10 January, 2010 8:13 am

Scrivener and The Pale Ones

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by Deb    in Fiction Writing, NaNoWriMo, Scrivener, Writing Diary

The Pale Ones are now in Scrivener and I’m faced with the task of organising the scenes and getting to grips with the story again.

Since the end of nano I’ve done very little fiction writing. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I picked up quite a bit more ‘work for hire’ than I normally do and that kept me busy with nonfiction.

But the Pale Ones are nagging. They want their story told and I want to tell it. So I need to get back on track and figure out where we go from here.

Scrivener does make the task of importing a WIP easy. Previously I was using yWriter, and while it’s a great writing tool, it doesn’t quite do what I want or present the work in the way I want it. So the first task was to get the POs out of yWriter and into Scrivener. Simplicity itself. Both programmes behaved perfectly. YWriter exported neatly into .rtf, and Scrivener picked it up effortlessly when asked to do so.

I ended up with a very long single file in Scrivener, which seeing as I’m working in scenes, was no good at all. Scrivener promises that breaking up long files is a simple matter, and it is. Just put the curser in the file where you want to the break and tell Scrivener to make the break. Everything before the break is put into into its own little scene section, and everything beyond the break stays together in the long file. You can select text at the beginning of the break to use as the scene title which makes later identification much easier. In a matter of minutes I’d run through the whole 60k odd word count and recreated the scene sections.

My next task is to organise my Scrivener index cards on the corkboard. I have scenes out of sequence, scenes I no longer need because of changes further on in the story, and scenes which, frankly, just aren’t doing the job they were supposed to do.

I’ve got to pin down my ‘sentence lites’, (Think Sideways jargon), or should that be ’sentences lite?’ and relearn/rethink my story arc. I’ve been away from the story for long enough to have forgotten a lot of what I’ve written which is both good and bad. Good because I can read it back with a fresher eye, and bad because it feels jut a bit like someone else’s story and I’m half afraid that when I try to get reacquainted with it I won’t like it anymore.

Hopefully Scrivener is going to make my task easier. Apart from the normal frustrations of learning a new programme, (and an irrational fear that by clicking buttons and experimenting I’m going to break either my story or Scrivener) my first few days with it have only made me more glad to have it.

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8 January, 2010 11:52 am

Scrivener – Finally!

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by Deb    in Fiction Writing, NonFiction Writing, Scrivener, Writing Diary

CorkboardI’ve wanted Scrivener, an absolutely amazing writing programme, since the very first moment I saw it. And finally I have it. It didn’t come easy. First off I made a deal with myself that I would only seriously consider the purchase if I won nano this year.

It’s got to be the most expensive piece of software I’ve ever bought because I had to buy the Mac computer to go with it. Macs are brilliant though, and I have absolutely no regrets. I suppose if I hadn’t loved Macs I would have though twice, and I was lucky enough to have a play with a friend’s Mac (and download a trial of Scrivener) to see if the object of my desire and I were going to be compatible. It was love at first sight and I’m now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro and Scrivener.

What I wanted most was the index cards. I reached the stage where I was dreaming about them. I use index cards for plotting, and up until now have had physical ones. I’m not sure the physical cards will be banished altogether, but if there’s one really big advantage that virtual cards have over real ones it’s that the virtual cards can’t fall on the floor and get muddled up just as you’ve spent hours putting them in order.

No more, thanks to the corkboard in Scrivener. I can have as many index cards as I like, all attached to their respective pieces of writing, be they scenes in fiction, ideas in nonfiction, or whatever. I can rearrange the order with the click of the trackpad, and see at a glance exactly what I have and what else is needed.

The split screen function is a stroke of genius and gives Scrivener an added dimension making it just the perfect writing tool whether you’re into fiction or nonfiction – or both, like me.

I do quite a lot of writing for web clients, where research is key, so I need lots of snippets from lots of different sites and it used to be hard to keep track of what I’d learned from where if I needed to backtrack. Not any more. Scrivener has a research section where you can store webpages, music and audio, pdf files, images, or anything else you may need to refer back to. A click of the split screen button and I can keep my research material in front of me while I write. It has really speeded up the process.

Of course I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Scrivener can do and what I can use it for. The few bits and bobs above are just the main things I knew it would help me with, and the things I’ve tried out and found to be just as successful as I thought they would. I expect to write a whole lot more about Scrivener as the months go by and I get further into its functions and processes.

D’you know what I really like? Scrivener doesn’t try and teach me how to write or force me to write in the way it thinks I should. It’s just there, to do the job I need it to do to hold the various elements of my writing in one place, accessible, moveable, and logically presented.

It’s beautiful.

I gave a huge cheer when I realised Literature and Latte, the company behind Scrivener, is English, based in Cornwall. I’m biased, I know, and I make no apologies for that. That great things still come out of England gives me a real kick.

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4 December, 2009 3:46 pm

How to Win NaNoWriMo

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by Deb    in Fiction Writing, NaNoWriMo, Random Writing Rambles, Writing Diary

nano_09_winner_120x240There’s no doubt that nanowrimo is a hard slog. No matter now determined you are at the beginning of the month, by half way through you’re flagging, and by midway through the 20s of November you’re beginning to wonder how to win nanowrimo and if it’s really possible.

At least that was my experience. But I did win. Yeh!!! Last night I romped home with 16 words over the 50K finishing line, and reckoned that was good enough. I got a huge kick out of seeing that winners page flash up and realised yep, I managed to win nanowrimo. Very satisfying. And now, after a good nights sleep, I’m looking back and wondering how on earth I did it.

It was easy enough to start with. The story was fresh, my characters were not much more than new-born babes with all their potential still untapped. My shiny new outline seemed infallible and all I had to do was write in order to win nanowrimo. That was the first week.

By the second week I could see the cracks beginning to appear, and the first realisations that if I was indeed going to win nanowrimo I was going to have to do more than write. I was going to have to come up ways to skirt round gaping plot holes (no time to mix the replots that would fill them in) and tame misbehaving characters who, as they started to grow up, wanted all their own way. I started jumping around in the story, writing the best bits first rather than dangling like carrots to write towards. Better to get 2000 words of a tempting scene than 500 of one I was fighting with.

The third week saw me resorting to writing in ten minute bursts. This wasn’t new to me, and I knew once that timer was set and running I’d write until it pinged. Sometimes these spurts took me in unplanned directions and often they were good directions. When the words were coming and I could see how they could be tied into the earlier part of the story, even if they were unplanned, I started believing I could win nanowrimo.

Determination played a big part. I held a huge carrot in front of my face with the promise of Mac laptop if I made it. No words, no mac. That easy. I’m sure it helped.

The final week was pure slog. My story stopped making sense to the extent that I became convinced every word was total dross. Even if I did somehow manage to win nanowrimo, the words I’d written would be useless and every one would have to be discarded. I became certain I’d wasted a perfectly good month on worthless wordy rubbish. But so close to the finish, I couldn’t let it go. So, ten minutes here and there. Jump into part two of the novel before I was really ready and deal with the final stages of part one in flashback. Move forward, always move forward.

If a part of the story got stuck, I wrote the next part, even if I couldn’t see how to get the two ends to meet.

But I did win nanowrimo, and guess what? My story is not lost in a sea of worthless words. My random scenes and abupt switches between acts do make sense, and I have a much stronger novel that I first anticipated. I’m surprised. And pleased.

I’m not finished with this novel yet, as I plan it be around 90K words. But having put it through the nano mill I feel it’s really kickstarted and I’ve got something solid to work with.

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23 November, 2009 5:15 pm

Nano Update

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by Deb    in NaNoWriMo, Writing Diary

It doesn’t get any easier, in fact keeping up with nano word count gets harder. It’s very easy to slip behind and once that happens it’s an uphill slog to get caught up again.

I’m full of admiration and wonder for people who’ve already hit the magic 50K  and there are plenty who’ve gone past it.

Me? I’m hoving in the 30Ks but still determined to get that little winner badge for this site. I have to write 2000 words a day to keep on track. This gives me a little buffer each day, but not much, as I’ve discovered to my cost when I’ve missed the odd day or so for one reason or another.

Another reason I’m struggling at the moment is that I have run out of planned scenes. I thought I had enough to see me sailing happily over the 50K line, but that was in outline and not in reality. As we all know, outlines change, and mine has done a happy snake dance from the beginning, leading me in all sorts of directions I hadn’t planned on. Some have been good diversions, others I know will have to come out in edit.

Today saw me winding up the first act and moving into the second, and that has given me a second wind. My people are now in a different location, with a different set of problems and are about to enter a whole new world, literally. It should be fun, and a couple of them are already beginning to show their true, and previously hidden, colours.

It’s the home stretch – and I WILL do it.

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