26. Let’s talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!
Do I draw my characters? No, I can’t draw.
Do others draw them? Only one person (to my knowledge) has ever drawn one of my characters. That was the amazing Eve LeDez, who did me this beautiful picture of Sulien (and Oswy in the form of a raven) from The Witch’s Boy:
Read the rest of this entry »
25. Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
Hm… Oswy (from The Witch’s Boy) has a dog, as a result of a symbolic gesture on the part of Leofwine, which told us a lot about Leofwine and something about Oswy, but nothing about the dog. The dog then plays no further part in the story. It’s hard to think of stuff for animals to do, unless you go to the trouble of making the animal a character in its own right. (Introducing characters/items which you have to keep track of, but which are not contributing to the plot is redundant and to be discouraged.)
Making a pet into a character in its own right is not something I’d ever thought of before. But if I have another character like John Cavendish, who wouldn’t dream of talking to another person about his problems, and a publishing climate where lengthy introspection is discouraged, a pet might serve in the way John’s diary did – a device for letting the reader in on the character’s thoughts. IE, even an introvert who won’t talk to people might talk to his dog.
I was thinking “huh, 18th Century sailing officers wouldn’t have time or space for pets,” but then I remembered Admiral Collingwood and his beloved dog, Bounce, and decided that I was wrong about that.
24. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?
I’m perfectly willing to kill a character whose purpose in the story is to die – that’s what he’s there for. To a certain extent I think of my characters as actors who are playing the different parts in the story, and like most actors, my characters like a nice death scene. It’s a chance for them to get lots of attention and to have the spotlight firmly on them for a while. As long as I manage to get it across how terrible and tragic it is that this character is no longer with us, as long as the other characters mourn enough, my characters don’t mind being killed. They’d hate to have a good death be wasted (as it so often is on TV, where next week all the other characters act as though the person they’d been working with for years never existed at all.) But I try and make sure that doesn’t happen, and the repercussions of the death take a good long time to work out – as they would in real life, of course.
Day 23 of the meme:
23. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story–from planning to writing?
It very much depends on how long the story is. I don’t really like short stories, so I’m generally looking either at a novel or a novella. In that case it doesn’t normally take me more than a week to do a basic plan. On weeks when I’m being professional and sticking to my goals, I write about 5,000 – 6,000 words a week (not less than 1050 a day, with weekends off.) So you can calculate how long it would take to do the first draft of a 30K novella or a 100K novel.
The second draft, editing and polishing takes a lot less time, in general, because I usually create a fairly decent first draft. But where I don’t (as with False Colors), my own personal editing can take another three or four months before I think the book is good enough to submit to a publisher. And after that, there are more edits guided by the editor.
The trouble is that many things stop me from keeping up my goals. School holidays – Easter holidays, half term holidays, Christmas holidays, one and a half months of Summer holidays! My husband being ill, my children being ill either separately or together, me being ill. Me being depressed due to lack of sunshine/lack of vitamin D/over-sensitivity to what people are saying on the internet. Me being out of the habit of writing because of the aforesaid everything and being unable to force myself back into it.
Add long periods of inactivity due to the factors above into the daily word count, and it comes out at approximately a year per novel. Four months for a novella.
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However, thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
essayel I am currently feeling quite hopeful that I can up my daily word count from a minimum of 1050 to a minimum of 1500. She recommended Dr.Wicked’s Write or Die application to me. This is brilliant! You type your story in a little box. If you stop typing, the screen goes pink, then red, then brighter red, and then a little message comes up saying “back to work!” (or something.) You can set the time before it starts turning red. I have it set so that I do have time to go back and fix spelling mistakes and really horrible errors, but I don’t have time to spend 20 minutes wondering whether I’ve chosen the right place for my comma.
I set the goal for 500 words in 20 minutes and start typing. Every time it starts to go red, it stops me from slowing down to a halt. As a result, in 20 minutes (sometimes 15) I end up with 500 words. Then I go and have a coffee and think about what I’m going to write next – you have to do the thinking separately from the writing, because there’s no time to think while you’re doing it. Then I come back, do another 20 minutes, rinse and repeat, and at the end of about 2 hours (taking into account the breaks for thought) I have 1,500 words or more. I’ve been doing it for three days and have now added 4,500 words to the 1,600 I did on Monday and Tuesday.
I was so impressed that I paid $10 and got the desktop version, where you can set the grace period more flexibly using a slider. So I’m hoping that henceforth I’ll be able to be more productive, at least during those periods where I manage to be productive at all.
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I’m also watching Foyle’s War for research, though I’m not sure what it’s research for!
22. Tell us about one scene between your characters that you’ve never written or told anyone about before! Serious or not.
If I haven’t written it, and I don’t intend to write it, is it really a scene at all? I mean, yes, there was the one where Farrant survived and he, John and Alfie became a threesome, while Lady Lisburn had an affair with her stableboy. But that was never really going to happen.
I decided that I would like to try the first book of the Dresden files, but I have no more shelf space, and I have my new ereader, so I thought I would get it in ebook format. Bloody hell! They really do do everything in their power to stop you from reading your ebooks once you have them, don’t they? The e bookshops in the US don’t sell to the UK. Once I’d found it in Waterstones UK, they force you to download some kind of Adobe software to enable you to read it. Do I look like I have 13 MB of computer space going spare? Well I don’t! And then, even if you cave in and have this unwanted software, you then have to register it with Adobe before they’ll allow you to take your ebook off your computer and put it on your e-reader.
Do I want to register my computer with Adobe? No I don’t. Who knows what they will do, once they’ve got me? Put DRM on the rest of my ebooks? Prevent me from using the rest of my library unless that too is registered with them?
Call me paranoid, but I don’t care to find out. So I have refused to register – which means that I can only read the ebook on my computer. There’s no way I’m sitting at my computer to read a book – that’s why I bought an ereader in the first place. So I’ve uninstalled the unwanted Adobe Lit thingy, and have spent £6 on an ebook I have no way of reading.
I’ve never been tempted to get a pirate copy of any book I could get on MBAM or one of the other romance etailers, because there you just pay the money, download the file, and it’s yours to put on your laptop or your e-reader as you like. Simple – it’s like buying the book and receiving it. But this rights management palaver that says I can grudgingly download the book but I’m not allowed to read it without signing over my firstborn first. Fuck that. I didn’t want to read it that badly anyway.
21. Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?
I’ve written characters who are children (Oswy in the Witch’s Boy who is an 11 year old protagonist), and I’ve written my fanfiction characters as children. I’ve written Farrant running alongside his son’s pony, and Elizabeth Sheldrake with her baby, but they were more or less cameo scenes. So I would say that I write children but I tend not to write families.
I’ve been told that I write children well. I write them in the same way I would write any character – as people with their own set of interests and their own personality, although less experience of life and more naivety than an adult.
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I was amazed and rather chuffed to get a Google Alert this week notifying me that Shining in the Sun is available for pre-order here: Books on Board It certainly makes it feel a lot closer 🙂
20. What are your favorite character interactions to write?
This one’s fairly easy. I’ve often said that my short stories consist entirely of putting two characters into a room and having them talk. I like to take characters who have very different points of view, who possibly dislike each other and have contempt for everything the other represents – and then put them in a room and have them talk themselves to a point of mutual respect. They don’t have to end up agreeing. I don’t even mind if they come out of the room still sure that they have to kill each other – they just have to come to understand that their opponent makes sense and is not contemptible after all.
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Good news this week (for me) is that I am writing again. Only about 800 words a day, but that’s better than nothing. I’ve got a little timer which I’ve put on the computer and I set it at 20 minutes and then just write until the alarm goes off. Three twenty minute sessions with breaks in between gives me approximately 800 words. Clearly I just need to start earlier and get a fourth session in to break the 1000 word a day barrier.
Better news (for me) is that I want to write romance again. Of course this may be my brain trying another new way of sabotaging Under the Hill (wanting to write romance now that UtH isn’t a romance any more.) But it’s nice to have what feels to me like an essential part of my character restored. I’ve just got to get the output back up to reasonable standards to have any chance of meeting this year’s goal of one novel and a novella. I can’t believe it’s nearly May already!
I’ve missed two days of meme this time, so here’s a new record – three at once 🙂
17. Favorite protagonist and why!
That’s too hard. I love them all for different reasons. I like Sulien and John Cavendish because their combination of emotional sensitivity and barely leashed violence makes them explosive to write – lots of pressure under there to keep the energy levels up. But they’re not comfortable or joyous to write the way someone like Darren or Garnet was. And Sulien would come way down my list of “people I would like to meet if they were actually real.”
18. Favorite antagonist and why!
Similar problem – I can’t choose. I don’t generally go in for big moustache-twirly villains. Even my villain who wanted to take over the world was motivated by petty reasons. So I can’t really say that I like any of them.
19. Favorite minor that decided to shove himself into the spotlight and why!
This is a toss up between Gunnar in The Witch’s Boy, who I introduced into the story on the principle that if you don’t know what happens next, have a man with a gun turn up. (In fact it was a party of Holmr knights pursuing a hapless peasant – but the same principle.) He never got exactly major as a character, but he did turn out to be the key to how I could bring the two subplots of the book together at the end.
And Flynn in Under the Hill, who was originally just going to be the much regretted dead boyfriend of 15 years ago. Then he turned out to be alive, developed an entire plotline of his own and is now one of the protagonists. I still don’t even know his surname!
I know I’m not the only Christian who has ever shaken their heads over the Fred Phelpses of this world, read some of the pronouncements of some of the Christian personalities and politicians in the USA and thought to themselves “that’s not what my faith is about at all! What happened to ‘God is Love’? Where are the Christians who don’t want to condemn and hurt people? When are they going to stand up against this tide of hatred and be heard?”
Well, this Pentecost (May 23rd) we’re going to try and do that. To that end, Jules Jones and Zeborah have started up the Bearing_Witness communities on Dreamwidth and Livejournal. We’re calling for fellow liberal Christians to come along and join up and make the commitment to do one blog post aimed not at converting non-Christians, but at explaining to our fellow (less liberal) Christians why things like gay rights, women’s rights, universal healthcare etc are things we ought to be calling for, in obedience to Christ’s command to do God’s will in the world.
My contribution so far has just been icons, but I’m hoping I will find something to say when it comes to it. In the mean time, if you fancy icons, there are some here.
