Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

So, I did say there might be reviews. And here one is - Ta-dah!

This is a war story. And a torture story. Normally either of those two are firm no-no's for me. Combined, I would not touch them with a barge pole. Not even someone else’s barge pole.

 And yet. Code Name Verity was recommended by Maggie Stiefvater, and so on a whim  I got hold of a copy (yes, clearly I am that weak-minded and can be influenced to ditch my principles so easily). And I am so glad I did. Because, beyond the war and the torture, this is a story about friendship. Pure I'd-do-anything friendship.It's also a story of true grit and determination by girls, in a framework where to date, most accounts have been about men.  And smartly Wein doesn’t construct the female heroism to the detriment of the male characters, showing that it was a time where everyone could make the difference if they were brave enough to step up to the mark.

 I really don't want to say too much in fear of spoilers and depriving you of the joyous experience of being so well led by the writer. There came a moment where I recognised that I was firmly in Wein's control, and frankly I would have gone anywhere she took me. And that is a good sign for me. Followed by the desire to start it again as soon as I’d finished it. Those books don’t come along every day.

Not only did I love the book but it meant I was willing to read a second book about WW2, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which was just charming, and reignited my interest in reading Epistolary novels.

Who’d have thought? From book-shunning, suddenly it was Book-tag. That's two prizes in one.

Today’s Distraction Tool; constantly checking the window to see if my delivery has arrived, given they say they’ll be here somewhere between 8am and 6pm. How usefully precise...

My favourite tool.

Just wanted to write a shout-out for a writing tool that I find extremely useful, and that is 750words.com. For anyone who has tried Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way, then you’ll be aware of the concept of Morning Pages. Essentially it is writing three pages first thing in the morning, before you speak if possible, to get the fresh thoughts, musings or blockages out of your head  and onto the page. Personally Cameron’s course didn’t do it for me, but the Morning Pages did. What can I say, I am a pick-and-choose kind of girl...

750words.com is a space where you can do this, where your words get counted, saved and password protected. And because we are all kids at heart and like an incentive, you get Badges for the number of days you have written, the amount of words you have crafted, and a shed-load of other stats for those who have geeky tendencies, or like to procrastinate a little after their words.  They even give you a cinema rating. Seriously. I like to aim for a certification above a PG.

Now' I am not the person who gets up early to write my words, and most days I will already have done plenty of shouting before I even get near the computer, but I do my words every day. The site lets me clear thoughts that are clogging up my head, it gives me a private venue to rant, and it allows me space to trial ideas I am juggling about. It’s now a frame for my writing habit. And often the entries will start with being mundane dross, and by the end I can be in a state of free-flow writing; words that I’ll then copy over to my Work In Progress file and extend for the rest of my writing time. Give it a go, if you don’t already and if you don’t have a writing routine. See if the badges don’t get to you too.

(A word of warning;  Make sure you write the title properly. I missed out the “words” part of 750words.com once, and boy- that is a whole different website. Not one you’d want to access in an open office or with the kids about....)

Today’s Distraction Tool; the supermarket

Current competitions and critiques.

Two new Agent competitions have recently been posted.

 Madeleine Milburn is looking to represent a debut writer in the Crime/ Thriller/Psychological Suspense field here.

Over on writer Ruth Lauren Steven’s site, 30 winners can post a query letter and the first 500 words of their Picture Book, MG, YA or Adult (sorry, not the Erotica writers though) in July, for 10 agents to view. ( Just to digress a minute; I often see competitions where they state that Erotica writers can't take part. Given the current boom in "mummy porn" and the mahoosive sales of E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey, I'm wondering whether Erotica writers will soon be allowed to play with the other kids...?)

For those that aren’t looking for the competition, but instead would like to try for the prize that is feedback, then  Nicola Morgan is currently critiquing some query letters ahead of the launch of her new book  Dear Agent.  (For any aspiring  authors out there, who haven’t yet discovered Nicola’s blog, I can’t recommend it enough. Pure sense on a page.  Fact. )

For regular critiquing competitions - many of which include anonymous agents’ comments - there is also Miss Snark's First Victim, recommended to me by my Lovely Crit Partner and now a staple in my blogdiet.

For the űber-courageous there is also Query Shark. But that requires a brave heart and full armour - yup, right down to chainmail knickers . Should be safe enough to view from a distance though...

Today’s Distraction Tool;.children

Waiting for a Fling...

Sketching and writing. That is generally how I write; sketching scenes and conversations – reams of dialogue- until a point where I feel ready to fling myself with abandon into the actual first draft. But right now it isn’t happening. The flinging.

 I’m currently doing far more sketching than normal. Now that my last story, a YA contemporary romance is done, I seem to be finding the actual commitment to a new project difficult.

 Not that I haven’t got  ideas, currently I am sketching plots for no less than five stories, but I’m still waiting for one to surface as the front runner.

 Contestant One has the first thirty pages in rough draft and the outline plot, but I ground to a halt on it.  Contestant Two has an outline plot, and a pile of conversations scribbled in a note book. Three has an outline on the computer, and the idea of its form, which is the more unusual element. Then there is Four; a sequel, the second part of a trilogy that I wrote a while ago for a 9-12s. Do you start on a sequel when the first part is still hiding in a drawer? Perhaps not, but the plot is roughed, in another drawer somewhere. (Honestly, it isn’t as disorganised as it sounds.)

 Contestant Five, is still a sketchy idea, and it is screaming for a plotting spreadsheet. Yes, I know, a spreadsheet.  Mostly I plot onto a big sheet of clean A3 paper, with messy scribbles, ideally while sitting outside in the sunshine.  There isn’t a lot of that happening at the moment. Neither one nor the other. But the form just feels like it warrants a spreadsheet, or else I’m just letting this technology thrill go to my head.

So currently I am being a story-slut, and playing all of them at the same time. I’m taking the poly-amorous approach, and dating each every so often, usually in the 750words.com venue and then building files on them all.

And at some point, one file will have to be bigger than the rest, right? One has to come out on top, as the one I have most material on and the one that I should just sit down and focus on.

Or am I being that girl, and just waiting for something better to come along?

Today’s Distraction Tool; school permissions slips.

Here comes the science part....

If you follow Holly Black’s blog, you’ll know that she is embarking, with some fellow writers, on an experiment to see if she can up her daily word-count, a holy grail if ever there was one.  Prompted by Rachel Aaron’s (The Legend of Eli Monpress, Orbit Books) article How I went from writing 2000 words to 10000 words a day , they are looking to see if they can also stimulate an increase, based on recognising how you use your time, knowing what you are about to write and thirdly, being enthused about it. Rachel even has a diagram. Like in Science. I’m tickled when seeing a diagram in relation to writing in much the same way as Nigella gets when employing a diagram to show how to cut potatoes for the best roasties (Feast, P26, Nigella Lawson, Chatto & Windus. No, do not scoff. The proof in is the pudding, or in this instance, the potatoes). Nerdy. Yes indeed, but mmm so pleasing. As are the roasties.

I can definitely vouch for easier flow of words when you already have your scene sketched,  and I’d bet every writer knows that soulful joy as the words gush for a scene that they’ve been hankering to get onto the page, but I hadn’t thought to spread-sheet my productivity by hour yet. (Is that a new procrastination tool I see before me? Yes. Yes, I do believe it is...) I suspect I already know that my best writing time is during school hours, but that is by necessity as opposed to my nature. And I am not a pre-7am person. On any level.

 So I’ll be watching how their results shape up, and equally hoping that some of them go so far as to progress from diagrams to Graphs. Mmmmm.

Today’s Distraction Tool; Establishing word count spreadsheet.

TwitFest

  As mentioned, not only have I embarked on my blogging journey (I say this to make it sound like some a big romantic adventure, not "putting myself out there",) but I've also dipped my toe into the larger social media world by way of Twitter.  I'm an avid Facebook aversionist, primarily due to an ongoing conflict between Facebook and my face. To date, there are very few cameras that seem to able to understand it -my face, that is. In just about all photos of me I am gurning in some way.( Hence the lack of picture up there in the corner.)  But Twitter doesn't seem to require an enormous and ever-increasing gallery of Gurning Me, plus I do love good text banter, so it seemed a good fit.

 Being quite a technophobe, I was bricking it, and successfully put off taking the plunge for ages, but Thursday night I might have had a glass of something and finally went for it. In addition, I was armed, having bought a copy of Nicola Morgan’s e-book Tweet Right. (What? You wouldn’t visit a foreign country without a guide book, would you? This is no different...)

So I had my instructions of How to... Twitter, and honestly I didn’t know what I had been worrying about. Maybe that was the wine.

And as the book had made it such a painless start, I sent Nicola a Thank You tweet on Friday, and then pottered off on the school run. On my return I honestly thought I’d broken Cyberspace, or Twitter at the very least. Myemail Inbox, was full of Twitter messages.  Fully expecting to be expelled on my first day, I saw that they were all Follow notifications, stemming from Nicola asking her followers to make me welcome. And what a welcome it was! I had over twenty followers within the hour.

 Admittedly, the Follow-bomb sent me into a flat-spin, as I endeavoured to thank them all personally, no doubt clogging up everyone’s Timeline, and various further acts of muppetry followed. (Apologies to @nicolamoran, whoever and wherever you are – I have fat fingers and was overexcited. Apologies to everyone else, as I’m not sure how to fix my gaffs yet. You don’t seem to be able to retract erroneous tweets...)

But here is the thing; nobody seemed to mind, or if they did they didn’t make a big deal of it. And having spent yesterday  lying in a darkened room, sticking with my original plan of Lurking and Learning, I have calmed down, and can take stock of the lovely bunch of people that Twitter can bring together.  The followers I now have -and honestly I thought it would take me a veeeery long time to get to over thirty- is a fabulously eclectic mix of people – many of them writers, but not exclusively -  who are welcoming, accommodating and supportive. How lovely is that?

As for muppetry, just as Today’s news is Tomorrow’s chip-paper, I’m choosing to believe that gaffs get buried in Timelines even quicker. Plus as one new friend tweeted – “it is supposed to be fun...No-one dies.” And hurrah for that.

And the bonus surprise? Twitter brought visitors here too – visitors who left comments! See that? That’s media synergy in action, right there. Not bad for a newbie’s first day.

Today’s Distraction Tools; Star Wars Lego, Father’s Day’s duties.

Yes, minor miracles can still happen in this day and age...

  Finally I have conceded defeat in my resistance to the Modern Age, and have given up my Amish stance toward technology and social media. As of last night I have joined both Blogger and Twitter. (Don’t get too excited - Facebook is still not happening. A girl has limits.)

 Yes, I know, I am at least half a century behind every single other person I have ever known, but here I am. Please curb your urge to poke your fingers at me and say “I told you so. It was only a matter of time. Resistance is futile.” Trust me, it will make you look worse than it does me. Ignorance can be overcome. Smugness, not so much...

 So to an audience of... oh, that would be None, I will now henceforth merrily ramble and rant, rather than spend my time on the housework- a task already sidelined by my writing.

 Which now that I mention it, sounds like a decent trade.

Anyone else up for shirking, procrastinating and general distraction?