Category: NaNoWriMo


Raincheck… and countdown to 1st Dec…

Filed under: Cover artists, General musings...., NaNoWriMo, New releases by J. A. Clement — 4 Comments
November 23, 2018

Hiya peeps;

a bit overdue with a blog again, but that’s because I have been;
a) busy
b) laid out on the sofa because I put my back out again.

Work of course is always mad and unforgiving, but happily right now I am very busy with writing. I am working on book 3 of the Sprig of Holly series, which is due to release next week on 1 December.

I am really pleased with the way this story has gone, and I’m busy lining up ARC reviews for it at the moment so if you would like to review it and can commit to leaving a review on 1 December or within a couple of days of that, bring me a comment below and I will add you to the list!

In addition to that, Holly 4 has gone through its first draft and is going into editing. I say it’s going into editing, but that is a little imprecise as technically at the moment I am in contact with the talented Wes Souza to get the next cover done.

Watch this space for details of the reveal!

Holly 4 is going live to preorder, hopefully in time for the release of Holly 3. The story is getting a little bit more twisty and complicated as things start going wrong in the mountains, so I am hopeful that you will enjoy the ride as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

And then there’s Holly 5… Phew! I can hardly wait to introduce you to the next set of characters! I can hardly wait to see Wes’s cover, come to that, but I can’t say much about it because spoilers… 🙂

In any case, it’s always heartening to have a new release, even if it’s only a short story – and the fact that the rest of the Holly series is already written out in at least initial draft is very pleasing.
Working on a little bit of marketing for the release but not huge amounts just yet as with three short stories in a line it’s not really going to get much traction until we have the whole series up. That’s also nice because it takes the pressure off me a little bit. Sadly it also means I’m writing the series at a bit of a loss, but that’s the way of it. Fingers crossed, when the end of it comes out it might start selling a bit and pay for itself.

In addition I am starting to plan out the two Dragon series. I am thinking of starting with the series – currently a trilogy – which will be known as “A Blaze of Dragons”, a group noun for dragons from a 15th century manuscript. Isn’t it cool? I love that.

In any case, I have three of the covers already lined up due to the small but not inconsiderable glitch in cover buying mentioned in earlier blogs, so I have the skeleton of a plan in place and I’m busily fleshing out the bones of it. This is the second half of my NaNoWriMo project, but in all honesty I am not bothered if I don’t make the 50,000 words this year, as a significant chunk of it was spent finishing off Holly 6 (or maybe 7, depends on how the editing pans out) and so it has done what I needed it to. I am still doing chunk of words every day just because I like adding it to the graph, but if I flag before the 30th, I’m quite chilled with what I’ve achieved already.

Looking at my back posts, it strikes me that I have now been dictating for nearly 6 months. Certainly it got a lot easier when I bought the Dragon software (and a halfway decent headset) but it’s an interestingly different way of writing.

For a start, you really do need to plan things, and I have always been a bit of a discovery writer. At first I found it difficult, but actually as time goes on, I find myself still doing the discovery writing but just in smaller chunks – inside the scene rather than plot stuff.

I think verbalising the plot instead of manually typing it is starting to come a little bit easier, and certainly while my back has been bad I have had quite a productive time because whilst lying on the settee I can simply put the headset on and dictate. It makes me feel like Barbara Cartland, only a Barbara Cartland who detests pink, doesn’t write steamy romance, isn’t 300 years old and uses far less ellipses – or at least has far less left in after the final edit! Oh, and also isn’t a millionaire. So almost exactly not like Barbara Cartland…

But it’s quite comforting because although I’d never realised that writing was quite an intense activity, dictating seems to come far more easily. The planning is dull, but the actual dictation session is getting easier every time, and hopefully the editing will become easier as my brain gets up to speed.

Certainly the dictating is getting faster which I put down to a joint effort between my brain getting used to it, and the dictation program software learning more about my accent and the way I use words. It still comes up with nonsense sometimes, and makes me laugh, but usually if it doesn’t get the right word first time, it’s on the list of suggestions.

It’s pretty impressive stuff, and I find myself wondering if in 20 years time we’ll look back on keyboards like we do now on typewriters and faxes – the sort of things where, if somebody’s still using them, it’s a bit of a surprise.

I’m starting to feel as if my writing process is becoming a bit more streamlined. My first book took 10 years to write, and subsequent books have been two or three years in the processing. This is partly because I keep writing other books but then having to cut bits out that turning to other books which is frankly a silly idea, so pinning them down and planning them out seems to keep that process under control a little bit. We shall see.

In any case, as I progress through the Dragon books I hope to ultimately end up back at On Dark Shores in such a way that I can edit it into a sensible order and reissue it along with book 3 and indeed book -1. Because I did so well in the order of writing those books…

I’m also working on editing Song down so that I can change it to its new title sooner rather than later, though the new cover won’t be ready till well into the New Year. (this one is being done by a new designer, and one I haven’t worked with before, so it’s all a bit of an unknown quantity).

So it’s all progress, albeit in tiny steps.

And as part of the Holly 3 release I will probably do some kind of giveaway with paperbacks of Scarred Artisan, if only because they are so cute and will make great stocking fillers so the timing is good to give some away!

There isn’t really much more to add today, so will stop blathering and get on with my next chunk of dictating. Just wanted to check back in and give you the latest goss!

In the meantime, have a great weekend, and Happy Thanksgiving (and indeed Joyous Wolfenoot!) for those who celebrate.
All the best;
JAC.

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Guest Post – Julia Lee Dean

Filed under: Cyberfriends, eBooks & Publishing, Guest Blogs, NaNoWriMo, On Dark Shores by J. A. Clement — 5 Comments
November 27, 2016

Hi all: 

Once again the weekend beckons, and this week is the last of #NaNoWriMo.This year, I am chuffed to say, I have written my 50k words already, rah! Trying to keep the momentum up till the end of the month but I am getting pretty tired. 

 Fox in the Snare is now at about 50k words and it’s about to all get busy in the Valley again, though I am sad as one of my characters who was supposed to have a happy ending has messed up and now is having a premature one instead. Sadly, it makes a lot more sense to the general narrative arc this way, but there is a certain amount of snivelling into the keyboard happening in his scenes. Damned awkward characters! I liked this one too. But sometimes there is an inexorable pull in a certain direction and if you resist it, it shows, and jolts the reader out of the moment. Besides, usually when there is that tidal movement going on, it’s a kind of balanced evolution towards a goal which will ultimately work better than anything I had in mind. Which is all quite irritating (don’t look at me, I just hold the pen!) (all right, tap the keyboard!). 

So come the end of November I will drop tools on Fox and get on with the Christmas shorts which are in the works. The first is The Locket, which is a short story from the world of On Dark Shores, but set some twenty years before that story, when Nereia was a child living in luxury with her parents. The second is The Holly & the Ivy, which is a standalone sequel to A Sprig of Holly. Hoping to have Wesley Souza do another of his beautiful covers for that one! 

And in the meantime, Christmas Lites 6 is due out any minute, and there will be a cover reveal for that due with the breakdown of how the picture was made again (because I love that bit of the process best). Wesley has done another fabulous job on there, so I can’t wait to show it to you!

So, busy busy, eh?

In the meantime Flight from Shantar is currently pinned under the scalpel of editor #1, fellow novelist and talented playwright Julia Lee Dean. I asked her to tell us a little bit about what she’s up to at the minute (though not too much about all the bacon sarnies she’s had to cut out of the book… again…!)

=*=*=*= 


Julia Lee Dean

writer – editor – teacher

A quick glance at the kitchen clock tells me it is nearly 12:40pm, German time. I am at home, in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn and, so far it’s been a good day. I was awake at 6am this morning which was useful because it means I did my 15 pages of editing for J.A Clement before I launched into my main task of the day; 20 university exam papers to mark. You see, I am not only a novelist and editor, since my move to Germany in 2014 I have been working as an English teacher in and around Bonn. The trick with exam marking is rather similar to that of proof-editing; don’t try and do it all at once. A little bit at a time guarantees a closer attention to detail and avoids tunnel-vision. I must admit, exam marking isn’t my favourite thing but it does allow me to work from home which means I can sit, as I am now, with curlers in my hair and look forward to a meal that I have not been carrying in my bag since before dawn.

However, while the exams I mark are only mildly annotated, the novel I am editing is bristling with comments; observations about descriptions and characters designed to give the author something to think about with a view to development or amendment rather than direct instructions (I can only suggest, I cannot be not the authority on someone else’s novel). Occasionally I edit the text itself; typos of course and grammar when I think another tense works better. Since setting up shop as an English-language teacher, I seem to have become rather more sensitive to grammar. Again, it’s all using the “this is my opinion, feel free to ignore” approach that J. A. Clement and I agreed when we were at university, editing each other’s poems. Online editing (tracked changes) makes that so much easier! As I write that, I am rather aware that when I had my novel edited, I chose hardcopy and really loved it. I prefer to work from hardcopy but I must admit that online is much more environmentally friendly.

I have just taken up my current novel after rather a long break. Well, not a break exactly, more a prolonged period of not-getting-very-much done. Over the last two years, I have worked very hard to establish myself as an English teacher and make enough money to be able to pay rent without sacrificing my social life. So far so good. However, my own novel writing has suffered quite a bit. It’s just taken off again over the last few weeks – I do find NaNoWriMo a helpful motivator – but it’s still caught in between the need for gainful employment and the rather demanding (three times a week with homework each time!) German course I finally managed to squeeze into my schedule in August this year. Still, I must admit I do consider myself pretty lucky. Nowadays I enter an office only to teach English and, considering how much I used to hate being in an office, this is an incredible boon.

I am, however, very excited about my new novel. It is the sequel to my first novel, And I Shall Be Healed. That book followed the experiences of a young Army Chaplain on the Western Front during the First World War. The sequel, Lost & Won picks up the story five years later and takes Leo and his wife through the 1920s and 1930s, an era of incredible – and sometimes harrowing – change. Up until a few weeks ago, my writing was sporadic to say the least. However, joining NaNoWriMo gave me the impetus to finally type up the novel so far (I write longhand in the first instance) and, since then, the new material has been flowing fairly steadily from my pen. I must admit I do find the research task ahead a little daunting but right now I’m just enjoying feeling my way around my characters. Some already familiar but growing older and adapting to experience, and others quite new. I do not consider myself to suffer from writers’ block. When the words won’t come I go and do something else, grateful for what I know will be a temporary release. So far this year I have taken three exams in music theory, set up The Bonn Writers’ Club to give myself and others pure, unadulterated time to write (we meet in a café once – two times a month and just work on whatever we’re working on) and I even managed to acquire a certificate in Foundation Journalism from the NCTJ so, hopefully, I will be able to ease off some of the teaching in favour of more editing and writing work.

If the writing goes on at the current rate, I shall have a good bit done by Christmas. For those who are looking for an editor, I am taking bookings from January 2017. An average novel (c 86k words) should take a month at most. Articles and academic stuff is usually a lot quicker. If you’re interested and want more information, have a look at my website. On the “Novelist” you’ll be able to have a look at the reviews my novel attracted and, if there’s anything else you want to know, just contact me through the site or at julialeedean@gmail.com

For now, keep writing. If the writing’s not happening, read something!

Julia 

=*=*=*= 
Thanks for that, Julia.

Having read her first book I Shall Be Healed, I gave copies to my Mum, Dad and mother-in-law, all of whom loved it (and in my Dad’s case you have to bear in mind that he didn’t read much). It is a quietly melancholic book, very understated and consequently very effective – if you like the slow development of characters, I can heartily recommend it.

She has edited all of my stories (I think all?) and I can tell you she’s pretty easy to work with. If you’re after a thoughtful and perceptive editor who suggests rather than demands, look no further! Moreover, she has a great grasp of characters and plot holes – certainly she’s saved me from a couple of howlers (and we’re even still on speaking terms…) Heheheheh.

So that’s it for me this week, peeps. Hoping to bring you a cover reveal next week, so watch this space. If you’re still working on Wrimo, keep at it! You’re on the home stretch now. If you need harassment of an encouraging nature, add me and I will cheer you on from the sidelines… 

In the meantime, don’t forget there’s still time to get your freebie copies of The Last Dragon and The Scarred Artisan from Instafreebie – and watch this space as there may be an amusing Christmas short going up there too, under the name of Trial by Christmas Pudding, no less. A comic historical cowboy romance? Don’t mind if I do….

Have a good weekend, all, and catch you on the upside.

Take care:

JAC

 

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NaNoWriMo encore….

Filed under: NaNoWriMo, New releases, Writing by J. A. Clement — 5 Comments
November 6, 2016

Right now I am sitting on the floor next to a table under which my dog is hiding from the fireworks, poor lad. He will settle and go to sleep if I’m here but if not he gets really anxious and goes on patrol. In fact, he far prefers it if OH and I are in the same room (collie herding instincts kicking in, we think) but he’ll settle for me sitting on the floor next to him, and I don’t mind, as he’s a love. I am, however, going to have to keep this short, as otherwise my legs will go to sleep and I’ll fall over when i do have to get up. Besides which, jerk chicken for tea (ALL THE NOMS!).

Anyhow. This year, as usual, I am hoping to take part in NaNoWriMo. My page, if you’re doing it, is here.The past three years being what they are, it didn’t go specially well, but so far this year I did manage to get far enough ahead to spend a weekend dog-wrangling without falling too far behind.

Every year there is a great discussion over whether it’s worth doing Wrimo or not, and I think it’s very much dependent on how you work. Last three years I’ve been too burnt out to relish the challenge, but mostly it appeals to my geekly side – I want to see that barchart advancing in a steady manner, dammit! And as always, even though what you get down is not going to be top quality, what first draft ever is? For me, it’s a good way to have a specific goal, and get down a chunk of words that I otherwise would not have done.

The other side of it, of course, is that everyone in my family knows that in November you’ll get no sense out of me at all because I’m doing Wrimo, so I can get away with prioritising my writing then in a way that doesn’t happen the rest of the year, because it’s a specific, measured challenge in a specific, limited amount of time. So though I try to set aside a chunk of time every day for writing that I can, the only time other considerations don’t really present themselves to impinge on that is during Wrimo. Very useful.

The novel I’m NaNoing is the third in the new series and as you see, it’s currently about 15k words. Stuff is getting sticky for the heroine, and back at the ranch (so to speak) it’s all going to kick off for the hero too, so exciting times…!

Meanwhile back IRL, I am working through edits on the sequel to Sprig of Holly, which will be called The Holly and the Ivy. I hope to have a cover done for it by Wesley Souza, the incredibly talented guy who did the cover for Sprig, which I totally love! So watch out for that, hopefully before Christmas (fingers crossed the edits are not too involved!)

And in the meantime, we are working on this year’s Christmas Lites — the anthology a pile of us do every year to raise funds for victims of domestic violence. All monies go straight into the coffers of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and if possible I might try to get some of the other authors to come and guest in the run up to that. So, y’know, busy busy.

But for now, enough! the fireworks have quietened, the dog has relaxed, I have severe pins and needles in my legs, and it’s time to put the oven on for my current favourite food ever. Then tea, a last circuit with the Luxury Lurcher, and an early night with the laptop to try and do a bit of catch-up on the NaNo count!

It’s all good…

Have an excellent week, peeps, and will catch you the other side…

JAC.

 

 

 

 

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