Another post on Mslexia

If you're interested in reading about the way my mother and I come up with ways to be funny on our blog, Hey Ma, I'm Home, click over  to Mslexia's site and read on.​

Mslexia Interview

My mother and I have been interviewing each other about our process of writing our daily blog together.​

In this installment, we discuss how we settle on subject matter.​ Click here if you'd care to read.

This was originally posted on 4 March, but I've been busy working on a book proposal (with my mother) and have only just now had time to re-post it.​

Guest blogging on Mslexia

I mentioned in an earlier post that my mother, Laurie, and I are guest-blogging on Mslexia's site for the next three months.​

We'll be interviewing each other about the processes we go through writing our blog, Hey Ma, I'm Home.​

The first interview is up today, and it focuses on how our blog came to be. If you'd like to read it, click here. ​

Interviewed on CBC Radio Calgary

Last night, as I was making dinner, I got an email from the Homestretch radio programme in Calgary. They wanted to interview me about the essay that was published in The Globe & Mail. Who could say no?

You can listen to it here.

Advice for the stay-at-home adult child

Today, an essay I've written has been published in The Globe and Mail.

You can read it here.

Guest-blogging

Not everything I write is fiction. 

After I finished my PhD, I was dead broke and unemployed. While I figured things out and looked (desperately) for work, I went home to live with my mother. I'd planned on staying the summer, but it took me a year and a half to get back on my feet.

While I languished on her couch, she and I started writing a blog together, called Hey Ma, I'm Home. 

I'm very pleased to announce that we'll be guest-blogging on Mslexia.co.uk from February. We're interviewing each other on what it's like to write a blog together, the challenges we face and how we keep doing it, even though I finally moved out.

I'll post a link to our first post once it's up, so stay tuned...

First Draft – done

After a massive great push over the Diamond Jubilee weekend where I literally locked myself in the flat for four days and wrote nearly 70 pages, I have finished a first draft.

It’s long and needs trimming and I can see where themes haven’t been developed as well or as fully as they could be, but it’s something to work with.

The characters come across well, but there is still much work to be done. But the bones of it are there, the skeleton. There are good lines and less good lines, long conversations and short as well as unnecessary ones.

But the important thing is that the hardest part is done: the first draft.

Now, a bit of a rest, some distance. Start editing in August.

For now, a bit of research, a bit of consideration, and a much needed break.

Chapters vs Scenes

A strange thing has been happening as I work on Heather and Robin. I normally write fairly short scenes, so that the end effect is that the novel is storyboarded. But with this book, the scenes are more like chapters.

And instead of having constant dialogue between characters, this time it feels like there’s more of the inner monologues, more thinky bits as I am want to call them.

It’s perhaps turning out to be a slower paced book this one. Though, as I’m not yet finished, I can’t say for sure. It’s nice though for the form to inflict itself on the work as opposed to the other way round. Maybe this is the way the story wants to be told. Possibly though, I think the pace will speed up once Robin starts stalking Heather properly.

Which will be nice for him – he’ll be able to start taking pictures. Right now he’s frustrated, stuck for inspiration and his dating life isn’t going well either. But once he meets Heather, I think they’ll have a nice effect on one another.

The other thing I was wondering this past week was if I might be writing a sort of love story. Not a romcom type thing, but something more true to life. Whereby two people just click with one another, regardless of how different they may be.

Only time and a finished draft will tell.

Time and more of it please

I knew getting a fulltime job would have drawbacks, one of them is of course, less time to write. But I didn’t realise how much less time.

Two hours or possibly three of an evening isn’t enough. I leave my imaginary friends on the street corner well away from my office. They wait there for me. I pick them up on my way home every night. They wait there, rain or shine, until after five in the evening. Patiently or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what they get up to in the day anymore.

And I miss them when I’m at work.

But they’re here now, sitting here on the bed next to me.

And so, to work. Real work. Important work. Work that isn’t dull, not subject to approvals, and above all, work that is not boring.

And so, at long last, to work.

Conflict

As I was working the other day, I ran out of steam. I thought perhaps a rest might be a good idea. Took two weeks away from the book only to find that actually, a rest wasn’t the problem.

Not enough conflict was holding me back.

There are so many things to keep track of in a novel when you’re building it that it’s hard to remember to ensure the characters hardly ever get what they want. So now I’m going back in and doing a little surgery, putting in a bit more conflict. Which is also helping me feel closer to the characters.

To work, to work.