New Toy

I have a new toy for the New Year to help my writing endeavours along. I should have got one ages ago and I have no idea why I didn't. Anyway, there it is, shiny and untarnished, stuck on the inside door of my computer cabinet. I'm a compulsive list maker and the top of my computer cabinet is covered in both old and new lists that I haven't looked at again since I made them! I write writing agendas each week so I know where I'm headed with my writing and what I want to achieve over the week. Now it all sounds rather organised and impressive until you realise that despite my best intentions when I write them, I hardly ever follow them!

That's why I took the drastic step of purchasing my new toy. It's one of those wipe clean white boards.There was one large and two small boards in a pack for £3 from Staples. They are for kids really, but when I saw just how much the bigger, more sturdier ones were I almost had an attack of the vapours!  I figured I could write my lists on there and wipe each item on the agenda off as I've achieved them, rather than accumulate endless paper lists. It might even save on trees too. If you haven't got one then maybe it might be a good idea to have one. I know of writers who use them to plan out their novels and timelines etc. If it works for them, it might work for you and me too! I'm keen to try anything that might make my writing life easier.

All I've got to do now is buy a whiteboard pen (I gave the one that came in the pack to my dad for his white board!)

Now I've taken the Christmas tree and decorations down, my next plan of attack is to get rid of the hundreds of magazines I have (hurrah, my husband shouts!) My theory is that if I de-clutter my work space I'll de-clutter my brain and write better. Plus I'll be able to find things more easily and stop wasting valuable writing time searching for things.

Happy New Year and I hope your writing dreams come true in 2011

Julie xx

I've Got a Feeling.

My fingers are tingling and my imagination is running wild and no, it's not due to too much chocolate or alcohol over the festive period. I can feel a writing frenzy coming on. You know that feeling when you think you might burst (not through troffing one, or three, mince pies too many) if you don't get something down on paper in the next five minutes? Well that's the feeling I have right now. I have ideas for short stories running riot in my head. I've just got to try and catch them, pin them down and tease out some sort of usable story out of them.

 I think the 'dead space' between Christmas and New Year provides the ideal opportunity to get writing ideas down on paper and start working them into a plan. I used to just start writing short stories as soon as I got the idea but I found, in many cases, I petered out halfway through as I didn't know where the story was going and I couldn't figure out a good ending. Maybe this meant that the idea wasn't strong enough to carry a story in the first place. This is were I think I have been going wrong. So this time I'm going to sit down with all of my ideas and plan the stories out. Some writers don't plan as they feel it ruins the spontaneity and surprise in writing. Part of me still agrees with this, that if you know where you are going my fear is that I will become bored with it and not want to complete the story. But, on the other hand, I think that knowing where you are going with a short story from the start helps you to structure the story better and can save a lot of wasted time when you haven't planned but have dived straight in without your rubber ring and find yourself drowning half way through, with no story at the end of it.

I'll let you know how I get on!
Happy writing.

Julie xx

All I Want For Christmas .......

........ is more time and more discipline to write publishable short stories, articles and novels. I'd quite like the ability to come up with good ideas for short stories that have a beginning, middle and end, with fully rounded and believable characters,  conflict and actually pan out as a story and not a series of events strung together. I often have a good beginning to a story but it peters out in the middle and either I can't think of an ending or the ending I do come up with isn't satisfactory and I find that magic 'something' that makes a story publishable just isn't there! So if I could just get all the essential elements of a short story working together I would be happy. I've done it before and I know I can do it again  -  I just wish I could do it more often!

Oh, yes, and I have been a very, very,very,very good girl this year, Santa, honest I have!

So, fellow bloggers, what's on your wish list for 2011?

Friendship, bugs and not writing

We Wrekin Writers had a wonderful Christmas meeting followed by a wonderful Christmas lunch at the Buckatree hotel last Saturday. It was so lovely to be amongst writerly friends and spend more time together than we usually do. I cannot stress how important this writing group has been to my writing success. If I didn't have them nagging, I mean egging me on all the time I wouldn't have achieved half of what I have. I have a lot to thank them for.

 It wasn't until that meeting that I realised just how far I had come. Sue, our wonderful Chairman pulled me aside and said that for a minute, during that meeting, she wondered who it was sitting in my chair when, after an excellent writing exercise set by fellow Wrekin Writer, publicity officer, short story judge and soon to be Chairman (we hope) Darren Bailey, he spied that I'd finished writing and asked me to share my writing with the group. Now, normally, this would have sent me into a fluster as I hate reading out loud in front of people. as Sue knows. But, on this occasion, I didn't give it a second  thought and was happy to oblige. It's amazing how your writing and reading to an audience confidence can increase in the space of a year. If you have access to a writing group then it will do you and your writing  the world of good to join them. You could also bring something to the group that they appreciate too. A win - win situation.

Unfortunately, December hasn't been kind to me health wise: first I hurt my back and then I had two bouts of flu for good measure, the most recent bout was just this last week that I'm still struggling to shrug off, so I haven't managed to do any writing or anything else productive for that matter.

One thing that I did manage to do during my enforced rest was to listen to our local radio station Radio Shropshire. I hadn't listened to it for years. It was quite entertaining  -  well through my flu addled ears it was anyway. I think my husband put it on rather like you might for a pet dog or cat for company while you were out at work. It's also a great source of information and inspiration for writers! Song titles, pet phrases/catch phrases the presenters used, local history/local interest stories, it was all in there. Though I did think at one point that they were trying to bore the germs out of me with some of the songs they played. It must have worked as I managed to get out of bed for an hour on Tuesday and actually ventured downstairs (one small step and all that.) Believe me, if you had seen me on Sunday you would know how much of a big achievement that step was for me.

So, my writing advice of the week is to tune into a radio station you wouldn't normally listen to and actually listen to it: take notes on the style of presentation, what news items they cover, the music they play, the general interest pieces they do, advertisements, etc. It occurred to me, in my flu filled  stupor, that radio stations are like big audio magazines, so you could get a fair few writing ideas from them.

Before I go, has anyone got any suggestions as to how I can stave off the germs and bolster my immune system (now there's an article in there somewhere!)

Happy Writing!

Julie (Atishoo).

Get Ready

No, I don't mean get ready for Xmas. Although, if you celebrate it, it might be a good idea to get yourself organised as you only have about ten days before the big day (is that the rumble of feet stampeding to the shops I hear?) I am referring to getting ready for your 2011 writing year. You may have had a fantastic writing year in 2010. You might have had a mediocre writing year, or a downright lousy writing year. Put all that behind you now: look at it, smile, shout or cry at it, but then file it away. If it's been a bad writing year, be comforted that it's over now and you never have to look at it, or go through it again. Next year is going to be better. In fact, it's going to be our best writing year yet.

How do I know this? Because I know that you and I are going to be sitting down over the next couple of weeks and writing a plan of action. We know where we've been with our writing and now we are going to plan our writing journey through 2011 so we have a clear idea of where we are going. We might not end up at our ideal destination and we might take a few detours along the way, but we are going to try our best to stay on track and get further than we've ever got before with our writing.

At this time of year I always seem to end up in a bit of a writing doldrum. I'm not keen to send anything out for fear it will get lost in the Christmas post and I''m concerned that some editors don't want to know until the New Year! The weather's been horrible. I love the snow  -  correction  -  I love a BIT of snow, but I can't stand the freezing temps we've had or the ice. Everything seems to slow down at this time of year, not less the traffic on the roads and, to a certain extent, outlets for our writing work. But, the only thing I know that can lift these doldrums (apart from mulled wine, mince pies, Xmas pudding, winter sun and a bit of Zumba) is to write a plan of action for my writing for the coming year and actually sit down and start writing something to send out in the New Year. That way, this 'down time' won't be wasted when things start to pick up again in the New Year.

How does everyone else feel about their writing situation at this time of year? Are you in the doldrums? If you are, how do you plan to drag yourself out of them? Have you just admitted defeat and just going with the flow until January?  Or are you eagerly planning and writing in preparation for 2011? How are you going to get what you want from your writing next year? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Julie xx

How Do You Do It?

I've been thinking a lot about short stories recently. In between writing the 50,000 words of my NaNo novel I've been considering what it is that makes a great woman's mag short story. I pondered this for a bit and then decided that if I knew what it was, I'd be swimming in my own published short stories! Can you be taught and learn how to write a good woman's mag short story? Yes, I believe you can. I know I've read hundreds of short stories in a wide spectrum of the women's mags, read countless brilliant books on the subject,  and  been to a few short story writing work shops, listened to the very valuable advice on Womag's blog, and the blogs of all the wonderful woman's mag short story writers out there and I even did a creative writing course. But am I any closer to being able to define what an editor of a women's mag wants in their short stories? I have to admit that no, I'm probably not!

Okay, I know how to present my stories to the editors. I know how to structure them. I get the mechanics of the woman's mag short story  - the theory. But that's a world away from being able to identify that essence of what editors want. I've even had two of my short stories published in Australia and one soon to be published here in the UK, but I still can't tell you why those stories got published and the 40 odd others I've submitted didn't!

I've been guided by the women's mags own submission criteria and gleaned a lot from reading the stories that they do publish. Reading the stories in the women's mags offer writers a goldmine of information on the style, structure, length, and subject matter of the stories the editors choose. If you're clever you can use that information and give yourself an advantage over other writers who don't read the magazines before they submit their own stories.

It can be frustrating to write your heart out after reading the stories in the magazines, thinking that you've surely cracked it this time, and still get your short story rejected. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason sometimes. But the important thing to remember is that every writer goes through this. Every writer, no matter how much they've had published, still gets rejections. That knowledge had quite a profound effect on me as I thought it was just me that got rejections! But once I realised that they came with the territory and were nothing to get in a tizz over or - heaven forbid - stop me from writing.

So why do I still bother to submit my short stories? Because I enjoy writing the stories and I want to get more published. And the only sure fire way of achieving that that I know is to keep reading stories that have been published in your target magazines, keep writing your own stories and submitting them. It's a numbers game: the more short stories you write, the more you improve and the more you submit and, eventually, if you do the ground work and work hard, the more you will have published.

So that's one of the points in my writing plan for the rest of the year and into 2011: write more short stories and get more published. It's a slow process but one I've enjoyed so far. This writing lark is like a compulsion for me and I want to make sure I give myself the best chance I can, as I'm sure you all do too.  So read the stories in the magazines, learn from them and other writers, write lots of your own and send them out. That's how I do it!

Happy writing

Julie xx