Cover lesson

Have learned not to be precipitous in announcing the cover of my short story anthology. That picture is not available except with some complicated restrictions and at a high price. I had a back-up so we are going with that, and doing the poetry book cover and a new cover for A New Era For Manny Youngman at the same time because we can get a better price from the picture suppliers. 
Meanwhile the new novel is taking shape quickly. I have the broad outline and just need to fill in some detail before I start writing the first draft.

New novel starting to take shape

 I've started on a new novel, provisional title Searching or The Search. The central theme is a man looking for a soul-mate and going through a process of deciding whether such a thing exists and, if not, what he can do to find someone.

I am developing several story lines with different characters all searching for something but with some obstacle in their way. The stories will be interwoven with the solution to each problem giving the main character a clue to solving his own.

Because of this structure I have to have a plot worked out. It is not a seat of the pants novel, at least not at this stage. It is going to be important to time the events to come together at the right time, 

One problem may be the number of characters - I may need to cut them back, which means reducing the number of stories, or introducing them in a different way - say one character referring to another story as well as her/his own.

All good brain exercise and something to look forward to working on each day.

Proposed cover

 

This is the picture I plan to use for the covers of my short story anthology. Buying the right to use it from fineart america. The right side will be the front, with the title in the yellow pages area and the blurb will be in the top left hand corner on the back cover.

Decisions on reprinting

 With the publishing of 'My Life In Short Stories' under way I have been giving thought to what to do with my two novels. I have limited stocks of both. 'The Man Who Didn't Like People' has been the better seller so I will reprint that as it is. With 'A New Era For Manny Youngman', there has been criticism of the cover so Bec is going to give it a fresh look before we reprint it. Meanwhile I am putting the finishing touches to 'All My Years', a collection of my poetry and songs I plan to publish later in the year. By the next time I have an exhibition I should have a good selection to present to potential readers.

Anthology on its way

 Completed the final edits on my anthology of short stories. Now goes off to be typeset and sent to the printer. It was an interesting experience, reviewing stories I have written over more than 50 years. Some of the earlier stories were better than I expected and there were one or two themes that ran through a lot of them. One was observing strangers and imagining their stories, another was a dislike of prejudice and discrimination and a third was a continuing search for a something not quite attainable.

A fitting end

 I struggled over the ending of the final story for my anthology until yesterday, when I realised it had to finish with an inconclusive ending. The anthology is my life in short stories, a chronological account of stories I have written since my first when I was in my teens. Since my life is not over, it follows that the ending of the last story leaves the future open to speculation. Moreover, the last story is the most autobiographical, it tells of a elderly man travelling on coach tours, looking for something or someone as I have been doing in the past year. 

After throwing out a few which I did not think were worth including, the anthology now consists of 27 stories totalling just short of 80,000 words. They range widely in subject matter and are not confined to any genre. I have no idea what readers will make of them, but my aim is simple - having written so many stories over the years I want to see them in print instead of gathering dust in a drawer. Hopefully my great grandsons, Noah and Cooper, and their descendants, will one day read them and have some idea what sort of person they are descended from. That's probably a vain hope, but it is one that gives me a good feeling.

Ready to start editing

 I have finished transcribing my short stories into the first draft of an anthology. Twenty-seven stories and 75,000 words. Now I start editing, which may see some of the stories disappear as I have found some of them not up to the standard I want to be remembered for, On the other hand, the anthology is meant to be a memoir of what I have written throughout my life, so perhaps they should stay, 

I am also at the same stage with my book of poems and songs, which will be a much slimmer volume. I think at this stage I may leave that to be published at a later stage.

Another project

 Partially ignoring my previous resolution (in as much as I have shelved some of those projects) I suddenly became enthused with reviving my book of poetry and songs, which I had almost completed. It would be great to be able to launch both my short story anthology and my book of poetry at the same time, although perhaps staggered launches would produce better sales. That is something I will have to think about.

So I have made a first draft of the poetry book and I'm working on changing the typeface to make the poems look better on the page. Some of them have to be on a single page and some go over two pages, I have also designed a cover for it with the title All my years, which is a play on All my tears from Omar Khayam.

I have also transcribed most of A Living Death, with only two more stories to be transcribed and one new story to be finished before the first draft of the anthology will be ready. The cover for that is also in draft form, the title being A Life In Short Stories.

All of this is making me feel good and a lot more positive about life in general.

Need to concentrate

 In a rush of enthusiasm generated by my renewed urge to write, I think I may have rushed off in too many directions.

I've given up the idea of an illustrated children's book. Not only is it not the sort of thing I usually write but I don't want the cost and effort of organising an illustrator.

My priority has to be the short story anthology with the hope I may get it published in time for the Book Fair in July. I have nearly 60,000 words so far with about another 5,000 transcribed. I can start to work on the cover while this and the editing are in process so it should be possible.

I have two stories for the Writing Centre's anthologies and there is plenty of time to tidy them up and possibly write two more.

Everything else has to go on hold, including the other short stories I have been working on and the next novel.

On a roll

 Not only can I transcribe my old hard-copy stories using the OCR capacity in Onenote, but I've realised I can read them direct into Word using the "dictate" feature in the top right corner of the Home page. I really should have read the manual when I started using computers. I wonder what other clever things it can do?😊

So, I have been transcribing stories for my anthology using both methods (my voice gets a little tired doing only dictation), I have completed a first draft of a christmas children's story I am so pleased with I am thinking of making it into an illustrated book, and the germ of an idea for a new novel is starting to sprout into something more tangible in the back of my mind.

I have one other short story I have to get beyond the first opening sentences and then all my current writing projects will be moving along nicely.

All this has been helped immensely by being in lockdown because of Covid. There's no pressure on me to get out and make as if I want to be part of the rest of the world. I suspect it was the feeling I had to do that and have a busy social life that contributed to the hiatus in my writing through most of last year.

Now I am back writing I know what I always knew before - that this is who I am, misanthropic old hermit or not.😉

OCR

 I great find yesterday - I can use Onenote, which is already on my computer as part of Windows, to use optical character recognition to transcribe my old typed stories into digital format. It is an easy process, basically scanning the original, inserting it in Onenote and clicking on it to produce the digital text on the clipboard, from where it can be pasted into Word or anywhere else.

So far I have transcribed  two stories in a lot less time (and effort) than it would have taken me to retype them. 

I made someone cry

 It always good to get feedback from a reader. One lady messaged me this week: " I finished reading your book. It was great. The last chapter brought me to tears. That's how involved I got."

What more can an author ask? As the BeeGees almost sang: "I wrote a book and started the whole world crying."

That was The Man Who Didn't Like People.  Some suggested I should now write The Woman Who Didn't Like People. Maybe it will make readers laugh.

2021 Update

 The new year has started off brilliantly. I am writing again after a long spell thinking I wasn't going to write another word.I am compiling an anthology of about 30 of my short stories, writing two short stories for the up-coming anthology of the Rockingham Writers Centre and starting to put down some ideas for my next novel.

Meanwhile, my two novels: A New Era For Manny Youngman and The Man Who Didn't Like People; are among the best sellers at the Friends of Rockingham Arts Community exhibition which has been running all this week and will be on again in March. I'm not sure why there has been this burst of interest in them but it may be because I have become more involved in the Writers Centre activities and have taken over as convenor of their short story group. Some of the members who hadn't heard of me may have decided to check out my novels to see if they are any good.

Not that I worry why people read my books as long as they do. 

With the anthology of my own stories. it may take some time as a lot of my early stories were pre-digital and will have to be transcribed from the hard copies I have kept in drawers for a couple of decades. The earliest go back to the 1960s.

It has been fascinating to revisit them. I can see a period in my twenties when I was first published and sent off story after story, a long hiatus while I aimed at a more up-market publication without any success, then back to where I could get published. By then my life had moved on, I was married and had children and was busy running my writing business, which included writing for clients and not for publication.

During this time I started writing a number of novels without getting any of them to publishable stage. That was very much a learning period. I did write some short stories, mainly aimed at competitions.

Around 2011 I had success with a couple of minor competitions and that set me off on a burst of short story writing.

Finally I started writing novels again, having by then learned what I needed to do, and A New Era For Manny Youngman and The Man Who Didn't Like People were published.

However, trying to write another novel took me down a dead end, mainly I believe because I was trying to write for a market and not what I wanted to write. That dried up and I stopped writing for about a year. Now I'm back in the writing harness again and it feels good.

Grey Nomads rolling along

Fifteen chapters into the first draft of my Grey Nomads novel. Target is around 35 chapters and I hope to have the first draft completed about the middle of the year. Even earlier if I can get my daily output up, but there is a lot going on in my life at present.
That of course means I have even less time for promotion and marketing, so sales of my completed novels are flagging a little. I have high hopes with a new bookseller who has shown an interest and has promised to come back to me with an offer to take some of each.

Reached the quarter mark

Past 20,000 words or about a quarter of the new novel in the Grey Nomads series. The rhythm of writing every day is very satisfying and I am resisting the urge to edit and rewrite, focusing on the next scene or chapter and getting the words onto the page. I've just completed a chapter set in one of my favourite Rockingham cafes and my next chapter will include a development in the romantic story line. I've also been re-reading one of the Alan Hunter Inspector Gently novels and reminding myself why I like his writing style. He is able to include the emotions behind the words, which is one of things I think distinguishes a very good writer. Jane Austen was a good example. Her language may seem archaic now with the longer sentences and stilted phrases, but you always know what her characters are feeling and what is driving their words and actions, That's the essence of good story telling.

Discipline v emotions

Maintaining levels of emotion to build up tension and lead to climaxes is one of the hardest parts of writing a novel, but fortunately it does not all have to be done in the first draft. The focus has to be on discipline, getting a minimum number of words on the page each day and keeping the story lines moving. Often this means leaving some of the emotional triggers for a later revision. Choice of certain words, settings and even character traits do not always come to mind immediately and time can be wasted scratching the head and searching for the mot juste. It's one of the joys of having already written and published two novels that I am now aware how the process works, at least for me. I can write what I know is not up to my highest standard with the assurance that when I come back to it, I will have the whole of my story in my head, know what I need my characters to do, and give them the emotional layers they need. What's more, it's something I can look forward to, because it is in applying the fine detail that the writer's craft can be most satisfying.

The new first novel in the Grey Nomads series is coming along nicely. I have been able to salvage quite a lot of material from Murder For A Grandmother, particularly in the background to the characters and the caravan park setting in the early chapters. Once I move into the investigation itself there will be less similarity because the murder and the characters involved in it will be quite different. I've written 6 chapters now for a total of more than 12,500 words. The aim is a minimum of 80,000 so I only have 34 more chapters to go. Allowing for Christmas interruptions that should be achievable by early next year.
I spent a lot of time at the Rockingham Writers Centre Book Fair over the weekend. I found it motivating to talk to the other writers there. Even though we work in different genres, the problems of writing and marketing are the same and it is always possible to pick up new ideas. 
As usual the romance novels were the most popular but The Man Who Didn't Like People was among the books that achieved sales, so that was encouraging.

I haven't written anything here for months because I have been through some upheavals in my life and my writing. I'm not sure if the two are related.
In my life I sold my Walpole home and I now live in Rockingham where I am embarked on a bucket list programme, having been to Broome, flown in a helicopter over the Bungle Bungle and visited Paula Boer in NSW for the launch of her latest novel, The Bloodwolf War. Coming up next year are the Tamworth Country Music Festival, the Ghan and a Country Music cruise around some Pacific Islands.
Meanwhile I struggled with the Man Who Voted For Australia and Murder For A Grandmother before deciding to kill both darlings and launch into a new novel to replace Murder For A Grandmother as the first of the Grey Nomads series.
Working title Genesis, although the final title is almost certainly going to be The Grey Nomad Detectives to get the series off with a bang, as recommended by Kate Goldsworthy, who did a structural edit for me on Murder For A Grandmother.
It will have many of the personal story lines of Murder For A Grandmother but the murder itself is very different, and a lot less complicated (which was part of the reason that books wasn't working). I will also use a lot of Kate's other recommendations on character and story development.
I've written four chapters and I am now developing the outline to ensure all the clues, red herrings and crises come at the right places. It feels very good to be writing regularly again.

The Man Who Voted For Australia Chapter 9

Jeff has an uncomfortable meeting with his very-British brother in which he begins to suspect the rumours about him are true. He learns that the Chinese woman is working for his brother, which makes him suspect her agenda, and he is invited by his son to go with the grandchildren and their other, Turkish, grandparents, to an Anzac Day ceremony. All of this is moving the story forward but something is missing. I think the problem is that Jeff's racist undertones are not relevant here - so where is the conflict?

Making my hero reader-friendly

Working on a chapter today in which my hero is taking the bad guy role, expressing the opinions he will eventually reconsider and modify as the novel progresses. The difficulty is keeping the reader interested and sympathetic instead of antagonistic. In this chapter I've tried to do that by having the people he is talking take opposite, more acceptable views while clearly admiring and liking my character. I think I achieved it in both A New Era For Manny Youngman and The Man Who Didn't Like People, but it may be harder in The Man Who Voted For Australia because it touches on anti-Muslim feelings and there are racist elements that some could find offensive. My point is that most people have some racist feelings, however suppressed, and my hero is facing up to his and working his way through them. Hope that's coming through the words.