// BLOG
Charlotte Betts in Writing Magazine
May 1, 2012
We’re all very excited here at Wordwatchers – Charlotte’s been featured in the ‘New Author Profile’ in the June edition of Writing Magazine, sharing with its readers her thoughts on ”creating realistic worlds for the Restoration characters in her debut.” It’s a lovely piece about Charlotte, her book, The Apothecary’s Daughter, and how it all started.
We’re particularly pleased because Wordwatchers gets a plug: “Join a writing group. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Wordwatchers’ support and encouragement.” Thanks Charlotte!
Rewriting: The Art of Letting Go
May 1, 2012
At the last Wordwatchers’ meeting, in April, I shared my efforts of a rewritten first chapter. ’Being mauled with velvet claws’ is what we’ve called it in the past; the wonderful act of sharing your work and then sitting back and listening to a group of people you respect, and trust to be honest, share their opinions.
On this occasion, it wasn’t pretty.
Last year, the opening chapters of my novel got an airing with a small number of literary agents, generating some very positive comments (along with the rejections). The main issue, it seemed, came from it being something of a cross-genre story – and therefore doomed from the start. One agent did actually ask to read the whole manuscript, which suggested it might not be as big an issue as I first thought, but when they too couldn’t commit, I knew I had to do something.
So, I set about reworking it more into the crime genre – after all, the book has always started with my main character being asked to find someone, in something of a classic ‘film noir’ style. And this was the new first chapter that the group was reviewing.
Many of them had read the earlier version, and all had previously responded very well to the main character. This time, however, they didn’t; they felt he lacked sufficient drive to engage the reader – and there was less to like about him. The newer members of the group, who’d not met my character before, tended to be more positive, liking my take on a classic detective story, and the overall pace of it.
It was then that the penny dropped.
I didn’t want to write a crime novel. Yes, there’s a crime in it, but I realised that in order to give it the pace required to sustain that aspect of the story, I had stripped out much of my character’s depth and in doing so rendered him a lot less effective, and a lot less likeable.
But it starts with him getting the case, I thought. It always has. And people have always liked that. How can it start anywhere else? But although the readers were liking where the story was starting, I knew it was setting the wrong expectation for what was to follow.
My book needed a different opening.
So, I’ve spent the last few weeks writing it. A new opening chapter arrived literally within two days of my velvet mauling, and has since been followed by five more chapters. And it’s feeling so much better – I’ve learned a lot over the last year about the book I want to write, and realising that is probably the most useful thing I could have done. Maybe that seems a bit obvious. But letting go of established truths has never been an easy thing to do, and that’s what I was asking myself to do – it’s what I needed to do, if this rewrite was going to do anything other than tweak a book that people already seemed to like… but somehow just not enough.
Potter’s month in writing. April 2012
April 30, 2012
As spring makes itself known and the next WordWatchers meeting looms, we come to that time in the month when I reflect on what I achieved within the literary world.
One of the creative highlights for me came at the beginning of the month when I discovered AudioBoo via another WordWatchers member. It galvanised me to do a podcast. I used the fabulous Blue Yeti microphone I’d bought for this purpose and recorded to Audacity on my PC. I edited the mistakes and the occasional sigh or deep breath, had a great time hunting for a royalty free jingle and uploaded the finished content to AudioBoo for all to hear. The podcast was of the Prologue from Chasing Innocence. You can check it out here. I plan on doing at least a chapter a month.
I made some postcards too
Last month (March) I started a series of blog posts on Creative Crow about how to indie publish a book, the second appeared this month. This resulted in the Literary Agency I’d worked with in copy and proof editing Chasing Innocence, to suggest we work together producing a How to guide for indie publishers. This seemed a great idea and the book is tentatively titled ‘From Clueless to Published – an Indie guide to writing a good book, publishing in digital and paperback and getting it into the hands of the reading nation’. It’ll be out sometime towards the back of 2013. It also resulted in this post titled the Indie Writers Illusion, which addresses the age old question of how to write a good book. I list a whole bunch of ideas.
Chasing Innocence got some great reviews this month, which led me to write this post on those moments that make you feel all the sweat and tears are worth it.
So we finally come to that tricksy matter of the next book. I’ll be expanding on this in greater detail in my next blog later this week. In writing book #2 I wanted to really challenge myself, not only in writing a first person narrative, but to create and explore a character and situation totally alien to me, while making it engrossing for the reader. The net effect has been very slow progress. There have been so many variables to consider. New characters to feel natural writing about. Skills and world events that ripple through the narrative. Understanding the pacing and immediacy required in first person while keeping the scope of the story wide for the type of plot I have in mind. And keeping the reader engrossed. Did I mention that already? If you asked me how it’s been, I’d say: Hard. One of my biggest problems has been that I now know the quality required of a finished book. So much so I’ve busily been layering in that quality as I write, which I believe has to be tempered on the first draft. In order to stop myself doing the endless cross-editing I got an iPad this month. I LOVE my iPad. I downloaded and now use IA Writer to create the first draft of a chapter, tapping away directly onto the screen. Only when the chapter is finished do I port it out to OpenOffice for editing. This has seen a marked increase in productivity and two extra chapters, totalling 4,000 very polished words. The first draft of this book will be roughly equal to the quality I eventually got for CI on draft three, I believe.
Finally, Amazon ran another free promotion this month for Chasing Innocence on the Kindle. In two days it went to #10 in the overall free charts and #4 in Thriller Fiction, totalling 2500 downloads including four hundred in the US, fifty in Germany and one in France. The result was a week in the top #100 paid charts where it spent half that time in the top #50 of Thriller Fiction. It’s slowly falling now as you need multiple points of attack to sustain a run in the charts. The hope is it will settle slightly higher than where it had been. Prior to the promotion I was selling one to three books daily. Currently it is twenty daily. It’d be nice to settle around the five a day mark. Hopefully reputation, Amazon reviews and brilliant blogs like Confession of a Reader, will keep it selling.
See you next month.
Suddenly bereft
April 25, 2012
John Hoggard (ex-Rocket Scientist)
Something very odd happened last night – I accidentally finished my current novel. That’s one I’m writing, not one I’m reading. I’m not sure how you’d accidentally finish reading a novel. Although you may be wondering how you accidentally finish a novel. Well, to be honest, so am I.
I was writing away, having just started a new chapter, and then suddenly a paragraph turned up that coalesced the essence of the story and a little voice in my head said “You should probably stop there.”
So I have, stopped that is, for the moment at least. I’m not sure it really is the end, but I need to work out why the little voice thinks it is. If it is the end then there’s some even more editing than I had originally planned since quite a lot of my plot remains unwritten (hinted at but not resolved!).
One of my fellow Wordwatchers, Julian said after critiquing the first 90K “You seem to be 2/3rds the way through your word count but only halfway through your plot”. These, it would seem, were rather prophetic words.
Feeling rather empty at the moment, I have lived with these characters for quite some time and suddenly not being involved in their most intimate of moments is rather disconcerting. Perhaps they’re living their lives without me?
I have an idea of how to resolve all of this, and a severe pruning in the edit will help enormously. In the meantime I’m going to have a few days rest (possibly, the urge to write is still there!) and then write out where I thought the story should end, just in case it turns out I need it.
When I know more, I shall share it with you.
John
This March in Writing
April 8, 2012
Potter looking purposeful
Each month at Wordwatchers we gather at someone’s house. We sit down and chat and then we start with the confessional. This is one of my favourite parts of the monthly meet. It is where we tell everyone in the group how much writing we have done, or what we have achieved during the month against what we said we would. I love the confessional because it is one of the few times in my life that I’m routinely out geeked. There are some serious writing geeks at Wordwatchers and it is wonderful company to share.
Typically when it comes around to me I’ve been so hooked into what everyone else has been saying, my carefully rehearsed list of achievements through the month go out the window. I’ll remember about three things I actually did. I’ll go off on tangents, vaguely mention a word count and where I am with the work in-progress, and then off I go again, talking about some random concept I’m currently excited about.
To try and establish some kind of order I’ve decided to use the Wordwatchers blog as a platform to briefly detail what I did each month, so when I’m sat in someone’s house and all eyes turn to me, I can calmly reel off the key detail from this blog. Well not this one. We already had our April meeting. I’m writing this now just to get my hand in. Some great things happened in March 2012 and I’d like to tell you about them.
We start with Handyman – my current novel. I’m a third of the way through the first draft. I dreamed up the concept two years ago and the character has steadily evolved as I edited and published Chasing Innocence. I’m introducing some very exciting elements into Handyman, not just to the story but to how it plays in the reader’s mind. The trouble is, it has been four years since I actually started a book and I have been struggling to get going. I wrote about the struggle in two blogs during march; In the Absence of Daydreams and That Eureka Moment. It was in embracing both that I had a real epiphany that galvanised the characterisation of Handyman in my mind. As March came to a close I was for the first time closing the laptop and feeling I could write more. I spent most of the month struggling with two chapters, the first of which will unlikely appear in the book, but needed to be written as it explained the characters to me. The other chapter launches the rest of the book. It has been tough because it’s less than 2,000 words but has to justify the beginning of Marcus’ transition from ordinary to the extraordinary. Important is the belief in the reader’s mind that he is capable and they want him to take the journey. Both chapters are as finished as they can be in the first draft. The exciting bit is what comes next.
Additionally I wrote two blogs for the Wordwatchers site. One discussed this lonely business of writing and the need for collaboration. The other explained how to use URL’s to promote your website’s content in search engines.
Then we move onto the small matter of promoting Chasing Innocence. Getting your creatively imagined and thrilling novel onto Amazon is only part of the journey for an indie author. Getting it into the hands of readers is another adventure completely. I wrote posts for my johnpotter.info blog detailing the separate journey for publishing the paperback and Kindle editions, and more importantly the lessons I have learned.
In trying to promote Chasing Innocence I have entered it into three competitions. The two key ones for me are the Writer’s Digest Self Published awards 2012 and the Kindle Book Review’s Best Indie Book of 2012.
Finally, I have started and will continue through April, to proof read my good friend Donald Stilwell’s new manuscript. This is a huge honour. I loved his first book and am hoping the second will be even better.
That’s about it. See you next month.
JP
On reflection…
April 4, 2012
On Reflection
Due to circumstances beyond my control I actually missed last night’s WW meeting. It’s a genuinely sad moment. The Wordwatchers meetings are the only time I feel like “John the Writer” – three precious hours a month where I really do feel like a writer, not not just a bloke sat at a keyboard typing in stuff that may or may not ever be read. Chris was very proficient with the minutes – though he teasingly changed my texted in confessional from 18,000 words this month to just 1,800 (to see if I was paying attention). Oh how I laughed… not…
Amazing that this was Wordwatchers 133rd meeting, the first of our 12th year and would have been my own personal anniversary too, 5 years a member of possibly the greatest collection of writers and friends that the world (mostly) doesn’t know about yet. (The beacon of hope for the rest of us is of course the brilliant Charlotte Betts and of course our very own (now Alumni member) Katherine Webb). Both these amazing ladies took the traditional route to publishing, but we’re also hoping for great things from our Indie published John Potter and there’s lots of good stuff round the corner for Abbie too, who at least has an agent and has the most amazing dedication to her art and appears to be able to produce a novel faster than I’ve known some people draw up a shopping list. So Abbie already has a couple of novels prepped and waiting to go.
In fact, everybody seems to be pretty much cracking on now and reading the flurry of post meeting emails, I clearly missed out on a fantastically energized meeting.
Me, I’ll be really pleased when Endless Possibilities is finished and that’s mainly because of the encouragement from within Wordwatchers who read (and critiqued) the first 100K and insisted that I finish just so they can find out what happens to the main characters. And if I’m honest, that’s pretty much all the incentive I really need.
(This blog originally started as a shorter musing on Wordwatchers Facebook page and it was Abbie’s response to it their that lead to its expansion and subsequent title – thanks Abbie – inspiring as ever)
Addendum: The author makes no apology for the rather gushing terms used to describe his fellow Wordwatchers in this blog because it’s all true and well deserved – so there!
Image: Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Set the scene for success
March 25, 2012
Queen's College... an inspirational setting
What was I doing going to a lecture at 10am on a Sunday (9am real time) anyway?
I hadn’t been very good at going to lectures as a student and, now that I’m working, my weekends are prized possessions not to be squandered.
My tired mood soon evaporated in the sunshine though, and when I arrived in Oxford the dreaming spires woke me up.
Everywhere looks great when the sun is on, but Oxford… well… it must be up there with the best of them.
I made my way to Christ Church to collect my ticket to hear agent Leah Thaxton, publishing director of Egmont, and Julia Churchill, of the Greenhouse Literary Agency, share their views on what makes a successful children’s book author.
On the way down Oxford’s wide streets and through its narrow alleys, my mind was transported back to earlier times when I worked in Oxford shops and businesses, drank in the city’s pubs and spent many of my weekends there.
Entering the college, my eyes roamed over the ancient stone, and manicured lawns and made me wonder what it might have been like to study there.
Queens’ college, where the talk was held, had more secret sights and ancient walkways, and a few open doorways for me to peek into as I made my way to the lecture room.
Oxford’s older colleges are inspirational places to be. The history, the privilege, the traditions, the beauty behind the doors that often only admit the country’s elite students – these are interesting things that spark the mind. Oxford University is an amazing setting for a book. A crime or a murder in such a hallowed academic setting elevates it, as Morse discovered, and Philip Pullman’s novels are given another dimension because of Oxford.
And that got me thinking about how important the right setting is for a story… or for anything really. I believe everyone attending the talk turned up positive, and inspired thanks to the setting and the sun. The scene was set for a great lecture, even before our esteemed speakers arrived.
And then, almost an hour into the talk, Julia Churchill summed it up perfectly.
“Setting becomes a character in its own right”, she said.
Think Narnia, think Hogwarts… think Oxford.
We had Julia to inspire us, we had Leah to inspire us and our third speaker/character was Oxford.
So, ground your story somewhere, and use the setting to the best effect you can.
A beautiful combination
March 24, 2012
I have to say I’m liking FocusWriter very much!
Today was its first proper “used in anger” moment – when I took my new netbook with me to my daughter’s dance class and sat in the car (when I would normally read) and got back to my much neglected novel. In the 23 minutes I had between dropping her off and walking back to the car and then leaving the car to go and collect her again I managed to get 431 words down.
The netbook (an ASUS 1015PX) sits perfectly on my knee in the car, the back of the screen rests on the steering wheel (I don’t even have to move the seat back) and it’s a very comfortable sitting position (more comfortable than sat here amongst the end of week detritus that litters the kitchen table – although at least the netbook manages to find a space amongst it, not something I could have done with my big work laptop). I think it’s going to be a very beautiful relationship!
My one little gripe with FocusWriter is that it has a US English dictionary, so I’m having to ignore its little quirks and add British (proper!) spelling to it as I go along. Apparently you can add the British Dictionary from Open Office to it (but this info I found on the web was before the OpenOffice, LibreOffice split) so this will require some investigation and no doubt some fiddling.
Just before I came to write this, according to FocusWriter’s daily counter I had achieved 167% of my self-imposed 500words/day total (this is good, but it doesn’t do (it would seem) cumulative totals, so I can only feel pleased or disappointed daily. Being able to set, for example, 5000 words per month would be more useful to me at the moment!)
I turned on, for no other reason than it amuses me greatly, the faked old fashioned typewriter clicky-clacking sound as I type. I never been a touch-typer exactly and I do have to keep looking down at the keyboard when things start to go wrong (the netbook’s keyboard is about the biggest and most well-laid out and tactile I could find on this class of computer – it’s one of the reasons I bought this particular model) but when I’m in full flow and the clicking is rhythmic and rapid its a great incentive to keep going and not pause to think of exactly the adjective you were looking for or to go back and correct a typo.
Well, there you go, a 400+ word blog… There will be some in Wordwatchers that might argue that’s 400 words wasted since they’re not in the novel and they could be right, but I just wanted to share!
John (on his netbook)
Who the URL are you?
March 22, 2012
Who? Urls? You?
The daunting subjects of online marketing and search engine optimisation have at their core two very simple principles. The first is the use of ‘keywords’ and the second are ‘links’. Links are what I’m talking about here. They are connections, or doorways, that are used to take you to websites or content within websites. The link contains a URL, which is the address of the destination. The words Link and URL in internet speak are conjoined. I use the word URL for the main part here to refer to both, not least because this post’s title wouldn’t sound half as good if it were: ‘Who the link are you?’
URLs are important because search engines such as Google use the number of URLs pointing to your content, to rate your content in context to similar sites. The more URLs that point to your site, the higher ranked it will be when people type a keyword relevant to your site. If you type ‘Chasing Innocence‘ to Google right now, the chances are my book will magically appear somewhere, at least once, on the first page of results. That’s because there are quite a few URLs on my various sites pointing to my book, along with the keywords: chasing innocence. The interesting aspect is these URLs can exist within your single site or blog, so they not only draw people to your site but can also channel people within your site to the bits you really want them to see. In fact embedding URLs within your content is vital. URLs within a web page are doorways. A web page with no links (URLs) is like a room with no doors. Once the reader has seen all there is in the room, if there’s no doors there’s nowhere else for them to go. So what is a URL and how do you use them?
A URL is an internet equivalent to a postal address. For example, a URL most people will be familiar with:
http://www.amazon.co.uk
HTTP:// – Is the language your computer will use to speak to the destination when it eventually gets there. In this case HTTP is web-browser speak.
WWW – Is simply the name of the computer at the destination. It’s the equivalent of speaking to someone called WWW at the destination. It does not have to be WWW, it can be almost any name within certain parameters. HTTP://KDP.AMAZON.COM means I want to speak to KDP at AMAZON.COM and I want to speak HTTP (web-browser speak) to KDP when I get there.
AMAZON.CO.UK – Is the address where you can find, in this case, the computer named WWW. It’s equivalent to the full postal address for a building, anywhere in the world. It can be further broken down into .COM or .CO.UK or .INFO or a number of other identifiers, but knowing the breakdown and why, is no more necessary than understanding the breakdown of a ZIP code. All you need is the ZIP code (post code).
That’s the detail on a basic URL. You now know how to get there, you know who to talk to and you know what language to speak. But if you’re linking to content actually within the site the URL will need to contain more. For instance:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006Z0KYEQ
/DP/B006Z0KYEQ – These are specific locations or layers at the destination that WWW at the address AMAZON.CO.UK will take you to. The /DP can be equated to a room in the building and /B006Z0KYEQ, can be equated to something in that room.
So, we can now look at the address again:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006Z0KYEQ
We now know this means I would like to talk HTTP to WWW at AMAZON.CO.UK and I would like WWW to take me to the room DP and to the item referenced: B006Z0KYEQ
If you type the link into any web browser right now you will find /dp/B006Z0KYEQ points to Chasing Innocence on Amazon UK.
Sometimes you will look at the link and see lots of symbols towards the end of the URL. This is simply extra information WWW might use to find extra content.
So how do we use these URLs? Now we understand what a URL is, actually using them is simple. You add a URL to content on your site. You might have a line of text that reads: Check out John’s book on Amazon. To create a doorway to John’s book on Amazon you first highlight the text and then click the add link button within the application you’re creating the web content. In WordPress it’s the chain icon. In Blogger you simply click on the Link button.
In WordPress you click on the Chain-Link icon
In Blogger you click on 'Link'
As creating links is a core function of any internet content tool, each will have a link creation button. Once the relevant ‘Link’ button is clicked you will be presented with a dialogue that requires the following:
Creating the Link
The URL – In this case: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006Z0KYEQ
The Title – Which is optional. I might enter: Chasing Innocence on Amazon. Adding this might also help search engines to additionally rank the content.
Open a new Window/Tab – This is quite important. Clicking a URL will take the web browser to the destination, if you want the reader to come back to the page containing your original content, you want to open a new browser window, or they might get to the destination and find a whole bunch of new doors and forget all about where they started.
Once you’ve entered the detail you click ‘Add Link’ and the link will appear in your content when you publish it.
So to the final and briefest stage. How do you find out what the URLs for your content are? So that you can link to it. Simples. You go to the content you want to link to on your site, then you look to the address bar at the top of your web browser. Most browsers will list the full URL. For instance if you look at the address bar right now, you will see the URL for the page you are currently reading is:
http://www.wordwatchers.net/who-the-url-are-you/
If you want to link to this page you highlight ALL of the URL in the address bar and (right-click) Copy it and then Paste it to a link in your content as described above.
That really is it. I hope that’s a little clearer than mud. If not then be sure to fire away with questions in the comment section below.
Backup, backup and then backup again
March 20, 2012
I do a lot of work at home (one of the joys of being a university lecturer is that I seem to spend a lot of my own time staying on top of emails, preparing for lecturers and marking) and so I have a work issued laptop. It’s a beast of a machine, weighs over six kilograms and stretches the concept of “lap” in laptop to the extreme. However, over the last eighteen months or so I’ve put up with toasted and crushed legs because using this laptop, when I had the opportunity, to also write my novel was preferable to hiding in the hallway where my sickly old desktop PC lives.
All of that was true until this weekend when that beast of a laptop died, without warning and (at the time of writing) quite catastrophically. As well as losing the marking I’d been working on I discovered, when I checked online, that I’d also got out of the habit of backing up the novel. In fact, I’d been out of the habit for two months…
So, why the happy face in the picture? Well, it’s an old picture and I like it, so why not? You really don’t need to see the face I pulled when the laptop failed to boot up (indeed, failed to show any signs of life at all). Also, and more importantly several good things have come out of this potential disaster…
Firstly, I have finally stopped procrastinating over buying myself a netbook (specifically for writing my novel, to separate it from the same IT I use for work), which I was supposed to do when turned 40 (a dim and distant half-year ago now). So I’m actually writing this on a little ASUS EeePC 1015PX. I’m liking it very much and I’m just about used to the keyboard layout (I apologise now to the guys in PCWorld who perhaps thought, over the last few months that I might actually buy one of their machines, when in fact I was just sussing out keyboard feel on what was on offer). What amazes me is that it weighs less than just the power supply for the big work laptop and so far has been running for over six hours and claims still to have two hours left to run on its battery.
Secondly, I’ve found (or was at least reminded of something I’d seen before) a fantastic little program called, delightfully, FocusWriter. It only takes a few seconds to start (even on the netbook) and then you’re presented with a completely blank screen. No settings to fiddle with, no icons, no menus… Just a nothing, daring you to fill it up as quickly as possible. FocusWriter also has a Daily Goal setting, allowing you to pick a daily time or word count. I have decided that there’s no point in picking a time (I can stare at a blank screen for 30 minutes a day no problem at all) so have opted for 500 words a day instead.
Thirdly, even though a chunk of the novel is currently (and possibly permanently) lost, I have my overall plan. I know where I got to, I know where I’m going, so I’m going to carry on and if I ever get my work back, that’ll be a bonus and if not, I will chalk it up to experience and write it again.
So, I’ve decided to look upon the good rather than the bad of my current predicament, because what else can I actually do? I have my lap back, no longer superheated by high performance graphic card exhausts or crushed by six kilograms of 3-year old, no longer cutting edge gaming machine. I finally have my long promised birthday present and I’ve found a really nice little writing app that can nag me nicely that I haven’t yet reached my word count, or pat me on the back when I exceed it.
Writing is quite hard enough without looking for an excuse to throw in the towel, so I have decided not to give myself one!
Until next time…
John
John Potter's sensational fast-paced thriller, available now. 
Charlotte Betts' wonderful historical novel, available now. 
now, Wordwatchers' own Charlotte has been featured in Writing Magazine.