Aargh!
It is fantastic when you’ve signed a contract for a book of whatever kind. I’m delighted, and looking forward to sharing the news and contents, but I can’t yet announce it due to necessary publishing constraints that I very much agree with.
It is associated with what’s one of my favourite genres, SF, but more news when the day comes… 🙂
Lately, I’ve been thinking about ideas and how they link into imagination and, ultimately, into the process we call ‘creativity’. It was kicked off when I bumped into an acquaintance who claimed that they had no (or few) ideas compared to others.
It’s a common question for writers: ‘Where do your ideas come from?’ The answer is, almost always, ‘Everywhere and anything’. In fact, it’s difficult to stop having ideas and the real problem is being able to focus on one (or a few) to turn them into a coherent work. There si just so much around us: all you have to do is look, touch, listen, taste… and wonder.
So what happens? Even if we struggle, we all read about where ‘ideas’ come from, how they arise, and how to feed them, but what are the processes around them? How can we have more ideas? How can we turn those ideas into something tangible?
I’ve started another book this year, this time YA, but still SF. One of the things that stuck in my mind from last years helping out with the Summer Reading Challenge is just how much some of the younger readers loved the books they read – and what it was they liked about them.
It would be great, I hoped, if I could inspire that joy through a book.
2017 started off with a bang. I haven’t blogged on this site for a month or two, mainly because I’ve been busy on my other blog focused on the game Beyond the Gates of Antares as well as writing loads of articles. It hasn’t helped, of course, that I was tidying up another book following first reader feedback, finishing Shards in Exile (published sometime this year, hopefully), writing some short stories and also putting together a proposal for another project – for which the signs are hopeful!
That’s three novels finished in 2016, plus loads of articles, plus completing my MA. It’s an encouraging achievement.
I was asked recently how I felt about writing having just finished a novel. I was asked whether I had lost focus? Whether getting the novel out meant I wasn’t focused on writing as much? The immediate answer was a no: why would I? Then puzzlement set in…
I’ve mentioned before that I quite like the redrafting/editting process. Taking a rather scrappy first draft and forging it into something worth reading is really satisfying, probably more so than finishing that very first draft. What I didn’t quite expect, though, is that in rebuilding some of the rubbish, simple changes cascade through and make quite quite profound changes.
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