RWAus Conference 13 - Day 2

Another damp morning in Perth (really...if I wanted this weather I never should have left Melbourne). A HUGE day for your humble reporter.


The "Nautical and Nice" Cocktail Party last night was a blast with a good representation of Pirates (I am a buccaneer...my hearties!), vikings and sailors. Winners of the best costume was the Melanie Milburne and her lovely husband...unrecognisable as Olive Oil and Popeye. I suppose with  a room full of creative people, I shouldn't be surprised at the amazing costumes.

Conference proper kicked off this morning with the personable Julia Quinn as the keynote speaker. the theme of her talk was based on lists. She gave us 4 wonderful, affirming lists. No blue sky stuff but practical down to earth advice. She talked about goal setting...not just "I want to be a NY TImes best seller" but to set goals for each manuscript whether published or unpublished. Other items on her list.

• Finish your book...the world is full of first chapters
• Have a life outside writing.
• SAVE your work at regular intervals
• Help other authors. It may not help your career but could do wonders for theirs.
• Everyone needs an editor and when you find a good one don't let them go
• Get a treadmill desk.

Next up were Sheila Hodgson and Margaret Marbury from Harlequin talking about the revitalized E Harlequin and single titles. 

Paths to Third Party Publication panel discussion: Kate Cuthbert (Escape), Bernadette Foley (Hachette), Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press), Nina Bruhns (Entanged), Abby Zidle (Pocket). Some forthright questions about response times and reversion clauses in contracts. We have an educted membership these days!

Unfortunately my first pitch appointment cut across the first breakout session and I had a workshop to prepare for. An early lunch and then straight into the workshop Sasha Cottman and I had prepared on Scrivener for complete beginners. With only an hour to covers such a big topic we had to keep it moving but I think our punters were up to the challenge. We had fun and hopefully won a few converts :-)

From there it was straight into moderating the Published Authors Digital First Roundtable. Wow! How the landscape has changed in 12 months.  The Destiny and Escape Authors were there in force and we had some great conversations around marketing and promotion and most importantly,  the support we can offer each other.

On the RWA AGM. For those of us who were there in 2003 when the organisation nearly folded, we can hardly recognise this organisation today. Nearly 1000 members and a comfortable bank account. It just goes from power to power. So proud to be part of RWA!

So over and out from your Fremantle correspondent for tonight. Time to put my feet up and rest my bones before the Awards Event tonight. Will I have the energy for the After Party? I suspect not!

Post Script:  The "pretty" was in my Inbox this morning. An Honourable Mention from the RONE Awards for Gather the Bones.

Writing Craft - Scrivener Love

I am in love...my heart beats a little faster, my breath stops in my throat as I reach out my hand and switch on the computer and there it is waiting for me...my Work in Progress in glorious technicolour. Every nuance, every trashed word, every unused word or scene...all carefully filed away in the writing program that changed my life...Scrivener.

It is only three weeks until the Romance Writers of Australia conference where my partner-in-crime and critiquing, Sasha Cottman and I are presenting a beginners workshop on Scrivener. I do not hold myself out as any sort of great expert on Scrivener- just a simple user - but  I have written my last few books using this amazing product and like all converts I have become a prosletyser. I will preach Scrivener's virtues from the mountain tops...or at least to a room full of writers and computers.

If you want "the expert" then go to the wonderful Gwen Hernandez (who has generously donated a couple of door prizes for our Workshop). Not only has she written the bible ("Scrivener for Dummies") but she runs regular courses. 

This brings me to Scrivener's one big failing... You look at the interface screen and, if you are not technically minded or have a shortage of time, it will send you screaming back to Word. You will see words such as "Inspector", "Binder" and the dreaded (and still to be fully understood by me) "metadata". I think a lot of writers, like me, went to the hands on interactive tutorial given by one of the creators, who knows and loves his product so well. Unfortunately he knows and loves it too well and after the first 5 minutes (and the first mention of the words "meta data" and "scrivening") I had given up on him. So what I know is what I have taught myself (with a little help from Gwen's book) and I thought I would give you the 5 things I love most about using Scrivener.

1. (and this one took me ages to work out) There is no one right way to use Scrivener. It is completely flexible and adapts to your own writing methods. So if you put two Scrivener users  side by side their interfaces may look completely different. It is totally customisable and (almost?) impossible to break.

2.  Project targets. If you are starting a new project you can set the goal number of words and the date on which you would like to complete the draft eg. 80,000 words by 30 September. Scrivener will then give you your daily target and in the Mac version you can watch the little line turn from red to green as you approach your daily target. The daily target then readjusts according to how many words you write (ie a few great days writing and it will come down, a few missed days and it goes up).  It will even send you a message when you have reached target. This was brilliant when I was doing Nanowrimo (50,000 words by 30 November...too easy!)

3. Label Colours. I write my stories in two points of view, hero and heroine. In the helicopter view (called the Binder) where all my scenes are listed, I can label each scene according to the POV (I use red for hero and green for heroine - Sasha uses pink and blue...). In one glance I can instantly see where one POV is predominating.

4.  Research:  With Scrivener you can store all your research (including importing photographs, videos and web pages) directly in the Binder with your story.

5.  Templates.  I am writing what I  hope will be a series. Because I can store all my character and research in the same file, I can create a template for use with the next books in the series to incorporate the research done on the first book - a sort of portable bible.

That's just 5 of my favourite things I love about Scriv (we are on abbreviated name terms now). If you are a Scrivener user, what are a few of your favourite things and if you are not a Scriv user and want to ask a question, try me...

In the meantime if you are coming to the Romance Writers of Australia conference, Sasha and I are running a hands on workshop...bring your own computer. Sadly we only have an hour and it will be a very basic introduction to Scrivener but if it overcomes your fear of the dreaded interface then our work will be done... (and rumours of us getting Scrivener tattoos are quite unfounded!)

NANO fail? Not really...

At the start of Nanowrimo I announced I would be partaking in the "Chocolate Frog Challenge" - one chocolate frog would perish for every 5000 words written.

At the end of Nano three frogs lived to tell the tale of an apparent Nano fail... Or is it?

The surviving frogs...

On Day 1 of Nano, I sat down with a premise, a couple of characters, a bit of a world build and an opening chapter. I could have frozen there and then but I stuffed the internal editor into a box with a brick on the lid and let the creativity go. A whole new world began to unfold for me as new characters jumped on to the page and  Singapore in 1910, almost unrecognisable from the modern, bustling city state, began to emerge.

Harriet World

It was inevitable that I had to pause now and then for research. As the characters came alive, I needed to know the city they were moving around. A fruitless search for a contemporaneous street map of Singapore ensued and I had to make do with a modern map and bits and pieces of older maps...and my own memory. I lived in Singapore for three years in the early "noughties" and as I dug through my notes and photographs, it was almost as if I had been subliminally challenging this un-yet-thought-about story. The result is a "Harriet World" on my cupboard door.


Then there was Scrivener...if I have not extolled the virtues of the love of my life, then that is probably a post for another day. I wrote directly into Scrivener, scene by scene, using a different colour label for the POV of my protagonists so I now have a lovely long colourful list of scenes. I set up character cards for each character as they entered stage left, grouping them in folders according to where they fitted. I have a folder labelled "Corpses".

Likewise the research - every little tit bit of research got squirrelled away in the Research and Locations folders and the best thing of all is that if there should be more Harriet books, I can save the information as a template and move it from book to book, adding to it as I go. I LOVE Scrivener.

I stalled at 37,000 words with maybe 5 or 6 scenes left to go before "The End". Why? I hit the last week of November and it was like hitting a brick wall. What is it with the last week of November? It's as if everyone wants to cram everything in to it, in the anticipation of December being busy. I had work, I had late meetings, I had daytime meetings, I had social events...I had no time to write...and so the 30 November rolled around leaving Harriet Rough Draft #1 unfinished so tantalisingly close to the denouement (but thanks to the magic of Scrivener there are cards with the concepts for the last few scenes scribbled on them so I wouldn't forget what came next).

Nano fail? Absolutely not! It was never really about writing 50,000 words or finishing a book - I already knew I could do that. What I have proved to myself...

• I have most of the rough draft for a book I thought I would never have the courage to write;
• I proved I could write a mystery while remaining a "pantser";
• I have established a world that is just screaming for some more stories to be written;
• I proved I COULD write the rough draft to a story in just 30 days!

What's more, I have characters I love, a setting that is just speaking to me and a fierce desire to finish Harriet #1 and move on to Harriet #2....

So thank you Nanowrimo, I will probably be back next year.

The author in Harriet mode...the Pith helmet arrived at the start of Nano

 PS The remaining frogs were put out of their misery on the completion of Nanowrimo

HOW DID NANOWRIMO GO FOR YOU?

Writer's Life...Lost Word Children (Or having a "Gibbons" Moment)

On Monday I suffered a "writer's disaster", 3000 of my carefully crafted word-children went wandering into the cyber woods and never came out.

Edward Gibbons

I call these moments - that awful realisation that an entire day's work has vanished - a "Gibbons" moment, for reasons I will relate.

It was the fault of the cat. Come 4.30pm on the dot and Oliver Kat appears, interposing himself between the keyboard and the screen - a large furry sight screen. (I am sure he thinks his name is "Get down! You're a b@#$$%^ nuisance!").  A quick glance at my watch told me that, apart from a demanding feline, I had my own dinner to prepare before shooting off to my 6.00pm exercise class. The result was a hasty computer shut down.  "Do you wish to save changes?" Word enquired. Thinking I was in the OTHER document, I clicked "No" and my day's work vanished. Now before you say...autosave...I have a new computer and it is not fully configured yet.

I do all my writing in Scrivener these days. I love the "helicopter" view it gives you of the structure of your manuscript. It also autosaves so there is never a lost child. Unfortunately I considered my manuscript was "finished" (as if any manuscript ever is!). I had uploaded it as a complete manuscript (again another Scrivener feature) into Word to give me that "completed" manuscript feel on which to run my eye for minor errors and discrepancies. As so often happens, I realised it actually needed some fairly major structural work including the reordering of scenes and the writing of a couple of new chapters.

Fortunately I had emailed a bit of the work with some of the more minor edits to a friend for comment but not the new writing so an afternoon's work disappeared in a key stroke. 

Moral of story... 
1. Do major editing in Scrivener. 
2. Make sure Word is configured to autosave.
3. SAVE my work at frequent intervals. 

In my shaky defence, if I am working in Word, I  do save any work in progress to Dropbox (as well as to the hard drive of my computer) so whichever computer I am (including the iPad) I have access to my latest version.


And if I feel like kicking the cat...I have to remember the loss of 3000 words is not really a disaster compared to that suffered by Edward Gibbons, the eighteenth century historian and author of a monumental treatise called THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Gibbons spent years writing this work, by hand, of course. The manuscript completed, it sat in his study awaiting dispatch to his publisher. The new maid, short of kindling for the fire on a cold winter's day, found a useful pile of paper and dispatched the only copy of THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE up the chimney. One can imagine she probably left his employ without a reference and Gibbons began all over again. The truth may be she didn't burn all of it...but it makes a good story!

The 6 volumes of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

And Edward is in good (if somewhat strange company). Jilly Coooper relates the tale of her lost manuscript "It was awful, awful. I'd finished the first draft, I went out to lunch and then I got the bus home – the number 22 bus – and I left it behind. I had this somewhat lovely fantasy of the West Indian bus driver publishing a novel about showjumping but it never happened. Everyone was very kind and the Evening Standard put out an appeal. That was 1970 I think. Then I suppose it was 14 years later, I started writing it again. I hate to be conceited but I think it's probably one of the best books I ever wrote because the characters had built up over 15 years."

So whenever I lose any writing, I just keeping repeating "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" as a mantra and I feel much better.

HAVE YOU HAD ANY "GIBBONS" MOMENTS OR TIPS FOR NOT LOSING YOUR WORK?

Collaging A Story for "Organic Writers"

I first heard of "collaging" a story some years ago when a workshop at a Romance Writers of Australia Conference was held on the subject. Unfortunately I didn't attend it but I did see the participants, clutching their "collages" and flushed with excitement as they left the room.

"Collaging"? I recall, with something of a shudder, art classes at school where you had to stick bits and pieces cut from magazines on to paper and make some kind of artistic masterpiece. I am a Capricorn and a Lawyer, I don't do "artistic masterpieces" - I do well ordered, neat and logical masterpieces. I really didn't think collaging was for me.

Jenny Crusie is an exponent of Collaging  but like me was slow to realise its potential, particularly in the pre-writing phase. For Jenny's journey to collaging read her blog post.

I blogged recently on "visualising a story" (The Mind's Eye) and until I started writing GATHER THE BONES, I'd never been one for visual stimuli but there is definitely something about the hand/eye/brain connection, which is why some people still prefer to write their stories in long hand. As I can no longer read my own writing that is probably not a great option these days.

That is until I discovered Springpad. There are so many great options for writers now (I haven't even begun to expound on my adoration for Scrivener).  With Springpad I discovered not only a great way to store my online resource but I could actually convert that on to a virtual "cork board" and I created a "virtual collage".

Springpad collage for GATHER THE BONES

It's not much to look at but I did explain about the whole Capricorn/lawyer thing... And amazingly, even though I was well into the story by then, it really helped with some of the finer plot detailing. I found pictures of 1920s tennis parties and WW1 hospitals in old churches. What you won't see there are "pictures" of my hero and heroine. I still like to live with them in my imagination. (BTW you can store all your online research in your Scrivener file but the Springpad "board" is fantastic)

As for sticking actual pictures from magazines on to pieces of paper, I was still sceptical until I got to try it myself  on a Writers Retreat with my own writing group, the wonderful Saturday Ladies Bridge Club (yes there is a good reason for the name and no, it has nothing to do with cards).


I looked at my blank piece of paper and the piles of magazines and my mind went blank as the Capricorn/lawyer/pantser combo muscled its way to the front of my consciousness. What was I even going to collage about and then it struck me. I had a new story tugging at my sleeve so I picked up the scissors and glue and began to leaf through the magazines. OK my story is a regency and there was nothing regency about any of the magazines but amazingly words and images began to leap out at me.

The SLBC collaging madly

At the end of the session I sat back and looked at my piece of paper. It was no artistic masterpiece but, by jiminy, it looked like the bones of a story.  And here it is. Hopefully it won't mean anything to anybody except me!

I have it pinned up in my office and while I haven't progressed very far with the story itself, it is a wonderful "aide memoire".

I am a "pantser" (although I prefer the term "organic writer") and I was surprised at how going through the collaging exercise really helped me with the setting/characters and basic plot. It's certainly not the whole story but as a kick start to the creative process it has been invaluable and I would highly recommend it as a precursor to writing. All you need is a sheet of paper, some old magazines, some felt pens, glue and scissors. Lock the "editor" away and allow the "girls in the basement" out and you should have a fun AND productive couple of hours.