Writing process

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Published, in progress and planned books, mapped by series and connection

The image above shows my published books (black), those I’m currently writing (blue) and those I intend to write soon (red). If it’s shorter than a novel, I’ve put (novella) or (short story). A yellow container holds a series, with connected stories (those that are not part of the series but that include characters who’ve appeared in the series) out to the side and connected by a line. I have also marked my five mobile characters with a penciled line and the character’s names in green.

The plan is to complete The Darkness Within, then finish The Children of the Mountain King series before I start anything else. That’s about 300,000 words to write, so maybe ten month’s work. Since I like to publish a Redepenning book a year, I’m hoping it’ll be quicker. I’m looking forward to writing The Flavour of Our Deeds, next in The Golden Redepennings. Lucas Mogg, Kitty’s amour and Rede’s gamekeeper, is hiding a secret. I’m dying to tell you what it is, but we’ll all have to wait.

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What Ash Wednesday has in common with creating characters

Outward signs. We burn last year’s palms from Palm Sunday and mix them with consecrated oil mixed with incense, also from last Easter. Inner meaning: we burn all the failed attempts of the year to make a new beginning.

I have been thinking about outward and visible signs of what is inward and invisible. Rituals, actions, habits, practices. They all hint at inner beliefs and motivations. This month, I’m slaving over the backstory, character, and inner motivations of characters for the next four books (one novella and three novels, one of which I need to have completed by the end of May). They’re all crowding my head with scenes that are giving me glimpses of my character’s inner self. But, I have to ask, do they show the character’s true self? Or do they show the mask they display to the world? To write them, I need to know both.

I’m religious, which (to me) means that I love the rituals and practices of my church. I’m also (I hope) a person of faith. I believe, and I try to act accordingly. The books I enjoy, and the books I try to write, are about characters with depth. I want the words I use on the page to hint at dimensions to the character that I don’t spell out in words; not just the rituals and practices, but the beliefs and motivations. And I want them all to be different — not the same hero and the same heroine in book after book with just the physical appearance and the name changed.

My husband has been watching best man speeches on YouTube. (No, I don’t know why, but he has.) The jokes and male-to-male insults of a best man speech are a ritual that indicates the support and affection of the selected friend for the groom. Outward signs with inner meaning.

At Mass today, they had the ashes ceremony for those who missed it last Wednesday, on Ash Wednesday. That day marks the beginning of a period of fasting, abstinence, and prayer in preparation for Easter, more than six weeks away, and the ashes are meant to remind us of the shortness of our lives (‘for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’, says the priest as he marks the forehead of each believer with a cross made from a mix of ashes and oil). They also call to mind the ancient practice of wearing sackcloth and ashes for remorse or mourning. Outward signs with inner meaning.

Oddly enough, one of my characters is a widower who may or may not be called Ash. That’s his name, in the notes about his story that I made close to six years ago; a shortened form of his title. However, in the last month I’ve given him a backstory that includes an unfaithful wife, a manipulative older brother, and a couple of daughters, one (and possible both) of whom is definitely his niece, rather than his own child. This means he hasn’t been Earl of Ashbury for very long, so he might think of himself as Val or Fort. I’m still working on it. Inner motivations. He’s a grumpy devil, and a recluse. He arrived home after his brother’s death three years ago to find that his brother’s widow has sent both girls off to boarding school, washed her hands of them, and departed for parts unknown. He has left them there, figuring they’re better off without him. I’m also still working on his heroine, but I need to know her a lot better before she turns up at his house with a carriage full of children, including his own two, refugees from the cholera epidemic sweeping the school.

I know that he will refuse her admittance and she will demand it, and refuse to move on since two of the girls (including his niece) are showing early signs of the disease. I know she shows her anxiety in contempt for his reluctance, not realising he is already thinking about how to help her. I know that he’ll marshal his pitiful complement of servants to look after the well girls and join her in nursing those who have become ill.  Outward signs with an inner meaning.

I know those things, but I have a lot more work to do before I start to commit the random scenes swirling around my brain onto a page.

I wonder if the whole story could happen around an Ash Wednesday?

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Black moments on WIP Wednesday

Each story reaches a moment when things go wrong. In the most gripping stories, at some point, things go so wrong that the hero or the heroine or both can see no way out. Prue has been killed when the building exploded. Rede is in the hands of his enemies, bound and helpless. Even in a romantic comedy, the black moment (though it might be more of a grey moment) brings despair to the characters we’ve come to love. Cecilia and Marcel have a magical kiss, and then must part. They are from different worlds. It’s over.

It isn’t, of course, at least not in my stories. I choose for my protagonists to find love and for their love to be returned. The happy ever after is just within reach.

But, still, the barriers must seem, at least to them and preferably to the reader, impossible to overcome.

This week, I’m inviting you to give me a clip from your work-in-progress showing part of your protagonists’ black moment. Mine is from Unkept Promises. My hero is tied to a tree, bound and gagged. And my heroine is trying to rescue his son against overwhelming odds when this happens.

“Quick, Mrs Redepenning.” Luke was urging her down, his hands firm on her calves as he knelt. She leapt from his shoulders. “Quick,” he said again. He led the way slightly around the tower to put it between them and the carriage they could now hear approaching.

This side of the hill was less even, full of bumps and hollows. Mia followed Luke as quickly as she could. He had just entered the trees, and she was less than a dozen paces behind him, when she caught her foot and came down flat on the hillside.

For a moment she could only lie there, winded. Voices from the other side of the tower had her pulling her knees under her to get up, but she froze again as they grew closer.

“I’m telling you, Captain, we didn’t hear anything.”

She recognised Hackett’s voice. “And I tell you to find him. You!” His voice retreated. “Get the boy. I’m not waiting to be ambushed.”

“Hey!” The man closest to her shouted after Hackett. “Not so fast. We haven’t been paid.”

“I don’t have time for this. Follow me, and you’ll get your money.”

Now. While they were arguing. Mia crept towards the tree line, keeping low.

She might have made it, but for the riders who appeared at that moment, coming up the hill through the trees on a path that approach the tower from the side. One of them turned his horse and in a few quick strides was in front of her. The moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun he had pointed at her.

“Stand up very slowly,” said a cultured English voice; a woman’s voice, and one she had heard before, though she could not, for the moment, place it. The other riders had joined the first.

Hackett and his men came down the hill towards them. Any thought that the two parties were aligned faded in the light of the weaponry each pointed at the other. Perhaps Mia could use this to her advantage.

“Madam,” she said, “please, I beg you, help me. Those men have kidnapped my son.”

The woman nudged tell course closer and bent to look into Mia’s face. It was Lady Carrington! What was that wicked woman doing here? She had fled England long ago; indeed, most of the Redepenning family thought she must be dead. The lady raised both eyebrows.

“Euronyme Redepenning. How interesting. Fancy running into you, here of all places.” She looked up the hill at the approaching ruffians. “Do come closer,” she invited. “I may have captured someone of interest to you, and I am willing to trade.”

 

 

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Series, serials, sequels, sequences, sets, and strings

I’m still processing the Romance Writers’ Conference. One of the presentations was very timely, as I’ve been rethinking my publication sequence because readers are asking me to complete some of my series before going on to others. I’m not one for serials. In a serial, you have to go to the next book to find out the resolution of the main plot, which I find annoying. But I do love series, where each book has its own story arc, but we continue to meet the same characters over and over.

I’ve also been talking to the wonderful Caroline Warfield about her Children of Empire, which has now become series 1, with more to come. Caroline is getting to know her characters, family by family, so she can discover the overall series arc for each group of books, which is something I’ve lucked into rather than deliberately sought. At the conference, Bella Andre and Nadini Singh both made a good case for thinking about both the story arc in the individual novel that forms part of the series, and the overall series arc. I think I can enrich my books by being a bit more deliberate.

I can certainly be more deliberate about the order in which I write and publish. In the beginning, I started publishing chronologically. Now, having written five and a half novels, nine novellas, and nearly twenty short stories, I still don’t have a completed series.

Here’s where I’m up to in my thinking.

The Golden Redepennings was always designed around the concept of a wealthy, handsome, charming aristocratic family, all descended from three brothers. I have published three of the planned seven books, and am writing book four for publication in March 2019. One a year until 2022? Maybe faster, if I retire. Each book has its own theme and its own arc. The end returns to the beginning, with a minor villain in book 1 coming home as the prodigal son in book 7. Series arc? I had one in mind, but I’m not sure I’ve kept it front and centre. I’ll have to mull a bit more.

The Children of the Mountain King series, which starts The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, has individual love stories for each child and niece of the Duke of Winshire, head of the Winderfield family. The overarching storyline of the  series is a secondary romance — between a Winshire and a Haverford. They start on opposite sides, since her husband attacks the legitimacy of the Winderfield children. And then, through the series, various things happen (including her husband’s death). (My next novella with the Bluestocking Belles is a prequel to this series.) I’m aiming to finish and publish this series over the next two years (2019 and 2020).

Game of Mist and Shadows, the Prue and David series, is a mystery/suspense, but each book will have a love story, and part of the plot will be the emergence of yet another Haverford bastard child for Prue and David to help. The first book, Revealed in Mist, was Prue and David’s love story. Concealed on Shadow has gone on the back burner so I can work on the other projects while selling my house, but I already have an idea for the next one after that. Revealed in Mist is also the first book in The Virtue Sisters, which will go on to explore the love stories of each of Prue’s sisters. The overall arc is the reconciliation between the sisters.

I’ve done a couple of stories in Lion’s Zoo, a series about an ill-assorted bunch of men who were exploring officers for Wellington in Spain. House of Thorns is sitting back on my desk so I can do the edits, and The Fifth Race was a newsletter subscriber story. I’ll have to think about overall arc. At this point, nothing occurs.

And The Heart of a Wolf is about to become a series, at least in my imagination. Who’d have thought? The hero of the short story will be the subject of the overall arc (finding, redeeming, and supporting his people), and the love story in the final book. I need to map out story concept for the other books, but I know the first one involves Bastian’s secretary, who falls in love while out on search for a suitable bride for Bastian.

I have others, as you know. But that’s enough to be going on with.

 

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Promises to keep

One of my takeaways from the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference had to do with the cost and the value of books.

There’s an old joke about people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s a trap for those who give away their books or sell them cheap. Hands up those who have an ereader full of free and 99c books they’ll possibly never read?

I guess it’s way too easy, as an author trying to be noticed in a bazillion book market, to focus on the financial cost of an ebook and think that tweaking price is going to help with sales. We know that our book has cost us many hundreds of hours to write and edit. We probably know to the cent how much we’ve spent on professional services to produce the book, and on marketing to get it in front of you. What we maybe don’t think about is how much our readers commit when they buy our books.

The money people pay for a book is the smallest part of their investment. When you buy a book, you’re making a commitment to invest time — anything from a lunch hour to weeks of spare minutes, depending on the length and how fast you read. In return, you expect an emotional payback. You want the story to suck you in, let you live in the shoes of the characters while you’re reading, and leave you at the end feeling satisfied with the experience.

I’m still thinking about whether this insight might change my view on pricing. But I know it’s going to change some of my marketing. I want readers to know the promises I make when I put a book on the market.

First, I promise that things will work out, that my protagonists will have a happy ending (whatever that means to them), that villains will eventually be defeated (and punished even if not in this book). I also want you to have enough information to decide whether my kind of slightly dark and often convoluted story is your preferred type of read.

Second, if you like to read the kind of story I like to write, I promise to take you out of the everyday world into the one I’ve created. I don’t promise that things will go smoothly. They won’t. I don’t even promise that bad things won’t happen to good people. All I can say is, enjoy the roller-coaster. By buying my book, you’re asking me to play with your emotions and I promise to do my best to make the ride worthwhile.

Third, I promise to keep learning and innovating. I’ll work on my writer craft. I’ll try not to write the same story over and over, just changing the names and places. I’ll try new things, some of which might not work, but I hope we’ll have fun, you and I.

Thank you for your investment in me. You cannot know how much your appreciation motivates me to keep writing.

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Sunday Spotlight on Brainstorm Your Book

I was a beta reader for this practical workbook, and it’s impressive. I expected no less from Mari, who for sure knows what she’s doing as a writer, as a writing coach, and as an editor. I’ll be using the worksheets and other ideas in my future planning sessions for my own books, and I recommend it to those who want a robust way to improve and shorten their planning process (before, during, and after that crucial first draft).

Brainstorm Your Book: Planning the Parts of Your Next Novel

Brainstorm Your Book: Planning the Parts of Your Next Novel is a hands-on, pen-to-paper, rubber-to-road workbook to help you generate ideas for all the elements of your next fiction book—character, setting, plot, and theme—to produce a more robust first draft more easily, and improve on your later versions. Whether you are writing your first book or your fifty-first, no matter your genre or personal process, Brainstorm Your Book will spark creativity, increase productivity, and make writing your novel a whole lot more fun.

In a series of questions, prompts, and exercises, Brainstorm Your Book probes your imagination, pulling small and large details from your creative mind and the world around you. The workbook will introduce you to your characters and help build solid friendships with them, show you both a bird’s-eye and closeup view of your settings, generate action to drive the plot forward, and enhance the underlying messages in your manuscript. It will walk you, step-by-step, through choices you might never have considered, act as a catalyst driving progress through the whole first draft, and increase your chances of ending with a high-quality finished novel.

Coming soon: Brainstorm Your Book Workbooks for Memoir and Nonfiction!

Buy link: https://mariannechristie.com/brainstorm-your-book/

Contest:

Win a Kindle Fire 7 and free extra brainstorming worksheets for life!

For the entire month of August on Mari’s blog, you will find daily brainstorming prompts from the book. If you follow the prompts and comment with some of the writing that results, you will be entered to win.

Follow Mari on the web:

Author Website www.MariAnneChristie.com

Facebook www.facebook.com/MariChristieAuthor

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And, for more tools to improve your writing and your novel, find Mari on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/MariAnneChristie

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In praise of editors

I got the edits on House of Thorns back from Scarsdale Publishing a couple of days ago. This is the first time I’ve worked with a publisher, and so far I’m enjoying the experience. My draft looks, as one of my friends said about hers, as if Casey cut open a vein and bled all over it, but it’s going to be a much better book for her input.

It’s not the first time I’ve worked with an editor, of course. For a start, I am an editor. In my day job editing commercial and government documents into plain language I work with a whole team of editors. Nothing goes out of our office without being peer reviewed, so I’m edited all the time. From that experience, I came to fiction writing knowing the value of an educated eye. We get too close to our own work to be able to see its flaws — or, for that matter, its strengths. So I’ve employed editors since I started indie publishing, either paying for them or swapping manuscripts.

Good books are a collaborative process.

The author tells the story, perhaps entirely alone but more likely hashing out difficult plot points with a trusted friend, ringing or emailing specialists for a bit of expert knowledge, checking facts through research using information collected by other people. For my books set in places I’ve never been, I watch YouTube videos, read books (guide books, historians’ studies of the place and time, contemporary letters and diaries), study maps, go through local newspapers from the time period, and in many other ways draw on the work of others.

In my process, I then give it an edit and send it to beta readers; a group of early readers who will look at the half-cooked story and give me their reactions.

Another edit from me and it’s ready for the developmental editor to cut open a vein and bleed red ink everywhere.

My turn again. Time to make it better. I’ll often at this stage trial rewritten sections with the editor, or anyone else who will sit still long enough, until I’m sure I’ve got them right.

Next is a copy edit, and finally a proofread.

I say finally, but of course lots more has to happen. While the book has been off being rebuilt, tuned, and polished, we’ve been making the cover. And the production process involves adding the hair I tear out to the editor’s blood. Producing the stories you read is a very messy business. I’m looking forward to leaving that side of it to Scarsdale.

But that’s in the future for House of Thorns. Just for now I’m going to be grateful for editors.

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Stretch goals for the next eighteen months

So a person needs stretch goals, right? I’ve just spent a few hours setting up a writing and editing schedule for the next eighteen months, creating an accountability book for recording word counts and milestones, and writing the titles on my ‘take everywhere’ notebooks for the next three books:

  • Unkept Promises, Book 4 in the Golden Redepennings
  • The Beast Next Door, a novella based on the newsletter subscriber short story The Bluestocking the Beast
  • Charlotte’s Wish, a contemporary novella for the Authors of Main Street Christmas Wishes box set.

Further across the spreadsheet, I’ve calculated the word count per day to reach the publication date. I can write 1500 words a day, but can I do it every day? We’ll see.

House of Thorns is with the publisher, and Paradise Regained goes to 2nd beta on 2 July.

And I’ve made a start on Unkept Promises, so that’s okay. Day 1. Tick.

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Telling or showing in WIP Wednesday

Show, don’t tell, beginning authors are told. And it’s good advice. Put the reader inside the scene and let them watch it unfolding. Don’t give them a character (or worse still, a narrator) who fills in all the backstory in paragraph after paragraph.

Like all good advice, as you gain more experience you know when to ignore it. Showing is usually best. Except when it isn’t. Use the comments to share an excerpt with either sharing or telling, and tell us why you chose to do it that way.

I’ve been thinking of taking one of my newsletter short stories, and turning it into a novella for a box set the Bluestocking Belles might publish for Valentine’s Day 2019. Because of the format, they tend to have a bit of telling — purely and simply to keep the story short. Like this bit from the story I might rewrite, The Mouse Fights Back. (For those who don’t subscribe to my newsletter, each one contains the start of a short story written exclusively for newsletter subscribers and a link to the rest of the story plus all the others I’ve written so far. Click on the link in the side menu to subscribe for this and heaps of other free stuff.)

They were trying to kill his Mouse.

The runaway carriage might have been an accident. Such things happen. Mouse was shopping, with Jasper and two footmen in attendance, when it careened down the street, and only Jasper’s quick thinking and quicker action saved her from injury or worse. He thrust her into a doorway, protecting her with his body, and the carriage passed close enough to tear the back out of his jacket. The footmen both jumped clear. Hampered by her skirts, Mouse could well have been killed.

The shot that just missed her in Hyde Park must surely have been deliberate, though the magistrate called to investigate insisted on regarding it as carelessness at worst. “Some foolish young man making bets with his friends. Not at all the thing. Your wife could have been hurt, and how would they feel then?” Tiberius’s own investigators found a trampled spot in the bushes, probably the place where the assassin had waited to make his shot.

Tiberius doubled the guard on Mouse when she went out, and thought about confining her to the house, but couldn’t bear to curtail the freedom she was enjoying so much as she visited the art galleries, shops and museums she’d been barred from when she was under her aunt’s paw.

His own estate, his investigation into his uncle and stepmother, and Mouse’s affairs kept him busy during the day, and he couldn’t escort her as often as he wished.

As her husband, he now owned her inheritance, but extracting it—or, more likely, what was left of it—from Lord Demetrius’s hands was proving to be difficult, with his uncle’s lawyers throwing up one obstacle after another. Tiberius didn’t need the money, but he would be damned if Lord Demetrius was going to have it. Besides, as Jasper said, if they could prove the wicked uncle had stolen from Mouse’s trust, they would have a reason to have him arrested, and the whole sorry saga could be put to rest.

And then he could spend time with his delightful, fascinating, sweet little wife, who was blossoming like a rose away from the bitter atmosphere of her aunt’s home. The old harridan’s oppression had not suppressed Mouse’s intelligence or her sense of humour. It had made her afraid of almost everything, and every day he saw more reason to admire her courage as she fought through her fear and faced the world with a cheerful smile.

He dodged five more suspicious accidents and outright attacks, but none of them bothered him as much as the crowd of drunken slum dwellers who mobbed Mouse and her footmen in the street as she emerged from his house. He sallied out with the rest of the household and drove the attackers off. She was shaken, but not hurt. This time.

“You need to send her to Redfern,” Jasper scolded, after Tiberius had hugged her, examined her for injury, and handed her over to her maid so she could wash and change. “Every time she goes out in London, she is in danger.”

He was right. At the earldom’s principal estate, Tiberius could control every inch of ground for acres around. He had purged Redfern of the few servants who owed allegiance to Lady Bowden, and those who remained had either been born and brought up on the estate, or were people of his own. She would be far safer there. But he hated the thought of staying in London alone.

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Beginnings on WIP Wednesday

I’ve started my contemporary again, so I figured today was a good day to have beginnings as my WIP theme. Book beginnings, chapter beginnings — you choose. Mine is the (new) first scene in Beached, which I’m writing for the Authors of Main Street boxed set.

The road home wound through the hills until the sudden last corner before the coast. Nik had known the way by heart since she was a small girl, returning from a shopping expedition or a sports event.

In recent years, the little fishing settlement was discovered by weekenders. Land Transport New Zealand had been hard at work during Nik’s decade overseas, widening and straightening, cutting through slopes and filling hollows. The first time she’d driven out here a few months ago, the alterations made it unfamiliar.

But she’d been twice more, to check on the beach house for Gran and Poppa, and the landmarks beyond the road remained the same. A clump of native bush still screened Murphy’s Pond, a favourite summer swimming hole. They’d built a lookout with a picnic spot over Pleasant Valley, but the view of farmland, bush, river, and hills remained as beautiful as ever, and the hill known as Two Heads was still as impressive as ever, even if some aesthetically challenged cretin had somehow obtained permission to quarry on one side.

The road dropped down again from the hillside into the river flats. This time, the long row of massive willows at the river’s edge signalled the difference, growing steadily smaller as they approached the tidal reaches. No more hills, and in a moment she would have her first sight of the sea.

“There, Nikki,” Poppa used to say as they rounded that last corner, “the sea. Nothing else between us and South America.”

The numbness behind which she had hidden her grief lifted for a moment, pierced by a shaft of pure joy. Not allowing herself to feel had helped her survive the second funeral a mere week after the first, and the long days that followed. Coming home had been the right move. She could mourn them properly in the landscapes of her childhood: not the diminished frail couple she had nursed and cared for these past few months, but the Gran and Poppa of twenty and thirty years ago; the only parents she had known or needed.

The car, Poppa’s little hybrid, seemed as eager as she to eat up the last five miles, gaining speed on the gentler curves around the little coves and over the small prominatories between her and Paradise Bay. Gran and Poppa had left most of their estate to be split between their three grandchildren — her and the half-siblings she barely knew. But the beach house at Paradise Bay was left to her alone, and the decision to keep it had never needed to be made. She had been born there; had spent her early years in that community; had left only for high school and later for university. It was home.

Beks, her dearest friend from school and a faithful correspondent in all the years away, had promised to air the place and make up a bed with fresh sheets. She would undoubtedly stock the cupboards, too, though she’d insisted that Nik join her and her family for a meal tonight. Nik found she was looking forward to it. Beks had married her high-school sweetheart, and she and Dave had both known Gran and Poppa.

She began to hum the song Gran always sang as they finished this last stretch of the coast. “Our house, is a very, very, very fine house…”

Soon. Soon she would be home.