Don’t judge a book by its cover...

Unless you think the cover is awesome, in which case, feel free to judge away!

Presenting to you, “The Eye of the Beholder” cover art.

As you may have guessed, this means I’m onto the polishing stage for the collection, and I’m looking to launch it within the next couple of weeks.  I’ll have an official date for you as soon as possible!

So get your Kindles ready and I’ll see you soon!

My face hurts.

Another slight delay this week.  I’ve been a bit ill, and managed to burst the blood vessels in my face from being sick.  Gross I know.  The result is I have a lovely mottled effect that feels like a (very sore) bruise extending from my eyes to my chin.  I’m back to typing today, so things should get back on track.  I know you’ve probably all been holding your breath for the story collection, but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep you waiting a little longer! 

In other news, if you are in the London area, be sure to go along to get your copy of Queen of the World signed by Ben Hennessy!  I’m unfortunately not going to make it due to being on another land mass, however I’m eagerly awaiting my copy of the paperback, which should be arriving this week.      

And finally, a little inspiration!  Last weekend I went over to Scotland, here are some of the shots from that trip!

All photographs copyright © Sarah Cosgrove 2012

Local words

The point of language is to communicate an idea.  I’ve always found it interesting that the same creature came up with different sounds for different things, even to the extent that some humans can’t make the sounds that other humans do.  (For example, some languages have trouble with “th” in English.  And no one but the Danes can manage “Rødgrød med fløde”)

Why did one set of people agree that a tree is called a “tree”, but another that it’s an “arbre”?

But then to complicate things even more, there are words that only exist in local regions within languages.  One of the biggest debates between people in the UK is what this is called:

Image credit

I’d call that a batch.  A lot of people would call it a bread roll.  Some people call it a cob, others a bun, and if you go to Bradford it’s a teacake (seriously, Bradford?!)

So can you get away with local words when writing?  Maybe.  Even though I maintain it’s a batch, if I mentioned one in my story, I’d probably not call it that, because I know that anyone from outside of the Midlands would get confused. 

But maybe I could get away with “scraze”?  That’s what we call what others would call a graze.  I guess it came about as a cross between scrape and graze. 

I suppose this leads onto the question of why I want to use local words at all, and not the “proper” ones in the dictionary.

Well there are two reasons:

One is, characters don’t just use words out of the dictionary.  They have their own words for things, and probably have a few good regional ones of their own.

Two is, the dictionary isn’t language.  It’s a reference for all those words that people made up.  And some words haven’t been made up yet.

So make sure you don’t get in a mardy.  I’m off to eat a batch in the spinney!   

It was merely a setback!

So I imagined this week I’d be saying how my Sci-Fi story collection was nicely second drafted.  But it isn’t.

My editor (paid in chocolate/coffee) read through the last story to be reviewed, got half way through, and came to the conclusion that it didn’t live up to the standard of the other stories.

This didn’t upset me; in a way I was relieved.  You see the thing was, I knew it wasn’t good enough, before I’d even handed it over to be read.  I wanted to be told to keep that one out.  Why didn’t I make the call myself?  Perhaps a lack of confidence.

Would I be able to write a better story?
What if I’d run out of ideas?

What if I’d been deluding myself and all the stories weren’t good enough? 

I spent the next two days thinking.

Strangely that is one of the toughest parts of being an author.  You can spend hours or days, sitting, walking, doodling, making a drink, getting a snack, staring into space… and to the whole world it looks like you aren’t doing anything at all.

It sounds very lame when at the end of the day someone asks how it went, and you reply:

“Good.  I thought about a lot of stuff.”

The world values the physical, and if you don’t have something to show at the end of the day, you don’t really have a mark of progress.  I went through a stage of feeling worried and guilty that I wouldn’t have anything to show by the end of this week, that it would be a “wasted” week. 

Looking back on it, I can now see it’s been a valuable week.  I’ve learned a good lesson on how to deal with a setback, and maybe gained a little confidence too.

No one was angry that I’d been delayed in my plan.  I did get some new ideas.  I started writing one, it’s going well, and I’m enjoying it.  I can say with certainty that the final product will be as good as I can make it – and a bar to beat for my future endeavours. 

Writer’s block.

This is something every writer has to contend with at some point.  It’s not a lack of ideas, but struggling at how to put them on a page.

It’s like when you imagine the awesome cake you are going to bake, and then find out you have no icing sugar and the shop is closed.  Now what are you going to do?

Well you could give up on the cake.  Or you could look up how to make icing sugar on the net, throw caster sugar and cornflour into a food processor and walla! Improvised icing sugar. 

Ok so it turned out a bit floury and gritty, but hey, at least I tried.

Oh yeah, this post was about writing wasn’t it?

Well, I find one of the best ways to get over writer’s block is to just write.  Grab a pad and stream of consciousness write down anything and everything.  Eventually something will click.

Another exercise I read about was to go away and describe something.  Anything.  Like eating a nut.  What does it smell like?  What is it like as you bite into it?  How does it feel on your tongue?  What about when you chew it?

Sometimes it gets those words flowing again.  Sometimes you just get to eat a nut, which is a nice anyway.  (Unless you have a nut allergy, in which case, don’t do that.)

So this week I got another story for the sci fi collection first drafted.  I am both looking forward to, and dreading reading them back.  Sometimes things that made perfect sense when you were typing them become complete gibberish when you read them a week later.  Fingers crossed there won’t be too much of that!  I guess we’ll see how that goes next week!  

In the meantime, I’ve added a new link to the resources page, from those masters of storytelling, Pixar.  Enjoy!  

There’s a moral to this story somewhere.

When I was at school, I had some keyboard lessons.  You know the kind – where you are excused from class to sit in a tiny room for ten minutes trying to speed learn how to play a tune from an “easy” book. 

It was in one of these lessons I got into a discussion (argument) with my teacher about how “Rock Around the Clock” should be played. 

You see, I wasn’t playing what was written on the page. 

“Those notes are all crotchets!”  She would point out with exasperation.  “They are all the same length.”

“But the song doesn’t sound like that!”  I thought that if I was going to play Rock around the Clock, it should sound like the record did.  But this was a simplified version for doing keyboard grades – and the teacher pointed out that if I played it like it sounded instead of how it was written in the book, I wouldn’t pass the exam.

Who made up that rule?  To me, it seemed the ultimate silliness that you should fail at playing music by playing it to sound better. 

As it was, I never took the exam.  But whenever I played Rock Around the Clock, people didn’t seem to mind that not all those notes were crotchets.

Inspiration

Some days it’s good to just get out and see stuff.  If you sit indoors at a computer all day, eventually your imagination will get a bit worn out.  Even going for a walk will help, to refresh you memory on the texture of stone, the feel of the wind and the colour of the sky.

I got out to visit a local wildlife park this week; here are some of the words I brought back in the form of pictures!

All images copyright Sarah Cosgrove © 2012