Weekend Writing Warriors November 26

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image below.

I’m back with the start of a scene from my first book, Ghosts of Innocence.

Shayla has stolen the identity of a newly-appointed senior public servant, and infiltrated the Palace in disguise. She has already fallen foul of her new boss, Mabbwendig ap Terlion, Master of the Emperor’s Domestic Household, but has since kept out of Mabb’s way while she establishes herself in her new position.

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Shayla joined a flood of people streaming into the cavernous staff dining room. A wall of sound, the voices of hundreds of people, seemed to squeeze her chest. The air was heavy with the remnants of the day's heat and the scent of cooked meats steeped in pungent sauces. The senses combined to form a suffocating blanket around Shayla's head.

Am I doing the right thing? Her eyes burned from fatigue, but there was no turning back. After Shayla's brush with Mabbwendig yesterday, she knew she could no longer put off this moment.

Three rows of long tables stretched away left and right, broken by an aisle ahead of her which led to the center of the room. Three more rows of tables filled the far side. To her right, a more lavishly appointed table sat apart, under the frowning portrait of Emperor Julian Skamensis.

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Note - both Ghosts of Innocence and Tiamat’s Nest ebooks are still on sale at $0.99 for a few more days.

Books on sale

It’s that time of year again ... time to wish our American friends south of the border a peaceful and stress-free Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, if anyone you know is interested in picking up a bargain (maybe to wind down when all the family festivities get a bit too much) both Tiamat’s Nest and Ghosts of Innocence e-books are on sale for the rest of November.

Down from $3.99 to $0.99 (US).

Links to Amazon and other markets are in the sidebar >>>

Taking the scenic route

I made another discovery last year, while drafting The Ashes of Home: The power of writing in threads and scenes.

I blogged in more detail about this last year, but the essence is that my entire manuscript at this point is a long series of scenes with only a few tentative chapter breaks marked in as yet. Alongside, I have a summary spreadsheet listing the scenes, a brief description of what the scene is about, and the scene’s point of view. The latter is color coded so the whole list provides a great visual for how much attention each of the main characters is getting throughout the story.

I found this approach really helpful in keeping up momentum along the different parallel threads of the story during the drafting phase. I could just get on with writing each point of view as its own story and worry about weaving them together later.

Now I’m into final edits, the power of this technique is showing itself again. There is one particular story line that I want to draw more to the fore. There was a whole hive of activity linking two of the main characters that I never articulated in the first draft, mainly because I wasn’t even aware of it. When I thought about it, it was obviously present but happening entirely off stage. I decided to bring it explicitly on stage, which means writing a series of new scenes, or additions to existing scenes, and weaving them back into the storyline.

If I’d worked directly on the manuscript, agonizing over where to edit in new material at the same time as trying to draft it, I think I’d have been paralyzed by the complexity of the task. Instead, I focused simply on the thread I wanted to weave in as if it were a complete story in itself. I jotted down notes about how that storyline would evolve and ideas about point of view and timeline.

The novel’s scene list helped here, giving me an overview of the story structure and making it easier to see where this new thread would fit naturally into the overall structure. Then I simply wrote the new scenes as if they were a standalone story.

I’m now in the process of editing the new material into the whole, and I have to report I’m very pleased with the effectiveness of this technique.

Musical nostalgia

I mentioned in a post last year how I discovered, unexpectedly, that music helps me to write. I say “unexpectedly” because I had many times tried writing with music on in the background, and always found it a distraction.

The difference was ... headphones.

Ambient music = distraction. But put on headphones and the music suddenly becomes a shield, a cocoon walling me off from the outside world.

At the time that was a new and surprising discovery, but it seems to be consistently true, not just a passing phase. Music has since carried me through many productive writing sessions, even when the going got tough and the words just weren’t co-operating.

Many writers use music to set the mood. They make up playlists that in some way reflect the writing. It’s not a mood thing for me. Regardless of what I’m writing, the music is simply my productive setting, like absolute silence is for some people, or their cozy writing den, or an inspiring landscape in front of them. For me this means the music has to be fairly loud, rhythmic, melodic, and not too demanding. Classical music would kill the muse.

I started off with recent artists like Taylor Swift (yes, I happen to like her music, don’t judge!) and Mumford & Sons because they were already in our family iTunes library.

Along the way, this started to turn into a bit of a nostalgia trip. I’ve been seeking out artists I remember from my university days. I found loads of early Genesis albums on iTunes, and am currently listening to The Stranglers.

Remember when punk horrified nations with its iconoclastic break from sugary pop blandness?
#DinosaurAlert
What a difference a few decades makes! In a world of rap and hip hop, some of that early rock and punk today sounds remarkably lyrical and I wonder what all the fuss was about.

What about you? Does music help or hinder your artistic endeavors. And is there any particular music that brings back powerful memories?