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12 Books in 12 Months

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Poisonous Mushrooms

Cats = Comedy

Lol. This post isn’t really about poisonous mushrooms, that was a cunning ruse to get you attention. It’s really about book 9 and why I’ve been finding it hard to write. I believe it’s a question of genre.

With specific genres, plots tend to come fairly easily once I have a character in mind.  The story grows up around the characterisation and dialogue – probably because those are the bits I like playing with most.  To give you a for instance, when I was doing fantasy in May I was given two character suggestions and knew immediately what I was going to do with them, so I sat and wrote it. 

Humour is not a very specific genre, and to be honest I don’t have a specific character in mind.  My vague plan was to write about the experiences of recent graduates living in the city in a sort of bubbly, chick lit way – Sex and the City but with real people who have real relationships, money issues, terrible flats, identity crises, whatever.  Not just any old real people, but real Scottish people. 

Continue reading “Poisonous Mushrooms” →

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Sweet Valley Confidential Review

For those who never read any of the Sweet Valley books, here is an overview: gorgeous identical twin sisters grow up in California. They may look the same but by jimminy their personalities couldn’t be more different.  Elizabeth, four minutes older, is serious and sensible and wants to be a writer.  The younger, Jessica, is the more shallow, cheerleadery type who is forever stealing her sister’s stuff (clothes, boys, etc).

I have been trying to pinpoint exactly when I read them, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to about Primary 5 for the Sweet Valley Twins and Primary 6 for Sweet Valley High – so around the age of 9 or 10.  I used to take them out of the library and I think I read most of the things, although I never owned one. Till now! Well, till July, when my mum got me a copy of Ten Years On: Sweet Valley Confidential for my birthday – a look at where the twins are a decade after the high school series ends.  Even though there were all kinds of books about what happened after that, including Sweet Valley University and a series where Elizabeth goes to live in England for a while.  I think they jumped the shark with SVU – I don’t remember reading many of those ones.

Anyway, “Haven’t you ever wondered what happened when Elizabeth and Jessica grew up?” the tagline asks.

I won’t lie, it hasn’t kept me up at night.  Continue reading “Sweet Valley Confidential Review” →

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Good Search Terms

If you follow me on twitter (@12books12months) you’ll be aware that I am a sporadic stat obsessive.  Which basically means I while away certain evenings by checking how many hits the blog had that day, then putting out plaintive messages on social networking sites to increase the numbers.  Obviously it would be more constructive to spend this time writing, but whatever, you’re not the boss of me.

This lurking around the WordPress Dashboard offers mixed results, but I think the main thing we can take away from it is that it makes me kind of annoying to be around.  I know the best way to get hits is to have interesting stuff to post, not to whinge at folk on Facebook – but that doesn’t stop me.  It doesn’t even slow me down.  I merely hark back to the glory days of the book festival when I was all kinds of popular without having to do very much, because people wanted to read about what was going on and I happened to be writing about it.

However, the book festival comes but once a year, and to conduct a countdown from this point on until next August would be overkill.  So what to write about?  Well, stats can help with that, because they show the most popular search terms that have brought people to the blog.  Once you know what piqued internet interest in you, it’s merely a case of emulating that success.

Except it isn’t really, because people get to this blog by searching for three things.  They either look for “12 books in 12 months” or some variation thereon; “Amanda Palmer”; or some one-off random search term that means nothing to anyone other than the searcher.  Having said that, I do like reading those bad boys.

Here are some of my favourites.

Continue reading “Good Search Terms” →

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Trenton Lee Stewart Interview

© Shannon Sturgis (http://shannonsturgisphotography.typepad.com/)

Trenton Lee Stewart is the American author of The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is the sort of book a library assistant might recommend to young persons who like warm humour, adventures, puzzles and fun. I asked him if he would do an interview with me by email, and he said yes.  So here it is.

Can you sum up The Mysterious Benedict Society books for people who haven’t read them?

After passing a series of mysterious tests, a diversely talented group of four children are recruited by a benevolent genius named Mr. Benedict to go on an important mission. The first book is about that mission and the children’s developing relationships; the second and third are continuations of the Society’s adventures.

I read in one interview with you that the editing process for The Mysterious Benedict Society was quite arduous – was it the same for the other books in the series or did it get easier?

Continue reading “Trenton Lee Stewart Interview” →

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Ode to Coffee

I have written about the relative merits of tea and coffee before, as part of the readers Q&A series.  Back in May I informed The Rogue Verbumancer that I saw tea as my staple writing drink, although I tend to kick-start the day with coffee.

It was a pretty riveting post.

Anyhoo, whilst this remains true, I tend to regard coffee as my rent-paying-job drink (journalism/writing is not my main income yet, but I’m working on it).  This is because when I am conducting assorted administrative tasks in an office environment, I need to sporadically re-kick-start myself several times a day as opposed to the once or twice required when penning glorious fictions.  I find the immediate caffeine boost of coffee sharpens my focus on envelope stuffing and email-replying better than tea – maybe because over the years I’ve imbibed tea more often and have immunised myself against its effects. 

Continue reading “Ode to Coffee” →

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Touch Typing

The other morning I forgot how to touch type. I don’t know if it was down to tiredness, or lack of concentration, or perhaps a touch of mild bubonic plague; but whatever it was I was coming out with endless streams of jumbled consonants.  In the end I had to start watching what my fingers were doing on the keyboard in order to get coherent sentences out of them.  Best administrative assistant / writer evar.

Any person who has tried to write 2000 words of fiction every day over a sustained period of time will already know that touch typing is A Good Thing.  It means you can get lost in the words, letting them fall out of your brain and onto the screen in record time without breaking your concentration to remind your left index finger where the ‘f’ key is (which defies logic as it is – the ‘f’ key doesn’t have that bump on it for decoration, brain, it’s there so you can find it without looking).

Probably the worst thing you can possibly do in a ‘forgetting how to type’ situation is ironically most people’s default position, namely to overthink it.  If you go ‘oh, I’ve made more mistakes than usual, what’s going on there?’ you start to come up with outlandish ways to explain your ineptitude, which then gets progressively worse because you’ve been dwelling on it rather than getting on with what you’re meant to be doing.

I suspect if you didn’t pay any attention at all you’d probably work it out of your system naturally, and as long as you proof read your correspondence with due diligence no one need ever be any the wiser.  Although I don’t know that for sure, because I fall into the ‘noticing and wondering what’s the matter with me’ camp rather than the blitz era carrying on regardless group.

And this, dear reader, is what is known as a First World Problem – I gather there are some people out there who don’t even have any hands. Touch typing is but a distant dream for those brave souls and yet they struggle on.  Presumably they dictate their novels to a secretary, or upload them directly to Audioboo.

Verily, this is food for thought.

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