LOUISE PIEPER

Hold the phone!

In breaking news, it turns out that I can’t move house and finish my novel at the same time.

This isn’t really news to anyone. Moving is one of those life events that everyone acknowledges is about as stressful as nailing one’s intestines to a tree and then running around and around it until you die.

So, maybe not quite that stressful. But uncannily close.

I’m moving in a week. There’s a lot more of my things packed in boxes in the garage than in the house, and yet there still seems to be an awful lot of stuff in the house. There’s a long, long list of Things That Must Be Done, with deadlines. I’m worrying about packing logistics and notifications and all the rest of it. I’m tired and grumpy and stressed.

And I just want to write. I can’t stop thinking about my current work in progress, and, worse, far worse, about the next book. I sneaked a little writing session in today, just so I could get some of the characters’ dialogue out of my head and into the document before it starts leaking out of my ears.

One week to the move. Then there’s the unpacking and the sorting things out. Then, oh then, I’ve promised myself a new writing space and a couple of weeks of glorious, unfettered writing.

Eyes on the prize, and on we go.

Words you didn’t know you needed

I’m a word nerd.

I love bang up to the elephant articles about weird words to add to my vocabulary, like this list of slang from the Victorian Era, and collections of obscure words. One of my favourites of the latter is The Phrontistery with its Compendium of Lost Words.

Feel free to share your favourites in the comments – I’ll be forever grateful!

I have beguiled many a happy hour reading through the Compendium. I could try and justify it by saying it’s research for writing historical fiction, but that would be entirely disingenuous. I just love words.

It has occurred to me, though that there are no words for things that should have words for them, and other words out there which can hardly come up much in conversation. One of the latter, courtesy of The Phrontistery, is brephophagist. Try and recall, if you’d be so kind as to indulge me for a moment, the last time you needed a word for “someone who eats babies”.

Never, I thought (or, at least, I hoped.)

And now, to prove me wrong, a good friend reminded me of the fascinating collection of online oddities at Atlas Obscura, and whilst taking a circuitous route through its treasures, I stumbled upon the Child-Eater of Bern. (That’s him caught in the act in the cropped header image, photographed by Andrew Bossi, available in creative commons on Wikipedia. See the full image at the linked sites.)

The good folk of Bern refer to the subject of the horrific sculpture that tops their fountain as a Kindlifresser – a child eater, or brephophagist. He’s been there since 1546 and, for all I know, it may have been all the rage in Europe during the 16th Century to decorate one’s town with such things. Suddenly, I can imagine the word ‘brephophagist’ arising quite naturally in all manner of conversations.

That’s my disturbing thought for the day.

Retrofitting story structure

My current work in progress is something in the way of an experiment. I’ve never tried to write a novel-length anything in a single process. I’ve always written bits and pieces, here and there, put it away for ages, written a bit more, edited what I had, mucked around with it – you get the idea.

I’ve heard of a marvellous kind of storyteller who has an idea, starts writing and writes through (you people know who you are). I gave it a try and at around 35,000 words realised that this particular bunny was never going to fly for me.

No worries. I worked out the broad brushstrokes of what the plot needed to do, wrote the scenes that were clear in my head, and added in hashtag notes like #check delivery time 1834 mail London to York and #Julian needs to talk to Mattie about hares and curses. On the next sweep through the document, I write out more scenes, or maybe add more hashtags as I need to.

It’s a messier process, but it works for me, and I can easily search for # in an edit to find any points where I’ve reminded myself to check a fact.

What I don’t do is consciously plan out the overall three act, or five act, structure. And while I understand that a story doesn’t necessarily need that structure, it’s a reliable touchstone for the reader. I’m a big believer in the writer respecting the hell out of the reader, because that’s what I want when I’m reading.

The reader is doing a lot of stuff , inside their busy brain, bringing the writer’s story to life, and if the writer has used a solid structure it’s like a strong foundation on which you can build anything.

The other great thing about structure is that it reminds me to bolt things together better – that is, to make the connections that I’ve made in my writer head more overt on the page (but remember, respect! – no bludgeoning the reader with it).

I’ve written about four fifths of this current WIP. Soon, I will need to have a look at my document as a whole and identify the turning points (or the pinch points, or the pivotal scenes, or whatever you want to call them) where things shift for the characters, and tension increases.

Ideally, these scenes will mark the transitions between the acts within the classic story structure, and I need to make sure that my main character is being proactive, rather than reactive – that is, that she is making choices that cause things to happen, rather than just having things happen around her. I’m pretty confident she’s doing okay on that front, but retrofitting the structure also makes me think about the overall pacing of the story.

I’m a little worried, after trying the just write the thing from start to finish approach, that my pacing is off, and doing some word count checking of where those turning points happen will help me ensure that the eventual reader will feel invested early in the story, and there will be enough rising tension to keep them turning pages until the entirely satisfying conclusion.

Sounds perfect! Now I just have to make it happen.

A new year revolution

dandelion

The year has turned so it must be time to spin around, blow a dandelion clock and make a wish.

I’ve always preferred that kind of revolution to the other, and definitely favoured it above resolutions for this time of year. I like me. I’m not perfect, but just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean I need to create a new version of me.

But there’s definitely more than just dandelion seeds in the air. I’ve spent the last couple of days packing books. We have 30 shelves crammed to overflowing and I’ve never mastered the art of ruthless weeding. If I’m lucky I will whittle it down to 28 shelves worth of books that need to be moved.

Because it is time for a change.

I’m not particularly reliable in my migratory habits, but it’s been seven and a half years since we came back to Australia from our second Scottish amble, and I’m tired of being this close to the equator.

So, my first change for this lovely leap year of potential and promise is a southerly peregrination – from 28.0167° S to 35.3075° S. That might not sound like much of a difference, but I’ll be going up in the world as well – from around 13 metres to 580 metres above sea level.

The chances of snow improve dramatically, I assure you.

The clarion call to adventure, in this case, does not allow me to stride out of the cottage, sword in hand, to go where the road leads ever onwards. It will take four weeks of planning, packing, and cleaning, and devouring anti-histamines in the hope I can prevent my dust allergy from making my face fall off.

And I want to have my first draft of novel #3 finished by the end of January, too. To achieve that I’ll need to think of some way that neither the villain, nor an important secondary character, are required to do something stupid in the process of reaching their desired, mutually exclusive, outcomes.

Well, packing is just like playing Tetris, right? And plotting is really just puzzle-solving. It’s all the same skills, surely?

Hmm, I’ll let you know how that theory works out.

Tally-ho, and toodle-pip!

That was so 2015

There are fewer than 40 hours remaining to 2015, and I’m wishing I was with a friend of mine who is currently trekking around Cambodia, if only so I could work in a bad it’s time to look back in Angkor, what? pun for the end of the year.

See what I did there?

It’s been an interesting year. Some great stuff and some maundering around in the abyssal depths stuff, both on a personal and a global level. I’ll just get over the personally abysmal first, because seguing from good things to hopeful futures is always so much cheerier.

It was a bad year, healthwise, for me. Thankfully, medical science is an amazing thing and with the assistance of a couple of surgeons, an awesome anaesthetist, some titanium tacks and assorted personnel and paraphernalia, I am now pretty damn tickety-boo. Plus – titanium! It’s all good.

Also unfortunate was being kind-napped by revolutionary tapirs and held in a location with unreliable bandwidth. It’s made me think about what I want to achieve this coming year, but it’s also why I haven’t been updating here as often as I would like. Still, that’s a story for another day.

And speaking of stories, 2015 was a great year in regard to writing. Last year, I went part-time at work for 12 months and resolved to finish writing a book. Any book. How about one of those eight books you’ve started, Louise? Yeah, how about that?

So I sorted myself out a bit, and then this time last year tried to give myself a kick in the backside and get on with it. But it wasn’t until April, when I went to Adelaide for Fiona McIntosh’s five day commercial fiction masterclass, that I got a proper kick from someone who knew what they were talking about. Best thing ever.

By the end of May, I’d finished my first draft. I actually finished a manuscript! While my lovely beta readers started on their feedback, I got stuck into draft novel #2. At the end of June I submitted the edited manuscript #1 to a publisher and kept working on #2. I finished the first draft at the end of August, and submitted the first 15, 000 words to a publisher’s open submission call. I started writing #3 on the 1st of September. In November, following another inspiring couple of days at GenreCon in Brisbane, I finished the edits on #2, revised #1 to fix a couple of things, and sent them both off to an agent.

And here we are at the end of December. I wish I could say I’d been offered a publishing contract this year, but I’m saving that news (hopefully) and the reward of finally devouring my masterclass Haighs chocolate frog, for 2016.

I know that the number of words doesn’t really matter (I could sit there typing All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy over and over again, and we know how well that would turn out). But I worked it out anyway and it looks like this:

#1 historical fantasy 118,800 (12/15) – 65,800 (01/15) = 53,000 words
#2 YA urban fantasy 84,000 (12/15) – 37,000 (01/15) = 47,000 words
#3 sequel to #1 83,000 (12/15) – 0 (01/15) = 83,000 words

That’s 183,000 words this year. More, really, once you take editing into account – woot!

And, better than that, I finished something. I started writing #1 in March 2011. I started writing #2 in 2007, while I was still living in Edinburgh. I’m really happy to have made 2015 the year when I could finally say I’ve written a book. Many, many thanks to my family for their support and encouragement, and to Fiona for inspiration and support.

So, what are my 2016 new year’s revolutions (tapir related or otherwise)?
Well, writing is good – I like it, and I’m sticking with it.
As for everything else … I feel a change in the air.

The satisfaction of revenge

Forgive and forget, or at least forgive and get over it, might be good advice for our souls/karma/general state of mental health. But, you know, there’s something so very satisfying about a great revenge story.

The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham is one of my favourite books. I reviewed it enthusiastically five years ago, when I picked it for my library’s online book club read of the month. I was *super* excited when I heard it was being filmed.

Ah, and what a fantastic job they’ve done of making it into a film. I loved it! It looked perfect. I was completely emotionally engaged with it – laughing at the humour, recoiling from the revolting, gasping at the transformations worked by the amazing dresses. I wept buckets at the sad bits (in fact, I started crying before the sad bits because I knew they were coming). It was a fantastic two hours and I emerged from the cinema dehydrated and blinking at the reality of the world.

Which is pretty much the same effect the book has on me – the immersion just lasts a little longer.

I particularly love two things about this story. The first is that it doesn’t box itself into being just one thing. If you want a rom-com with a happy ever after – er, no. If you want a serious examination of the dark recesses of humanity – look out, Mad Molly’s made the hash brownies a little stronger this time. But it is romantic, and comedic, and tragic – sometimes at the same time. And that’s great storytelling.

The other is that Tilly’s sewing skills and eye for fashion can transform the way the women of the town look, but she can’t change what they are really like. A fabulous dress does not make you a nice person. Old secrets are raked up and resolved, but Tilly is not forgiven, and not accepted. Not because there’s something wrong with her, but because there is something wrong – something closed off and soured – about the people of Dungatar.

They forego their opportunity to transform. And so it’s up to Tilly to force that transformation in an incredibly satisfying revenge scene.

The director, Jocelyn Moorhouse is said to have decribed the movie as Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven with a sewing machine”, and that’s pretty much perfect.

So if you’re in the mood for a gunslinger in Dior, I highly recommend you go and see The Dressmaker. And, if you really want a treat, read the book too.

An enticing, genre-blending book

Once you start messing with your genres, things can get confusing.

You know what Dr Spengler said – “Don’t cross the streams.”

So should a writer stay well inside the lines, genre-wise? Well, you may also recall that, actually, crossing the streams worked out fine, and I like to think that genres are there to be played with. Still, it can be tricky knowing what to call your chosen genre once you’ve done a bit of blurring and blending.

That’s why my writing inspiration for today comes from Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Glamourist Histories are fabulous historical romance adventures with a dash of magic. Or to keep it simpler, urban historical fantasies. I like it!

I’ll be chairing a panel at GenreCon in Brisbane at the end of the month (you know you want to be there: go on, buy your ticket!) and this very talented author will be on that panel. So I thought I’d better catch up on the series. I had read Shades of Milk and Honey a couple of years ago, but the series is now up to its fourth, so it was time to get a reading wriggle on.

I’ve just finished the third, Without a Summer, and it was delightful. 1816 was called the year without a summer, because a massive volcanic explosion in Indonesia in the previous year continued to mess with global weather patterns, and caused widespread crop failures and heightened social unrest. It also caused bicycles to be invented and the guests at a house party on Lake Geneva to resort to telling each other ghost stories to pass the time, inadvertently creating a whole genre, but that’s another story.

Jane Austen’s books of the time give almost no acknowledgement of the political and social environment in which they occur. Although influenced by Austen, Without a Summer ties the story into the time in the best way, and seamlessly incorporates magic by having public blame for the bad weather fall on the coldmongers, who are able to manipulate folds of glamour to cool things – but not to the extent of ruining the weather.

It was an intelligent, well told story, with engaging, flawed and likable characters – as well as a wonderful villain. I very much enjoyed reading it, and I am looking forward to meeting Mary. In fact, the only flaw with the book was on the otherwise gorgeous cover:

Oh, dear. Enough to make an author weep.

A serendipitous hare

I love it, when I’m researching for my writing, and I have a kind of tenuous plan of where I want to go with something and I’m following the trail along, reading this and that, which leads to the other and then – BOOM! – I find stuff that’s just so perfect for what I want, I feel like I couldn’t have made it up.

Happily, that’s the way the week’s gone with my research on hares. I like hares. I’m not a huge fan of rabbits, although I’ve been reading some interesting things about rabbits and warreners in The Brecks area of Norfolk and Suffolk. But hares are really fascinating.

There’s a scruffy, fugitive-looking hare that I sometimes startle, late at night, as I drive into my suburban street. I love the way they move, and the way they look. And the things that have been believed about hares – the myths and legends that have been passed on as fact – are just sitting there begging to be told in more stories.

I’m happy to oblige. Not the least of these is that hares would change their sex, just as they changed their coats from winter to summer. According to Sir Thomas Browne, writing in 1646, hares may transition from one sex to the other, or they may be hermaphrodites, either way it is the reason for their vices of “unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”.

Well, how can I resist that? If it wasn’t 1834 my main character would be wearing a T-shirt that read “Warning: may display unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”. And really, now that I’ve thought of it, I may have to design one, because who wouldn’t want one of those?

Murder, she wrote

I’ve been writing.
Nothing odd in that, but what I’ve been writing was different, for me at least.
Next Tuesday is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Agatha Christie, so we’re having fun with crime and mystery in the libraries – if you happen to be near Runaway Bay Branch Library at 10am on Tuesday come and talk Christie with me and have some birthday cake.
Last night, I ran a murder mystery event at Robina Branch Library for 50 people. It took me a good deal longer to write The Body in the Library than I had expected, and only two hours for us to play our parts. I had the very best assistance from Sulari Gentill, our special guest crime author and judge, and from the four librarians and four family and friends who were playing the eight suspects.
These suspects were all literary characters who had been shortlisted for an award and so they were based on popular mystery tropes: the elderly amateur sleuth and knitter Miss Syrup; the eccentric crime consultant and genius, Sheldon Harths; the hard-boiled P.I. Jo Hemlock; the ‘Tartan Noir’ Scottish forensics expert Tavish MacDuff; the aristocratic historical investigator Lady Lally Larkworthy; the precocious child detective Hardy de Nancy; the professional police officer D.C.I. Claude Code; and the paranormal psychic investigator Sanya Skorpio.
The suspects had information about their characters and what they knew or had seen. The participants received a short biography of the suspects and the basic facts of the crime – the murder of the third judge, antagonistic librarian Moira Konanowski – then they had to cross-examine the suspects and search the library for clues. People had a whole lot of fun and really got into it. We’d set a 1930s theme and the costuming was fantastic!
Writing the characters and creating alibis, making up clues and sub-plots to serve as red herrings, coming up with funny-because-they’re-cliche back stories and everything else that went with it gave me a whole new respect for crime writers. I had big spreadsheets of characters, clues, alibis, red herrings, suspicions and props. I kept feeling like my head was going to explode.
So, to all the writers of murder mysteries, I salute you! Just this little bit of a fun dabble in the genre has made me realise how cleverly constructed your novels are.

Speaking about an author’s voice

Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet Annie Barrows, who was a co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Her new book, The Truth According to Us is set in 1938 in the fictional West Virginia town of Macedonia. It looks at how stories create different versions of the truth, and how the past is mostly stories that have been told over and over.
Annie talked about how, when she studied writing, there was a lot said about an author’s voice – on finding what it was about the way you told a story and the stories you chose to tell, that was unique.
Of course, she threw that out the window when she came to complete the story of Guernsey – she had to tell the story the way her aunt would have told it. As she’d grown up with her aunt and her mother telling her stories , that was something she could do, and do so seamlesly that readers can’t unpick where Mary Ann’s storytelling stopped and Annie’s began.
This got me thinking … you can read a lot about an author’s voice and the cultivation thereof. About how it needs to be originl and authentic. How it should have authority and a distinctive style.
But I think if I sat down at a keyboard to write, while consciously thinking about my voice, I would silence myself. Overanalysis would equal writer’s block. The books that I’ve read, the things that I’ve seen, the people that I’ve known – all of that influences the stories and the way that I tell those stories – but not consciously.
Could I tell someone else’s story their way?
It’s an interesting question. Annie’s experience of finishing her aunt’s book made me wonder if I’m close enough to anyone elses fictional heartland to write with their voice.
I don’t think I could, and that made me admire even more what Annie Barrows has achieved with her writing.