Tag: books

Something for WIPpet Wednesday

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 22 Comments

Wednesday

Is it just me or does WIPpet Wednesday come around faster and faster? Lol. Anyway I’m being kind again this week.  I’m sharing a whole 30 lines from chapter 4 of my current WIP, which is tentatively titled Reunion, though I’m working to change it.  One idea I had was ‘Reunion’s Meeting’.  Any thoughts?

OK, on with the main event.  I would have shared 29 lines (for the 29th January) but the excerpt makes more sense with the extra line.  This week’s WIPpet takes place a while before last week’s just to confuse you.  Anna is out jogging when she sees someone she’d much rather not…

Feeling unnerved she turned around.  When she saw who it was she had an unpleasant surprise. 

‘Will!  What on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded before she could help herself, pulling out her earphones.  She’d barely looked him in the eye at the reunion; now she saw him as if for the first time.  He was tall, taller than she remembered, with dark eyes and short hair that curled gently around his temples.  He would have been attractive, but his expression was conceited and smug.

‘I live here,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone.  ‘Well not here in this park,’ he added jokily, seeming to register her dumb-struck face.

‘You mean you live here, in Warston?’ Anna was unable to hide her incredulity.  This was all she needed.

‘Yes, as I just said.’  He had an odd expression on his face, somewhere between a self-satisfied smile and a genuinely interested look.  ‘Warston is a big city, Anna,’ he went on.  ‘It’s not that surprising that we’ve never bumped into each other before.’

‘No thank goodness we never have,’ Anna blurted out unable to stop herself.  She knew she shouldn’t be rude, but this was Will.  After the way he’d treated her he didn’t deserve to be spoken to politely.

‘Well it’s nice to know that I’m still in your good books.’

Anna was surprised that underneath his sarcastic tone he sounded hurt.  But she mentally shrugged off this thought.  Will had put her through hell during her school years and the scars were still there.  His hurt feelings weren’t worth worrying about.

‘Well I didn’t expect to see you here,’ she said, hearing her voice sound abrupt and cold. ‘But I doubt we’ll meet again.  Like you say, Warston’s a big city.’ She turned to jog back down the hill.

‘Good luck then.  You must have a lot of work to do on your novel.  See you around.’

WIPpet Wednesday is open to anyone who has a piece of writing they’d like to share.  If you want to join in, just post a bit of your writing that relates in some way to the date.  Then add your name here.  Thanks goes to K. L. Schwengel for hosting. 🙂

A WIPpet for Wednesday

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 25 Comments

OK, so not the most fantastic of titles but it’s the best I could do. I hope this WIPpet finds you well and getting into the swing of 2014.

For this week’s WIPpet Wednesday I thought I’d share with you 15 words from chapter 1 of my current WIP Reunion. Like many of my fellow WIPpeteers, I’m finding it hard to… well find parts to share that don’t give away half the plot.

So this week I’m keeping it short but sweet. This line is further on in the same chapter from last week’s excerpt. Anna is thinking about the people she might see at the school reunion.

It would be good to see Lizzie and Rachel again, but they wouldn’t necessarily go.

I will try and be less stingy with the excerpt next week! Looking forward to reading yours.

Wanna join in the WIPpet Wednesday fun? No problem – just share an excerpt from your current WIP on your blog. Make sure it relates to the date somehow. Then go here to add your details to the list. And you’re off!

Thank you K. L. Schwengel for hosting! 🙂

To Scrivener or not to Scrivener??

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 18 Comments

Scrivener

I wanted to comment on my experiments with Scrivener and what I’m making of it.

Back in September I downloaded a free trial of Scrivener to see what I thought of it. Since then I’ve been a bit of a chicken and I’ve barely looked at it. Although I had made some headway with the tutorial, I was finding it very complex and a lot to take in.

My husband suggested I just forget the tutorial and simply play around with it to get a feel for what it’s like. I couldn’t even work out how to get past the tutorial; he had to show me lol. Anyway today I was having a proper go for the first time.

And I have to say I’m unsure about it. My husband’s offered to buy it for me for Christmas if I’d like it. But like I say I’m in two minds about it. Yes it’s very clever and allows you to do all sorts of things to assist your writing, such as making it easier to plan by having easy access to all your ideas and thoughts on different aspects of your story.

It also enables you to navigate much more easily between the different parts of your work, so that if you need to go back and amend things or refer to passages you’ve already written in a chapter way back, it doesn’t take forever. That’s the idea anyway.

But I didn’t get that far today. I barely did anything – at least it felt that way even though I spent quite a long time playing around with it. I’m definitely going to keep plugging away at it to see if I could get used to it. The thing is though I found myself getting rid of things I didn’t mean to get rid of and then not being able to access them again.

Scrivener just seems so vast in terms of what it allows you as the author to do. And so complicated! People have said to me that Word is easy by comparison and that’s so true. It’s like I really REALLY want to love Scrivener. I can see the potentially enormous benefits of it to my writing.

But if I can’t get to grips with it, even the basic stuff then there’s going to be a problem. My friend and fellow author Jade Reyner uses it and has written about her problems with it here and here. She’s getting on all right with it now I think.

I just hope that if I give it a bit longer before my free trial runs out, that I can maybe make some headway with it and perhaps just perhaps get used enough to using it that I can say ‘yep, Scrivener’s definitely for me’.

Or maybe it’s a case of square peg, round hole…

What are your thoughts on Scrivener? Have you/do you use it and if so what do you make of it?

Harnessing the power of Twitter

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 10 Comments

Twitter

I joined Twitter just over 18 months ago. I’ve found it to be incredibly helpful to my writing and I’ve made contact with other writers through it, some of whom I’ve even met and become good friends with.

But for quite a while I wasn’t engaging fully with other authors on Twitter. Although I had over 1000 followers and I was following over 1000 people, following people and gaining new followers was slowing to a trickle. I just wasn’t very active on it. Most of the time I would do a post on my blog, tweet about it once and expect people to respond.

If I’m honest with myself, I did realise that wasn’t enough. But I was busy doing lots of other things, writing and blogging to name two, and so I neglected Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago I was given some good advice by another writer, Terry Tyler. She was commenting on my guest post for Joanne Phillip‘s blog which I’d written as part of my blog tour to promote my debut novel The Inheritance. She suggested that to publicise myself more online, it would be a good idea to make sure I’m active on Twitter by retweeting about 20 people a day. That way I would likely get more people retweeting my tweets and therefore be seen by more people.

I decided to take Terry’s advice. I’ve been trying to retweet around 20 people a day as she suggested and I’m seeing the results. When you retweet other authors, they really appreciate it – as I do when people retweet my messages about my novel. It leads to more people following you, you have a greater presence online and it helps towards that vital marketing of your book. Your tweets end up being seen not just by your followers, but by their followers too and so on.

I’m going to continue to take a more proactive attitude to using Twitter and harnessing its power to promote my writing. So far it’s paying dividends.

When the words just won’t come

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 21 Comments

Words

I will be honest with you that the title of this blog post isn’t entirely true of my writing right now, although it has been in the past.

But I have been finding that the flow of my WIP is slowing at the moment. Before I began writing I made a comprehensive plan of the plot and in which direction I wanted my story to head.

Of course in actually coming to write it things change and I’ve found that the characters I’d planned have evolved and taken new paths. That’s all well and good. But sometimes you get to a stage in writing a story where things just go a bit stale.

As I said I know where I want to take my story ultimately but I want it to flow seamlessly, with one scene merging into the next so that the narrative doesn’t feel forced.

Right now I’m feeling my writing’s a bit barren. I’ve had a lot of things to focus on apart from this WIP because among other things,as you may have seen from other posts, I’ve been promoting the publication of my debut novel The Inheritance. So I’ve had plenty of distractions.

That’s not the real reason for this dryness in my writing though, I don’t think. I just need to somehow regain a bit of momentum with it, to really tell the story and focus on the general plan I originally came up with and not get too bogged down in dialogue between characters which doesn’t go anywhere.

When I’ve got past this difficult stage of trying to sew the story together seamlessly somehow and I eventually finish the first draft, I’m actually looking forward to sending it out to beta readers and getting their opinions on what’s working and not working, particularly in this part of the story.

Ultimately I want to be able to finish and publish this story by the end of next year but I’m not sure I’ll manage it. Especially seeing as writing a new post for my blog feels a lot easier than moving the action in my WIP along with no visible seams!

What do you do when you’re finding it hard to find the right words to carry a plot forward?

Interview with Martin Lake for ‘The Inheritance’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ Leave a comment

TheInheritance

I’m delighted to say that today as part of my blog tour to promote my debut novel The Inheritance, I’m being interviewed by Martin Lake on his blog.

Martin is the author of some truly wonderful novels, all of them historical fiction but also very diverse. The novels he’s written include a wonderfully imaginative sequel to Oliver Twist entitled Artful, which as the title suggests continues the story of the Artful Dodger, as well as a trilogy about England’s lost king Edgar Atheling in the 11th century and another novel set in medieval times about the Crusades.

Martin has been extremely supportive of me in my path to publication. Please do check out this interview and let me know what you think.

If you’ve missed any of my blog tour, you can read my guest post on Kate Frost’s blog which I did on Saturday here. My guest post on Joanne Phillips’s blog on Monday can be seen here. You can catch an excerpt of The Inheritance which was on Jade Reyner’s blog on Tuesday here. And my interview on Briana Vedsted’s blog which I did yesterday can be seen here.

Details of my blog tour can be found on my blog.

If you want to buy The Inheritance it’s available on Amazon UK and Amazon.com. I’m also on Goodreads and can be contacted on Twitter via @ElaineJeremiah.