Tag: novel

Flashback

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 34 Comments

Welcome to a very wet and windy WIPpet Wednesday.  Well it is here in the UK anyway! 😦  Or at least the sun is shining now but it’s been horrible all day until now.  Anyway for this week’s WIPpet Wednesday I thought I’d share with you one of the many  flashbacks that my MC Anna has in Reunion of the Heart.  For the 12th February I’m sharing 12 lines from chapter 2.

In the present, Anna is at her school reunion and she and best friend Melissa have just been reunited with their school friends Lizzie and Rachel who they haven’t seen since school.

In this excerpt, in the flashback, you can catch a glimpse of why they fell out at school and hadn’t made up until now, many years later. I’m not going to say too much more than that.  So without further ado, here’s my contribution to this week’s WIPpet Wednesday:

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Melissa had demanded of Lizzie, marching up to where she was sitting eating her lunch at the edge of the school playing fields and tapping her on the shoulder.  Anna was trailing in her wake.

‘I’m sorry, but when did you become the boss of my life?’ Lizzie had replied.  ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, you’re not!’

‘You know what Matt’s like, you know he’s a nasty bastard who’s given our friend hell and yet you still choose to start seeing him.’

‘It’s my life; I can do what I want!’  Lizzie retorted.  ‘And anyway, when are you ever going to let Anna speak for herself?  There she is, cowering behind you…’

‘I’m not cowering,’ Anna said in a quiet voice.  ‘But Melissa’s right, I do have a problem with you dating Matt.  He’s made my life miserable for five years of secondary school.’ 

And if you aren’t taking part but would like to, just post on your blog whatever you’re working on with your writing and add it here, where all the other wonderful WIPpets for this week can be found too.

Thanks goes to the most gracious hostess of them all K. L. Schwengel.

Indie Blog Chain

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 2 Comments

I was tagged by the lovely Laekan Zea Kemp on her blog to take part in a blog hop to help connect and promote indie authors. Laekan is the author of three novels: Breathing Ghosts, Orphans of Paradise (which I’ve reviewed here) and The Things They Didn’t Bury.

So I’ve answered four questions about my work and my writing process.  Here they are:

What am I working on?

I’m currently working on my second novel with the working title Reunion.  It’s a romance, about a young woman who’s invited to her school reunion and what happens to her while she’s there and afterwards.  She has very unhappy memories of her school days so it’s a difficult thing for her to do and she’s only gone along because her best friend, who was also at the school, has encouraged her.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?

A lot of romantic novels I’ve read have been romantic comedies.  This definitely isn’t one.  My character goes through a great deal during the course of the novel.  I don’t give her an easy time of it!!  I think the romance genre is very broad and there’s a lot of scope for how to tell a romantic story.  It doesn’t have to be just romance with comedy or romance with erotica, there are many ways a romantic story can unfold.

Why do I write what I do?

I enjoy writing whatever I feel like at the time.  Having said that I’m finding that in general when writing, it’s a good idea to think about genre and which one your story fits into and to try and tailor it to that.  My first novel, The Inheritance, doesn’t really fit that easily into any one genre which has made it a bit problematic for me to market.  So for me, I feel that writing romance is something that my style lends itself to.  And I’m trying to write for that genre at the moment.

How does my writing process work?

I start off by making a fairly detailed plan – but I seem to end up not sticking to it!  Or at least I stick to the essence of my original plan, but veer from it quite a lot.  The story often goes off on a tangent and I find myself exploring whole other situations and possibilities.  I definitely have an idea in my head of the basic plot though and more or less know how it’s going to end.Jade

I’m now tagging the lovely Jade Reyner who’s the author of Twelve Days – The Beginning and the upcoming Twelve Days – The Future.  She’s a fantastic author and her blog is excellent with plenty of helpful information and humour about the writing process. She also posts short stories and some poetry, so go check her out.

Well I’ve finished my book… kind of

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 10 Comments

This week I hit a new milestone on my journey as an author.  I finished the first draft of my second novel which I’m calling ‘Reunion of the Heart’.

It’s been a lot of fun to plot and then write and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world. 🙂  But as the title of this post suggests, it’s not finished yet.  Those of you who are writers will recognise that I  need to edit, edit, edit before I release it.  And of course I need to have other, dispassionate eyes on it so that I can make it the best that it can be.

So at some point I’ll be putting out a request for beta readers, but NOT YET!  There’s lots that I need to work on by myself first.  I may well tweak scenes and/or insert scenes.  I realise that as a story it does need a lot of tightening up.  I feel like there’re potentially a lot of holes in the plot, things I haven’t caught yet in my writing process.

Yes, I know that’s where beta readers come in, but I want to finish reading it all through first as my initial edit.  I want to make sure I’ve ironed out any obvious mistakes before I (fearfully) hand it over to be read by other people for the first time.  That’s a scary process, for sure – handing over your precious WIP to be scrutinised by other eyes for the first time.

If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’re familiar with that feeling.  You desperately want your WIP to be read by other people… and yet at the same time you’re scared ****less at the thought of other people who aren’t you reading and potentially being critical of your work.

But it needs to be done and so I’m working towards that point when I can finally hand it over to some generous people to read and make comments on.  I want to be the best writer that it’s possible for me to be.  I feel I’m improving and growing in confidence as a writer all the time.  As I’ve said before, the online community of writers has transformed the way I write and my confidence in myself.

So thank you once more.  And I’ll keep you all posted as to my novel’s progress.

By the way… are any of you working on editing?  How are you finding it?  I’d love to have your comments. 🙂

How I write

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 6 Comments

Writing

Just a quick post to update you a little on how I’m getting on with writing every day this month.

Not bad so far. I’ve written properly, working on my WIP Reunion, most days. The days I don’t have given me the opportunity to start planning my next story – which to me counts as work on my writing.

That’s been really nice, to get back to planning which I always enjoy. But doing work every day on my writing has made me compare how I’m doing now writing/working on writing every day with my usual ‘method’ of working on it most days but not every single day.

The highest word count I’ve managed in one day, writing this way, is about 600 which for me isn’t bad. However a few times before this month, when I wasn’t working on my WIP every day, I could do well over 1000.

So the question I’m pondering is this: is it better to write every day and do less each time, but have the total add up to quite a lot, or is it better to write a bit more sporadically but write in heftier chunks?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! 🙂