Welcome to Gaia! ::

Daily Updates:
This is more for me than you guys. I don't like to see 0s, and I never keep track on excel docs, so I'm doing it here.
If you see a 0, feel free to punish me (or motivate me??)

June 1st: 2,005
June 2nd: 0 [Planning done on the way home from London]
June 3rd: 1,751 [= 3,756]
June 4th: 1,414 [= 5,170]
June 5th-9th: 0 ... What a stressful few days!
June 10th: 2,002 [=7,172]
June 11th - 30th: 0

July 1st: 1,390
July 2nd:
July 3rd:
July 4th:
July 5th:
July 6th:
July 7th:
July 8th:
July 9th:
July 10th:
July 11th:
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July 14th:
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July 20th:

Novel Excerpts, Prompts and Character Sketches
As I said earlier, I won't be posting the whole novel here. But I will post snippets, occasional more than a few lines worth, and I'll link those here. :3

1. Penumbra for Kids ~ A short story that is definitely not for children.

Musings on Progress
This will be more like a journal, where I consider the progress I've made not in terms of words but in terms of story and character and the like. This will likely be updated more frequently, and will probably have my favourite lines from the day's writing.

1. June #1
2. June #2
3. June #3

4. July #1

Reserved

It looks great! Can't wait to stalk this thread for updates!

Spoilers, ahoy! Today in the main SuWriMos thread, StarStruckKitten posted this prompt: Write your novel as a children's bedtime story. Because I was bored, and had a short space of time to fill at work, I gave it a shot. It does, of course, contain spoilers for my actual plot, but I doubt many of you will mind.

Also, do remember the fact that this was written and posted in less then 20 minutes, so sorry for its appalling quality... I don't write children's stories, so I was torn between sugar-coating the details and just going for it. OOPS.



Once upon a time there was a little girl who got lost. She was a bright girl, very clever, and she read lots of books. She read books about animals, about people, about the world and about science. She liked history and geography and even books on maths. But little girls who are clever do not always choose the right path.

On the fateful day that the sun was eaten by the moon the year she turned eight, Olive Warren disobeyed her grandmother, who had told her to stay at home. She snuck away from her house in utter silence, tip-toeing all the way and keeping her adventure a secret from her sister. She ran to the place where she could see as the shadows crossed the world, hoping she wouldn’t be late.

And that is when he stole her. A man. A man in a van stole Olive Warren. He was a stranger, but she had seen him before and he always seemed kind. So she climbed into his van, and so did another little girl, and neither of them was ever seen again.

But Olive’s big sister was worried. She searched high and low for little Olive. She trampled through the forest, looking under the ground and in the town. The police searched, too. But nobody ever found her.

Still Cassie did not give up. She was named Cassiopeia - Cassie - o - payer - named for a beautiful kingdom of stars in the sky. Cassie told everybody she knew that she would search forever for her sister.

Many years passed, and Cassie grew afraid of Olive. She felt like Olive was a ghost who was hunting her, following her everywhere she went. Cassie ran away many times, but never escaped. So eventually Cassie decided to come back to the place where her sister was lost. She wanted to look after her grandmother, who was old and sometimes couldn’t remember things. Cassie knew she had to be brave, had to come back to face her sister’s ghost.

But then something horrible happened. Although Olive had never been found, her friend who was also stolen turned up. She was bones, by then, a long time gone to the place in the sky where things are safe and happy. Cassie was very upset because still Olive’s ghost chased her, and now she knew that Olive probably wouldn’t ever come home - for sure, because of the bones.

And then, to make matters worse, with only a few days to go until the sun was once more swallowed by the moon, another little girl vanished. Stolen. Just like that. Cassie knew that this time she would have to find the little girl, because she never could find Olive - but now she was older and braver and stronger, and she hoped she could make sure this new girl, a girl with a pretty name, Grace, would return to her family like Olive did not.

So Cassie searched once more, this time determined. She was clever. She played tricks and asked questions to people who last time had thought she was too young. It was difficult, because Cassie’s Gran kept wandering off and getting into trouble, but Cassie kept going.

Then, to Cassie’s surprise, during the eclipse the stolen girl returned. She was happy because she had been to see her Daddy, who did not live nearby. She wasn’t stolen at all! Cassie’s friends at the police station were relieved because they thought the little girl was safe forever now, but Cassie was still afraid.

“What if more children are stolen?” she cried. “What will we do then?”

But Cassie’s police friends just laughed and said, “Don’t be silly.”

Still, only a few hours later, the body of another little girl was found. She, too, had gone to the place in the sky, and Cassie was sure that it had something to do with Olive. She started to ask more questions, to tell people they had to help her. And sure enough, there was also a family who said their daughter wasn’t home, and they were scared that she might have been taken too.

This time Cassie wasn’t going to let anybody stop her. Not when there was a dangerous monster on the loose. She didn’t know if this would help her be free from Olive’s ghost but she wasn’t doing it just because of that any more. She wanted to help that poor little stolen girl!

Cassie asked everybody she knew, even her Gran who didn’t remember anything any more. She got into lots of fights, with people in town and even with her own best friend Marion who was just trying to help. She did bad things, but only because she was so desperate and Olive was still a ghost.

But, just when Cassie was losing hope, she remembered something her Gran always used to say, about buying Coke for special occasions. And she remembered that Olive had wanted the day of the eclipse to be special.

She suddenly knew that the last person to see Olive alive had been Adrian, the shopkeeper in town. A friendly man, but lonely, with a dead wife and a little girl. He was not a stranger to Olive - and in fact Cassie had even become friends with him!

She was so angry about this, so mad, that she went to see him immediately, to ask him what happened to Olive. Cassie, cunning and brave as she was, also knew that he had a building all of his own out in the fields away from town where he kept the things for his shop.

Cassie thought that if Adrian was indeed the monster she thought he might be, that would be where he could keep the stolen girls. She didn’t want to think what happened to them there, so she hurried to the place and hoped she was wrong.

But she wasn’t wrong. Cassie slipped up to the warehouse just in time to see Adrian sneaking into the building. He was being extra creepy, she could see it in the way he moved, and Cassie was sure that she was right. Adrian was the monster.

Luckily she had come prepared, and she ran straight into the building to rescue the missing girl from his evil clutches.

When she had done her job, and her police friends had helped her to keep him locked up forever, Cassie discovered that Olive had not gone the way of her other stolen friend - at least not right away. She had not been killed and buried until she was quite a lot older, after she had given birth to a baby girl.

That girl was Adrian’s daughter. Cassie’s niece. Cassie was, of course, still very upset about not finding Olive. But Olive’s ghost was happy that the mystery had been solved and that the bad guy had been punished and stopped from hurting anybody else. And so Cassie decided to stay in this town with her Gran and her new niece, to look after them both and to not be afraid any more of a ghost that could not hurt her.

The end.

Flea, you get yo butt back in this thread!

I have been working up to replying here because I have had one HELL of a rollercoaster week.



The pitch I mentioned before was a bizarre creature. I thought it had gone really badly, because some of the feedback I got was not 100% positive, but other people in my class kept saying things like, "Oh you must be pleased. That went really well!" so I left not knowing what to think. The feedback wasn't particularly helpful either, half of it relating to the way we delivered our pitches, and half related to the novel itself. But considering some people felt it went really badly, I don't feel as bad as I did on Tuesday night. XD

But the real kicker was what happened the following day. I went to a separate, but related (in that it was also hosted by my university) event on Wednesday. It was an Open Evening to encourage people to consider our course. And after that there was a panel called "How To Get Published" which I thought sounded interesting. Anyway, a bunch of us went, and on the panel were my teacher (Claire), her agent (Diana), one of our recent grads who just got a two book deal (Rod) and his publisher (Katherine).

So after the panel, which was super interesting, I popped back to have a chat with Rod. I've spoken with him on Twitter a bunch of times, but never actually met him in person, so I thought I'd go introduce myself. We were chatting away, and people were filtering out of the room. Then Claire, my teacher, introduced me to her agent. She said, "This is Fran. She's writing an exciting thriller set during the eclipse."

First off: That's the nicest thing Claire has ever said. I was over the moon! Normally I scrap for her approval, so this was lovely. And unprompted. And it led to Diana giving me her business card and saying, "Let me see it first" and I was like YEAH SURE. emotion_awesome

I went home, and followed her on Twitter. And was then even more excited when she followed me right back. AND THEN. AND THEN she sent me this message:

"want to see something from you asap. Heard good things!!! Will you send some material! Thx"

And I may or may not have lost my s**t. I was like, How much do you want to see?? Do you know it's a WIP??? But she does know, because obviously she's spoken to Claire about me and she knows where I am in the course at the moment.

So I sent her what she asked for this morning (after much agonising) and now I'm going to retreat to my quiet, dark corner of the internet and wait for the rejection, lol. But actually, if nothing more positive comes out of this, I know that Claire has my back, which is nice. I always thought she didn't like me much. emotion_c8

In other news: writing is slow, if it's happening at all. Hopefully I can return to some sense of normalcy soon.

So, remember those plot changes I was talking about? Yeah. I had a workshop with some of the other folks from my class the other day, and we discussed some of the changes I'd talked about with my tutor - and collectively we decided to throw most of the changes out. gonk I hadn't written anything with the new stuff, and was struggling to make it all work, and when I rocked up at the workshop with this bundle of messy ideas, everybody was just... really helpful. They all said that the changes sounded fine, but that they thought it would move the novel away (quite drastically) from where I had been going with it. The changes would have affected the novel's heart.

So I decided to throw them out. Well, all except one, which really doesn't affect very much that I've already written, I don't think, and which won't make too much of a change in voice/tone/POV like the other ideas would have. I'm scaling Cassie's age up by a few years, to aid with her role in the 1999 portion of the storyline, and I'm giving her a more 'useful' job (she's now an ex-freelance journalist). Otherwise, I'm going to truck on as I was before, I think.

Yesterday I wrote 1.3k for the start of Camp. I've not written yet today because I'm currently at work. But I'm hoping that any confusion/fear/anxiety I have right now will melt away a bit when I jump in again. And I'm going to try hard not to keep going back and editing the beginning, because that's a trap I'm not ready to fall into just yet. >_>

Anyway, happy Camp everybody!