Standing by for NaNoWriMo

It’s that time of year again. It’s the countdown to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and thousands of writers, published and unpublished, will be sitting crouched over their keyboards waiting for the stroke of midnight on Hallowe’en. Then they’ll be off, aiming to write 50,000 words of a novel in November.

I’m very target-driven, as long I choose my own targets rather than having them imposed upon me, so NaNo and I are a perfect fit. I do it every year, clearing my desk and going for it. My family might starve. The dust might gathers. I neglect my other obligations. If I’m feeling inspired I can do 10,000 words in a day. The words are rubbish but that’s irrelevant. It’s all about having something to edit.

This will be the sixth year I’ve taken it on, but I’m a little more nervous about it than usual. For the first time I haven’t been able to cancel everything in preparation for it. I’m away for the first four days of the month, so unless I can squeeze in a few hundred words or so here and there I’ll be chasing the game from the beginning. And then there’s the small matter of edits to my first detective novel, which I’m expecting them at some point in November, but I don’t know when or how long they’ll take.

It’s a pity I can’t jump the gun and start now. (I could, of course but that would be cheating, and I would know, even if no-one else did.)

In the meantime, I’m sitting ready. I’ve looked at the list of things I’m committed to doing in November — blog posts, books to read and review, articles — and I’ve got three days left to get as far ahead with them as I can.

Most importantly, I have my chapter-by-chapter plan, which I’m trusting will see me through. It isn’t without its attendant problems, of course. I usually depart from it somewhere between the halfway and two-thirds marks, and end up somewhere completely different to the place I’d intended. (Is that mega-twist I have planned the end a little too much to be credible? What happens if I get there and realise it could never happen?)

So, as always, I’m excited and awed in equal measure. I’ve always “won” at NaNo before but that doesn’t make it any less of a challenge and it doesn’t mean that completing those 50,000 words is a given. So I won’t beat myself up about it if I fail. Roll on 1 November…

A Crime Update

Grave matter in the Lake District...

Time for an update, though if you follow me on any of my social media you probably won’t need it. It was on 24 September last year that I announced my decision to switch genres and write crime and it was on 18 September this year that I had confirmation that Aria Fiction wanted to publish the first three in my crime series.

What a year that’s been.

I’m not going to repeat the story of how I began to write crime. It’s up on the blog and you can scroll back through if you’re interested. But I wanted to use this blog entry to encourage anyone else never to give up.

The reason I didn’t write crime was that I thought I wasn’t good enough. I thought it was too difficult. I thought the plotting was too complex and it would be impossible to keep readers interested in so many characters, that handling several points of view was beyond my capability.

And here’s the thing. It was almost certainly true.

I’ve been writing for ever. When I first started I almost certainly couldn’t have handled the crime genre. Let’s face it, when I first started writing I couldn’t handle any other genre. I had too much to learn. I did have a couple of stabs at thrillers but they were woeful, so woeful that even in my naive innocence I knew it. So I wrote romance, not because I thought it was easier — anything but —  but because the structure of it is simpler.

I liked writing romance. I still do, and it was the genre in which I was first published. But I couldn’t help myself and I shifted to romantic suspense, which involved a crime alongside a love story. And that’s how I became a crime writer. Without realising it.

But the message is this. It took me years to develop the skills to tackle writing a publishable novel, in any genre. I have a cupboard full of unfinished (or finished but unreadable) manuscripts to prove it, the carcases of good ideas that died on the long march to my dream.

There was no instant revelation, no stepping into crime and suddenly realising that I’d found my genre. The truth is that once I’d assembled my writer’s toolkit I could apply it to anything. Because the fundamentals of writing a good story are the same in any genre. I didn’t become a crime writer overnight. I became a crime writer because I practised and practised and practised.

My advice to any aspiring writer is to do write and to keep writing. The chances are that most of your early work will fall way short of being publishable (there are exceptions). But writing is a craft. Give it everything. You won’t regret it.

Originally posted on 6 October 2018 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

Me and the Ghosts of Mardale Green

The old field walls of Bowderthwaite
on the shores of Haweswater 

I love a good walk. I was down in the Lakes recently, and rather than go to the gym I got up early, packed my breakfast and headed off for a scenic walk. Just as I did for the walk I described in my last blog I picked Mardale, which happens to be where my current protagonist, Jude Satterthwaite goes to clear his head. 

This time, I chose to walk round the lake rather than head up the dale. It was hot, and the route is much flatter and there is, crucially, no bog, though there are other hazards. Haweswater as we see it isn’t entirely natural, but a larger lake resulting from the expansion of the original body of water following the building of a dam in the 1930s. 

The new reservoir flooded the village of Mardale Green, leaving us one of those drowned villages that are common across the UK and that occasionally reappear in times of drought.

The long-submerged walls and old bridge
emerge from the lake

As you may be aware, it’s been incredibly dry in the UK recently, and Cumbria’s lake levels have dropped dramatically. On an earlier visit, a lady I met on my walk informed me that we would soon be able to see the church tower, which we never will because the church, like every other building in the dale below the waterline, was demolished, though the village bridge does appear along with the footprint of its buildings. 

Even the ducks sink into the soft mud.
Maybe one day these will be fossil footprints.

The village hasn’t emerged yet, though its presence is slowly crystallising as the water level drops. For my walk I left the main footpaths and walked around to Riggindale, out of sight of the car park and much of the road. Once there I followed the shore back round until I ran into rocks and had to scramble up the bank and into the woods. 

If you look at old maps (you’ll find one here) then you can see where the old houses are. I spotted the ruins of Fieldhead and the skeleton of its bridge. On the other side of the lake, the remains of the farms of Goosemire and Grove Bridge were printed on the landscape. Ducks had left their footprints on the rapidly-drying mud, making fossils for the future. Most hauntingly, I could see the trees. Cut down before flooding, their stumps roots are still there, the soil washed away from under them so that they stood free on the rocky shore like stranded aliens. 

The line between the lucky and the unlucky -
trees above and below the new shore.

It was an amazing walk, made all the better for being so early in the morning that I met nobody. I doubt I’ll ever weave it into a story, because someone somewhere will have done that before, far more elegantly than I ever could. But it’ll be a long time before I forget that sunny early morning on the parched shores of Haweswater. 

Just me, a couple of sheep, several dozen ducks and the ghosts of Mardale Green.

Originally posted on 7 July 2018 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

The Problem of the Boggy Middle

I am writing the first draft of a novel and it is mince.

I write from a plan, much as I walk from a map and, like a walk, a story has many different options for getting from A to B.

This is a map of a walk I did the other day. It’s also one of the favourite walks of my protagonist, DCI Jude Satterthwaite, who likes a quick stroll to clear his head.

Jude, in solving a crime, knows the beginning and the end, as do I. It begins with a crime and it ends with an arrest. So it is with a walk. It begins at the car park and it ends at your destination, in this case, Blea Water. 

Unfortunately, things aren’t always so simple. You will see that this map has all sorts of possibilities — a positive spider’s web of wonderment. But when you get to the ground, your options are rather more limited. Because, bluntly, a lot of these routes that are marked on the map are utterly invisible on the ground, and the ones that are there have a nasty tendency to peter out in the middle of nowhere. 

In my walk, as in my writing, I have to make sudden sideways jumps to accommodate them. (Don’t worry. In draft 2 I’ll go back and sort them out.) In the meantime, at least I have two options. I'll pick one.

 But the big problem, dear reader, is marked in green. 

It’s a bog. And to get from A to B, from the crime to the arrest, from the beginning to the end, we have go through it. There is no way round. High road, low road. You end in the bog.

This is where I am right now. 

In a draft of — say — 75,000 words the first third is easy, and the last is easy. The middle third, known to writers as the saggy, or as I now call it, boggy, middle, is where all the things you need to do to get from A to B get shovelled in to a big heap, a random selection scenes. Get to the end of it. Sort it out later. 

I’m at 34,000 words right now, and I’m not so much heading through mud as jumping from tussock to tussock and hoping the next one I land on will bear my weight. It’s an energy-sapping experience but, I tell myself, it’ll be worth it. And when I finally finish it, I hope my readers enjoy the view. 

Originally posted 23 June 2018 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

An Update from the Dark Side

Dark deeds among the trees...

It’s been a while since I blogged, although as always my intentions were good. But the regular updates on my crime writing…they didn’t go well, did they?

Still, here I am. It’s eight months since I stared in the mirror and realised that despite what I thought I actually am a crime writer. And believe me, a lot has happened in that time. First up, I’ve validated  myself. I applied for membership of the Crime Writers’ Association and after a review of my published works they decided that, yes, I qualified. So it’s official. Even without having written what I thought of as a crime novel I was a crime writer. 

The next step was to write the book. I chose my setting — Cumbria. I chose my protagonists — DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his-newly-arrived sergeant, Ashleigh O’Halloran. I set up their back stories — he struggling it the balance between his job and his relationships, she still trying to break free from an unhappy marriage. Then came the plot, hinging on the discovery of a child’s body after a wildfire on a Cumbrian fell. 

It was easier than I thought. It’s probably because I still thinking of myself as primarily a romance writer, so that the shackles were off. I had fun. I experimented. I tried things I’d never tried before. I played with many points of view. I made characters do things that romance readers  would never forgive them for. I broke the chains of the romance genre and left a relationship unresolved. 

Book three is set in beautiful Grasmere.

I wrote the next book, about the murder of a centenarian in an old people’s home. I sent the first one off to make its way in the world and (as you may have seen elsewhere) it found itself an agent. I planned the third book, in which a controversial and outspoken US professor outrages all and sundry and doesn’t care who she offends — until it’s too late. I have ideas for books four, five and six.  

Quite where this series will go remains to be seen. I’ve been in the writing game long enough to know that there are no certainties. But I’m enjoying the ride, and at the very least it gives me the excuse to undertake research and to post some photographs of a beautiful part of the world. 

Originally posted on 22 may 2018 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

Introducing "Wildfire"

I don’t remember the exact date that I decided to write crime, although I’d been mulling over it for  long time before I first mentioned it on my blog, back in late September. (Back in late September? That’s…less than two months ago).

I’m pleased, if rather shocked, to be able to say that I now have the first draft of the opening novel in what I hope will be a series. My enthusiasm for the project rather overwhelmed me. Not only did I rush to draft one crime novel, but I also have ideas for two or three more, and I’m pretty certain how the stories of the main characters will develop over the series, too. Although I wouldn’t count on that, because characters have a habit of surprising you.

But it’s here, in initial draft form, at least — 67,500 words of error-strewn storytelling waiting for revisions and the for the bugs in the plot to be trapped and eliminated. Wildfire introduces us to DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his team as they struggle to find the identity — and the killer — of a body discovered in the burned-out shell of a ruined building following a grass fire on the shores of scenic Haweswater.

I won’t tell you too much, because no crime novel ever survives a spoiler. But I will say that I enjoyed writing it. I enjoyed the puzzle, deciding who the killer was and how s/he committed and covered up the crime. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of researching how homicides really are investigated and then trying to turn this into something that’s acceptable to a reader without being totally untrue to the process.

Most of all, I enjoyed creating a new cast of characters. Killers are real people, just like their victims and the people who track them down. To understand the crime you need to know the criminal. I enjoyed getting to know them all. And I hope that, one day in the not too distant future, you’ll enjoy getting to know them, too.

Originally posted 27 October 2017 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

A Note to my Scientific Self

Because it's fiction, right?

So I decided I wanted to write crime.

Now, I have a scientific background and that means I value accuracy. All right, it’s tempered by the fiction half of my brain which, by definition, is fuelled on making things up. I’ve never been one to let the facts get in the way of a good plot and you won’t have to look far in my books to find an example, but there’s a balance to be struck. For example, I made up a series of caves along a stretch of coastline in Majorca, but it was limestone and caves are found elsewhere on the island — just not the bit where I wanted them.

Crime fiction — specifically, police procedural crime fiction — is posing me problems. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past few weeks reading up on procedure. There are some fabulously informative documents out there — I thoroughly recommend the Murder Investigation Manual and the Guidance on Major Incident Room Standardised Administrative Procedures, (both available online). These and many other documents will give you chapter and verse on exactly how an investigation proceeds.

If you spend time reading them, you’ll learn one thing — that much of the work in policing is dull, time-consuming and anything but glamorous. If I’m true to life and have a cast of dozens in our investigation, each of whom might play a tiny part and each of whom requires to be introduced as a character, at briefing meetings, I’m going to end up confusing my reader. If I allow a realistic timescale for the analysis of forensic evidence, I’m going to leave my investigators and readers twiddling their thumbs (or looking through reams of evidence which proves totally irrelevant).

Large-scale, heavily-staffed, drawn-out investigations don’t lend themselves to gripping fiction. So what does a writer do?

The answer, of course, is compromise. We have to acknowledge that we’re writing fiction, not true crime. Reduce the cast of thousands to a core handful. Show only the detective work which leads forwards, rather than along blind alley after blind alley. And assume the all forensic tests are going to be rushed through as a matter of urgency.

I’m not sure this sits easily with me, as yet, and there’s no question that the rigours of a crime novel are less comfortable than those of contemporary romance — it’s as if I’ve been writing free verse and suddenly find myself having to write sonnets. But I shall persist…

Originally posted 29 October 2017 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/

Where is the Whodunnit?

Dark deeds in a brooding landscape...

In my last blog I gave you a quick — and not especially teasing — clue about where I’m proposing to set my new series of detective novels. The answer, of course, is Cumbria, and the picture I posted was a well-known view of Ullswater looking towards Gowbarrow Fell, where Wordsworth saw his daffodils. Not that there were any there on that spring day, though they abounded everywhere else. Maybe one of the books should be The Case of the Missing Daffodils. 

Why Cumbria? Well, to begin with, it had to be somewhere I know well. There are a few options here but the most obvious among them, Edinburgh, has been done to death, so to speak. Besides, I don’t feel that the city offers quite the same range of opportunities for crime scenes. 

It came down to a choice between Cumbria and the Highlands, and the Lakes won. Why? Because there’s a range of different types of place in a relatively small area, along with terrific access and vast numbers of people coming in and out. There are wild hillsides where it would be oh-so-easy to have an “accident”. There are lakes where you can disappear, crowds in which you can be lost, a coastline into which you can smuggle your contraband — and a motorway by which you can make a sharp exit.

A wonderful place to dispose of the body.

I did try to research exactly how many people are murdered in Cumbria in a year and by what method, but I failed. My guess is that the majority of homicides here are pretty run-of-the-mill , as they are in most cases. The National Centre for Policing Excellence’s informative Murder Investigation Manual points out that: “Between them, domestic homicide and confrontation homicide account for just over half of all homicide cases. Within the category of domestic homicide, killing by a current or former spouse is by far the largest group. Compared with these types of homicide, all others are infrequent. None generally have an incidence greater than ten per cent and many are much less frequent than that”.

That’s not particularly creative — but then, it’s always been this way and it’s never stopped crime writers focussing on, and extending, the very few genuinely complex and puzzling murders that aren’t committed in the heat of the moment. So if we’re to create a series of genuinely intriguing and original crimes in a single, rather steady, location, we have to step away from reality. 

So here I am, metaphorically  speaking, looking down on a broad range of environments from a Cumbrian fell, and musing. Where in this wonderful county will the first mystery take place?

Originally posted 11 October 2017 on https://jenniferyoungauthor.blogspot.com/ 

First Steps Along the Slippery Slope

Not su much whodunnit as whereisit?

Last week I shared my decision to switch genre — not, in fact, a particularly difficult thing to do, given that the writing of one type of novel shares very many of the requirements of another. Of course there are differences in the formula and the readers’ expectations, but the similarities are greater. If you ca create plausible characters, if you can structure  plot, if you can rack up the tension and produce a satisfactory ending…it doesn’t really matter what genre you write in. 

As I’ve said before I do read a lot of crime, although I avoid anything too grim and gory. And writing romantic suspense requires many of the key elements of any crime novel. With this in mind my research into crime writing of this week was a refresher rather than going in cold. Much of it is things I knew but had never thought about — such as what, exactly, constitutes a crime novel. And, under the definition that the genre encompasses everything that revolves around a crime, I’ve already written three. 

One thing that did strike me is that there seems to be a split in the how-to-write-crime ranks. One camp champion the plot as the driver of the novel, with its twists and its turns and increasingly desperate (it seems to me) ways to kill someone. The second focuses on the characters of hero and villain, especially in longer series of novels. 

Anyone who’s read one of my books will know exactly which is my dog in this fight. It’s character for me, all the way. The limitation of the romance genre was that the relationships between the two main protagonists have to be tied up at the end of the book, and moving into a different genre frees me from this. This allows me to plan a series of relationships which extend over several books, and which aren’t required to have that element of romantic love. Friendships can wax and wane, professional partnerships forged and fractured, in a realistic time frame. 

 I’ve begun with my two main characters and I know how their relationship will develop over what I hope will be the first three books in the series. And I’ve decided where to set my books. I’ll tell you that next week — but in the meantime, in true detective tradition, I’ll offer you just a tiny clue with the picture.

First posted 1 October 2017

Turning to Crime

Whodunnit? Who knows?

I think I may be having a mid-life crisis. Not the normal sort — I don’t feel any urge to buy a Harley Davidson, have a fling with a tomboy or go to India to find myself. It’s a writer’s crisis. And actually it isn’t really a crisis. It’s just a need for change.

I write romance. That’s because I like a happy ending. But romance, like every other genre, has its rules and if you strain too hard against those rules your audience don’t like it. In a sense that’s the problem of genre, and genre is something I’ve always struggled with. But still I write romance. Sometimes it’s contemporary romance. Sometimes it’s new adult romance. Sometimes it’s romantic suspense. Once I struggled against genre and shimmied into mystery/women’s fiction, but it was still romance.

Though I like my happy endings and suspect I always will, I’ve recently felt the need to try something different. I’m having a flirtation on the side with women’s fiction, but does anybody really know what women’s fiction is? And something’s happened. A couple of people have asked me if I write crime. 

Of course I said no. In my head, crime involves hard-drinking, hard-swearing men without souls, and unflinching descriptions of gruesome violence and eventual, unavoidable death. But I love reading crime and the crime I read isn’t too grim. I read detective novels, with a fondness for the classics of the 1930s, and I love cosy crime. 

When I thought about it I realised that I’ve always written crime. My first ever attempt at a novel (that is, something longer than a couple of thousand words) was about a stolen ruby. Later I moved on to a cold war thriller which found subsequent expression in a psychological suspense based around a man who killed his best friend. None of these will ever see the light of day: they’re too ill-formed and badly plotted, though in all of them there are characters who will reappear. My second book, which I considered romantic suspense, centres on a murder. My current series of romantic suspense book features a detective as its hero. 

Reader, if this isn’t crime, what is?

In the past my view of myself as a romance writer has held me back. I’ve allowed it to tie me to genre. I’ll never give up on romance but I’m not going to be tied to it. 

I’m turning to crime.   

Originally posted 24 September 2017