Happy New Year!

New Years also demand new resolutions, but like most people, I tend to recycle the old ones. They're perfectly servicable, after all:

1 - Keep Writing
2 - Keep Revising
3 - Keep Submitting

However, I've been struggling to find a work to describe where I want to go with my writing. Too vague to be goals, too specific to be ambitions. 'Resolutions' fits perfectly. So, here are my long term resolutions:

1 - Write approx 3 Erotic novellas, and several short stories
(Selkie, Bliss, another, and WolfSpider and other short stories)

2 - Write at least 2 pulpy adventure stories
(The Dark, that moon-out-of-sync idea...)

3 - Complete at least one Greenhelm trilogy
(fairly striaghtforward, that one)

4 - Write 3 children's/young adult stories
(House with Too Many Doors, Tower in the Wood, Deliberate Changeling)

5 - Write approx 20 ghost stories. Get at least 10 published, then consider anthologies
(though evidence suggests I might need to get all 20 published before thinking of anthologies...)

One day, I'd like to come back and strikeout the ones I've achieved, like I did with yesterday's cleaning list!

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A good way to start a new year: with a submission! I discovered Flashes in the Dark about, oh, ten minutes ago, and I've sent Trapped to them. Ruin came back from All Hallows yesterday, and I'm going to send Pluvial to them soon.

I also edited an chapter of Greenhelm and a chapter of The Dark. Greenhelm has been much neglected of late, and I've been putting off The Dark because I've made a decision to change the setting, which of course requires a lot of minor changes. I was never comfortable setting it in Lesotho, so I've moved it to a fictional island in the South Pacific.

I spent most of today making enough chicken soup to last me the month. Also, a huge pan of beef and bean chilli. No more cooking for me in January!

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ETA: And Trapped has been accepted! That's insanely prompt ^_^ It will appear on the site on the 23rd of January!

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Edit again: I've updated the site to reflect this. I've also instigated the most recent rejig (I really have to learn to leave the layout alone!) which splits the writing up by pseudonym. I've also included Winter08's site-specific story, which was originally written thanks to prompts at the_literatzzi.

Back Online

...And wireless, too. Did I miss anything good?

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With regards to my notbook resolution:

I've typed up about half of the notebook; all of the Greenhelm stuff, and half of the short stories. There's just a few odd bits otherwise, and a chunk of The Dark which is half typed up anyway. Some of the short stories I'm really pleased with as are, others need a bit of filling in. They're predominantly ghost stories, which makes me feel anthology-ish, but I need to get at least some of them published in magazines first. There's just a sad lack of English Ghost Story mags at the moment. There's also an unexpected piece of mythological erotica that sprung itself on me towards the end of the book, about an artist who rescues a selkie. I'm now adding scenes to it, in a way that makes me feel like I could have a novella here, or even a novel, which is nice.

I started another in the new notebook, but I'm going to have to force myself to stop, because it's not going anywhere and it's dragging down a decent beginning. Too much RL Stevenson and M Shelley (and a little bit of EA Poe). It's hard, to kill something after you've put effort in, but it's stopping me from writing anything else; today I flipped the notebook round and started on an additional scenes for the above mentioned myth erotica, which was much easier and more fun. Obviously, I'm not writing the erotic parts at work!

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With moving house, I've had a lot of DIY to do, and I've found myself listening to a lot of audiobooks and radioplays. I am utterly in love with The Avengers Radioplays (and the TV show, which I spent uncharacteric amounts of time and effort to obtain). I've also been listening to a bit of out-of-copyright Classic Short Stories (Vol 1) and War of the Worlds. It's alright, but some of them are read by what seems to be a Mac Computer, which is incapable of pronouncing even the simplest Surrey place name, and has no variation in tone or grasp of pacing. But War of the Worlds is too good not to listen to.

I've never really listened to audiobooks of my own volition before; as a kid I'd listen to whatever my parents were listening too, though usually miss chunks, and for long car journeys my sister and I would get some say (usually Terry Pratchett, read by Tony Robinson). Actually, that's part of the reason I started downloading them; because I had some long journeys coming up, and I wouldn't have bothered with the radioplays if it wasn't for next month's holidays. It makes it harder to write while travelling, but I'd started out with some standup CDs and realised that I'm tired enough of music on trains to sacrifice the writing time.

I wouldn't listen to an audiobook in the same way I do music - when I'm walking to work, for example - but for quiet but boring tasks, they're great. In terms of my own writing, it makes me much more keen to submit to those podfic sites, and more interested in downloading from them, too.

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Having mentioned holidays, I probably won't be posting much during July. I have a family holiday 4th - 12th, and then I'm off to FatE from the 18th to the 20th (if I don't get lost in Shropshire!). I'll definitely post about that when I'm back; it's a storytelling festival with some world famous faces. I attended a few performances during the York Literary Festival, which clued me in to FatE's existance, and my general desire for a camping cultural festival that was affordable and manageable without a car pretty much confirmed for me I would go.

So, after all that moving kerfuffle, I'm probably not going to post for another month!

Naming Characters

Okay, so I'm stealing post ideas from LibraryThing, because the writer-readers group is full of people asking good questions.

For the most part, I try and give characters ordinairy names, often old friends or people I went to school with. No one I know too well, in case they ask questions! Preferably names belonging to multiple people I know. Sometimes, I repeat names of minor characters, especially common names, because that's how real life works. Honestly, it gets a little creepy when there are over a hundred named characters in a series and not one repetition of either fore or surname.

I only have a few charactes with made up names, despite being a fantasy writer; Laina and Vaughniter Fale. 'Vaughniter Fale', as a name, came to me in a dream, which mostly proves that dreams are a bad source of names. 'Laina', despite a change in naming philosophy since I named the character, is going to stay, but the rest of the family will have equally unusual (bu real) names. Consistency in naming, I feel, is important.

I deliberately avoid giving characters 'meaningful' names; I want my readers to decide based on my writing, not my naming, whether characters have certain traits. Much as I love latin, and etmology in general, name meanings are hard to do tactfully enough not to annoy bright readers; if Dolores is depressed, I'm going to be annoyed with the author for showing off. The same goes for names with certain connotations, especially historical names. Is Alexander a bit of a conquerer? A redhaired, left handed, bisexual conquerer? Do I want to slap some subtlty into you?

Having said this, I have stuck myself with a family in which all of the characters have 'virtue' names. It's actually an improvement on Arthurian names (in the above paragraph, I am very much speaking from experience), which were chosen based on Bernard Cornwell's characterisation in his Arthurian series. I changed this, but it was important to me to choose a series of names with consistency; it's a family to which lineage is very important. That I chose virtues was almost artibtrary; an ancestor of the family was called Trust, and it seemed like a good place to start. The difficulty was in choosing names that neither reflected nor rejected their personalities; I've gone for fairly generic traits. It turns out, masculine virtue names are hard to come by in English speaking countries, and once I'd used Earnest and Valiant (thank you Oscar Wilde and terrible 80s Arthurian cartoons) I had to make up another for my main character.

It was Diligent, in the end. Positive, but not predictive.

I've also been naming characters in another project after fantasy heroines. I started out with traditional and literary characters, but that's overused, so any fantasy film in the last twenty years is being explored. Badly. I'm probably going to change my mind about this (as I have done every time I've started a new draft of this story - two different sisters have been named Lucy and I can no longer remember which I'm refering to without the story to refer to).

In my pulpy projecy I made a point of giving the characters fairly cheesy names, to suit the tone of the story. Honey Smith and Dirk Miles; the names make me happy. They aren't going to get changed, not unless there's a real Honey Smith or Dirk Miles who've done something massively famous that I've managed to miss. That has happened to me before; it's always worth googling names, just in case.