Tag Archives: teenagers

Artists Town – Rewrite DONE #amwriting

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Artists Town by Emma Baird

Drum roll – I finished rewriting something this week. Big deal, Ms B, you say, and I don’t blame you.

But regular readers and friends might know I LOATH rewriting. When I finish a book, I go off it very quickly. In the perfect world, it would rewrite itself, magically upload itself on Amazon, Kobo et al., and then, oh I dunno, sell? And sell in enough quantities to make money.

I gave myself a ticking off. Emma, I said, the magic fairies do not come along and do this for you. In came the carrot and stick. Restructure the novel – BOOM; you get a glass of wine. Fail to rewrite for an hour or so. WHACK – you’re not allowed to write anything new. (Writing new stuff is what I love doing.)

The carrot thing, unfortunately, ran out on 1st January as I signed up for one of those Dry January thingies, so that motivated me to rewrite faster.

Rewriting Artists Town kept presenting different issues. I changed my mind numerous times about the order of some chapters. A weird and wonderful crime that took place in the 1990s was my inspiration. When I did more research, I had to change quite a few things.

And then there were the bloody comma splices. My factual writing differs a lot from my creative writing style. It turns out I am forever putting independent clauses in one sentence. I’m not keen on semi-colons, and they shouldn’t be used too frequently anyway. I rewrote a lot of sentences as a result.

I end a lot of sentences with prepositions too*. I took them out where this would improve the prose, but left in a lot of them as otherwise the sentence didn’t sound natural.

But hey, at least I know what comma splices are now!

One rewrite does not a finished novel make. Improvements are still needed. And I have some factual stuff I need to check – police procedures relating to crimes committed in different jurisdictions. But the project is a lot further on that it was two months ago.

Here’s the blurb for the book, which I hope to publish later this year:

Fifteen-year-old Daisy has been dragged along on a family holiday in a small Scottish town against her will. But then, that’s what happens when you suddenly develop a chronic health condition. Your mum and dad take away all your freedom.

Still, the holiday has its compensations. There’s Katrina, resident ‘cool’ girl who decides to take Daisy under her wing. Katrina happens to have a gorgeous, older cousin who looks at Daisy in a certain way. Is this holiday about to change Daisy’s life for the better?

Escaping from London seems to have affected Daisy’s dad. He’s got some madcap schemes in mind, but just where is all the money for this coming from?

Set in 1990, Artists Town is a coming of age tale that explores friendship, first love, learning to be cool and navigating life’s challenges.

 

*See the wonderful Grammar Girl’s article on ending sentences with prepositions. She also does a weekly podcast which manages to make grammar easy to understand AND interesting.

 

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Writing About Teenagers – Can You Keep Up?

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teenagersLast year, I finished a book about teenagers – specifically a teenager with mental health issues. I enjoyed writing the story and I felt reasonably proud of it once I had finished, but I knew work needed to be done on it. It needed re-writing in places and it needed some re-ordering of the plot half-way through.

[I find beginnings easy to write and endings fairly straightforward, but the middle of the novel – the rising arc seems to give me issues.]

I started the re-writing and then ground to a halt, beginning another novel instead and letting that take up my time. One of my issues with the book about teenagers is my feeling that I can’t possibly keep up. When I started book number two, I felt reasonably confident that I knew how teenagers lived and existed day-to-day, but as time went on I lost that confidence.

How do teenagers live these days? Do they talk to each other at all? Or are they too busy, heads bent, hands curled round a mobile phone awaiting updates on whatever social media platforms they belong to? And what social media platforms are they on? Is Twitter now passe? Have young people grown bored of Instagram yet? Have they moved onto Periscope? And how exactly does Snapchat work?

Modernity feels as if it’s difficult to accurately reflect these days because it moves so very, very quickly. I’m sure anyone writing about children and teenagers 40 or 50 years ago could confidently feel that their book would be as relevant at the end of a decade as it had been at the beginning of one, but I don’t feel that way about teenagers living in 2010, compared to teenagers living in 2016.

The answer to this dilemma? Who knows… Writing about teenage vampires or teenagers living in a futuristic world where they need to take part in games to stay alive? Maybe that’s the answer.

Oh. That’s been done already. Oh well.

 

Two Slices of Carrot Cake

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One slice of carrot cake.

One slice of carrot cake.

Wanted: Readers.

Wanted: Readers Who Can Make Suggestions Which Will Vastly Improve This Book.

 

 

 

I started book number two last year and finished the first draft in May. And since then, I’ve filled in tax returns, written copy for a timber craft website and spent countless hours procrastinating on social media and blogging accounts to avoid doing the necessary re-write of book number two, title Two Slices of Carrot Cake.

Sighs…

Anyway, here’s the blurb about Two Slices of Carrot Cake – see what you think and if you think it sounds worth reading…

Two Slices of Carrot Cake Book is the story of 16-year-old Savannah Dunn, a wise-cracking teenager struggling with a serious eating disorder (binge eating) who disguises her issues via various personalities online.

There is the super sexy girl who is engaging with the Hollywood star of the moment via Twitter, then there is the needy teenager who keeps asking various eating disorder forums for help, and finally the girl who is having a love affair with an authority figure via a blog that is notching up the ‘follows’ by the minute…

But where is real life in all this? Real life, unfortunately, has a habit of catching up with you and when the truth gets out there a whole load of nasty repercussions, discoveries and revelations. But ultimately, real life away from the online world has a lot to offer and Savvy is about to find out why pretending to be someone else online is never a good idea…

 

 

 

Tango-ed

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This week’s inspiration came from a fellow Friday Flash Fictioner who wrote a story about getting inspiration for writing; an author who had found words suddenly leaping together on his page.

Two of the words were ‘holiday’ and ‘tangerine’; as a long-term resident of the west coast of Scotland, I could not resist.

tangerines

 

“Are you sure about this?” Teenage girl 1 asked teenage girl 2.

“Yes, you always need a lot to get a decent colour. The whole bottle will do the job. Keep rubbing it in.”

Teenage girl 2 eyed the product suspiciously. It didn’t half stink. Still, a holiday tan was a holiday tan. Guaranteed to knock a half-stone off one visually AND attract the attention of hot lads.

Half an hour later, teenage girls 1 and 2 regarded each other with horror. Bronzed beauties they were not. Tangerine, they most definitely were. Whose stupid idea was it to use Cuprinol?

 

Photo thanks to flickr.