Research On the Go - a fairy tale by Valerie-Anne Baglietto

Once upon a time...

...a woman of indeterminate age set off on a journey. This woman – with dark hair that was not entirely natural anymore, and dark eyes framed by black geeky glasses – was, and always had been, a Writer. The journey wasn’t as perilous as others she had embarked on, as it didn’t involve the M6; but the A49 proved eventful enough.

The cottage the Writer was staying in for a week had a wonderful, quirky name, yet she wouldn’t reveal it to anyone until her dying breath – or at least until it popped up in one of her novels.

The detachment of being away from home lent a fresh perspective to her research. She found herself taking lots… and lots… of photographs with her phone. (Thank goodness for WiFi and that one terabyte of cloud drive, she realised, as she made sure to back them up daily.)

Now, oddly enough, the Writer lived in a picturesque village herself. But somehow, it was easy to be blind to sights she saw regularly. The saying “familiarity breeds contempt” didn’t seem so cliched when she considered how a never-before-seen vista can spark inspiration, or a new outlook lift a story up out of the grey and into a rainbow of light.

Trying to capture the essence of a place in a photograph wasn’t easy, the Writer discovered, especially with a phone case that made the edges of certain photographs blurry and pink. But it was worthwhile and fun. Viewing the typical settings of her stories with a fresh lens meant creativity was stirred and new scenes imagined.

An old gate here (ooh, the possibilities of where it might lead!) or a pretty cottage. A crumbling, ancient gravestone remembering a tragic young life, or a war memorial marking the loss of so many others.

The Writer’s brain was never still, never silent. 

Without the infinite number of errands and chores she faced back home, it was uplifting. Only a finite number to tackle here. Such as feeding the dog. And the children. The writer might not be sitting at her desk slaving over her keyboard, but she was working, even while enjoying a break from the chains of deadlines or fitting in laundry (washing and hanging) between chapters. She was “on holiday”, and yet… she wasn’t. There was no need to feel guilty. She was free. Her mind was free. More importantly, inspiration was free – to run wild.

How fortunate Writers are these days, she thought, to be able to record their travels in pictures, storing them in albums on hard-drives or printing them out and pinning to study walls. Perhaps she would add her photographs to a Pinterest board. Or use a particular favourite as a screensaver. She would decide once she was home. There was no rush. No pressure. It was satisfying simply to be able to enjoy them and play games with the possibilities...

A whitewashed cottage for the heroine,
with flowers around the door.

A posh house - for a posh person? 
The hero's imperious mother, maybe?

'The Old Vicarage'. 
Does that mean an old vicar should live here?

An uber-modern interior for the posh house?
Interesting...

Who would want to walk along here on a dark night?
*shudders*

Every village needs a quaint church,
but just look at that impeccable lawn!
(Gardener with a strain of OCD perhaps?)

And of course, the village local.
Indispensable.

Once upon a time...

...a Writer went on a journey and finally returned home, if not with a tan (it was only the Forest of Dean, after all), then at least with a whole new village in her head.

The End

By day, Valerie-Anne Baglietto writes contemporary, grown-up fiction. By night, she clears up after her husband and three children. Occasionally she sleeps. During her career so far she has written rom-coms for Hodder & Stoughton, won the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writer’s Award and been shortlisted in the 2015 Love Stories Awards. Valerie-Anne tweets @VABaglietto

Valerie-Anne's latest modern fairy tale for grown-ups is available from Amazon worldwide click here for more details.

Downtime by Sophie Claire

We’re into exam season and my children are studying hard. 

I’m glad. I have a strong work ethic and I firmly believe that hard work pays off in the end. But recently I’ve found myself saying Take a break, have some downtime, and I’m trying to follow this advice in my own writing too.

Because the more books I write, the more I realise that writing isn’t only about getting words on the page (although that is crucial, obviously), meeting targets, or sitting at the computer for long hours. It’s also about getting to know your characters and spending time with them, and you don’t have to be at your desk to do this.



When I begin a new book I find the writing is stilted. My characters are still new to me, I’m not sure how the plot will unfold.

But as the weeks and months pass by and I become increasingly submerged in the story I’m creating, the characters come alive and begin to follow me around. They creep into my life and float around at the edges of my conscious thoughts. When I’m watching television I find myself wondering what would X do in that situation? How would he/she react? In the supermarket I spot a product and think; That’s it! That’s what reminds my heroine of her childhood!

I love it when this happens. When my characters become real to me and the tiny quirky details of their lives and personalities reveal themselves.

But I believe that you need two things for this to happen:

1) To have spent time with those characters already (ie. writing)

2) To relax and take time away from the computer, giving the mind room to wander.

Time off can be really productive. 

It’s when the subconscious gets to work, absorbing and mulling over all the information it’s collected, both real and fictional. It’s when – for me, at least – the best ideas bubble up to the surface and land in my head, as if out of nowhere. It may not feel like work, but I've found that reading and researching are as crucial as writing itself. 

And so is time off. Spending time with friends and family, or indulging in your favourite hobbies feeds the imagination. An emotional conversation with a friend or even a passing comment from a stranger can trigger a new idea, and with any luck, that might develop into a character or a plot for a new book.

So I’ve learned that prioritising time off is as important as working hard. Switching off is actually like switching on.

How about you? When do you have your best ideas?

Sophie.x

The Inspiration Behind 'Another Man's Child' by Anne Bennett

In this post, Anne Bennett talks about how her family history inspired her latest novel.

Many times  I have been asked where I get my inspiration from to write. Some wonder if it is helpful to me that I live in such a beautiful place. While walking the beaches and hills near my home has helped me iron any knotty problem I have encountered in the manuscript, the inspiration to begin in the first place comes from other sources. Sometimes I don’t even know what these triggers are, but the book coming out on 19th November, called Another Man’s Child, was inspired by my mother’s tale and the house she was born and raised in.

Wales

This house is not just any old house. It is the family home of the Logues.  My mother was born in 1910, the eleventh child in a family of twelve.  But I never saw the house in its heyday, for it was in ruins when I eventually caught sight of it.  I had no idea anyone had a photograph of it, because photography was expensive and usually only used to mark significant events.  However, two cousins, Martin in Redditch and Michael in Dublin, began researching the family history and pooling resources on the Facebook Page 'Logues of Tawnagh'.

Tawnagh, Ireland

Martin unearthed the picture of this house and suddenly the story my mother told me about one of her sisters made sense.  My mother was born in rural Ireland and in that time most houses were small cottages, single-storied, and consisting of two or three rooms. The walls were mainly white washed sod, and the roofs were made from thatch. This house,  by comparison, was a large, two-storied, double-fronted, brick-built house with a slate roof.  The house showed the Logue status in the community, which would have been high, and the daughters of such a thriving farmer would be expected to marry well and so be kept in the manner they were used to.  That meant marrying a farmer, the eldest son of a farmer, or a man with a trade.  So when one of my mother’s sisters was attracted to a hired hand, looking at the house it is easier to understand her father’s rage and actions, which would be considered extreme by today’s standards.

In real life the sister was packed off to America, where the Logue family really did have a widowed Aunt Maria living in New York, but my fictional Celia Mulligan did something equally daring to escape from her father’s dominance and marry the man she loved.  However, the path of true love is never a smooth one and much was to befall the young couple and in the end Celia comes near to losing all she holds dear.

Another Man's Child
by Anne Bennett

A moving family drama of one young woman’s fight to survive, to find her long-lost relatives and to find a place to call home.

Celia Mulligan is in love with farmhand Andy McCadden, but when Andy asks her to marry him and she accepts, her father is furious – no daughter of his will marry a mere hireling. Celia elopes with Andy and they make their way by ship to England. While on board, Celia meets a demure young woman called Annabel who tells her in confidence that a friend of her father forced himself upon her and she has since fallen pregnant.

Annabel plans to throw herself on her brother’s mercy and asks Celia if she will accompany her to Birmingham as her ladies maid. Without a job and with nothing to offer her, Andy encourages Celia to accept – he can find employment for himself and save for their future. But neither of them can foresee the events that will follow, and soon Celia will be forced to choose between the man she loves, and the love of a vulnerable child…

Published by Harper Collins: 19th November 2015

Two sides to every story - except when there isn't... by Valerie-Anne Baglietto

Earlier this year, I left the cosy confines of North Wales and headed down to London to take my daughter to see Wicked. We both love the Wizard of Oz, so we’d been dying to see this musical for ages. I expected to enjoy it, but what I didn’t expect was that it would ignite something in my Writer’s Brain that I’m now finding endlessly fascinating. I mean, I already knew about POV, of course I did. After nearly two decades in this business, I’m hardly a novice. But now I’m thinking much more deeply, not just about POV but about perception.

We’ve had a couple of great posts on Novelistas Ink already about this subject, and I don’t want to repeat what Juliet and Annie put so eloquently. They’re well worth a read or re-read.

This particular post is the one about my own point of view about point of view (yes, I was trying to be too clever there).

View on Amazon

By the time I saw Wicked, I’d already finished the first draft of my latest book Four Sides to Every Story.

POV was something that had been constantly on my mind for several months, since the title for the book first popped into my head while I was staring out of a window on a train one day. (Seriously, what is it about trains? Didn’t JK Rowling come up with the idea for Harry Potter on a train?) Anyway – my story, which has a grown-up fairy tale romance at its core, didn’t just have the hero’s and heroine’s sides to take into account, there was also the fairy godmother to consider, and the hero’s stepdaughter. Their roles in the story were crucial, and it was imperative they narrated their parts, too.

But just like Wicked, it wasn’t enough simply to get into each character’s head for a scene or two. How the characters perceived the same unfolding story, and how they were perceived as people within that tale, were paramount. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot of Wicked. After all, if you haven’t already had the pleasure, you might want to read the book or see the musical for yourself. But basically, it’s the Wizard of Oz from a different angle, so it helps if you’re familiar with the landscape of Oz. And it shows us, in such a fiendishly inspired way, how a different narrator can turn an entire story on its head. An exciting concept for a writer. I came away with my head BUZZING. (Maybe my life is very quiet and I’m easily pleased.)

Propaganda is a powerful tool, not just in wars...

It can scramble our brains, make us forget to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. The same with gossip. How quickly we can think ill of someone, without knowing their side. And villains, after all, are the heroes of the stories we tell - in their own eyes. Recently, movies like Maleficent also help us to see a well-known tale from a different POV. I wanted to do something like that within Four Sides to Every Story. My fairy godmother is young, and not at all theatrical like the kind we’re used to. But we see the tale from her perspective too for once, as well as from the others involved. Although the plot of the book isn’t a modern retelling of an actual fairy tale, we all know the markers, the familiar thread, the way the story ought to unfold. But it doesn’t. It starts going very wrong. The path to true love becomes perilously rocky. And not everyone is telling the truth or letting us completely under their skin.

And that’s another thing. The trendy-but-not-new device of the "unreliable narrator". The omissions. The secrets they don’t share with the reader.

Ah, I learned to love that, too; although it wasn’t easy to begin with. It was too new to me - or so I thought. If you have more time to spare, make a large mug of tea or coffee and look the term up on Wikipedia. In essence, all fictional narrative is unreliable to an extent, because if we're using POV correctly then the story is filtered through the narrator's eyes, with his or her own life experience, prejudices, moral code, etc. But while I was working on Four Sides I hadn't researched the device, so failed to appreciate the history behind it, or the fact that I'd absorbed the subtleties of using it from many books I'd read in the past, including Agatha Christie.

Out of the four points of view in my story, there are various degrees of 'unreliability'. Ooh, the fun I had once I got into my stride. This was my Happy Book, as I nicknamed it. The one that was a joy to write after the torturous bit at the start when I couldn’t see beyond the first few chapters. I’m grateful to it for giving me those months of unadulterated pleasure. I’m indebted to the lessons it taught me.

Of course, in my earlier rom-coms, I tried to use POV as effectively as I could, too, but on the whole, the narrators were the ‘goodies’, even if they sometimes behaved badly. They always laid themselves bare to the reader. I received a tweet a couple of weeks ago which brightened up a rainy Sunday. It was from a fan of Fresh as a Daisy, which is over a decade old now, who said she still read it at least once a year. She liked the fact I had managed to make all the participants in a love triangle sympathetic. It got me thinking, and re-reading it myself. There were three ‘nice’ people involved, who made mistakes throughout the story, but none of them was out to hurt anyone. They were real and ordinary and exactly who they claimed to be, even if they didn't spill all their secrets out in one lump on the page; the idea being, the reader would perceive them as such and be sympathetic to their problems.

But that isn’t quite the case in Four Sides to Every Story. This is a modern fairy tale, with a twist.

I felt I had to go one step further than the way I normally approach the craft of writing POV. It reminded me of a still-life art class, with all the artists in a circle around a bowl of fruit. Each completed painting will look different, depending on the individual artist's perspective. And not just the image in their line of sight, but how they translate it in their heads, too, and how they choose to capture it pictorially. At the end of the day, though, it’s the same bowl of fruit.

So this is how I visualised the book in my head as I wrote it, with my storyline in the centre and my characters as the artists gathered around it. A floundering, surly hero. A heroine who isn’t just prickly with the other characters but with the reader as well. A fairy godmother who desperately needs things to play out the way the reader expects. And finally, a child, who perceives things as they truly are, without the complications, as only an innocent can.

One story. Four very different perspectives.

Wicked fun to write ;-)


Why not have a go playing around with POV, too, and take it a step further than you normally would? You never know, there might be a whole new chapter ahead of you. Just let me know how you get on! 

Valerie-Anne x

The Wimbledon Effect (and How It Can Inspire Your Writing) by Sophie Claire

Every year at this time adults and children across the UK are inspired to play tennis by watching Wimbledon. People who have never played before pick up a racket, tennis club members with busy lives realise they haven’t played much recently, and they all head down to their local courts to knock a ball around.

I know because I've been a victim of the Wimbledon effect myself.

I’ve watched Murray and Federer and Nadal and wished I could play like them. The power, the speed, the grace, and tenacity in the face of defeat: I’m motivated to get outside and emulate them.

And though I know I’ll never match Sharipova or Serena Williams, it’s still fun trying!

Watching the pros, there’s always something to learn. Their technique is perfect and beautiful to watch because they’ve spent hours and years practising it. Their fitness is at its peak because of careful training and diet. Their mental strength is incredible too – they’re out on court alone, and even in the face of impending defeat they have to conquer self-doubt and never give up the fight to win. They’re champions, and they make winning look effortless.

No, actually, scrub that. It doesn’t look effortless: they throw up because they’re pushing their bodies to the limit in the heat (Djokovic, the French Open 2014), they play through excruciating back pain (Nadal, Australian Open Final 2014), never giving up the fight. For me, this is true heroism and professionalism.

Good writers are the same. Professional. Practised. Dedicated. And reading a good book by an accomplished author is, for me, like watching the Mens’ Final on Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

I’m filled with admiration for the beautiful language or clever plot or memorable characters. It makes me analyse what it is about the writer’s style that works so well. Most importantly, it pushes me to strive to write better myself, working on my weaknesses, building on my strengths, putting in the hours.

And it also reminds me of why I started writing in the first place, of the power writing has to touch other people’s lives. My enthusiasm is renewed, my imagination re-energised. It’s so important to have heroes we look up to, and submerging yourself in a well-crafted novel is exciting, it’s inspirational!

So next time your writing feels stuck in a rut or jaded, try pulling a good book off your shelf – whatever the literary equivalent of Novak Djokovic is for you – and read.

Watch how the masters do it, and allow yourself to be inspired.

Which authors or books do you return to for inspiration?

Sophie x

Sophie's debut novel is available from Amazon UK 
and Amazon US

What Inspired Your Story? by Sophie Claire

I must confess that when I wrote Her Forget-Me-Not Ex I was reminiscing very nostalgically about my childhood summers spent in Provence at my grandparents' house. Not so much the place, though it's still very special to me, but the atmosphere. Let me explain.

My mother is French and every year at the end of July we used to pack up the car and make the two-day journey to the south of France and the house that Mum had known since she was a little girl. It must have been an emotional time for her because she didn't get to see her family during the rest of the year (air travel was expensive back then), and the main method of keeping in touch with my grandparents was by letter – handwritten and posted in air mail envelopes. My grandmother used to write to my mum, my sister and me individually every week, so despite the distance I felt very close to her and I loved the long summers we spent at her house. They were such special times that, come the month of August, I always find myself reminiscing, even now years later.

Although my family didn’t own a vineyard (I wish!) like Luc Duval, the hero in my novel, I have wonderful memories of sunshine and trips to the beach and delicious meals that stretched for hours with my extended family all around the table. With the wine flowing and everyone in holiday mode, there would be lots of stories told and joking and banter. It is a very special feeling to be surrounded by so many people who love you and have known you since you were born…

I drew on these memories when I wrote about Luc's large and noisy family in Her Forget-Me-Not Ex and it wasn't difficult to make my heroine, Natasha, wish she belonged at Chateau Duval. Natasha doesn’t have any family of her own, so she’s particularly envious of Luc’s loving family, and her feelings are made all the more complicated by the fact that she’s there under false pretences. As welcoming as the Duvals might be, she knows she doesn’t belong in this place that’s filled with children’s laughter, where there’s always someone who could use her help, and where the beautiful house and garden are enfused with centuries of tradition. At the end of the two weeks, she and Luc know she will leave and return to England.
But I'll leave it for you to find out what happens when she faces that dilemma...

Has a place inspired you?
How did you spend your childhood summers?
Leave a comment and you could win a free Kindle copy of Her Forget-Me-Not Ex!

Sophie.x

Her Forget-Me-Not Ex is out now and available in paperback and e-book:
Amazon UK
Amazon USA

You can find out about forthcoming giveaways and news on Sophie Claire's Facebook page and Twitter

Ten (and a half!) Things We've Learned About Blogging

It’s become increasingly important for authors to have a ‘platform’ to promote themselves and their books, but keeping a blog regularly updated can eat into precious writing time. A way around this is to have a joint blog with a group of friends. We started this blog way back in September 2012. It took a while for us to find our feet. We had no schedule - posting randomly whenever we felt like it, or not at all! Gradually our confidence grew, along with our visitors, and we now average over 100 hits a day. We’ve made mistakes along the way - and no doubt we’ll keep on making them! – but we have learned from them.

And here's what we've learned:

To ensure we stayed friends, we agreed in advance about the essentials, such as what we were going to blog about, and how often, and whether to have guest posts or to make our blog all about ourselves.

We learned to keep the design of our blog simple. Going mad with graphics, multi-coloured fonts and too many large photos meant our site was a bit slow to load and kept doing weird things. Occasionally it still does weird things but we decided to stick with the orange swirls because they've become our trademark. We've recently created a news page for our book launches and new releases, and another page lists all our latest books. This keeps our home page free for our blog posts.

We now tell visitors who we are (we used to be mistaken for a book blogging site!) and have lots of photographs to make ourselves seem more 'real'.

Most of our blog posts are around 600 words long, which we hope are just the right length to read during a coffee break. But we also like to alternate these with longer posts, which we break up with sub-headings, such as Valerie-Anne Baglietto did when she wrote this post about her favourite childhood books. (It makes them easier to read.)

We love photographs, but prefer to use our own rather than breaching someone else’s copyright. We recommend getting into the habit of carrying a camera around and building up a library of suitable photos, even doing your own photo shoot, as Johanna Grassick did for this post about books.

A group of authors blogging together can create a cross-pollination effect amongst their readers, but we try to be subtle about promotion. We write about the themes in our books rather than the books themselves. Trisha Ashley wrote a post about her pets when promoting her novel about a dog rescue centre and Juliet Greenwood wrote about creating a WW1 garden when her book set during the Great War came out.

We make sure our posts have a point to them and we’re not just blogging 'because it’s a Monday and we always blog on a Monday'. We try to make our posts informative, interesting, or at the very least entertaining - and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, like this one by Louise Marley.

If we get stuck for ideas we brainstorm subjects and themes. We’ve written posts about where we write (June Francis), how we juggle writing with family life (Anne Bennett) and even our favourite Christmas traditions (Cheryl Lang).

We keep an eye on our blog statistics and have found our posts about writing, research and inspiration are the most popular, especially this one by Annie Burrows, which has had almost 2,000 hits.

Finally, because there are ten of us, our posts receive ten times the exposure when we all link to them from our personal social networking sites. We tag our posts with all the (relevant!) labels we can think of. We try to keep old posts going by linking to them in a new post (in the same way we’ve done here - sneaky, eh?) or add the links in a list at the end, sub-titled something like ‘Related Posts’.

Setting up a blog and finding things to post about can be intimidating but with a group blog we can bounce ideas off each other and share the work between ourselves. And very often it doesn’t seem like work at all!

A Mother's Duty by June Francis



Looking for Inspiration:
June Francis (left)
at a writers' party in London

I don’t often get inspired when it comes to writing the next novel. An idea doesn’t hit me like a bolt from the blue. I was really searching around for ideas for my novel, renamed A Mother's Duty, when it actually occurred to me to do what published writers are forever telling wannabes, and that is write about what you know. So this book is one close to my heart because it is about Kitty, a mother of three sons. I know what that is like. What it feels like to have someone poke their heads under the hood of a pram and say, “What is it?” And, when I answered the second and third time, “A boy,” a look would come over some faces and I would hear the words, “Another boy! Wouldn’t you have liked a little girl?”

Big sense of failure! Especially as my mother-in-law was one of those who longed for a granddaughter, having given birth to just twin boys, herself.

So Kitty, who just like me loves the bones of her lads, has a secret longing for a daughter. It’s not that she has a sense of failure, though, because she had given birth to a girl. Sadly it had been stillborn. Happily I never had to harbour such a grief.

We writers have to spend a lot of time thinking up obstacles to put in the way of our main characters achieving their aim. So Kitty is a widow who has passed thirty-five. I also wanted her situation to be a bit out of the norm so decided she would be the proprietor of a hotel. There were lots of hotels in Liverpool city centre during the period I had settled on ‒ the Thirties ‒ with plenty going on, ending with WW2 and the famous May blitz in 1941. I knew next to nothing about running a hotel, so I rang the doorbell of one on Mount Pleasant and hoped for the best. I was blessed because I was welcomed in by the proprietor’s son, which led to an interesting conversation with his mother. There is nothing like research for giving a writer ideas.

Hotels on Mount Pleasant, Liverpool

What about my hero? I didn’t want to write the obvious, such as him being a guest in the hotel. No, he’s an ex-medical orderly who had seen action in the Great War. Half-English, half-Scots, with a secret, he’s a bit of a wanderer and entertains cinema queues playing the fiddle.

How much were Kitty’s sons inspired by my own three? I never put real people in my books but I use the odd trait. So the eldest son has a sense of responsibility and is a bit of a worrier. The middle one has a touch of the rebel and the adventurer which gets him into trouble. As for the youngest, he has a real curiosity about people which can lead him astray.

Does Kitty get what she longs for? You’ll have to read the book to find out!

  

A Mother's Duty
Out now!

A Writer's Resolve ... by Valerie-Anne Baglietto

So - what exactly does RESOLUTION mean?

Its original definition was, apparently, 'to loosen or dissolve again'. Ironic I think, because that's exactly what happens to most people's New Year ones as January lurches on, freezing, wet and windy, and possibly the bleakest of all the months in the northern hemisphere. Our resolutions, like tight, tense knots in our days, loosen. Our determination dissolves in the face of teeth-chatteringly cold mornings and dark evenings. Spring is somewhere out there, we can sense it, but it's still too far away. We try to starve after Christmas, forgetting that our bodies need a few calories to stay warm. We vow to go to the gym, but funnily enough, there still aren't twenty-five hours in a day, even in our technologically advanced 2015. We promise ourselves lots of things we never live up to, and so we get depressed and winter eats into our bodies and souls until we get the flu, or just binge on wine or hot chocolate or too much tinned soup. Anyway. 

Enough.

My resolution this year was paradoxically not to make any. I broke it almost immediately by making one. My wardrobe is so fit to bursting that I decided to take a leaf out of my daughter's book and try experimenting more with what I already have rather than adding to it. My daughter isn't afraid to try out combinations you wouldn't think would go together, and quite often, she manages to pull it off. Maybe you can get away with this when you're nine.

Well, I then went and broke my resolution not to buy any new clothes almost immediately last weekend when I bought this... 

I couldn't resist, it was on sale. It's obvious I need to stay out of shops because my willpower is pathetically low.

So as my husband returned to work and my three children to school, I turned my attention to the WIP that I'd put aside to make way for Christmas. Maybe instead of resolutions I knew I couldn't keep - anything involving retail therapy basically - I would focus on my writing instead.

Writing in itself has always been like a form of counselling for me. When it's going well and I'm getting lots of words down on paper, it helps keep depression at bay. But sometimes there's a glitch and I'm not getting those words down fast enough, and the glitch isn't life getting in the way but my own fixation on making those words Perfect with a capital P. I can obsess for far too long and lose sight of my reader, who won't care or notice that I substituted a fancier word for another with the same meaning. If the emotion is there, and the page-turning elements of the plot, it shouldn't make any difference, as long as the word I decide to use doesn't jar, or detract, or fall short. 

I know voice and style and good prose are vital, but not at the expense of getting the story across and making it resonate in the reader's heart. What I mean is that I'm going to focus on the emotion in my story, and on the narrative more, and not get so bogged down by the prettiness or cleverness of my language quite as much.

So, that's my first resolution. For me, it's important. It should increase my productivity. But at this gloomy time of year creativity in general might need a boost anyway; like a blast of virtual Vitamin D, we often need something to pep us up. Another creative outlet besides writing often helps. 

I'm no good at crochet, sadly. My spirit is willing but my fingers are rubbish at it. I do enjoy photography though, I always have. Nothing serious, but these days I like the challenge of taking good photos with nothing but my phone. I also like playing around with filters afterwards. 

#NoFilters (Taken on 29th Dec 2014)

It serves a second purpose because I'm also taking photos of places or objects that inspire me and might end up in one of my books. So I'm resolved to enjoy this hobby more than ever this year and take advantage of Instagram. It's fun and I've met some lovely people on there. 

As writers, our words and stories paint pictures but sometimes we need to fix that picture in our own heads first before we can convey it to our readers, and with the digital wonders of Pinterest we don't need that pin-board hanging above our desks any more (which is just as well as I don't have room for one.)

Well, these are my most important writerly resolutions. I think some of the Novelistas are planning to share theirs, but we'd love to hear yours, too...

Happy 2015!

Valerie-Anne x
www.valerie-annebaglietto.com 
Twitter: @VABaglietto

The perfect antidote to winter... 

(Yes, really.)

Marrying the man of your dreams might be more literal than you think.

A modern fairy tale for grown-ups, available on Amazon worldwide. 

FREE on KindleUnlimited and Amazon Prime.

Amazon UK 
Amazon US