Work on Bethany Rose has kept me busy, as I’m on the last three or four thousand words now. The total word count will run over my intended 100,000 words but as I’ve already decided to delete one minor character completely that’s not an issue. This is only the first draft, of course; there’s a lot of work to be done yet, editing and polishing. Some people balk at this aspect of writing but I thoroughly enjoy it.

I’ve enjoyed writing Bethany’s story. Her character’s an interesting mixture of contradictions; sensitive but strong, creative but practical, and incredibly brave in the face of awful circumstances. She’s a very different person from Tamsin, that’s for sure. But I won’t say too much about her publicly for now.

I’ve also been enjoying our two chickens. In the spring, Mum began talking about having two pet chickens. She gave it some thought, and by early summer they were in residence in her small garden. Richard laughed and told her we’d have them by Xmas. Well he was right, and here they are.

Cute little characters they are, too, with amusing habits and quizzical expressions. They’re not in the least bothered by our dogs. Actually, Ygraine has already lost interest. Emily is more inquisitive, though, having discovered that these new residents produce mini footballs - eggs to you and me.

Richard’s famous. Really, he is. Check him out on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3RJ9RA2fk8

October 31st saw an evening or short monologues by various writers from Wirral performed by members of the Carlton Players. The event was organised by Jenny Humphreys. Three other members of Riverside Writers took part, apart from myself: Tim Hulme, Carol Falaki and Peter Hurd.

My contribution was one of my short pieces involving the Caldy fae, The Faerie Tree, which is partly autobiographical. This was performed by Angela Keeler, who has been acting for seventeen years.

My photos are poor, my only excuse being the tricky lighting conditions which my digi isn't clever enough to cope with - sharp spotlights from the ceiling and bar area, and deep shadows. I had to push the highlight option in PhotoImpression 4 to extremes in order to be able to see much of the stage area. With my old and trusty Pentax SLR it would have been a doddle.

Enjoy your All Hallows Eve celebrations, people, whatever your plans for tonight. We're hardly being visited by wild Samhain storms here, though; the garden is flooded with golden sunlight and the French doors are wide open to allow in the soft, warm breeze.

The word-count for Bethany Rose now stands at 91,500 (and I’m aiming at 100,000), which means that the first draft is on its last lap.

Around half-way through writing this, I realised that my intention of telling all of Bethany’s story simply wasn’t going to fit into one novel - not unless I wanted to pen a 200,000 MS, and unless you have Stephen King’s level of assured readership most publishers would probably baulk at accepting that due to costs.

As so often happens with me, the process of writing feels like accepting silent dictation. Or it can be like watching a film projected onto the inside of my forehead; an internal pair of ‘eyes’ watch it play through, and I just write down what happens. I know that probably sounds loopy to most people but your reaction is your own responsibility.

So three-quarters of the way though writing the MS, I was still wondering how on earth I could close this novel in a good place, knowing that the main character’s story continues. If someone had read the other two books from the series, they’d already know her story continues too. Also, while these are part of a series I want it set up so they can be read in any sequence. All I could do, really, was accept more silent dictation and discover where it lead.

Anyway, this week suddenly the final plot was revealed, which has been fun.

And this ending fits in perfectly with the following book - which I hadn’t even thought of until yesterday. Today, not only do I know who the main character is, and therefore the title, but also the loose plot outline.

Yaay!

By the way, if you’re in Birkenhead tomorrow evening, drop into the Little Theatre where a groups of assorted actors will be performing one-act plays or monologues by local writers. Four members of Riverside Writers are taking part, including myself. Angela Keeler will be performing The Faerie Tree, which is one of my series of short tales about the notorious Caldy fae. Doors open at 7pm. Seating is limited, so be early.

You're invited to take a look at my latest painting, which is an oil painting of Vlad Dracula.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Portrait-of-Vlad-Dracula

A quiet weekend, spent pruning back some of our roses in readiness for winter. It seems such a shame to cut away the last of the flowers, and yet the job needs doing before the colder weather makes it much more of a chore. So now I've a vase on the fireplace, filled with mismatched but perfectly beautiful fragrant roses which are already starting to sprinkle petals over the black mirror-like hearth below it. Autumn is already upon us, here - my favourite season, actually.

Tim Hulme


Peter Hurd


Peter Caton


Carol Falaki


Andy Siddle


Adele Cosgrove-Bray

More photos from this event can be viewed on my Flickr site. Either click on the images above or go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/__Adele__

Am I ready for tonight? I think so… I hope so! Yesterday, I was chatting to Julie Mann, one of the librarians at West Kirby Library, and we remarked how the initial planning for New Tales for Old Byways had begun at a meeting a year ago. That was when the Wirral Bookfest had been scheduled for April, before the threatened library closures set everything back months. Julie will be taking photos tonight, just as she did for last year’s Words from Wordsmiths event.

Wirral TV will be filming tonight’s event. This was confirmed only yesterday. It should be an interesting experience to have a film crew moving around.

I’ll be reading Seth’s Basement, which introduces one man’s strange hobby; and also Food, which is one of my series about the Caldy Hill fae. But the program is very diverse, being a group effort.

Hope to see you there!

The Faerie Tree, one of my series of tales about the notorious Caldy fae, will be performed by actress Angela Keeler as part of an evening of short monologues. Angela's theatrical career spans seventeen years, and has included such diverse works as Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and Frank Marcus's The Killing of Sister George.

This event will take place on 31st October 2009, at the Carlton Little Theatre in Birkenhead. The performance begins at 7.30pm. Seats are limited, so arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Permit me to introduce andysids who is a talented member of Riverside Writers.

Andy will be performing some of his work as part of New Tales for Old Byways on October 14th. Meanwhile, go say hi!

Last night's meeting of Riverside Writers began with our planning the program for the above event. Several of us will be performing more than one piece of work for the two-hour cheese and wine evening. Then we moved on to updating everyone on the progress of our anthology, as Carol Falaki has done wonders in finding an affordable publisher.

Once we'd got the formal stuff out of the way, we returned to our more usual style of meeting which is very much writing-based. We heard the results of two monthly projects, The Literary Chicken (flash fiction, 200 words max.) and Presents to Myself, which generated more poetry than is typical for our group.

Next month's writing project involves creating a short story or poem which feature the following objects: cracked plate; horse; recipe; cushion; daffodil; rag doll. If you'd like to join in, help yourself!

Events listings leaflet for Wirral Bookfest 2009; reproduced with permission. To view larger, simply click on either image, then click on 'All Sizes' in the menu bar.

The countdown to this year's Bookfest begins! We will be presenting New Tales from Old Byways at 7pm on Wednesday, October 14th at West Kirby Library.

All our stories and poems will have a local Wirral theme, which means they will be set locally or have some link with the area. This is the second time Riverside Writers has taken part in this week-long festival, which will see twenty-one events taking place in libraries across the peninsula.

The head librarian at West Kirby Library, told me there has been a lot of interest in New Tales for Old Byways already.

This photo was taken during a recent walk along the sand dunes, at Red Rocks in Hoylake. The solitary figure sitting on the sandstone outcrop, gazing towards Middle Eye and Hilbre Island, reminded me strongly of Rowan. This exactly captures the pose which Rowan would fall into, and in one of his favourite locations too.

Editing Rowan is coming along well. I’ve almost reached the end of the MS, and my next task will be to put all my alterations onto disc and reprint the hardcopy so I can clearly see what I’m looking at. I’ve gone over the existing paper MS five or six times already.

If you’d like to see some of the places where my stories are set, then I’ll invite you to visit http://hubpages.com/profile/AdeleCosgroveBray

I’ve been creating a few non-fiction articles there, illustrated with either my or Richard’s photography, or my art. The subject matter covers a fairly broad range, and it has amused me to watch the viewing stats for these Hub Pages. To date, the most popular by far is the page about how to make jam. Weird!

No-one is obliged to go along with everything--or, indeed, anything--that a critic or editor says. If several people say something similar then they may have a point. Then again, consider the actions of lemmings.




However, in the case of The Karens I agreed with the editor who told me the story didn’t really begin until six pages into the MS. I hadn’t noticed that until he’d pointed it out. I’d been too busy enjoying the flow of my own thoughts on a pet topic to notice that what I’d produced was, effectively, an info-dump.

The simple truth is that if a person wanted scientific information, they’d go to a scientist and not to someone who can just about tell the difference between a Bunsen burner and a Petri dish.

This is why so much Science-Fiction is written by real-life scientists. (You don’t say…!)

So it’s a pet topic--and if some future reader of the story is prompted into further research of the subject, great. Meanwhile, the story needs to be publishable. (Is publishable a real word? Oh, who cares; it’s 5.30pm gone and I’ve had enough for today. This is my blog; I can be semi-literate if I want to.)

So I cut 1,000 words from The Karens, and from those opening pages I kept only two small paragraphs which I segued separately into another scene.

Here’s hoping that when I read it through again in a few days, the pace seems improved without loss to the overall tale.

Ah, yes, every rainy Sunday afternoon when I was a child, my father's vinyl record collection would emerge from the gargantuan radiogram - a prized object the size of a sideboard, with a radio and record player built into it. A crackly loudspeaker was at either end, and inside was a slot intended to house the average person’s entire record collection, (probably around twenty LPs at the most.)

So the rain would fall, and the house would smell of the remains of Sunday dinner - a traditional roast, followed by a somewhat solid rice pudding - and rolling out of the prized loudspeakers would come such ‘delights’ as Delaney’s Donkey (as in the YouTube vid above) and Paddy McGuinty’s Goat, the theme music to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Paint Your Wagon and, just when it seemed things could not get worse, the dreaded James Last Orchestra.

Ah, yes, the trials of youth…

Truly, parents have no mercy.

http://insidethemiddleeast.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/18/video-1m-reward-for-mermaid-photos/


Pliny the Elder, in the first century AD, was apparently sure that mermaids existed. According to him, their bodies were rough and scaled all over. A fifth century bestiary by Physiologus describes them as beasts of the sea, shaped as a woman from the navel upward and a fish from the navel downward, and added that she especially enjoyed stormy weather.

In a thirteenth century work, De Propietatibus Rerum by Bartholomew Angelicus claimed that mermaids lulled sailors to sleep then kidnapped them for sex. If the sailors refused, the mermaid would kill then eat them. Then in 1739, The Scots Magazine reported that the crew of the Halifax, short on rations in the East Indies, had caught and eaten several mermaids. The sailors said mermaid flesh tasted like veal.

More mermaid info: http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/mermaids/1.html

You're probably wondering why I shared these gems of fishy authenticity. It's largely the consequence of having hubby upstairs, snoring through another of his migraines. Having written myself to a (temporary!) stand-still, I went web-wandering while part of my brain tinkered around with the more-detailed formation of a particular character. I couldn't write more of his story until I knew how he would react to the situation and the other people in it. I needed to know his motivations for being involved in the first place. Anyway, those details have been sorted out now.

Recently, I posted a short piece about Riverside Writers which ended with a off-the-cuff quip about my writing a Hub Page about how to start and run a happy writers' group. Qute a few people (on LJ and elsewhere) asked me to go ahead. And so, for those who are interested, here it is:- http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Run-A-Writers-Circle

The first draft of Bethany Rose has now reached 75,000 words, and there’s plenty more story to be told yet. I’ve already decided I’ll delete one character who appears fairly near the start of the book as she slows the pace down and doesn’t contribute enough to the plot, and there’s a particular scene which will probably be deleted too - again for reasons of pace.

All that can wait. The whole point of a first draft is to get the story onto paper. That it’s rough and flawed doesn’t matter. The important task is to get it written. Editing, re-writing and polishing come later. In Gabriel Marquez’s book, Living to Tell the Tale, the author quotes an older, more experienced writer who tells him the only person who should hear a first draft is the writer’s dog.

Maybe my neighbours think I talk to myself. (Well, actually…!) However, I’ve found that if you read your work aloud, rather than just read it silently, you’ll spot errors much more readily. If you stumble over the same sentence twice, there’s probably something wrong with it. My dogs don’t mind my reading aloud. Even if the story bombs, they’ll still love me.


By the way...
There will be an author event for Footprints (pbs. Hadley Rille Books) at Waterstone's in Dorchester on Thursday, the 27th of August at 7.30pm. Kate Kelly and David L Clements will be there to read from it and sign copies.

Riverside Writers’ meeting last night was unusually well attended, largely due to the coverage given in the local press. We were joined by Gary Smailes from Bubblecow http://www.bubblecow.com who delivered an information-packed talk about today’s publishing business and the value of social networking.

First Gary talked about the pros and cons of self-publishing, and the various options available. These roughly fall into two categories - the kind you pay for, or the web-based sort where you upload your MS to a print-on-demand site.

Self-publishing is really only a valid option if you plan to sell a limited number of copies to a pre-established audience, such as friends and family or a circle of acquaintances who share a specific interest relevant to your book.

Increasingly, mainstream publishers instantly reject any self-published works unless they have sold an absolute minimum of 3,000 copies, and very few achieve this.

Gary then moved on to discussing the emerging importance of small publishing houses, many of which actively welcome new authors who show promise.

A writer seeking a deal with a big-name publisher, however, really does need an agent, and Gary spent a considerable amount of time explaining the importance of finding an appropriate agent and how to approach them through email, cover letters and MS submissions.

Cover letters should not be dashed off in a morning, he said. Set it aside for a week then come back to it. Comb the letter through for errors in punctuation, spelling and grammar. Get someone else to look at it and find faults. This letter is likely to be your first-contact sales pitch, so you need to get it right.

Then Gary moved on to the subject of traditional publishers and what they’re looking for. The big-name houses are inundated with unknown or barely-known writers hoping for attention, and many of these have false ideas about the business.

One of the first things any agent or publisher does these-days, when looking at a promising MS, is run a Google search on the author’s name. If little or nothing results, it will probably be assumed that the author has no audience - which translates into minimal prospective sales. Gary encouraged everyone to develop a central site, such as a blog, and then add two or three social network sites. (Riverside Writers’ members have heard me tell them this numerous times!) Twitter came highly recommended - in fact it was via Twitter that Gary and I met.

Gary had invited questions from the audience throughout, and I think it’s fair to say that everyone enjoyed his talk and learned something new.

Thanks go to Gary Smailes for his hard work.

Thanks also go to West Kirby library staff for rapidly finding us a bigger room to hold the meeting in, as numbers exceeded expectations.

And here’s hoping the next meeting of Riverside Writers will see a return of some of the new faces who came along. That will be at West Kirby Library, 7.30pm on Monday, September 28th.

The first of a series of YouTube videos which offer valuable insight into cryo-preservation, it's pros and cons, it's potential, reasons why you might consider cryo-preservation for yourself, and the science involved behind the process.

Richard took this photo of me yesterday. It was taken in our garden; you can see part of the thick curtain of glossy ivy which climbs up the wooden fence by the contorted hazel tree, right by the entrance to the Grove or "circular lawn" as I obliquely describe it in my latest Hubpage: http://hubpages.com/hub/Adeles-Garden

The photo was taken for use with my author's bio for a horror/dark fantasy anthology to be edited by Raven Digitalis, who started this project two years ago. Raven intends to submit the MS to an interested prospective publisher on October 1st. My contribution was Spanish Jones, part one of which was broadcast live on 7 Waves Radio in October last year. It's a tale of pirates, selkies and witches fighting to the death on Hilbre Island and Middle Eye. Anyway, here's hoping that the MS will be accepted.

Meanwhile, Riverside Writers have now received one quote for printing our anthology. Obviously we're waiting for other quotes to come in, but already it looks like being a choice between two local companies. I sent emails to members this morning to tell them Gary Smailes from Bubblecow http://www.bubblecow.co.uk/ will be joining us at the next meeting.

Yesterday Richard arrived home clutching Cajun chicken and two wonderfully dreadful films: one had Godzilla and Rodan battling with a three-headed chicken-ish winged thingy, and the other film featured a giant shark (which ate San Francisco bridge and leapt skywards to chomp a plane) battling to the death with a giant octopus, which ate a few ships and an oil rig or two. Both films deserve a place beside Shark in Venice! and King Kong Lives - the one where Kong has a heart transplant and takes a fancy to a Lady Kong with a ginger rinse. Awful but hilarious, all. The Cajun chicken was good, too - peppery spicey, just as it should be.