Every now and again it goes, and no matter how much you want to find it, you can’t, you’ve lost your creative flow – your mojo, it has vanished.  You look, desolate, at the flickering cursor, it blinks back at you accusingly, daring you, taunting you, and you are lost, you have no flow to give!  It is a lonely place, writers block, is a cruel mistress, she lets the ideas race around your head, keeps you awake at night with phrases and moments just begging to be written, yet the cursor steadfastly just blinks back at you when you attempt to create those whiling scenarios. 

But, all dams must burst, all logjams must eventually give way to the pressure of the water.  What was held back, cannot forever be denied, and, just like that the blockage is gone, the cursor hungrily skirting across the screen, ideas taken flesh, perilous drama poised to be read, and you feel yourself breathe, air again flowing freely through your once trapped and tight lungs. 

The cursor no longer taunting, now waiting in expectation, pasting ideas on the screen at a speed that your hands are now too slow to type – oh, euphoria, to be prisoner of nothing more than slow hands is a joy, a blissful state of ecstasy as your imagination runs freely again across the screen and the little vertical line reveals line upon line of your minds free flow. 

We were once so bound, but now we are running free, and to paraphrase an oft abused cliché, freedom, it feels so good, so darn good!! 

So, it’s out there for review, the first 20,000 words of ‘Magic’ are out for critique and the infamous red pen!  We now wait judgement.  It’s a nervous time waiting for feedback.  Sending out a chunk of your thoughts and efforts for external ‘validation’ is a truly bizarre state.  You want honesty, you want constructive feedback, but secretly (or possibly not that well-hidden) you want confirmation that what you’ve produced, what you’ve given for review is of worth, that any errors are small, minor, inconsequential even.  But, as much as you want to be lauded, to be feted and praised as the next great thing, you want honesty more.  You wait and you hope that the red pen is minimal, that the mistakes that you’ve presented are redeemable. But that above it all the story was enjoyed – you can fix everything else, but, you can’t really recover if the tale isn’t worth telling, isn’t a compelling read.  So, you wait, you hope that they are kind, but most of all you hope that they are honest and despite any flaws, you hope that it was an enjoyable tale!    

I wanted the story to go in a certain direction, the story didn’t, and the story it won – I guess that’s ‘magic’ for you!

I have a loose idea of where I want to end up, but no real fixed and firm idea of how I’m going to get there – and this story not being the ‘chase’ that was/is ‘Thomas Payne’, I guess the fluidly to go where ever the mood takes me is that more open, less constricting. 

Amy is a wonderful character, one of warmth and failings, one of genuine depth, and I feel a certain duty upon me to give this young woman a fair and sympathetic telling of her tale.    

So, I started this book with an idea of what I wanted to tell, what concept I wanted to cover, what progress I wanted to make in the telling of her adventures, and where I am now is not where I thought I’d be – never thought the plot would be where it is now. 

The title and concept of magic only appeared after I’d written the first ten pages – then out of the blue it hit me, make it up, add magic to link whatever you want to wherever you want to go, and so more by accident than design we have a telling of a tale that revolves around ‘magic’. 

If you could go back in time, change one thing (butterfly effect notwithstanding) would you?  Would you go back to a pivotal moment in your life and turn left and, not right? 

What if you were pushed back to before you chose either left or right, what would you do?  And that is where young Amy Grace is, she is at that crossroad debating what to do next… 

The cursor is blinking… 

A statement that could be a great opening line, or the opening shot in a screenplay; the camera panning back slowly from that little flickering line on a screen revealing…  and your imagination fills in whatever you want to happen next!

And that is where we are, we took the flashing vertical line for a journey through our fertile imagination, rode lightning while summoning the gods ancient and new, took the little ‘vertical’ through the world of goblins (well one specific goblin) and several decapitated fairies.  

Now, having written those pages, we are sitting and re-reading the journey, looking at the tale to date, and asking ourselves if it works, does the latest outpouring of my imagination add/detract from the plot line? 

A goblin, who rides lightning, conjuring magic to rejuvenate the dead, does this fit in the story of our heroine coming to terms with what she has done, what she has become? 

I’m not too sure, but it’s there now, and whatever the original plot may have been, it now has a little goblin folding time, returning what is, to what was, and suffering immense pain to make it so. 

And, we love that little flashing line for allowing us to do such things, the little blinking line is liberating; empowering!

 The cursor is blinking… 

If somebody told you that the fruit of your labours, the prize for your hours of endeavour and inner torment would be a miserly 7% of the jacket price – would you bother? If you are looking at a nice £4.99 jacket price, keeping it price savvy, is the £0.35 really ample reward? Makes you think doesn’t it!? So, if not for the money, why are you doing it? Is it just vanity? You must be heavily egotistical when you think about it – can’t be for the money, the riches, the trappings of fame, not for 7% it can’t…

So, if I’m only going to get 35p, I’m going to dig my heals in, and keep everything as mine, I’m not going to change tack, alter or remove anything in a vain attempt to shift a few more copies – and that’s kinda rewarding. If you are not chasing the money, if it is all about you and your creation, then dam it, you can wrap yourself nice and snug in the art-for-arts sake blanket.

Although, for a 25% return, I would consider making Amy a mid-western American, traveling the world bringing truth justice and the American way – the ‘baddie’ wont’ need to change, he’s a Brit, but for some extra gold coins…

Yeah, as if!

7% though, what a tiny return for your labour! I’d have to sell over 350,000 copies just to make a reasonable attempt to pay of the average mortgage – and that would be a very lot of paper to shift! So, I’d have to shift as many copies as say American Sniper (which had a massive movie tie-in to boost sales) in order to make a living – daunting isn’t it!

And then when you think of true ‘mega-sales’, someone like J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that has sales around 4.5m, or Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code c5m, you can see sheer size of the task you face if all this typing is an attempt to make a living…

So, if you see a writer who “made it”, be nice to them, they worked very hard for that 7%!

Ever tried the infamous ‘elevator pitch’? 

Harder than it sounds. 

Got cornered by someone who said ‘so, you’re writing a book, what’s it about?’

Hmm, not the best time to stutter, procrastinate…

Okay, Amy Grace is the tale of a young woman who is attacked, finds her inner strength, flies in an airship, and you know – rights wrongs and stuff.  So, it’s graphic where it needs to be, but not voyeuristic.  It is deliberately sympathetic to the long terms effects that such a brutal attack would have, so ‘coping’ theme reverberates throughout the tale. 

It’s steampunk insofar as we have an (nuclear powered) airship flying in a Victorian world, but it’s not googles and corsets, or dependent upon the technology to propel the story forward – but it helps.  The backdrop of Steampunk and the British Empire are wonderful tools that just beg for a few characters to be dropped in their midst.  The late 1800’s were a fascinating time, full of genuine epoch defining events, and so that’s why the time period is where it is.  We have the Empire at its height, the great game being played by other imperial powers, the burgeoning independence/nationalism of the ‘conquered’, it just cries out intrigue and adventure.  It was also a time where to be British, to be a man, to be an officer was all that was needed – so our hero is a heroine, a small woman, an Irish woman.  And her being a woman, and Irish to boot, I think adds a slightly different and very interesting slant on the whole adventure genre – oh, and that she channels the warrior women through her adds that little bit of Celtic Mythology into an already interesting mix. 

Can I get this whole thing across between floors three and four?  Possibly not, but I’ll practice, and I’ll try to get what, in my head, is a big complex intertwining series of thoughts together in such a matter as to come across as coherent and interesting, that or I’ll have to find the stop button to give me some much needed ‘waffle time’! 

So, if you hear of a man being arrested for a poorly planned and executed abduction in a lift – give that man some sympathy – it could very well be me…. 

Day whatever in the Big Brother House, and twenty-four lost and confused souls had stumbled across my site. Pressure is therefore mounting to deliver something – not just ‘anything’ but most definitely ‘something’ worthy of note.

Today’s lesson – if you write it, you can change it! Sounds obvious, and probably is, but when you are stuck in the midst of a plot line from which you can engineer no escape – go back and change it, change it all if you want to! And so I have. I’m writing bits for ‘Magic’, and the cul-de-sac was well and truly entered, three-point turn a none starter, frustration mounting, curser blinking but not moving…. So, it’s my book, I go back a few pages, insert a nice link that allows me to move the plot along, and it being a book about magic, fairies and goblins, anything kinda goes as long as it’s almost plausible, and bingo we are moving forward again. So, metaphor for life’s journey – it’s your story, change it if you want to!