Tag: teen fiction

Sci-fi is difficult to write!

This update is late, I know!

At the beginning of the month I decided to get a draft completed for one of the sci-fi stories that I’m writing for Globe Soup’s latest contest, thinking it would just take me a few days. How wrong I was. Who knew how much research would be required to write a short story related to terraforming? (Probably most people, I imagine 🤣) First I had to decide where was being terraformed, how it was being terraformed, how the characters were surviving pre-terraformation, as well as working out the story within that! Thankfully I do have a draft now but I definitely didn’t enjoy expanding my scientific knowledge and I’m not convinced it’s my strongest idea. Sadly, I also got a ticket for time travel so I’m going to have to get all sciency again before the end of the month 😭

On a more positive note, my story on 50-WordStories was chosen as story of the month, so that gave me a wee mental boost as I waded through Wiki articles on how to extract oxygen for life support systems 😄

My mind has drifted a bit from my focus on George Square due to the contests I’ve been preparing for lately – I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, the contests are helping me to hone my writing skills. On the other, novel writing is much more my preference over short stories and I only have so much time for writing. The problem is that a completed short story gives me a much quicker sense of achievement than trying to type my way through tens of thousands of words!

I know not many of you are reading this, so I’m sure there won’t be a momentous backlash, but I’m thinking that I’m going to skip a month of writing George Square to get my short story commitments completed – then I will hopefully power through the next few chapters. So next month may just be a wee blog post to update you on my activities but I promise normal programming will resume the following month 🙂

Or check out my published short fiction here 🙂

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Once again, it’s time for my monthly update. Trying to put your writing out there in the world can be a bit of a rollercoaster for your emotions. As I mentioned last month, I wrote a story for a historical fiction contest and was pretty proud of it by the end, but didn’t score within the top 10% of entries. Logically, I know that the outcome doesn’t mean I wrote a bad story, but it does knock your confidence when you don’t get the recognition you hope for. I’ve also had a few rejections from online literary magazines this month, which hasn’t helped either!

However, I try to remind myself that it’s a slow process, a marathon not a sprint as they say! Writing short fiction is a means to an end for me in some ways – it helps me to hone my writing skills and also to get my name out there for my work. While I enjoy writing the shorter stories, I have far too many novels in my head to let it take up too much of my time.

On that note, George Square has been a bit of a nightmare this month. I am generally what is known in writer’s circles as a ‘pantser’, though I’m not that keen on the word. I work stories out as I go, with vague ideas floating in my head to give me a sense of the direction I’m going in. Unfortunately that hasn’t been going as well for me lately and my progress with George Square has really slowed down. So, in a change to my normal strategy, I’ve actually made a planning document! To be fair, it’s written in the vague way that I generally think so it’s in no way a proper structured outline for the remainder of the book but… I do now feel that I have a clearer idea of where the next few chapters are going, which should hopefully help to speed up my process again. Fingers crossed!

One thing that I struggled a bit with was how much to keep back from the reader. The story could have been drawn out as more of a mystery about who is involved but I’m not sure that format worked for this story. Or maybe it was just that I don’t trust my own ability to sustain a mystery and make it clear why the characters weren’t working things out right away! Hopefully the approach I’ve gone for works for those of you reading it 🙂

For my final note, I just want to wish everyone who happens to read this a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It has been a challenging year for everyone for various reasons but hopefully 2023 will see a change in fortune for us all 🙏

Take a look at my short fiction here

On holiday with the family while trying to write

My regular update is a little late this month because we’re on holiday in the Lake District. I had planned to get the latest chapter of George Square finished before we left, but the plague rat that is my 3 year old inflicted me with a throat infection in the weeks leading up to going away 😪

Penrith Castle on the way to a playpark

While my children are of course a wonderful addition to my life, a holiday entertaining these two can feel like just as much work as time at home, if not more, because you’re out of your usual routine (the wifi isn’t great here so the 3 year old is discovering scheduled television and realising that watching something 500 times on repeat is a luxury not available wherever you go 😅 ). As a result, being on holiday has meant having less time than usual for writing so getting this blog post written has taken me what feels like forever. However, it is nice to have a wee change of scenery and a chance to explore somewhere new – if you find yourself in Keswick in the rain, I recommend checking out the Puzzling Place, where visual illusions abound – entertaining for both children and adults.

Multiple reflections of me and my girl at the Puzzling Place

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