Behind Sally's Books Mark 2

I wrote a short story called The Legend of the Cloud Maze for a contest calling for stories under 1500 words with the theme of clouds. The main characters are two cousins, Bell and Millie. The story was told from Millie's point of view. After I submitted the story, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to explore what Bell made of the story, so I wrote a second part. This wasn't for the competition, but just for fun. The combined result, with comments by me, is available to read at the link below. The Legend of the Cloud Maze

 Round Robin time again~  So, how has my writing changed since I began? Quite a lot, because my first stories were published in 1970. Back then, I had just started high school and already had some competition wins under my belt. In primary school, we were taught to express ourselves with lote of adjectives and adverbs, and with lots of imagination. I've never quite managed to change that mode of expression, although I suppose I've damped down the tendancy. I have also cultivated lots of different styles. Having gone through multiple typewriters and various computers I don't have much left from before the computer age unless I retype it, so here are some samples from my writing... dated. Over to you. How much have I changed? _________________________________________________ Beginning of In Search of a Husband from 1997 The Viking had a great blade of a nose and watchful, sea-narrowed eyes. These features were framed by a sweep of shaggy blond beard, tangled locks and a horne...

 This month, our round robin topic is creating character, which is one of my favourite subjects. Please check out my fellow bloggers below for their take on the subject! There are lots of different ways to create characters. Mine hasn't changed a lot since I started writing in the 1970s, except that now, as I drift away from those days, I have stopped automatically basing sisters and parents on my own. I also learned, quite soon, that using my own basic personality for a protagonist wouldn't work. Protagonists have to be proactive, and I like a quiet life! As well as being a writer, I am also an editor and manuscript assessor for Wordkettle, Therefore, I see a lot of characters in their prepublication state. The same stock characters get used and reused and that makes me conscious of two things. One is that I am so tired of seeing the same child... often with the same name... from multiple writers and the other that characters can't venture too far from "givens...

 Oh dear, the glamour of it! And yes, I am talking about the life of (most) authors. The word "glamour" picks up the image of a perfectly coiffed and polished, stylishly dressed and impeccably madeup celebrity, dripping with diamonds... or maybe wandering rustically about his or her reclaimed property where horses graze and rain comes on command... Okay, that's silly, but to most people "glamour" means wealth, comfort, fame and adulation. Picture the Hollywood stars of the Golden Age, when mink coats were the wrap of choice instead of something to hide away in the depths of the wardrobe because it was Great-Aunt Marina's and you can't quite bring yourself to burn it. Glamour has another meaning though, and that's the one that illuminates the lives of most authors. Glamour is illusion. It is hope. It is faith. It is that golden certainty that is just out of reach for everyone but fanatics, the fantastically wealthy, and --maybe--some politicians. Glam...

  Our fearless leader of Blog Hop, Skye, challenged us to talk about how Chapter One hooks our readers- specifically, what we do to get that hook working. Sounds simple but in my experience it varies from audience to audience and from book to book. Certainly the hook in Chapter One of an entry in a long series will be different from Chapter One in a standalone. You see, in long series, we expect readers to know the main characters, settings and the way the plots work. The simplest way to approach this challenge, I think, is to look at the opening scenes of a handful of books to see how they work. Book 1: Heather and Heath:            It had been late summer when the May Queen left the dock and now, a bare seventeen weeks later, it was summer again. A summer in December, while the loch-side at home would soon be mantled with snow. The herds would be keeping their sheep close, and the heather would be dim in the glens and up the brae.     ...

Airways... a science fiction sport story cross  Welcome to the blog hop for March. The challenge this month was to talk about crossing the genres. Maybe you remember Ghostbusters? Never, ever cross the streams. Until they did, and it worked beautifully in a chaotic sort of way.  Well, back in the day, genres were pretty clearly defined. We had family stories, pony stories, detective stories, historical novels, school stories, animal stories, romance, westerns, fantasy, science fiction, adventure, horror, ballet stories and a few others. Some of these were mainly, or always, for children. In the sixties, problem novels popped up. All those genres! Seriously! And some were perceived as being more worthy than others. And after a while, there was another shift. In this one, the literary novel was split off from the genre novels, and was held to be more worthy. I noticed all this but it never affected what I read with one rare exception: I knew Mum disapproved of books by Enid Blyt...