What's Up Wednesday!

Wow, it's been a while since I did one of these!

What's Up Wednesday is a blog hop created by Jaime and Erin to help writers keep in touch with each other.

SO, without further ado....

What I'm Reading
I've just finished reading the Kindrily series which I really enjoyed and am now starting on Sapphire Blue, the second book in the Ruby Red series. Although I don't seem to have a lot of time to read at the moment, I'm spending more time working on my writing instead :)

What I'm Writing
A week ago I completely gutted my WIP that I've been working on for a year and a half and pretty much started again. I kept the bones of the original wip but it needed a total make over so hopefully this will make it much better!

What Inspires Me Right Now
My photos from my travels. I had so many great ideas for new stories while I was travelling and so many of them are held within the thousands of photos I took. I honestly get lost in them every time I start looking through them. The life that many Africans live is somewhat similar to the life of my central character in my WIP (yet also very different), so I was able to really gain a lot of insight and inspiration from that. That and the gloomy London weather! (Summer, what summer?) A rainy day is always conductive for inspiration!

What Else Have I Been Up To?
Well I've just made my return to the blogging world after 9 months away. I wrote a post here about why i've been away and what I've been up to. More recently though, I've been working on cutting out grains and sugar from my diet, have been going to the gym, learning guitar and applying for job after job (with not a lot of success. Le sigh). I did go to a writing seminar on Monday night which was hugely interesting and i'll write a post about it soon :)

How is everyone in the blogosphere going? :)

I'm back... and I'm sorry!

So ... I failed at my blog for a while. I  fact I think it was as long ago as August when I last dropped by. I could make all sorts of excuses - I ran out of things to natter on about, the time zone thing was tricky for group blogging and life just got in the way.  All are valid excuses, and are true but that's no excuse. I really just dropped the ball. I'm sorry. But I'm back! Possibly not as frequently as I used to be, three times a week takes up a lot of my WIP writing time, but I'm definitely back.

There's a lot that's been happening in my life lately I'm not quite sure where to start! Over the New Zealand summer I worked at an amazing theatre company in Christchurch called The Court Theatre. I loved that job and lived everything about that place. I was so sad to leave but the reason I left was because I took off to the other side of the world and spent 6 weeks trekking through Africa on the most incredible trip of my life. We went through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya then up to Egypt. It was life changing and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. I was going to write an entire post about that adventure but then remembered this is my writing blog and you may not be particularly interested in that little part of my life! If you do want to know let me know... I'm one of those annoying travellers all too willing to talk about my travels!

The incredible sand dunes in Namibia

Making friends with a Cheetah, Namibia

Falling in love with these beautiful two lion cubs, Zimbabwe

Lions in Serengeti, Tanzania

After Africa I spent some time in Turkey, Greece, France and The Netherlands before moving to London. The last two months have been a little bit like being in limbo, looking for a job and a place to live but it's a fun city!

The city of love? Paris, France!

King's Day in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Giza, Egypt

In the heart of Athens, Greece

Kalkan on the Turkish Coast where we spent our days lying in the sun by the pool reading for an entire week :D

London! My new home!

Being unemployed has its benefits in that I have had a lot if time to work on my book.

When I last posted, I was still plugging away at my WIP. Well over the new year I finally finished that puppy. Then I let it sit. I mulled it over and thought about my characters then gave it to a good friend who gave me some excellent feedback. When I was in Africa I had a lot of ideas of ways I could alter my WIP for the better in the second draft.

A month after I arrived in London my computer finally arrived and I was reunited with my WIP. I knew it needed a lot of work and felt there was really something integral to the story that wasn't working. I spent a few weeks looking at my characters, looking at what makes them who they are and act the way they do... then I looked at the world my story is set in and the plot I had developed. Eventually I found the problem. It only took me a day of brainstorming before I figured out what the solution was. Typically it involved completely gutting my entire WIP. I sat there telling myself over and over that it was completely normal to rip to shreds your first draft and it was 100% necessary but it was still sad.

So now I'm starting again, but this time I know my characters and my world much more intricately. I know them inside out, the way I always should have. It's a nice feeling actually and I'm confident this story will be much stronger for the changes.

So, what did I miss around here?!

Blogging Inspiration

I know we've talked a lot about finding inspiration for our WIPs and future WIPs but I haven't talked all that much about finding inspiration for blog posts.

I know the whole reason Jaime and Erin started What's Up Wednesday is because they too were finding it increasingly difficult to find topics to write about regularly on their blogs.

So I would love to know, where do you find your inspiration? Do you get it from other blogs? From the news? From google searches? Or does it just come to you out of thin air?

You remind me of....

One of the questions I often see authors being asked is whether their main character (or another prominent character) is very much like the author themselves.

While one particular author would say that the character is very much like themselves or their best friend or mother, another author would say that the character has elements of themselves or is nothing like them.

When I started writing my WIP, I was basing part of the male lead (Noah) on my man. I imagined them to look very similar, and the personality to be quite alike, but as my WIP has grown, they're nothing alike. They don't think the same way, act the same way, the even look totally different (in my mind). Their motivations in life are completely different.

I find it quite amazing that Noah has grown to be very much his own person and now isn't actually based on anyone. By the time he walked onto my pages, there was no resemblance to my man at all. I was telling him how interesting I found this and asked him if he thought I was anything like Chlo (my MC).

It's a hard question really, as I haven't based Chlo on myself at all. I haven't written Chlo to be anything like me. She's from a different world, a different upbringing, a totally different life... but she's still a product of me so I guess it would make sense if by accident she really had turned out to be very similar to who I am.

We came to the agreement that while she's very different in her way of life, and the way she thinks about things and see's the world, and her reactions to situations presented to her are very similar to my own. Her emotions and the way she copes when life throws crap in her face are eight on par with my emotions and the way I would cope. Although, she's a lot stronger than I am and she's got way more balls (so to speak).

As my book progresses and the characters evolve, I'm sure I will see more of myself, my friends and family in the characters - most likely by accident.

What about y'all? Do you recognise yourself or your friends and family in your characters? Do you purposely write your characters to be based on someone or does it just kind of ....happen?

If there were no limits

I fell down the Google Image rabbit hole today. I'm not quite sure how but I ended up pouring through graphic art, real images of beautiful places all over the world and simply incredible sketches (isn't the internet a marvelous place?!)

It was the strangest feeling looking through these images.... I felt like my mind was opening and there were no limits. I felt like I could go to all of these magical places, I could dream of being inside this graphic art, of stories I could write set amongst the scenes laid out in front of my eyes.

If there were no limits in life, if you could spend all your time doing whatever you wanted and going wherever you wanted, what would you do?

I've got a little bit of a dream. I'm trying to achieve it, even though there a hundreds of limits. I'd love to travel all over the world. To see the big cities and small villages, the lakes, oceans and mountains. I'd love to immerse myself in all different kinds of cultures, see different animals and experience new ways of life. I'd love to volunteer in a place that could really use my help. I'd love to move back to America (amazingly this is one of the hardest pursuits on my list! Dang American visas are hard to get!), I'd love to live in Cali, in a house in La Jolla (or near there) and raise my family and I'd love to write my stories and run a cake/high tea shop that overlooks La Jolla cove.... Just a little dream of mine.

What would you do if there were no limits?

Note: By limits I mean financial constraints, time constraints and other various barriers or constraints.

A new resolution

I'm not yet confident in my skills as a writer. It's all still feeling quite new for me. Because I'm not so confident I've asked two people who know I'm working on this WIP to read what I've written. However I found that the comments they would come back with was really affecting my writing and my need to get the story out.

While one would simply say, I don't like this part, the other would ask the small questions that I hadn't even thought of and certainly weren't necessary to think of in the first draft. But I'd look at their questions and comments and panic. I'd say if these questions are coming up now and I can't answer them, or I'm giving the answer they don't want to hear, then my book isn't going to work. The story isn't going to be right.

Consequently I would stop writing. I'd stop for a few days or a week and then I'd usually delete huge sections. Then I'd feel deflated. I'd think I couldn't do it and that I'd never be good enough.

I know they didn't mean for their comments to have that affect on me, but I was so desperate for my story to be....right. I wanted their approval with what I was writing, I wanted them to like what was written on those pages. I'm not saying they didn't, but there were aspects that needed work, or questions that were raised that they wanted to bring up with me.

Eventually I sat back and said to myself, I'm writing this story for me. It's my story and these bits this person is telling me to include or exclude will totally change the vision I have for it. I need to do what's right for me to get this story told. I need to do whatever I can to get the first draft complete, then I can hear what they have to say.

To do this I had to basically cut them off from my story. I don't talk about the content with them much anymore, and I definitely don't send them chapters. They understand, which I'm grateful for, and for the moment that is definitely what is best for me and my WIP. Since I stopped worrying about the comments they'd make and the questions they'd raise, the ideas poured into my brain and helped the story form in my mind. Now i'm more on track than ever.

I've asked a lot of people for help getting past my roadblocks over the past month or so, and I thank you all for your advice. Every piece of advice I was given, I've kept, and I use when I need inspiration. It turned out for me though, the way to really open the dam and let the ideas flow was to get rid of the external forces and to write this story on my own.

It's scary, but I really think it's going to be worth it! 

Distractions

I'm TERRIBLE!

I was on such a great writing role, I had all these ideas kicking around in my head and then I got distracted. I got sucked into the world of The Game of Thrones.

Whoops.

I was going to watch it just when I had time (I was started from Season One), and for the first season I could see myself stretching it over a number of months. Then my co-workers started watching too so we'd have to watch a good number each night to discuss at work the next day. Then I simply got hooked.

I have three episodes left of season three, and after I've finished work and done the obligatory cake decorating for my cousin's third birthday party tonight I'm determined to finish.

The biggest problem however, is that I've TOTALLY abandoned my WIP. I'm so sorry. Terrible! I get distracted with things and those things become my whole world for a certain period of time until they come to an end (usually the end of a book or the end of the TV series so far, or until there is simply no more travel planning I could possibly do.)

Please tell me I'm not the only one?! Who else gets distracted, and what is it that usually distracts you?