Following the muse

My current WIP is taking me on a fascinating journey. It began with a teaching tool I've used repeatedly in the Adult Education courses, a means of providing a common connector to a group of disparate would-be writers in developing a story from a single scene in a forgettable movie starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman. In the process, I've written a dozen or so scenes from the story to illustrate how to begin, develop, sustain and complete it. Of necessity, I've kept the story reasonably simple, but my last group of students challenged me to write the whole story and, in a moment of unusual weakness, I agreed.

I began by joining the dots, connecting the existing scenes into a continuous narrative, but the character of the hero kept eluding me. I couldn't quite see how he came to be as he was and went searching into his background for an answer.

A memory came to me of a transit lounge conversation in the early hours of the morning, some ten years after Vietnam. Our plane was delayed, we were tired and bored and my companion on the journey had drunk more than was wise. He'd been involved in covert operations during the conflict, but didn't speak much of their details, concentrating instead on how he was recruited and trained. An astute individual, his descriptions of the methodology and the individuals involved kept me interested and successfully passed the time until our plane was ready.

Vietnam was too far in the past to be of value to the story I was writing, but the effect of the passage of time on my companion wasn't and I had the environment that moulded the hero into the man he was.

Storytelling presented a problem. With so much to be hidden until the right moment, a simple narrative from the heroine's point of view was inadequate, and the normal(?) balance of heroine/hero not much better. I'd already passed the thirty thousand word mark and was loathe to discard the lot so I went searching for another point of view that could carry the story and found it in a secondary character.

I'm now back at the thirty thousand word mark, having re-written the beginning to capture the changes in the heroine and introduced the thoughts and actions of my second point of view. Other than a very general picture, I have no idea where the story will go from here...and it's fascinating.

It's a great life...insane or not.

Amy

Snow Drifter

July is almost here and I'm gearing up for the release of Snow Drifter.

The first step was revamping my website, http://www.amygallow.com/ . I'd updated it along the way, adding books as they were released, reporting the progress of The Widow-Maker from book to film, but it no longer reflected my writing and it was time to change.

What I'd forgotten was amount of work involved for an amateur like me.

It took two days of experimentation, false starts and simple mistakes before what I'd designed could be seen in my web browser, let alone on the web itself, and another day before the website was successfully loaded onto the web. Since then, I've grown cross-eyed looking for errors and can only hope I've caught them all.

Yahoo group, Coffee Time Romance, etc., etc., etc., are next...then the preparation of excerpts for each of the groups I belong to...

With A Soldier's Woman coming out in August, I can't see me getting much writing done for a while.

Still, it's a great life.

Amy

Chaos

Our home bulges at the seams with children and adults. Our eldest daughter has returned home with her two children while their house sells and she reorganizes her life as a single mother after ten years of marriage. The children struggle with the effects of the change and she is as prickly as a hedgehog (an Echidna to fellow antipodeans).
Our second daughter struggles with a two bedroom house and returning to work as a teacher part- time with two children under five and needs what help we can give.
In the midst of this, edits arrived for "A Soldier's Woman" with a forty-eight hour deadline and jury duty beckons mid month, all making the completion of "Her Brother's Keeper" a matter of snatched moments.
I suppose the next crisis will involve the second round of edits and those for "A Fair Trader".
Looking backwards at our parents' lives in their seventies, it all seems so impossibly serene, but I suppose we should be grateful that we are both healthy enough to manage and still so involved in life as to feel the need to try?
It's a great life.
Amy

A homily from long ago

Back when I was young and we exchanged autographs between friends rather than sought those of celebrities, it was the practice to inscribe some small homily before your signature.
One I remember well:
In a life that's mainly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone;
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.
One of our children is going through a difficult time and I am proud to see the truth of the above demonstrated by her siblings as well as us.
None of our children are meek, their battles growing up were the stuff of legends, but their aid when it's needed is unstinting.
I am proud of them all.
It's a great life!

Cover Art

As writers we are at the mercy of many different people, publishers, reviewers, readers and the rest. If we are lucky, we have two staunch friends, our editor and our cover artist in giving our books their best chance of success.

Jinger Heaston created the cover for "The Widow-Maker" and now for my two upcoming Whiskey Creek Press books. I'll let you judge her success.

I'm a little biased. I think they're great.

Thank you Jinger.

"Snow Drifter" is due for release in July this year, but you'll have to wait until Nov/December for "A Fair Trader"

In the meantime, Eternal Press, propose an August release for "A Soldier's Woman."

"Once more into the breach..."

We returned from our holiday refreshed, having walked for miles along windswept beaches, clifftops, through the bush, and around Warranambool, Portland, Port Fairy, etc.
A new contract with Whisky Creek Press was waiting and a release date of July 09 for "Snow Drifter" added to our pleasure. Plus, there was an intriguing response to one of my general fiction submissions that could mean anything.
"A Fair Trader" now has a projected release date of Nov/Dec 09, so this year promises well.
It's a great life.
Amy

An ideal holiday

We are taking a rest from baby-sitting and all the other multitudinous duties of grandparents and having nine days at Warrnambool with no television, no Internet and no writing before the school holidays and other events double the intensity of our lives.
It is glorious in prospect and starts in three days.
It's a great life--truly!
Amy