Firstly, thanks to whoever left me the formspring comment about some bad grammar in an excerpt of my first unpublished book. It was an honest mistake that I can only attribute to the dialect in the area that I live, because when it was pointed out I already knew it was wrong and I am subsequently kicking myself in the teeth about it. So whoever you are, many thanks. If anyone else sees any such error, please do tell me.
My intentions for today are to clean the kitchen up a bit, figure out what to cook for dinner and then make a start on uploading photos of my mother’s jewellery to her site. If I have any time, I may attempt to write a piece of flash fiction. One of the lovely people that follow my facebook fan page has provided a statement for me to base it on. It’s much nicer to get statements from other people because it feels so much more communal. I like getting people involved, too. There’s also the fact that when other people provide me with statements, they’re usually statements that provoke writing from me that I wouldn’t normally consider scribing. This, in itself, is fantastic because it makes me broaden my writing horizons. I love new challenges where my writing is concerned. One of the most recent challenges I faced, whilst finishing off Secrets, was that I’d never written a proper battle scene before and the last few chapters required this. I don’t mind telling you that it really worried me. They were critical scenes and I didn’t want to get them wrong. Around the same time, however, I noticed a post show up on my blogroll at the side. The post was from the This Business Of Writing blog and it was a how to on writing battle scenes. I may not have used everything it said, but it did help me to make sense of how I was going to sort out the scene. I figured out a basic choreography for it – who was injured, what their injuries were and when they received the injuries during the battle.
What made my battle particularly difficult, however, was that it had been foreseen by another character. She’d witnessed deaths in her vision and so I had to get these events in exactly the right place, making sure that the right characters were in the right place too! You could say that this was a bit ambitious for my first real battle scene, but somehow it worked. Admittedly, the scene still needs a bit of editing to polish it up, but I’m incredibly happy with what I managed to achieve. I think it managed to flow well and it got all of the correct bits in.
It may be slightly obvious that I get carried away when discussing how writing a scene has gone, especially if it’s gone particularly well. My favourite anecdote about my writing at the moment is that I managed to make Andrew queasy when he was reading a torture scene. If I can make it realistic for a reader, then I feel as if I’ve done well.
Speaking of realism, I had a very realistic dream in amongst other dreams. For a short while after I woke up, I was under the impression that the dream was real, which is dreadfully upsetting because I’d dreamt something that I wish with all of my heart and for a couple of moments I felt thoroughly happy. Don’t you just hate it when those things happen? I really do.
(Lyrics in the title are from Wonder by Megan McCauley)